Best posts made by Thenomain

@HelloRaptor said:

What difficulty are you guys playing on, anyway?

Normal, but I generally let the characters do their own things because it's not like DA:O where it's simple to manage them and keep them where I told them to bloody well be. I suspect this is a setting change, but the combat AI in Origins seemed to be a lot more intelligent or at the very least natural, somehow. Somehow.

I find two warriors makes a nice wall for the other two to hide behind. Alternatively, one warrior and one melee rogue. Sword-and-shield for preference.

I want to be able to do things that may start off trivial and end up having importance and not have the connotation baggage of calling it a "plot".

For example, someone from an opposing camp was going to entrap my character's friend. This was obvious, but we went along with it in order to assess and possibly control the situation. We rolled our own rolls, we talked behind the scenes as to what a rule might mean. We resolved it ourselves. It was fun.

This scene itself was spurred by something similar, and before that something similar. It wasn't a player-run plot. It wasn't a staff-run plot. What do you call it? I want more of this.

edit: A game needs coders only because of what we've come to expect. I've coded for many games where the needs of the coders have been little more than, "How do I @dig again?" Or, "Can you tweak this a little?" Or at worst, "We need to do the math on this so that this responsibility is shared by 3 people instead of 10."

WoD games are extremely needy, and always have been.

@Coin said:

There's a lot left to do but we are nearing the zone where we reach "playability", so to speak. It's very exciting.

(slit wrists)

For you!!!!

The lesson here is: Do it if it makes you feel good. Being able to say you have a 4.0 is pretty liberating.

@Arkandel said:

Oh, I know. And I agree. I shouldn't have stopped developing when ES told me Glitch had been coding his similar approach for a while but it was easier to sit back and wait for someone to do it than get my hands dirty.

No, it's not. It's easier to be lazy and complain that other people aren't doing it.

I gave you a handful of ideas that don't require a coder at all, and this is the best you've got? Then I don't know how you can feel you have the right to make demands on the community.

I see your hippo and raise you two monkeys riding a wild boar.

@HelloRaptor said:

In particular you should see if DA:O includes the Awakening expansion and Witch Hunt DLC, and whether DA2 has the ..uh.. I forget what it's called. There's two huge DLC for it. The family one.

Legacy. Without playing Legacy, much of DA:I will feel like being told-not-shown.

Also play Mark of the Assassin, even though Felicia Day is not the best voice actress. I find it to be the kind of writing and level development that I wish was in DA2.

I hate that you can play both DA2 DLCs entirely out of sync of the story. If you're five people living in a ramshackle hut in the slums, having two GIANT STATUES in the back room where you run off and pretend this is a "remember that one time?", or worse, "now that you're famous, you're getting invites"... my brain hurts.

And that is why I consider DA2 to be kind of crap. I am holding it up to the standards of a game developed over five years, because world immersion is why you buy a BioWare game.

Fair 'nuff. It's part of the risk of talking like a lawyer, perhaps. (And my frustration at people relying on coders without thinking of other options.)

Still, I think seeing about using some of the web-based tools to accentuate the more nuts-and-bolts part of the game is an option. Be The Change, etc.

edit: Or maybe stop relying on WoD games.

@Coin said:

@faraday said:

@Thenomain Fallout has a thematic reason for being low-tech, like Battlestar. SR3's reason is just "It was written in the 80s." Given that it's arguably supposed to share the same history as the real world, that makes it a little jarring.

I haven't actually played Fallout, but IIRC, the reason for it being low-tech is that most of its advancements past 1950s technology are post-apocalyptic, so it only really shares a history with the real world up to a certain point in time--a point that has technology would would consider pretty retro now a days.

The Great War (WW3, I suppose) started October 2077. Yet radios, televisions, population density, all of these are at 1950s levels. Reasons: None. Yet we're stuck on this stupid wired/wireless debate for Shadowrun.

@faraday said:

@Coin - yes, I was saying Shadowrun was jarring, not Fallout. Fallout is more of an alternate history setting.

Except that it's an alternative future setting based on some changes that started in the 1940s. This is not unlike reminding people how Shadowrun had elves, trolls, and dragons in the Third Age, if you follow its reported history, and yet somehow we have absolutely no archaeological evidence to support this. I'm sure someone has said "herp derp magic", but if you can accept this then you can accept how an insanely large throughput required by the 'Net has outpaced wireless. But no, people are going to go right past the history and to this. Because we are nerds, and this is what nerds do.

Nnnrrrrrrrrrrrrds.

Many nice little changes to the crafting system with the recent update. Header for "there is nothing to update this with". You can now also no longer (accidentally) sell research components.

The lack of a character voice also grates now that we're out of that era, but I also miss the six game-world intros that DA:O had. In Inquisition, it took me about half an hour to realize that the title screen and subsequent intro "explosion" was a part of the game; sometimes a slower pacing is the better choice.

I mostly rail against DA2 because BioWare phoned it in, albeit forced upon them via their new corporate overlords. They've mostly won me back with DA:I. For instance, DA:I's art direction adds to, does not ignore, DA2's art direction, tho DA2's pretty much ignored DA:O. That's cool.

I'm also one of the few people who thought the original endings for ME3 was the right ending. I destroyed all galactic society everywhere. No wussing out. No "oh, but we'll be fine soon" back-peddling. BOOM. Galactic civilization set back a thousand years; that's my legacy. It made that decision weigh so much heavier, and feel that much more tangible. I'm not a hater, I'm just particular.

I will play on an M&M 2 game if someone promises to make my character for me. I do not understand the system one whit. The basics are clear, but there are expectations of minmaxing that are not evident in the rulebook.

I've also been reading too many web comics that subvert the superhero/hero trope, from "Superbitch" to "Cucumber Quest" to "Strong Female Protagonist". I find the power fantasy to be the least interesting part of someone with powers beyond mankind's ken which ... you know, maybe I shouldn't be allowed to play on a superhero game of any sort.

@rebekahse

We are more mega corporate than anytime before in history, it's just not something we feel we can, or need, to do anything about. A radio piece I heard from a pop culture analyst had superhero movies and now tv as popular because we feel that we have no control over impossible situations, mostly terrorism and rising control of our every day lives.

Back in the 80s, we still had a sense of the "punk" that's in cyberpunk.

I find the conclusion that you can't put in wireless or social networking into ShadowRun to be kind of strange, because Cyberpunk2020 is ready for it right now, and CP2020 has a heavy dose of world building too. (Five corporation books, four cybernetics books, etc.)

Cyberpunk 203x, while wildly unpopular, introduced reputation as currency, too, has a strict timeline of events starting in 2003, and many other conceits that you can find in ShadowRun.

So why do people flip their lid at idea of updating the game world?

@Coin

It always bothered me that The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby-Doo never got to the thirteen ghosts.

@HelloRaptor said,

I am a giant whining pussy.

Fixed that for you.

@rebekahse said:

But the lack of paranoia about it is what makes the difference, because Shadowrun's all about the paranoia. It's not a game that would get made in today's climate, I don't think.

Absolutely not, because that's not where we are, but you can easily update CP2020 into the modern climate, so why not ShadowRun? We are paranoid, these days. We are paranoid as fuck. Apple unlock your phone because think of the children are we paranoid! We're just not paranoid about corporate control, as the US Chamber of Commerce has announced a lawsuit against Seattle trying to allow unionization of Uber drivers.

We can feed that paranoia, it just takes a good twist in the right direction.

You could theoretically put wireless, social media, etc. into all of those, but you're basically having to write a lot of new rules for an old, established game system at that point, and I've never seen that work really well.

Are you saying that CP2020 is not an old, established game system?

That the latest rules sets are not thematically cyberpunk, that I can get behind, but let's also admit that the whole concept of cyberpunk is very 80s. Gibson's writings have moved on while playing to the strong social noir that made cyberpunk to begin with. I played a point and click adventure called "Void & Null" that captures the mood without having to be cyberpunk.

We can near future sci-if noir, if we wanted. Let's do it.

Warning: @Coin always plays Barnaby because he has no creativity nor soul.

@Lithium said:

Out of all the super hero game systems I've come across it's the easiest to understand

Because it's still a hell of a difficult thing to understand as a game in general. "Easier" does not mean "easy"; this is the responsibility of the game designers, who have apparently written a game for other people who understand the Superhero mindframe and also a more complex d20 Feats system. These are two conceits of the M&M2 system which limit who it's for and how easy it is to pick up.

If you think it's easy, then maybe consider the skills you have that make it easy, and find ways to teach this. You won't be convincing me that it's easy by simply saying so. @TNP gets it.

I have read exactly one superhero system that has addressed both theme and the best way to build powers Wild Talents. I felt that sigh of relief with one small side-note titled something like: "Why we don't throw people into the sun." I bet I can piss off any superhero game fan by building a reasonable, low-powered character who can, e.g., teleport someone into the deepest abyss of the sea and would. Wild Talents says, "Yeah, don't do that, because fun." It cares to introduce people into the game, not just make assumptions like M&M2 does.

I specifically listed two web comics that care about these aspects, and I'll name a third: Grrl Power. (Link to an example of the characters playing what sounds like M&M)

Maybe also Mutant City Blues, but I'm not sure Gumshoe makes a good Superhero game. It looks like a good game with super powers. It's probably the only superhero game I've read where the power system is not really a toolbox as much as a power-path. It is, however, another superhero game that thinks about it, for which I give it a lot of props.

@Jennkryst said:

Shadowrun has far more in common with WoD than it does D&D. Because if you want to go and learn how to fight better, you pick up a combat skill.

Systematically, yes. I was talking theme when I brought in D&D and Tolkein. I had already admitted to D&D and ShadowRun not being systematically equivalent when I quoted myse-- you know what, why am I arguing this?

@faraday said:

I guess it all comes down to how you define a game.

Nobody has managed to define a game to any single definition, but they usually come down to having rules, limitations, and voluntary involvement. Mind you, if we can't come up with a single definition of "game" then I don't see us coming up with a single definition of "role-playing game".

When I said "if it's not in the main rules then it's optional", this is a personal conceit because I've had this it-depends argument too many times. For an even more wildly off-topic example, when Mage: The Awakening came out, I complained that its was far too limited and a few people mentioned how the second book fixes a lot of that. I don't think it's fair or even a good idea to expect anyone to buy an expansion. The game that's in the main rulebook is the game that you're being asked to play.

I am 100% behind playing outside the rules and setting, but at which point the main book is being houseruled. When you're playing a Mu*, house-ruling the main rules is ... something we complain about on a fairly regular basis.

Most of the early fiction stories weren't about traditional runners at all. That helped to shape what Shadowrun means to me.

This tickled me. What defines a traditional crook in modern society? I don't know! In the third Shadowrun Returns game, you don't start out as a 'runner, but by god you end as one. Maybe it's entirely how people see you.

Ahhem.

@Finn said:

@Thenomain Still accepting players if for kickoff plot!

Does is even really matter debating a fictional universe vs the real world universe? Why not just let it be what it is- anachronistic at some points (wired internet, bulky cybernetic implants), and completely on point at others (i.e: Complete corporate coup of world governments + insane rich/poor dichotomy).

And BTW - Much fun to be had at Shadowrun Denver on the new plot.. Just log on!

Point taken, sir. Point taken!

@Insomnia

I'm waiting a bit to see if I get into the DLC Beta. You never know.

... Aaaaaaaaaaand I'm out. Good luck with this game.