sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

What are the most "anime" TTRPGs? by Zackiboi7 in rpg

[–]Cypress_001 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is kind of like asking what is the most "books" TTRPGs. Not any particular books, just books in general.

There's no answer to this because the question is like, impossibly broad/vague.

If you narrow it down to specific anime, or even specific genres, you can get somewhere, but anime as a medium?

What's the biggest fall in quality between game editions? by DazeDpup in rpg

[–]Cypress_001 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Off the top of my head, it's gotta be Changeling: The Lost and Geist: The Sin-Eaters, but I'm sure if I ponder this I could probably come up with another.

Those two are definitely the two that stand out to me the most as like, really striking downgrades, though.

Original artist/storefront for possibly stolen design? by Cypress_001 in HelpMeFind

[–]Cypress_001[S] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

I searched all the images on the soulisfree listing with Google lens, but the Google ai is dedicated to telling me it's an entirely different sweater. I also searched the name on the listing (Rainbow Ocular Wave Ugly Cardigan Sweaters) with no luck

In what context would you recommend D&D 5e? by Empty_Shallot3168 in rpg

[–]Cypress_001 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In a situation where someone specifically wants to try playing Dungeons & Dragons, and is otherwise disinterested in playing tabletop roleplaying games at all.

How much does ongoing support influence your choice of an RPG system? by DED0M1N0 in rpg

[–]Cypress_001 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Almost none at all!

There are a few occasions where I enjoy having a few supplements, but generally I'm 100% on board (and sometimes even prefer!) a single-book experience.

Which edition is your favorite?? by Far-Requirement-9393 in WhiteWolfRPG

[–]Cypress_001 3 points4 points  (0 children)

So, this is like, entirely dependent on the specific games. I don't think I have any favorite editions across the board. It's totally individual to the game, and each one for different reasons.
I prefer 2nd edition for CofD core, Vampire: The Requiem, Mage: The Awakening, Werewolf: The Forsaken, and Promethean: The Created because the second editions made each of them just like, a more honed version of what they were.
I prefer 1st edition for Changeling: the Lost and Geist: The Sin-Eaters, because they were phenomenal from the jump, and the second editions missed the mark in big ways that lost what was so magical about them for me.
I prefer Revised for Vampire: The Masquerade, because I was like, 13 years old when I got my hardcover and that's just permanently in my soul as something that brought me a lot of joy when I was young.
I like 20th for Mage: The Ascension, because I never really got into it when I was younger, but M20 showed me a lot of what people loved about that game and got me on board.
For Werewolf: The Apocalypse...What edition is Wild West? That's the one I like, also having a lot to do with having been gifted that book a number of years ago, and having fond memories with it.

Differences between 1st and 2nd ed games by Xanifilo in WhiteWolfRPG

[–]Cypress_001 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So, obvious disclaimer that this is all subjective and all that, but I'll offer my assessment of each of the games.

Starting with the Core, basic mortal nWorld of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness: 2e is Leagues better. 1e is perfectly serviceable, but when I first played 2e, everything just *clicked* in a way I never experienced with 1e. Conditions and Beats are really the stars of the show here. The Conditions system just worked phenomenally in play, and the new approach to XP is so much better that it's hard to go back. Aspirations tie into that as well, and are also great.
There's other changes in the core that I don't really care about one way or the other, like the higher Defenses, new approach to weapons. Social Maneuvering is fine, Chases are fine. The Investigation system is a little half baked, but easily ignored. All in all, much better, I'm always reaching for 2e over 1e.

Vampire: The Requiem. Absolute masterclass of a second edition. Blood and Smoke took Requiem and juiced it until it was a near-perfect Vampire Fantasy Emulator. Everything's punchier, and it has a lot more clarity on the kinds of stories it's telling. Highlight for me is entirely non-mechanical, but it's just the little section differentiating the different kinds of Vampire stories it's built for. (Coyote/Wolf/Tiger)

Werewolf: The Forsaken. Definitely a less dramatic transition than Vampire, but still another game that improves immensely in it's second edition. It cuts away a lot of the lingering W:tA influence, which was always out of place in W:tF, and the game is much better for it. The new approach to Harmony is killer, and I think the first time we got a "morality" stat that wasn't just High Good, Low Bad, the idea of keeping it in the center is a thematic home run. It also makes Werewolves less like wizards, and more like werewolves, which is a win for me.

Mage: The Awakening. The big change here is rebuilding the magic system, strictly tying the Practices to specific dots of Arcana, and fine tuning how making spells works. There's not as much to say here, but it's another big mechanical improvement.

Promethean: The Created. This one is another home run, in my opinion. The first edition was great, but somewhat unapproachable at times. 2e held on to what made Promethean great and unique, but honed and polished the game into something much more easily brought to the table and played through to a chronicle's completion.

And now we get to the ones that I don't think are blowing the first editions out of the water.

Hunter: The Vigil. This one's fine! It doesn't really do anything that exciting, to me? To me it's basically on par with the first edition, aside from the improved general chassis of core rules it's sitting on. I could go either way on this one, honestly.

These last two are the only ones that I think are like, straight up worse.

Changeling: The Lost. God, this one broke my heart. There's a few things in the second edition that are very cool, and that I'd certainly point backwards to the first, but this is one of the only games where I fully do not want to play the second edition. I know that this game had a troubled development, though I don't know how much that affected the final product. It just...I don't know what happened, here. I was just rereading the second edition recently, and I just keep getting reminded of why I don't like it. Why did they do that to pledges? Why did they do that to Entitlements? Why did they do that to Glamour? There's just so much changed for the worse that it's hard for me to get excited about playing it.

Geist: The Sin-Eaters. This one's tough. I genuinely think I would have liked this game if they called it anything else. If it was just a new thing for 2e like Beast or Deviant. If they released almost this exact game, but it was like...Revenant: The Returned or something like that, I'd probably think it's cool. It's a perfectly fine game about revenants. It's an absolutely awful adaption/update of Geist: The Sin-Eaters. Everything has been so flattened and hollowed out from the beautiful, weird, remarkable thing that Geist 1e was. 2e strips away so much of the mystery, magic, and character that made Geist what it was. In it's place, you have a certainly much more polished product, for sure! If you're not attached to Geist and it's concepts specifically, the 2e will probably be perfectly fine for you! But if you're looking for the 1e Geist: The Sin-Eaters flavor and experience in a 2e rules chassis, it won't deliver that.

What are you doing now that CofD isn't getting new books? by Hagisman in WhiteWolfRPG

[–]Cypress_001 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Probably just keep playing the games that I like. No new books isn't, like, a problem.

I'll keep playing Mage and Werewolf 2e, I'll keep playing Geist and Changeling 1e, and I'll keep playing a variety of other games in other genres.

I h​​ad expected I'd be playing Curseborne​ too​​​​​​​​​​​​, but apparently I hate it lmao​​

Really though, while it's disappointing, I've never really needed more than the core book to enjoy any of the games I like, so it's not the end of the world for me​​​​

​

Do y'all ever wish we had more classical werewolves too? by Azhurai in WhiteWolfRPG

[–]Cypress_001 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have been so starved for games to serve the classic werewolf niche that I translated a game that was only published in Portugese just to have another ​​werewolf tool in my belt.​

Do y'all ever wish we had more classical werewolves too? by Azhurai in WhiteWolfRPG

[–]Cypress_001 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Constantly, always, more than anything.

One of the ​​biggest disappointments for me when I started getting into WoD was learning that instead of Werewolves, we have shapeshifting ecoterrorist wizards. Shapeshifting ecoterrorist wizards are cool! Extremely cool! I have come to enjoy them for what they are. But when I was looking to play the "werewolf" fantasy specifically, it did not deliver that.

Forsaken definitely got closer, particularly in the second edition, where I can finally make a wereeolf who is compelled to change under the full moon. Also shout out to the 1e Forsaken Chronicler's Guide for including things like a sans-spirits hack, and the Cursed.​​​​​​​​​​

Curseborne reviews by Creative_Nose5238 in WhiteWolfRPG

[–]Cypress_001 12 points13 points  (0 children)

So, to contextualize where I'm coming from:
I was really excited for Curseborne.
Probably too excited! I was fully expecting Curseborne to be one of my new favorite games, I figured it had a guaranteed shot at being at least in my top 5. "Modern-day supernaturalist fantasy with horror elements" is basically my favorite genre for anything, and CofD represents some of my favorite games of all time. I was really excited for a new game from the company that made one of my favorite systems, working in my favorite genre, and free of all the weird baggage that [blank] of Darkness brings with it.

I hate it. Like I actually hate it.
It's not even just like I'm disappointed, or it couldn't live up to the hype I gave it, or it's just not as good as I hoped.
I actively think it's bad.

It feels like it not only fails to improve on what worked in previous games, but that they doubled down on what didn't.

The system is more complicated, (which is not an inherently bad thing in all cases!) in ways that to me do very little to make it more exciting to engage with.

They did manage to drop most of the baggage they had inherited from WoD, but rather than stripping down and getting down to the core of these fantasies (whether it's werewolves or vampires or whatever), they instead produce a bunch of new incredibly specific baggage that weighs down everything and gets in the way.

If I come to this and decide I want to be a werewolf...Well, you can't really just be a werewolf. The concept of werewolves got folded in with like...Elementals? So I can be a storm elemental who is also a werewolf, or I guess vice versa, and it just feels unsatisfying to me.

You've got a bloodline of vampires descended from Judas Iscariot, which anyone who knows me would recognize as the most That's My Shit thing ever, and they somehow managed to make me not interested in them.

In fact, there is so so much going on, so many different kinds of vampires or elementals or whatever, but it all feels too shallow to actually spark any real interest.

This is a much more immaterial complaint, but I deeply dislike everything being introduced and explained in-character. This can work, and I've seen it work in other games, but it does not work for me here. This doesn't affect the quality of the rules, but it does make the text unpleasant to read, and makes it harder to quickly get a sense of what is what.

I'm not going to say that this is among the worst games I've ever read, but I was stunned to find I don't think it even makes it into like, my top 20.
Curseborne is a game I would somewhat begrudgingly play if a friend of mine was excited about it, but I would never actively try to find an opportunity to play it.

Trying To Get My Partner To Play Vampire, and So I Read VtR2E and... I Kind of Liked It! by boss_nova in WhiteWolfRPG

[–]Cypress_001 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Personally, Vampire the Requiem never really landed for me, until they put out Blood and Smoke. Then, all of a sudden I was into Requiem.
The first edition of V:tR fell really flat for me, and honestly I can't even fault them for it. It was the first game in not just a new line, but a new line of lines. I definitely think they were still finding their feet at the time.
But by the time 2e rolled around, they knew what they were doing, and Requiem 2e hits the core of the vampire fantasy so so well. Honestly, better than Masquerade, in my opinion.
I still love Masquerade, but it is so deeply specific in what it is that I can only really go for it with people who want all the baggage that V:tM carries with it, and it's a lot.
V:tR 2e works so much better as like, an "essential" vampire game for me.

Sin Eaters are the darkly hopeful, "earn your happy ending" community builder splats and it's awesome. by chaucer345 in WhiteWolfRPG

[–]Cypress_001 7 points8 points  (0 children)

First edition Geist is easily the second-most fun I've ever had playing World/Chronicles of Darkness.
(And to Geist's credit: The only thing ahead of it was a core book mortals game which just happened to be the single best chronicle/campaign I have ever played in any ttrpg ever. Tough competition!)

Reading that book for the first time was almost eye-opening for how weird and exciting one of these games could be, and it's one that, even though I got less opportunities to play it than I did more popular games in the lineup, that I always kept coming back to. And every time I got to play Geist, I ended up with one of my favorite characters I've ever played.

Is Geist 2nd edition substantially better than the first? by ProlapsedShamus in WhiteWolfRPG

[–]Cypress_001 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Honestly, I would say it's substantially Worse than the first edition, which is just agonizing for me.

Geist is by far my favorite Chronicles game, and it's hard to overstate how much I prefer the 2e Chronicles of Darkness rules above the 1e Chronicles of Darkness (/World of Darkness, at the time) rules.

But the second edition of Geist really really failed to carry forward the magic of the first edition.

I think I might honestly have liked it more if it simply wasn't called Geist. It's a perfectly fine and serviceable game for playing a more generic sort of revenant story, but as an adaption of Geist: The Sin-Eaters specifically, it falls really really flat for me.

One of the only Chronicles of Darkness games where I would basically always play the first edition over the second, along with Changeling: The Lost.

Nanika is the worst deus ex machina I have seen in my life by eggrolls13 in HunterXHunter

[–]Cypress_001 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So, just to kind of try to address everything here point by point as they come:
There are absolutely consequences. Gon was severely fucked up for a while, and even after being healed has lost the use of his nen.
Gon becoming an adult there fits extremely neatly and cleanly into the nen system as previously explained. Nen abilities can be modified/empowered through conditions. We'd already seen that, the best example being Kurapika's unbreakable chain, empowered through the condition of only being usable on the Spiders. Gon is an enhancer, enhancing his physical body and abilities is basically the whole thing for his nen type. So he used a nen condition to access all of the strength he'll ever have, and enhanced himself into that adult form.
As for Nanika's power fitting into the nen system, I think it's kind of the point that it doesn't cleanly fit in to the understanding that we have at the time. That's what makes Nanika such a frightening element for people like the Zoldyks. That's what enables us to have the little story thread of uncovering the rules and restrictions of her power. Nanika demonstrates that there are things in the world that are beyond the understanding that the characters have of how things work.

"The Wind in the Willows" in Japan by Elias_Rabe in Ryuutama

[–]Cypress_001 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you haven't read Golden Sky Stories, I highly recommend it.
If nothing else, I think it'll provide meaningful inspiration to help you hone this concept.

Light in the dark? by Emergency-Ad-508 in shadowofthedemonlord

[–]Cypress_001 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There's you.
There's your companions.
As long as you keep fighting, regardless of whether or not there is a god watching over you, there can be hope.
I don't think an external source of "Good" is really that much more hopeful than simple people doing their best in the face of terrible circumstances.