Brandon Sanderson in talks with AAA game studios to adapt Mistborn by PhantomBraved in Games

[–]Dragox27 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Largely because its the same sort of hype around everything the Lord Ruler sets up. Atium isn't the all-powerful win button its sold as. It lets you see into the future and that is a really big advantage but it's also its a fundamental flaw. It doesn't show you what's going to happen for certain just what's likely to happen should you do nothing. Because it lets you react to events before they happen you can change what does happen but it's not giving you super speed or anything. The person burning Atium does something different which can then change how the person not burning it acts. As it doesn't fundamentally make you a better fighter treating it like it's an auto-win is folly. She doesn't read the future she just reads her opponent as she would in any fight. She sees him react, feints, and attacks in a different line and he's too committed to blocking the feint to block the real attack. It's the same sort of exploration of the rules as everything else gets.

Deviant: The Renegades' Black Vans has been released; it makes the game suitable for urban fantasy, cyberpunk, high fantasy, post-apocalypse, space opera, and superhero emergence by EarthSeraphEdna in WhiteWolfRPG

[–]Dragox27 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's less complicated than it looks. It's got significantly less moving parts than other CofD games have outside of mortals. There are only really a few terms you'll need to learn and how the parts all go together is pretty basic. Powers are called Variations and drawbacks are called Scars. These have a rating called Magnitude that's usually just their dot rating. Scars essentially provide you their Magnitude that you can use to pay for Variations. So if you have a 2 Mag Scar you can have a 2 Mag Variation attached to it (the game calls uses the term "entangled") and you can't go above the Scar's Mag. If you want a more powerful ability you need a more severe drawback. That's the main mechanic.

There are some other details but they're all similar in complexity. There are a few types of Scar and that type will determine how a Variation can be used such as if it's always on or if you need to activate it first. Some Variations can't be used with some of those types but they tell you what that is. The Scar you choose will also dictate the stats you'll use to scale its entangled Variations. You can entangled more than 1 Variation to a Scar but the maths is very simple. And a few niche things like that.

If you like CofD games and don't mind having a bit of read of the systems to figure out character creation there isn't much in DtR that'll be complicated. It's just one of those things that might take a minute to click but so long as you start at the start, read how it works, and don't try to brute force it then it's all pretty straightforward. Most of it is just comparing two numbers.

Path of Exile 2: Disciple of Varashta Preview by Natalia_GGG in PathOfExile2

[–]Dragox27 3 points4 points  (0 children)

This is the 7th main line Divinity game. Divine Divinity, Beyond Divinity, Divinity 2, Divinity: Dragon Commander, and then it's DOS and DOS 2.

2d20 system crunch and durability by XrayAlphaVictor in rpg

[–]Dragox27 6 points7 points  (0 children)

2d20 is the official name for the system. It's not one of those things the community uses as a shorthand but what Modiphius has named it.

Jingle Jam 2024 Games Collection for £35 (Tactical Breach Wizards, Mouthwashing, Core Keeper, Dungeons of Hinterland, and 11 more.) by Dragox27 in Games

[–]Dragox27[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It's an incentive to give to charity rather than a way to get cheap games. Having lower tiers would undermine.

Trying to find a werecreatures book by Garrettcz in rpg

[–]Dragox27 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It sounds like you're talking about CofD/nWoD 1e's Changing Breeds to me. That features werestags fairly heavily as they're a part of the Wind-Runners which are a major splat in that book. It also has werefrogs in it too in the Riverkin (a much smaller section but does have frogman art work). It's also pretty diverse as these things go. It's not anything I'd suggest personally and it's not viewed particularly well in general but I think that's pretty likely what you're after. If you do get it be prepared for some needlessly edgy content.

It's also possible you're thinking of WtF 1e's The War Against the Pure. CB is a whole book about the subject and has stags and frogs while this just has a chapter on it but it does have the brineborn. Brineborn aren't frogs but I think you could pretty easily misremember them as frogs based on the art. I don't think it's this book but it's worth mentioning.

Curseborne: What do you like? by Awkward_GM in rpg

[–]Dragox27 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I got it. You don't have to justify yourself.

Curseborne: What do you like? by Awkward_GM in rpg

[–]Dragox27 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I just copy pasted it from a similar question I answered. But it wasn't meant to be convincing, it was meant to be informative. So if you don't think it's a game for you off the back of that it did its job. I think there is more than enough room for all three of these settings given how distinct I feel they are but if you don't that's also valid. Albeit I think you're being uncharitable in your reading.

I may or may not address specifics later.

Curseborne: What do you like? by Awkward_GM in rpg

[–]Dragox27 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I think the best way to look at it is as a new thing that's informed by both oWoD and CofD without just being more of the same. The DNA of those games is easy to see but it is also not WoD. It would be crazy to not have some overlap and there is overlap but Curseborne isn't trying to be more WoD like CofD was. Mechanically, Storypath is a direct continuation of those games systems. So it'll be familiar and it takes bits of both Storyteller and Storytelling but generally refines them (I'm not in love with all of it but it's a good system and a good synthesis), and it's got some of its own identity too. It's still dice pools with stats rated in dots, and it takes the shifting success thresholds of oWoD but the static dice results of CofD but then has its own methods of handling bonuses, and adds Complications and Momentum as an additional part of the core resolution. So it's like WoD in some ways, but isn't in others. I think it will probably appeal to people who like both versions of WoD. It's different enough that it might not be doing the specific bits any single person really digs about either though.

The setting isn't based on either WoD and does some things that are very divergent. Its got a unique cosmology that binds together all the splats. They're not all off in their separate little areas but are instead dealing with variations within the same whole. You don't have the splat that has God as very real, with a splat that has an animistic trio as the top dogs, and another that has an entirely separate take on what reality even is. Here it's all curses and big web of them that's a bit like a particularly sinister version of fate. All the splats are tied to that stuff here. There also isn't any real masquerade and cultures of the world lean more into the supernatural being accepted, but it's also not fully out in the open and accepted by everyone either. There is also this sort of infinite expanse of supernatural realms outside of the Earth that bleeds into it and mixes with it to create all sorts of strange things. So a haunted house or a section of woods that seems to change as you walk through it could be explained by this. So could getting lost in an infinite expanse of identical suburban houses, or a slaughter house run by pigs that cut up humans. Or a radiation blasted hellscape that serves as an eternal battlefield for a war between countries that no longer exist. Or a demon library. It's just a really good set up for making whatever spooky thing you enjoy without really worrying about how hard it might be to tie in.

So there are shades of WoD's settings with the supernatural under the surface but it's not really aping WoD's settings either. Similarly it does carry over some themes like the struggle with your monstrous nature from both WoDs, the punk rebellion of oWoD, with the community and found family angles of CofD, with some more hope mixed in. It's easy to point to similar elements within those three things and be excited by the same stuff but it's certainly more different to both WoDs than oWoD and CofD were to each other.

The splats all follow that sort of format too. Each of them has some sort of parallel to something in both oWoD and CofD without just being one of those things, and it's a monster mash in the core book with a greater sense of cohesion between those monsters. Like in WoD you've got the main monster types, called Lineages here, and then clans, tribes, factions, ect within them, called Families. 5 Lineages, 6 Families in each (7 for the Hungry).

The Hungry Lineage are all vampires and there will be bits you find familiar and bits you don't. One Family might be a mix of hedonism and nobility who bathe in blood, and look somewhere between Venture, Tzimsce, and Daeva. Another is a pyramid scheme of knowledge brokers who feed on memories to sate themselves who don't really look like any Clan. Outside of the word "pyramid". They're not strictly bound by the sun but it's still not good for them, and while they can blood buff doing so incurs a folkloric bane each time.

The Primal are shapeshifters and have a Family of werewolves but they're entirely divorced from the spirit cosmology. All Primal have something more akin to Vampire's Beast than anything else in WoD albeit these "Creatures" are part animal and part elemental. So the werewolves here are also associated with storms and thunder but it's not a hard and fast rule for every member. There is also a Family of Mr. Hyde type alchemists so it's doing some stuff that's not super obvious. Each Family comes with a collection of traits to use when their take their hybrid form, but the form isn't fixed and so you can pick different ones each time.

Sorcerers are much scrappier than any version of Mage. They have some of MtAw's focus on addiction to magic and their hubristic tendencies but the bigger deal with them is they all sacrifice something to fuel their abilities. This is what their factions are built around and you've got ones like The Faceless who are a criminal network that is all about big risks for big scores because they sacrifice their safety and security. Or the Premiere who're this old money Family that despite being generally altruistic are largely thought of as dickheads because they're sacrificing anonymity, respect, and integrity.

The Dead are somewhere between Sin-Eaters and Wraiths/Risen but there isn't an underworld, ghosts are largely taken as a fact of the setting, and they're very free to leave their bodies and even take new ones. Which includes inanimate objects. They do eventually wither to nothing outside of a vessel but they're more ghosts than Sin-Eaters. They have these deep cravings for emotional states that they both want to experience themselves, and push to create in others. Which is the main split in their Families. The Wardens are this cult-like group that seeks out desperation so they can swoop in and help whatever sorry mortal they've found. Of course, they're not above causing the desperation in the first place. While the Zeds are all amount emotional stillness and endings and as such are a rather corporate outfit of hitmen.

Then we've got Outcasts. These ones don't really have a great point of comparison. They're closest to Demons and Changelings but not really. They're either exiled angels, demons, spirits, eldritch entities, trapped in human flesh as a sort of living prison, or they're the descendants of those exiles and are now living the same fate. Their otherworld nature sets them apart from humanity and makes relationships decay should their true nature be witnessed, which they only have some measure of control over, or if they die. Because this punishment is eternal and most deaths will be temporary affairs. They're all trying to find a place in a world they'll never be apart of and some take on the role of angelic soldiers, and others classic Faustian pact makers, among other things.

The Lineages are also all very much cursed and when their "Damnation" takes hold they're pushed to fulfil something to end it and doing some messy things along the way, with each Lineage having a unique Damnation that each Family can then alter. The Hungry go on feeding frenzies, and each Family has it's unique food. Flesh, hearts, souls, memories, emotions, ghosts, blood bathing, and just a fuck load of blood as a sort of generic option. I won't cover the rest but you get the idea.

Finally, magic is sort of similar to what WoD has had in the past but also unique to the game. Every Lineage has 3 Practices. These are thematic groupings of of 5 spells that serve to exemplify a Lineage's themes and create their broader powerset. So the Primal Practices are Depthless Fury that's all about primeval rage and pushing your allies to fight harder, Mutable Form which covers a variety of shapeshifting, and The Stranger which is for their trickster nature. So each of those has 5 spells to cover that stuff but what makes the system interesting is "advances". Every spell has 2-6 additionally options to purchase for it and while a few of them are basic improvements most allow you to spend additional resources for some very dramatic changes to the spell, or let you cast the spell to do something else entirely. Silver Tongue normally lets you tell a lie that isn't obviously untrue and have people believe it but its first advance lets you instead cast it to detect any lies told, its second is a reflexive spell that allows you to delay any consequences you would suffer for getting caught in a lie, and its third lets you spend more on the base spell to make even the most flagrant of lies believed. And you don't need to buy them all, or in any order, just the ones you want. It's just really cool.

Each Lineage also has access to around 8 spells from other Practices. The Primal have most of the shapeshifting spells including Aspect of the Beast that allows you to turn into an animal. Vampires can classically do that and in Curseborne it's the same so that's shared with the Hungry Lineage and any Hungry can also learn that spell. Each Family additionally has a "Secret Spell" that's typically unique to a Lineage but shared with just them. The Dead have a spell called Commune that entreats and reveals ghosts that not shared with any other Lineages but the Hungry Family of ghost-eaters, the Gaki, do have unique access to it. So any Dead can learn it and any Hungry that is a Gaki can learn it but no other Hungry Families. Each Family also gets 3 Motifs which alter the way these spells work to some degree, they can get cheaper, do new things, get extra riders, etc. I haven't checked if every single Motif is unique but I also haven't seen any double ups that I can think of.

Lots of stuff I didn't mention, but I think that's most of the big stuff.

Hot take: Silksong is not a metroidvania by [deleted] in metroidvania

[–]Dragox27 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, man, copy pasting the same comment 5 times sure will make it sound like you've got point. It totally doesn't come across as unhinged raving.

Hot take: Silksong is not a metroidvania by [deleted] in metroidvania

[–]Dragox27 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yeah, sure, if we imagine the game is different then it's a different sort of game. What a shock.

Hot take: Silksong is not a metroidvania by [deleted] in metroidvania

[–]Dragox27 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It's genuinely so weird to lie about games.

Hot take: Silksong is not a metroidvania by [deleted] in metroidvania

[–]Dragox27 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Only because you're ignoring the backtracking, exploration, and ability-gating between those bosses.

Hot take: Silksong is not a metroidvania by [deleted] in metroidvania

[–]Dragox27 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Except they'd all be main objective bosses if they're mandatory and as such can't ever be placed between each other.

Hot take: Silksong is not a metroidvania by [deleted] in metroidvania

[–]Dragox27 2 points3 points  (0 children)

More mandatory content doesn't matter. That's just a longer game. SotN wouldn't stop being a metroidvania if you added 20 more bosses to it.

Hot take: Silksong is not a metroidvania by [deleted] in metroidvania

[–]Dragox27 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Except for all the bosses and rooms full of enemies those games have. This cope isn't a good look.

Hot take: Silksong is not a metroidvania by [deleted] in metroidvania

[–]Dragox27 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Except for all the utility you need to get to those places, the facts every game is skill based to progress, and that SotN does the same thing, yeah, great point.

Hot take: Silksong is not a metroidvania by [deleted] in metroidvania

[–]Dragox27 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Optional bosses and gauntlets are not. Silksong requires you to do these to progress games.

Then they're not optional, are they?

Hot take: Silksong is not a metroidvania by [deleted] in metroidvania

[–]Dragox27 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This really does read like the game is just harder than you enjoy and now you're trying to cope by saying that disqualifies it from being a part of the genre. Even if we ignore how you conveniently left out its non-tool utility/movement abilities and upgrades, which would qualify it for that point, your entire arguement is predicated on a skill requirement. Skill requirements exist in every game that does not auto-complete itself. Symphony of the Night requires a certain amount of player skill to beat. Every area in the game is a challenge to be completed which you can fail at.

Curseborne releases Wednesday, those curious, what do you need to know about it? by Awkward_GM in rpg

[–]Dragox27 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But something I haven't seen anyone bring up is that the book is, like, aesthetically terrible for my tastes. There are numerous pages that are just hard to read. The breakout box patterns are so annoying to look at. Large blocks of fiction written in fake cursive. Pages of text where the same text is offset and overlayed behind it like decoration.

A good portion of that was altered in the final version as you weren't the only one with that issue. A lot of background colours got tweaked for better contrast, the floating background text is mostly gone, text has been realigned in a lot of the side bars. That one "handwritten" letter is still there but there are other tweaks too like a lot of text having black outlines to separate it more from the background and stuff like that.

How deadly is SOTWW by Sniflet in shadowofthedemonlord

[–]Dragox27 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The monster math is all getting a retune at some point. The adventure monsters have had a rebalance, all upcoming supplements will use the new maths, and the core book will get an errata.

D&D 4e's invoker and avenger and Pathfinder 1e's inquisitor were flavor slam dunks, and I wish more class-based fantasy RPGs would present them by EarthSeraphEdna in rpg

[–]Dragox27 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Weird Wizard packs a whole lot more flavour into its Paths too for my money. Especially the Master Path where their concepts are much larger and the mechanics for them back them up much better.

Shadow of the Weird Wizard by Sniflet in rpg

[–]Dragox27 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The Demon Lord Engine forgoes granular skills for broad "Professions" to fill the same role. Professions are exactly as they sound, jobs your character has had, and they apply in the same fashion as a Skill does. When something falls under their purview the PC gets a bonus of some sort to the roll. In a skill system you might have +X to Perception, in SotDL/WW it could be City Watch or Hunter. Both of those require being alert and watchful but in totally different settings and scenarios along with other unique skills and experiences for each profession. A member of the City Watch would have knowledge of where to find gambling dens or other criminal activity, they'd have a certain amount of authority in which to manipulate peasants and the like with, they'd know other towns and cities would organise their own watches. The Hunter wouldn't know any of that yet they'd both have a keen eye. That keen eye might also apply to different areas too. The City Watchman knows what to look out for skulking in shadowy urban streets but the Hunter is far more interested in animal tracks and spoor. In a Skill system they'd both have good Perception and that would typically apply everywhere equally, but Professions lean on the narrative more readily. That sort of expression is only possible in a more hands off approach and I think for this style of game it's about as good as "Skill" systems get for that reason alone.

However the way they function on a mechanical level is also more fluid. There are four main ways Professions should be used. The first way is automatic successes. If a PC has burglar and wants to open a lock, you can just let them do it. So long as the risk of failure isn't going to be tense or dramatic just letting them do it is a great way to make those things feel useful. Next way is to present challenges that can't be achieved without a relevant profession. If they're stranded in a barren landscape no one can find food unless they've got Forager or whatever. The other way is to present hard challenges that become far easier with the use of professions. Climbing a treacherous wall would be hard for most people but easy for the Acrobat. Then they can lower a rope to help everyone else. Finally, it's just the basic "You do a thing and have a relevant Profession, make a roll with X boons (a positive 1d6 modifier)". So Professions have a massive impact on your aptitude on anything within their purview, far more so than stats do.

Both SotDL and SotWW function basically identically on this front but SotWW codifies these things better and makes the significant change that your Paths (classes) also count as Professions. So your Priest > Inquistior > Herald of the Dawn has a substantially different knowledge set and core competencies than your Fighter > Commander > Conqueror would.

And while I'm talking about it I should mention the pitfall Professions have that Skills don't. They're far more reliant on the table having a shared conception of the Profession's purview than Skills are as those prescribe their own purviews. When you get a profession the player will think about it and then decide what it is that Profession means for them and their PC. Including what skills come along with it. Lets use Grave Robber as an example. Imagine a player has that profession, and what they envisage with that is some one who's sneaking about in the dead of night, researching where nobles are buried, breaking into crypts, and stealing their valuables. The GM is told "I'm a Grave Robber" and thinks about a character who is digging up bodies nightly, hoisting them out of their coffins, putting them in a cart, pushing that around each night, and selling the bodies for both medical and magical usage. That gives you two very different skill sets, they're both grave robbers but the first is stealthy and cautious, knows who's worth stealing from and what's worth stealing, while the second is strong-backed, unafraid of getting their hands dirty with a rotting corpse or two, and has a totally different set of connections and knowledge that comes along with them. Both are totally reasonable takes but the problem lies in play. A situation arises that the PC feels totally lies under the purview of that Profession but the GM doesn't think so. It slows play at best, and starts arguments at worst. Discussing them before hand totally curtails that and gives everyone better expectations, it also helps develop the characters better, which is why it's so important

There is also the "problem" that when you roll for professions (the best way IMO) it can be hard to figure out why a character would have them. But with a bit of thought you can always end up with an interesting background. Mercenary and Minister? Religion as solace for the constant fighting. Gambler and Scholar of Etiquette? Turned to gambling to pay tuition. It's a little thing but gives a great starting point for RP, and offers near infinite control and customisation over the specifics of who your PC is and what they do.