Downtown Khazan: Ice Cold Utopia

[The Dog]

In my view:

spoilers:

Adding any kind of "special-ness", be that power of otherwise, to Luffy's fruit, erodes a fundamental aspect of his character. Like, we have already have the will of D, Conqueror Haki, and that he's the son of Dragon but, the Will of D is not really a cohesive thing yet, Dragon doesn't actually play into Luffy's relative specialness or significance because both of them pretty much ignore each other and Conqueror's Haki, for all of it being a "one-in-a-million," power, is common amongst the top tiers of the series. Making the fruit somehow special because that is directly tied to Luffy alone and would hurt his character. Oda has played with some light "chosen one," elements as listed above but he's a good enough writer to present them in a way that One Piece doesn't fall into the usual pitfalls of those tropes.

end of spoilers

As noted, I trust Oda but I am very concerned about this direction.

A good way to describe your feelings about it.

spoilers:

I'm going with 'power' because of the World Government's previous actions. They generally try to gain or destroy anything that they feel is a threat to their control, whether it be a person, weapon, devil fruit, or knowledge. They had the Shichibukai in an attempt to further control the seas, and disbanded them when it was revealed they weren't living up to their end of the pargain. It's why they've tried their best to hide all knowledge of the Ancient Weapons. It's why they used a Buster Call to destroy Ohara and killed everyone who lived there (save for Nico Robin). It's why they're so terrified of the Yonko, because each of the Yonko equals them in power, so can't be controlled. And for them to be so gung-ho about keeping the Gomu Gomu that they'd use a rival to Rob Lucci as a guard, then throw him into Impel Down when he fails, the Gomu Gomu has to threaten their control in some way. And as it's a fruit, that means it has to be the power that it can bestow upon those who eat it.

end of spoilers

[Cody]

Second dose, done! Got a bit dizzy within minutes, but donzo!

[master of read]

we always use to talk about how badass chen zen and fujita are. but we slept on another monster from "fist of legend": master funakoshi.

[Tami]

Second dose, done! Got a bit dizzy within minutes, but donzo!

Congrats!!

[Len Ikari145]

Fire Force: Well, Arthur's going to be fun to use in Rumbles in the forseeable future. spoilers:

It's a shame that he's dead now.

end of spoilers

[Jcogginsa]

Binged through Godzilla Singular Point on Netflix. I enjoyed it! Though there is a lot of science talk, Writer was flexing their PHD

[Len Ikari145]

Binged through Godzilla Singular Point on Netflix. I enjoyed it! Though there is a lot of science talk, Writer was flexing their PHD

I'm looking forward to Season 2.

[Nik Hasta]

Fire Force: Well, Arthur's going to be fun to use in Rumbles in the forseeable future. spoilers:

It's a shame that he's dead now.

end of spoilers

Honestly? I think that's a very bold assumption on your part.

[bruceleegreyhulk]

[Sharpandpointies]

Pathfinder and 5e are both ultimately mods for D&D 3.5 I'd say. Pathfinder cut out a lot of its bloat, clarified some of its rules, and ended up with a pretty good system that suffered from many of the same flaws and turned into rocket tag at higher levels.

5e meanwhile simplified the rules a lot, nerfed the magic side of things in part by weakening spells but also by introducing a concentration mechanic, where most of the strong buffs take up 'Concentration', and you can only have one Concentration spell up at a time. Which did a lot to cut down on the god wizards and their fifty layers of invincibility. It also replaced the myriad small numerical bonuses with instead of the idea of "Advantage" and "Disadvantage", where if you have advantage you roll 2d20 and take the highest, and disadvantage you roll 2d20 and take the lowest. This cut down a lot on the on-the-spot math. The idea was to make D&D more open to newcomers and I think it did that pretty well. I find the system a bit simplistic myself, but for one-shots where players need to be familiar with their character almost immediately and want to make a character sheet quickly it works well.

This makes a certain amount of sense to me.

Pathfinder 2e meanwhile branches away from the basis of 3.5. It weakened magic a bit also and made the rules a bit more streamlined. The biggest changes is that it turned away from having different type of actions (full round actions, move action, swift action, etc) in favor of players just having "three actions" that they can do what they want with, with spells taking different amount of actions. I've only played one session so far, but it felt good.

Also interesting. I"m liking the whole 'weakening magic' on both sides of the fence. Streamlining is good. There came a point where D&D was just getting a little too...crazy with the rules.

None of this is enough to make me want to start GMing with either of these - I've poured over far too many game systems in my life, put too much time into the ones I finally settled on, and my group and I are pretty set on the campaigns we (still) have going - but I might poke my nose into a PbP game with these rules, or look through the 5e rules Beadle was kind enough to open up for me. ^_^ Just for funs.

Fantasy, but a bit further than the usual medieval fantasy. I'm aiming for more of an early 1800s Europe technological level.

I'm still fighting a bit on whether I want it to be based on a d20 or a d100. It'll involve obtaining X amount of successes for tasks, which is usually associated with d100. Ultimately that's just a question of math though so I'm working on the generic system around it and I'll decide on what sounds simpler later.

The inspiration for the system came to me when my group talked about... I think it was Anima ironically enough, and one of us complained that they didn't like how they could never be sure what their characters would know. It was really frustrating to them that a lot of RPG books mix common information and stuff very few people know in-setting, which made it a lot harder to get into character. Easier to adjust the numbers after having the skeleton ready.

Okay, that's fair enough. I like the timing/era/genre you're looking at as well.

I get that about Anima. My players just ask me 'would my character know about that thing we found out in the other game?' because...nobody, really, but me has actually READ the whole of the darned books (they know there are all kinds of secrets in them, ask me where the secrets are, and studiously ignore those areas as well as the Gaia books). But when other people in the group have cover-to-cover read everything, well....

Anyway, if I tell them 'you don't know that', they're good about playing that. I mean, good to tthe point of 'potentially trusting people they freaking KNOW their characters shouldn't trust'...the evil Daorland twin is in two different games, and in one of the games he's a sort-of ally of the players, some of whose characters think he's a 'really, nice, helpful guy' and defend him against all comers.

Meanwhile, their characters in the other game want his head on a spike.

So I had the idea of creating a system where you make your character using an app that runs you through a choose-your-own-adventure process, giving you the general information that your character would know while you're picking their life path that determines their abilities. It would also make the system have a higher floor in terms of game balance, since even if a new player doesn't know how the system works the life path would make a character for them that's decently strong.

Another motivation is that it would make character creation a lot faster and avoid the "Someone didn't actually make their character before the session." issue, since you can just tell them to go through the app process and have a character ready in 10-20 minutes.

Sounds like a good system for beginning players, and the multi-media aspect of it is certainly interesting.

Yeah, it's honestly a debate between fans if it was even necessary since again nobody is coming back and anyone back in the Inner Sphere who are even aware of this may had easily assumed they're dead.

Speaking of Battletech, the game has been enjoyable. I hope to one day salvage an Archer during a contract. I mean, there are better mechs, but I'm an Archer warrior all the way....With maybe a Hu*****ck as my backup.

1. I understand the appeal of an Archer. It's not MY thing (frankly, my favorite so far was the Hatchetman with modifications, so I'm about as far from an 'Archer-type' as possible), but as mechs go, the Archer leans heavily toward the 'highly specialized side of things, and I always prefer that to generalist stuff.

2. WTH did the site censor Hu*****ck? *****? Terrible word.

The reason this is weird is because I'm not arachnophobic. I've long been somewhat entomophobic, yes, but I can tell the difference between insects and spiders and the latter has never really frightened me.

Given I'm the exact opposite, I know how this can go.

Oh, don't worry about it. It doesn't really bother me. It's been ages since I had a nightmare that legitimately scared me.

Happy to hear it's just weird, and not upsetting.

[Iron_Twister]

I think Mechwarrior Online kinda helped my feelings on the Archer...The game unfortunately do not have Hatchetmans. I was simple on my customization. Two advanced guidance long range missile launchers, two lasers, and mostly more ammo that I'm pretty sure guarantees instant death if the enemy blew up my side torsos.

...Light Mechs from afar go boom is sorta now a norm in matches.

Just hoping to finish my summer courses this weekend and finally start playing more Battletech.

[Sharpandpointies]

No Hatchetman mech? Ugh. How can I live without that 1 in 6 chance of insta-winning against ANY mech up close, every round, on top of whatever damage you're doing? :P

Bleah.

[Iron_Twister]

No Hatchetman mech? Ugh. How can I live without that 1 in 6 chance of insta-winning against ANY mech up close, every round, on top of whatever damage you're doing? :P

Bleah.

Hopefully one of these days MWO will...Work something out with adding mechs such as the Hatchetman. Only heard it's just recently they've been trying to balance the game out.

[bruceleegreyhulk]

[Nik Hasta]

If people want a neat series to get in on the ground floor of, I would recommend Dandadan it has great art, fun quirky storytelling and looks like it might have some legs to it.