Best posts made by Packrat

So if anyone does make a Laurent, I have a Free* rubicund sword going for them! It is not evil.

*(Rubicund sword may contain black gemstones that are apparently tied to demonic powers and is thus banned from being taken into the palace)

The XP thing is a big concern of me as well, especially as the normal response to it being raised is vague mention of plans to add 'Abilities' or additional skills for say, maxed out combat people to continue to spend xp on. That is not a solution! That will just make the problem worse. They definitely missed a huge opportunity to wipe at the end of alpha then institute a much slower xp progression, ideally combined with say more starting skill points especially for older characters, commoners, or those who are otherwise expected to already be experts.

There is the system were costs build as you spend xp but I am not sure how this interacts with training, I actually feel it makes the problem worse because from what I recall hearing it increases the cost of new skills based not on your skill levels, but instead on how much xp you have spent. Raised skills without training? Welcome to being permanently inferior. I might be wrong about that but it is still a lot easier for somebody rich to get that training and thus save xp.

Essentially if anyone wants to be a combat badass, the time is passed, they really needed to apply back in alpha and ideally as a Grayson prince/princess or as a landed noble so that they could accumulate cash for the most shiny gear. Keep in mind that in early alpha a lot of the great house Swords had say, medium weapon 2. The entire scale has changed dramatically.

Equipment is also weirdly important but hits a soft cap fairly quickly, somebody in say refined HQ leather/steel with a HQ steel weapon has likely spent about 30,000 silver or perhaps a hundred odd economic resources, which can be obtained week one with a +task and no income plus a little trading for cash. Further improvements are then marginal unless somebody spends hundreds of thousands on a decent quality alacarite or diamondplate weapon, but somebody with such a weapon can then basically just slaughter equal skill opponents. They might be doing 30-40% more damage but when armour is absorbing most of the damage when you hit? You are suddenly hitting 2-3 times as hard against peer opponents.

Apparently these are the fashion now! Mine is going to be criminally underpopulated and mostly with years old ex-characters.

Arx (former): Cristoph
(In Alpha) Ailith

The Fifth World: Alexius

Star Crusade: Emmanuel (Staff)
Tarah
Rosario

Vargo: Emmanuel (Staff)
Arie

Dark Between The Stars: Joseph
(Yep, also Fading Suns) Buford

Road to Amber: Jitka

Nobody on any recent WoD games, I remember playing Leaps at Clouds (lupus Garou) on Metro back in the day, also a few characters on various Exalted MU* and some abortive attempts to try Shadowrun Denver. I did play on a fair few oWoD games but mostly a decade or so ago and with no memory of character names.

Ohh, also my first ever MUSH, Otherspace, I played a couple of weird space lizard people before realizing the game was terrible and run by a crazy person.

I can see why staff on say, Arx, would not want to engage with somebody who is talking about trying to bring about an industrial revolution.

First of all that is not the theme they want for their game, but secondarily the people who talk about this kind of thing on a MU* tend to want to launch a society like... 4-500 years forward over the course of one or two then get argumentative if this vision is not allowed to succeed. Having said that on Arx they are weirdly defensive about say, gunpowder (no bats because guano is used for making gunpowder!).

People who do not want guns in their late medieval/renaissance fantasy seem to be worried about the same super accelerated advancement, somehow feeling that if gunpowder exists in a setting then the next step is revolvers and breach loading artillery instead of 'two hundred years of fucking around with fireworks, garbage weapons for militia in siege defense and maybe the odd hideously unreliable static bomb'.

Fading Suns avoids this in some ways, 99% of people in setting have no fucking idea of basic physics or chemistry, how electricity works is ICly something that is mostly limited to a secretive quasi religious mystery cult guild. Moreover, even if basic stuff like electrical lighting is pretty widespread outside of the peasantry, knowing how it works other than 'switch turns on light' is considered undesirable. Technology is seen as distracting you from the important stuff like spiritual harmony and the state of your soul and in that setting, where the suns are literally dying in an inexplicable and not at all natural manner that defies all laws of science?

That is a big deal!

But the player characters are not 99% of people and a good number of them will be members of various guilds, or educated by them. Also when trying to put together a living and consistent world you run into all sorts of questions. I mean aircraft are rare and expensive in setting, but how expensive, how rare? How expensive are helicopters compared to anti gravity bikes? Or spaceships? Can I have a holographic dress made of colour shifting space fabric? What fuel is being burnt in your Space Limo? (The answer to the last one is alcohol, of course there is no Space Oil on planets that have been inhabited for thousands of years, they use biofuels).

Though it does lead to awesome quotes like this one:

"And so it came to pass that (the Eskatonic mystic) Diophora, lecturing to (the tyrant) Kurgari'i Alecto, spake unto her, `Wilt thou be as the hovercraft, which, so long as the terrain is easy and sure, bears its master aloft on invisible wings of false hubris, detached thereby from man and Pancreator; but, upon coming to a great and lightless abyss, fails in its boastful endeavor, and sends both itself and its erstwhile suzerain spiraling down into the void?'"

That said, as a teenager I did build a functioning mortar that fired napalm bombs up to about two hundred meters. It was not accurate, reliable or safe, but it did not require more than the internet, some chemistry textbooks and very poorly supervised access to a school machine shop.

@surasanji I feel you would be better off setting the game itself on the coast of the Dreaming Sea and thus very much on or beyond the edge of Prasad influence? You could have dragon blooded PCs with their 'safe' area in the empire proper. Then a mixed area of vassal states, dependencies and similar with all sorts of adventure shenanigans going on and ability for celestials to operate but probably not set up a fixed public base if they do not want to be smashed by a hundred experience dragon blooded with a serious business army. But plenty of ability to adventure and clash with Prasad influence if they want.

Then extended adventure times areas beyond that where celestials can openly set up kingdoms or lead clans of wolf pirates or whatever. If you have celestials within Prasad itself then they are going to end up 1) A majority of the PCs (this will happen anyway) and 2) Probably running the place.

So is this still being worked on? I very much hope so because I would love to play on an Exalted game!

@kay Important though, would this shared origin let me do something weird like play a dragon? This is key because I desire to play somebody who can respond to criticism with something along the lines of

@DarkDeleria said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:

Yeah, I've thought about that too. In the sense that you always have a large group of players that always wanna be the "special ones" but not enough people wanna play the "others." In a way (and someone may throw monkey poop at me for mixing things a bit), but Red Rising game could use the same kiiiiiinda system as Exalted--but maybe the focus is on Gold and Gold politics on one of the planets. Maybe award additional XP, bonuses, hugs, handies in the back alley (joking on the last part) for those wanting to play other colors: such as Obsidians and The Stained. Oooooooor....you could create a game based on the ending of the last novel in the trilogy, and the Golds on the outer rim.

I know that he's working on a 4th book that's meant to take place several years after Morning Star. Could use that or an "alternative version" of post Morning Star. Again, just thoughts

Setting things in the Rising, or in the Solar Republic after it's quasi success, would probably be the best bet yes, along with having the default character as a Gold. It is not as if after the main characters 'win' at the end they have ejected all Golds or event brought actual equality into the fold, even in the area they take control of. The Rim planets remain untouched and crush their local revolutions, likewise for the inner planets where the loyalist fleet flees. They 'just' get Earth, Luna and Mars and rather than completely wiping out the existing regime? They take control of it from the top down then pass reforms (no slavery), etc. I suspect that plenty of Golds remain in the republic and even if a lot flee, many would retain positions of influence and power.

They would not have that inherent assumption of utter social superiority though and lower colour character could definitely better them in specialist areas if you set up character generation properly. In setting, a Gold fighter pilot would typically be a squadron commander and better than all or almost all of their subordinates even at their specialist field, but you have people playing lower colours as the exceptions to the rule. So Stained champions able to butcher Gold knights in melee combat, or the Blue who is a better space captain than almost everyone else, or the Carver/Doctor who is retained to fix up mutilated main characters, etc.

So, still in early access so I do hesitate to recommend it outright, but I picked up 'Dead Sky Derelicts' and rather love it.

Think a grungy retro-future Darkest Dungeons type affair with some amazingly well directed art and a cool core gameplay loop. You take a three person team through ancient space derelicts to loot them whilst constantly keeping an eye on your life support power, medical expenses being immensely expensive when people are inevitably injured.

The early access only has 2-3 hours of content but you can also only take three people out of six rather different classes, I actually played through the whole thing twice and very much enjoyed both times.

I really feel that not allowing celestial exalted as PCs would be by far the best option.

Allow them as NPCs for specific plots or stories? Sure! They make great protagonists and similar, but they should not be anyone's main character unless you want things like people making 'placeholders' that they RP only until they can make a Solar or similar, with the dragonblooded PCs also then basically being allowed to continue living or achieving anything only according to the whims of experienced celestials.

To put things into perspective in my tabletop game we had a starting Solar fight a duel against an Essence 3 dragon blooded who had mastered a martial art (a good one! Shining Point) and had probably over a hundred experience points spent in total. This duel was completely and totally one sided with the outcome never in doubt. It is not as bad as in 2e where above a certain point a Solar could render irrelevant dozens of dragon blooded but the power differential is still huge. An equivalent experience Solar is very much a 'boss battle' for an entire well coordinated brotherhood of five Dragon Blooded.

@kay So based on this? I already have the concept of Space Dragon. They have been exiled to earth for Dragon Crimes. (ie. being a dragon and doing dragon stuff).

Now they are living life to the max. Hosting wild, extravagant parties, fighting crime in the most ostentatious and destructive manner possible whilst inflicting Maximum Fire, being easily distracted by shiny things and immediately and utterly receptive of all praise no matter how over the top.

@DarkDeleria Because making games is hard and requires a lot of time/mental energy!

I do not really play FPS very much personally but my little brother used to be in some kind of competitive 'Clan' and it was surreal to watch him play the Day of Defeat mod for the original Half Life. He had just played the game so much that he effectively had psychic powers when it came to knowing what other players would do or where they would go, either on his team or the opponents. He would play on public servers then restrict himself to using only hand grenades and spades with no guns and get an 8:1 kill ratio somehow.

He also used to set up surround sound in the living room and go absolutely ballistic if anyone dared speak or walk around when he was playing. Which was annoying.

3rd edition also does make things more... I want to say 'grounded' than 2nd edition? In 2E once exalts had some experience it started to make anything that was not powerful exalted increasingly irrelevant and pointless and that was very much to the game's detriment.

Solars in 3e are still tremendously powerful but things like having loyal mortal henchmen are legitimately valuable. A well established mortal sorcerer can be a meaningful ally, a squad of goons is a major force multiplier (if prone to being rapidly sworded) etc. There is no more mind controlling an entire civilisation by chatting with a beggar once a week and similar so you can actually have people acting within a (large) area and have things like the local societies matter longer term.

A group of starting Solars can absolutely still knock over a well armed city state in a single day but running it and keeping it secure will likely keep them occupied instead of everyone immediately becoming their slavish devotees instantly - even if they have a super demagogue they need to actually promise people stuff and work at it. (Even if not very hard).

I would suggest a combination of:

1. It needing some kind of legitimate case. You cannot just challenge Lord Bob then take all of Lord Bob's stuff, first you need some kind of claim on Lord Bob's stuff (he inherited it from my uncle who actually disinherited him and left it to me! Or I just divorced Lord Bob and he has refused to give me back my dowry! I claim that he pinky promised me that he would give me all of his stuff if my horse won the race and the high priestess who officiates this stuff has been bribed to agree with me! etc). Basically you cannot just challenge it yourself, you need to get the go ahead from some kind of spiritual or temporal authority who basically deems you to 'have a case' and allow the official duel.

2. Champions. If you are the challenged party then you can hire somebody else to fight for you, perhaps along with if this option is taken also allowing the challenger to use a champion if the defender does. The champions should probably be facing something pretty serious to ensure this is still a big deal. Maybe death or maiming in the fight if they are dangerous enough, or something added like 'the loser gets poisoned/cursed/whatever and loses their magical powers for three months! Or has some manner of mild banishment perhaps. Something so that you do not have The Strongest always just backing up their friends and fighting for them.

The thing that always amused me about the Whitecloaks is that people's reaction is that they are obviously crazed lunatics, but... they had a pretty good point?

I mean there basically was a Darkfriend hiding under every single rock in the books.

@auspice I probably cannot pilot well but I managed to get behind and murder a few Pythons so I guess I can pilot with sufficient mediocrity.

Playing in VR is just jaw dropping though, it is immersive enough that weird little things like the pilot chair having a higher back than my actual chair I am sitting in are more immersion breaking than 'I am flying a spaceship in space'.