The Gaming Den

fectin wrote:So UA=fishmalk. Got it.

Pretty much. We did an OSSR of Unkown Armies. It... hasn't aged well. And I'm not talking about how many of the pictures we put up don't load anymore because of link sclerosis.

Literally every single thing silva says about the rules of that game is stupid. But, you probably already guessed that.

-Username17

Frank wrote:Literally every single thing silva says about the rules of that game is stupid.

Well, UA is about risk. If you prefer playing safe all the time, then it really is not the game for you.

By the way, the name of the adept type that deal with chance and risk is "Entropomancer" (not Luckymancer ).

silva wrote:

Frank wrote:Literally every single thing silva says about the rules of that game is stupid.

Well, UA is about risk. If you prefer playing safe all the time, then it really is not the game for you.

By the way, the name of the adept type that deal with chance and risk is "Entropomancer" (not Luckymancer ).

Only if by "risk" you mean "you might risk playing a shitty game." UA has slow, grindy combats and as close as you can get to not having rules for "doing things" as it is possible to get. For fuck's sake, we give Scion grief for not having a difficulty chart and thus leaving a giant floating question mark in the sky as to what you actually need to roll to do things. But at least Scion has a skill list. Unknown Armies doesn't even have that!

You don't get to defend Unknown Armies by saying "Yeah man, but it's supposed to be confusing." Because it is a fucking game. And fucking games have to have fucking rules that you can actually play. Unknown Armies is just a couple of dudes' incomplete Call of Cthulhu house rules. Without a hefty dose of telepathy, you can't even play the fucking game because those assholes didn't write down all the rules they were using.

-Username17

Sorry, but nothing you say reflect my experience with the game. Perhaps you should try actully playing the game ?

By the way, thats the same case with Apocalypse World, where you point lots of "problems" that never actually hapenned at our tables, nor in ANY table or online game Ive seen.

Frank has a funny way of analysing games in that he seems to decide wether he likes the game or not BEFORE actually knowing or playing it, and then, if he decides he doesnt like it, he sets out to criricize the game in any possible way he can manage, EVEN in ways that dont fit the actual game (as shown in the "problems" in AW and UA that only he sees ).

There is no problem in dont liking something, but when you try to objectively qualify something as bad just to justify your preferences, you just showing everybody you have the maturity of a 14 years old.

silva is like a Dreidel. You spin him around and never can predict what he will come up with. But he still only comes up with four things to say.

I'm still not actually convinced that silva isn't a bot. He literally just responded to the charge "It is literally impossible to play this game because the rules are incomplete and do not cover basic task resolution" with "Have you tried playing the game?" He has descended so far into self parody that he stopped being funny and started being funny again.

In any case: Unknown Armies has no mechanics that anyone should want to emulate. And I mean that with all due sincerity. There are mechanics in fucking White Wolf games that you might want to steal for a worthier project. Unknown Armies has nothing. It's just a blind alley of epicycles added to Call of Cthulhu.

-Username17

silva wrote:

fectin wrote:So UA=fishmalk. Got it.

Wut ?

I didn't know fishmalk the first time I heard it on a message board either. That's why I googled it.

FrankTrollman wrote:silva is like a Dreidel. You spin him around and never can predict what he will come up with. But he still only comes up with four things to say.

Funny how the same applies to you. "You are an idiot/stupid" and "this game is terrible" are the only things you say, usually followed by nonsensic or competely miopic arguments in the likes of "I dont like horror movies so horror as a genre is objectively crap".

In any case: Unknown Armies has no mechanics that anyone should want to emulate.

Yes, it has. The fact YOU dont like it doenst means shit, really.

And I mean that with all due sincerity.

The sincerity of someone who allegedly dont like BRP in the first place.

Its like me - someone whoe dont likes D&D in the first place - saying "D&D is crap. With all due sincerity".

No, its not. The fact I dont like D&D doenst make it crap. It does make it unfit for my particular tastes as a gamer. Thats it.

There are mechanics in fucking White Wolf games that you might want to steal for a worthier project.

Sure, and I never said the contrary. If you have a good look, you will find intesting mechanics worthy of copying in most games out there.

Unknown Armies has nothing. It's just a blind alley of epicycles added to Call of Cthulhu.

UA "power gamble" / "how far do you go for power?" magic is something CoC doesnt have. And its just one example. The fact you dont like it doesnt nullify or diminishes it. (Sorry to say that)

Unknown Armies did not invent raising stakes. In fact, the term comes from a game that is nearly five hundred years old. Unknown Armies has a specific mechanic for gambling for power: you lower your effective skill and add dice. That is not a gamble. That is not pushing the limit. That is a fucking math problem. Rolling more dice increases the odds that one will land under the target number, while lowering the target number reduces the odds. There is a number of dice you can buy where the first effect holds, and after that the second effect does, and it is a completely trivial math problem to determine where the line is. That is a shitty mechanic. It is an objectively shitty mechanic, because it doesn't satisfy its own stated goals.

silva: whining that I'm always saying that you're wrong doesn't get you any points. I'm not always saying you're wrong because I can't see your point of view or because I'm caught up in groupthink or whatever the fuck you think is happening. There aren't two correct sides to every issue. I'm always telling you that you're wrong because you're a fucking idiot who is always fucking wrong.

-Username17

Frank, by "How far do you go for power?" I didnt mean raising the stakes, I meant the adepts magic nature where you gain more power the more you risk your life ( be it your social life, your sanity, or you life per se). I illustrated this with the Entropomancer way of gaining a major charge ( = throwing himself blind folded in a highway) in exchange for being able to do a major spell.

The funny thing is: this theme underlines the whole game, and I dont remember you citing it in your review. You got so occupied trying to nitpick little "problems" to justify your preferences that you forgot one of the game main underlining themes. As always, you confuse the forest for the trees.

FrankTrollman wrote:He has descended so far into self parody that he stopped being funny and started being funny again.

Maybe for you. I'm still waiting for it to come back round again.

I just remind myself. It's only a bot used to promote shitty games. It's only a bot.

*bot in this case rather than being an automated text program that tells us about shitty kitchen ware, instead is a human employee of some marketing group charged with the task of directing message board conversation towards a shitty game that paid for the service.

erik: I have absolutely nothing against you. (Yet). Differently from Frank, Kaelik and Fectin, you dont look lika a spambot for calling people stupid and saying all games are crap very two posts.

Whatever you think of Frank, he doesn't just say 'this game is crap'. He always provides reasons for his position. Ergo, if you disagree with his reasons, you can disagree with his position. However, if his reason is 'the mechanics are unplayable' and you think functioning mechanics are required to make a game better than 'crap' (as most people do) you either have to agree with him OR point out how his position is wrong (how the game is playable).

Of course, if you're the kind of person who doesn't use the rules ANYWAY, that'd be hard to do.

Deaddm, how trustful is the opinion of someone who thinks Unknown Armies - a simplification of CoC percentile roll-under (one of the more simple and transparent resolutions, really) - is confusing and broken while finding Shadowrun 4e - with its myriad non-unified subsystems and variable modifiers tables - ok ?

I dont have a problem if someone points to something in a game thats broken. I have a problem when someone declares a game broken because some aspect of it do not behaves in accord to someone preferred playstyle. See Franks assessment of Apocalypse World and you will se what Im talking about here - none of the "problems" he points to ever showed up in mine or any other table Ive seen, not in default AW nor in its multitude of hacks, from Dungeon World to Tremulus to Monsterhearts.

Its like a bridge engineer condemning a project and stating "this bridge would not last for 1 year", and then someone taps his shoulder and shows how the project is already being used in a bunch of places for more than a decade with no problem whatsoever. And then someone finds out that the first engineer condemned the project not because it was really condemnable but because it used methodologies and concepts that didnt catter to his preferred style or line of work.

That first engineer is Frank.

Can you see the difference ?

I think you might be interpreting him a bit too literally.

You may have never seen a bear, but I'm sure you've rolled a 7, 8, or 9 during an Apocalypse World session. Even if those numbers didn't result in a bear, the point was that the results were wholly quantum, rather than something you could game around.

silva wrote:erik: I have absolutely nothing against you. (Yet). Differently from Frank, Kaelik and Fectin, you dont look lika a spambot for calling people stupid and saying all games are crap very two posts.

I get that you are a fucking idiot trying to reiterate any and every criticism against you at everyone who has ever disagreed with you. But despite your stupidity and general inability to read I will suggest you stop doing that. If you learn how to understand a criticism first instead of being a moron, you can learn when it would be vaguely plausible to come back with the same insult, and when it makes no sense, and then you wil sound less like the idiot you are.

So for example, spambots exist to sell products, and literally every dumb word out of your dumb mouth is about how great [shitty game X] is. On the other hand, spam bots do not exist to call people stupid and tell people that the mechanics of [shitty game X] don't do what you claim they do.

The criticism is at least reasonably directed at you because even though not true, it reflects your weird stupid posting habits through the lens of what it looks like to other people who are not idiots, and are therefore confused when you idiotically praise a shitty game.

But it makes absolutely no sense to call someone a spam bot for disagreeing with you about [subject X], or being mean to you, which is all you are doing, because you are an idiot.

Nope. In my tables - and every other Ive been to or seen, in the physical plane or internet - ive never had any problems with that. But if you dont believe me, please go ahead and bring some actual plays where the groups criticize this aspect of the game. Be it from AW or DW or MH or whatever hack you prefer.

As Chamo said in that same thread, Franks points are all related to retard players. And retard players can produce Bears in any game.

No good GM will Bear you, right. Sounds a bit like no true Scotsman to me.

Sakuya, the fact Frank has a following around here helps lots of his bullshits pass as true story. I suggest you read the rules book yourself and take your own conclusions. And, if possible, read some actual play. After that, if you keep your opinion, I will respect that.

Kaelik, finally a coherent and reasonable critic. Yeah, I can respect that. I know I behave like that a bunch of times.

Frank doesn't really have a "following". I would wager that Frank is the most consistently debated poster here who is not a troll. The idea that he has a following here is a misconception held by people who don't post here. Many posters here, self included, respect Frank as a person who is good at producing or analyzing game design content but he is not called a cockbag any less than any other poster and, given that he posts frequently and is somewhat aggressive, likely much more.

silva wrote:Nope. In my tables - and every other Ive been to or seen, in the physical plane or internet - ive never had any problems with that. But if you dont believe me, please go ahead and bring some actual plays where the groups criticize this aspect of the game. Be it from AW or DW or MH or whatever hack you prefer.

Ok that's enough. You clearly think that this is a meaningful argument. It is not. The "actual play" argument only loses you points here, it is brand of faulty logic the Den has recognized long ago. Anecdotes about how something "works at my table" do not prove anything, especially if that table is composed of fanboys like yourself. RPG fanboys do not apply critical thinking to RPGs indeed they do the opposite of that living in denial about issues with the system even when those issues are spelled out to them.

When someone like Frank says that Unknown Armies is unplayable that's a very literal statement. He means that the rules for doing things in Unknown Armies are incomplete to the point that you can not run a session of UA for example without the GM filling those gaps with shit he made up. The fact that people can and do fill in those gaps with doesn't disprove Franks statement at all.

Kaelik wrote:

TheFlatline wrote:If I had to lay down a mechanic that won the "OMFG that's too cool" factor for me, it'd have to actually be the traitor mechanic from Battlestar Galactica.

There are other games out there that did it earlier (Dark Shadows over Camelot), there are games that even do hidden traitors quicker, or potentially even better (Resistance in particular takes 15 minutes instead of 2-3 hours), but only BSG has that one moment halfway through the game where... everything changes. New loyalty cards are handed out in the sleeper phase, literally halfway through the game, and you stand a chance of switching sides completely and secretly. Looking around the table after that deal and realizing for the first time that while you couldn't be sure before, now you *are* sure that one, possibly two of the people you worked with to survive this far are now working against you.

See, I actually fucking hate the traitor mechanic in Battlestar, because unlike Resistance, you are actually equally if not more powerful once your traitorosity has been revealed. So the mechanic does not incentivize in any way the action of sometimes succeeding in order to trick them into failing later. You just start off walking to the nearest important area and sabotaging that location until they kill you off, then you lead the cylons from the fleet anyway.

Over on BGG where they run play-by-forum games (I've even moderated several) and have a metric assload of session reports, early reveal with a really good team of human players pretty much hands victory to the humans. Once all the toasters are out, the humans close ranks, throw Executive Orders, take bigger risks, and rely on each other a lot more and they gain a distinct advantage. Statistically, the game only favors Cylons by a hair over the course of hundreds of games, and that includes the games were people are terrible at playing and the Cylons have a huge innate advantage. Among a good group it's even money or even in the favor of the Humans, especially with Pegasus.

Variants have been played where Cylons reveal on turn on and try to hammer away and it turns out this is not an optimal strategy. It just *feels* powerful. But especially in the base game, it isn't. I mean, sure you get great abilities, but at most you're looking at 6-7 turns total, with a severely limited hand that you can't do much with, and players that can brace themselves for your turn. In fact, your best hope at that point is that the player before or after you becomes a Cylon, because back to back cylon turns suck *way* more.

The key as a Cylon is to wait *just* long enough to reveal that the advantage of trust that the game provides the humans is too little too late, or to crush them without ever really arousing suspicion.

I dunno. I've probably played and moderated like 50 games of BSG. Sometimes you get dull games, but usually they're extremely taunt and fun.

Lord Mistborn wrote:

silva wrote:Nope. In my tables - and every other Ive been to or seen, in the physical plane or internet - ive never had any problems with that. But if you dont believe me, please go ahead and bring some actual plays where the groups criticize this aspect of the game. Be it from AW or DW or MH or whatever hack you prefer.

Ok that's enough. You clearly think that this is a meaningful argument. It is not. The "actual play" argument only loses you points here, it is brand of faulty logic the Den has recognized long ago. Anecdotes about how something "works at my table" do not prove anything, especially if that table is composed of fanboys like yourself. RPG fanboys do not apply critical thinking to RPGs indeed they do the opposite of that living in denial about issues with the system even when those issues are spelled out to them.

When someone like Frank says that Unknown Armies is unplayable that's a very literal statement. He means that the rules for doing things in Unknown Armies are incomplete to the point that you can not run a session of UA for example without the GM filling those gaps with shit he made up. The fact that people can and do fill in those gaps with doesn't disprove Franks statement at all.

This forum needs an essay on why this isn't a good argument. It could talk about how most games have major mechanical issues and people enjoy them anyway. A group of friends can have fun playing Candyland.

Lord Mistborn wrote:

silva wrote:Nope. In my tables - and every other Ive been to or seen, in the physical plane or internet - ive never had any problems with that. But if you dont believe me, please go ahead and bring some actual plays where the groups criticize this aspect of the game. Be it from AW or DW or MH or whatever hack you prefer.

Ok that's enough. You clearly think that this is a meaningful argument. It is not. The "actual play" argument only loses you points here, it is brand of faulty logic the Den has recognized long ago. Anecdotes about how something "works at my table" do not prove anything, especially if that table is composed of fanboys like yourself. RPG fanboys do not apply critical thinking to RPGs indeed they do the opposite of that living in denial about issues with the system even when those issues are spelled out to them.

When someone like Frank says that Unknown Armies is unplayable that's a very literal statement. He means that the rules for doing things in Unknown Armies are incomplete to the point that you can not run a session of UA for example without the GM filling those gaps with shit he made up. The fact that people can and do fill in those gaps with doesn't disprove Franks statement at all.

The *only* time when anecdotes are useful against an argument that Frank brings up is if you are literally playing RAW and can show mechanically that things work differently. Usually referenced by bringing quotes and other shit like that.

Frank's complaints are usually mathematical in nature, which means that you actually don't need to play the game to see the math at work: you're using dice, dice generate a limited number of random numbers, and you can work that shit out pretty reasonably.

His complaint against the wager/raise the stakes thing made perfect sense. Raising the difficulty and throwing more dice means that there's an island of statistical probability that is actually very stable for maximum power level: Going above it would penalize you and going below it would probably penalize you as well. You can calculate that island of stability ahead of time and just figure out what you have to do to hit that target point. Basically it's a free power up to people who know statistics and can rub a few brain cells together.

Plus, your example of running out into traffic to cast a big spell is fucking stupid. It's a MTP equivalent to giving someone a gun and saying "I'm going to flip this coin. Tails you blow my head off, heads I drop a nuke on Los Angeles." Or a fireball. Or you boil a kettle of water. Whatever. Still sounds like a shitty system and a shitty deal.

Lord Mistborn,

the argument is not that it doesnt work at my table - its that the kind of problematic behaviors cited by Frank as possible based on his read of the rules were never reproduced in any actual game at all. And if he cannot prove that his diagnosis of the game rules in practice is true, it means his diagnosis is wrong.

Back to the topic....

this will look weird, but after years messing with complex and slow initiative mechanics, I find the simplistic initiative in Savage Worlds and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying very liberating. They remind me that roleplaying games dont need to keep following their wargames heritage "just because ".