Tabletop Games Thread

[LegalLoliLover]

I mean, I wanted to play as a custom hero, based on a Cao Cao to Mewt's Han Xiandi. I guess Marche would be Liu Bei. How lax does the law have to be to allow Marche to so easily use a pub? His face should be on every wanted poster with anyone wearing his clan's colors to be recognized as enemies of the state. If not an alternate campaign, a Far Cry style "good ending is the one where you do nothing" would have nice, but of course, mainstream JRPGs have to get preachy about this kind of stuff. Dragon's Dogma would have been one of my favorite games, if not for the martyr ending. The box art really shouldn't be misleading words, like "do you even want to [return home]?" when the game forces you to go down one path.

[Mattias]

I don't think that was ever actually confirmed. For all we know Ivalice could have been a stable world forever if Marche wasn't so determined to tear it all down. And of course, the decision of whether dying blissfully in a dream is preferable to living an additional miserable forty years would be Mewt's alone, not Marche's.

I thought Marche couldn't leave without Mewt stopping whatever he's doing? At that point it's less about Mewt's assisted suicide and more about him taking other people down with him.

[LegalLoliLover]

How canon is the post-game? Given the post-game, it seems the opposite. Mewt leaves. Literally everyone else stays.

[Deathhappens]

I thought Marche couldn't leave without Mewt stopping whatever he's doing? At that point it's less about Mewt's assisted suicide and more about him taking other people down with him.

Yeah, exactly. Marche starts on his whole quest because he's determined that the storybook world is a "fake" one and he needs to destroy it to return to the "real" one. How actually accurate that is is left as an exercise to the reader.

[LegalLoliLover]

Which again, given the game's lack of meaningful choice, no matter what the reader's or rather the player's opinion, you're forced to do linear actions to advance the plot... Which runs opposite to the words written on the game box.

[Zork Knight]

Start playing Mage 20th anniversary edition last week. The, uh, creative freedom(?) in doing your magic(k) is really nice, but it also occasionally makes it feel more like superheroes than mages

[aldeayeah]

Start playing Mage 20th anniversary edition last week. The, uh, creative freedom(?) in doing your magic(k) is really nice, but it also occasionally makes it feel more like superheroes than mages

mage has always been about coming up with the most egregious bullshit

it's a great game for a nasuverse fan

[LegalLoliLover]

Remember how Uncle Vlad protected the Masquerade by breaking the Masquerade so hard that it flipped the other way? Well, nowadays, there's this thing called "VTubers"...

[Zork Knight]

mage has always been about coming up with the most egregious bullshit

it's a great game for a nasuverse fan

Oh yeah I definitely noticed some similarities between Consensus and Human Order
And I did briefly consider going Prime + Matter for Reinforcement and Projection, heh
But I settled for a Mind and Spirit-focused Choirboy

I do appreciate that they apparently did away with people losing their paradigms as they progress, since that means... everyone becomes samey? Maybe not in personality or skillset, but everyone converging into the "true practice of just imposing your will upon reality" sounds super lame

Remember how Uncle Vlad protected the Masquerade by breaking the Masquerade so hard that it flipped the other way? Well, nowadays, there's this thing called "VTubers"...

The worst part is this fits the Malkavian from Coteries/Shadows of New York to a T

[Zork Knight]

After some time in the company of more experienced World of Darkness Role-Players, boy am I glad Vampire doesn't delve at all into the Wyld/Weaver/Wyrm bullshit Werewolf is plugged into and Mage dances with.

[mAc Chaos]

Why?

[SpoonyViking]

Kind of curious, too - there are so many possibilities, I can't narrow it down to a single hypothesis. XD

[Dragos Bee]

After some time in the company of more experienced World of Darkness Role-Players, boy am I glad Vampire doesn't delve at all into the Wyld/Weaver/Wyrm bullshit Werewolf is plugged into and Mage dances with.

I despise Werewolf, but honestly, I prefer Mage above every other gameline.

[Zork Knight]

From what I get from the other players who are more experienced with the World of Darkness, Werewolf "makes it clear" their Trinity is the One True Cosmic Pantheon and everything else is Consensus-shaped fakes and misinterpretations and whatnot, which is confirmed(?) in the old old planned Mage ending where Voormas kills the Wyrm which prevents time from moving forward

And honestly these takes are way too high to my liking. Like how Werewolf (seems to me?) entirely focused around the Apocalypse War. Sounds like the type of thing that takes over your setting.

[SpoonyViking]

Ah, well, the truth is that the old World of Darkness games were never meant to cross over with each other - definitely not in full. That is, you can have werewolves in a Vampire: The Masquerade game, but you can't really have Garou.

- - - Updated - - -

That said, Consensus is terminology specifically from Mage, and Mage makes it clear that Garou cosmology is only one of the possible views. (Something which doesn't work at all for Werewolf: The Apocalypse games, of course.)

[Herod]

And honestly these takes are way too high to my liking. Like how Werewolf (seems to me?) entirely focused around the Apocalypse War. Sounds like the type of thing that takes over your setting.

Yeah, but, you know, you can play it as an ecoterrorist campaign and be fine. JUst like you can play Vampires on a completely political angle when the metaplot has stuff like the Ravnos antediluvian waking up and basically announcing the beginning of the Final Nights.

[WhiteFrenzy]

So I started a session with this new group. A short campaign, a test drive of sorts, friendly fire on, so on so short.

Everyone was creating their sheets with care, taking everything seriously, wanting to make a good 1st impression, the GM was super chill and helpful too. I thought "I could do the same. But I also couldn't" and then when I noticed I was the Megumin-esque mage. I threw common sense outta the window and embraced that chance.


Long story short, we're in a long campaign now because this group devolved into complete madness, true Konosuba style. We're driving the GM crazy. No one can do anything right and somehow we survive every time. We have 2 tanks because I keep fireballing everyone in closed spaces including allies. It's being nice to feel good about RPG again after so long.

[pinetree]

That sounds great. Especially the fact that the rest of the group went for it too, even building two tanks lol

[warellis]

I was reading a D&D crossover fic where Shirou got portal'd to Exandria (from Critical Role) via Grail Shenanigans, and while the standard problems of characterization popped up (and made me quit it), the author did something that in retrospect was kind of boring: the author contrived an excuse to remove Shirou's Circuits in order to lock away his access to UBW and thus force him to use the standard D&D Vancian magic.

I had issues with that because it just made Shirou another D&D wizard instead of being a stranger in a strange land, magically as well as metaphysically, but it got me wondering:

Are there advantages to having Circuits vs D&D's Vancian style spellcasting?

I ask this because Bludflag pointed out something:

UBW could potentially be a way to cheese spell slots ad infinitum in a more orthodox D&D setting or at least until the body breaks down completely—Shirou ran his Circuits ragged doing the stuff he did after just unlocking them and broke them. A shame those are gone here, they would have been really useful for things like photographic memory and the necessary calc power to bend reality over.

(Yes, that is a thing Circuits do—Reines stored El Melloi II being flummoxed in her Circuits so she could laugh at the memory more; magi don't really need smartphones because they are their own smartphones when they put their minds to it; when comparing Circuits and Atlas alchemists, first-class Circuits like what Luvia has was equated to the silly high-speed cogitation and multiple mental rooms of the likes of Sion whose computing power rose via tetration according to the number of rooms. Just in general, magi are all prodigies according to common sense because their brains can double as computers to greater or lesser extents.)

Thinking about it, the mental aspect of UBW negating or instantly regenerating spell slots would make for an interesting porn plot, perhaps. People wanting to recreate it except with blackjack and hookers, people wanting to hook up with Shirou for super baby wizards, and perhaps gods wanting to put Shirou on a hook for giving them a migraine with this new cheesing bullshit. You could swing that story in just about any direction imaginable—a magical Renaissance for wizards, a new era of condeming talent that reaches for the skies above, or a shady doujin.

I understand D&D spellcasting for wizards essentially being that they prepare spells, store them in spell slots, and when they use up a spell, they have to wait till the next day (or after 8 hours of rest in 5th Edition) before they re-memorize them again from their spellbooks.

Considering Circuits can store information like memories, blueprints, etc, would Circuits possibly be of interest to D&D wizards if they ever learned how they worked?

Like could they get around some of the memorizing and storage issues with spells D&D wizards have?

[Ismail2002]

I notice that there is a total of 69 voters in this thread