Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

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Capsaicin Addict said:
This ties into a common problem with radleft themes: their enemies must be both terrible and irredeemable, and yet weak and easily defeated.

Which is a real problem: if your villain is a wuss, why are the heroes concerned? To draw an analogy: imagine if the Ringwraiths in Lord of the Rings could be fended off by waving a fistful of pipeweed at them. Suddenly they're not exactly intimidating, are they?

Plus, as noted: the bad guys never seem to get any characterization. This is a long-running symptom in radleft thought, and you can see its echoes in some of the bans handed out at RPGnet. No discussion of bad things allowed except to say 'they're bad'. This is another reflection of that; the enemies cannot be more than cardboard cutouts. Even animated, mindless skeletons have more depth than the enemies depicted here.

Why? My guess is that they're fearful that if they offer the bad guys any characterization, people might start to identify with or at least analyze them, and God knows we can't have that! There are already people who point out that the Coalition in Rifts has a small point, as does the Jovian Republic in Eclipse Phase. That's doubleplusungood badthink!
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"The enemy is at once horrifyingly strong and laughably weak" is, ironically, one of Umberto Eco's 14 fundamental characteristics of fascism.

Thank you guys for doimg the work of reading this thing, by the way. It's a genuinely fascinating example of a basically interesting setting - a titanic planet of living flesh hurtling through an endless night, beset by resource shortages and ruled over by a brutal tyranny sounds fantastic in theory - ruined by the way the authors' ideological commitments place them in a series of artistic double-binds that they're too dim to even be conscious of.
 
Adamska said:
I suspect every single mental case that worked on it were trust fund kids who are just a bit smarter than ADF given that they seem to barely understand marxist thought, they don't know what work is like, and they had the time to absorb the most retarded takes on twitter.

Like shit, not hard to have your idea, especially if you make the nazis Gene Purists like what I came up with off the top of my head. Them making more perfect crops for services would fit.

It's actually amazing how incompetent this product is. I also am beginning to suspect this is the final end point of entertainment before the pendulum swings back.
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Agreed, they seem like the kind of dudes that are educated, however because they are only educated in their ideology they can't actually create a compelling gameworld. Also, bold of you to assume that there will be a rock bottom to modern entertainment. There is always a new horizon to ruin society and it's entertainment with enough twitter brainrot.
 
Adamska said:
Like shit, not hard to have your idea, especially if you make the nazis Gene Purists like what I came up with off the top of my head. Them making more perfect crops for services would fit.
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Yeah, I saw that in, I think, the review thread? It's a great idea that immediately sets up conflict/gives the characte's something to fight for.

Unfortunately, it's a great idea which is why it's not in this game.

So, EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER actually does something I like. In the adventure, there’s a full-page breakdown about what will happen assuming the player characters don’t interfere. This is organized by time, beginning at noon on the day the meatpunks go to the bar and ending at dawn the next day. This is honestly a relatively good bit of writing (even if it’s documenting a stupid fucking adventure). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been reading a D&D or Pathfinder module that devotes this huge amount of pagecount to an NPC’s rich inner life and thought to myself, ‘yeah, my players are not going to care about this’. Only to have the adventure hinge on you interrogating some dude about his missing wife or something and never bothering to think about what happens if you don’t.

Here, we’re told how it’s all going to go down without the players there, roughly:

  • Alexander leaves/escapes the bar and goes home.
  • One of the Ghost’s victims is not quite dead and manages to fight his way free of the monster’s lair, only to die of his injuries in the town square.
  • Two more people are kidnapped, one of them Alexander.
  • The Supervisor takes control of the Ghost’s faceless victims and kills off a collaborator.
  • A tornado starts to form, the townspeople seek shelter.
  • The Supervisor has the Ghost burrow into the town hall’s tornado shelter and kill everyone inside.

That’s cool and all, but when the villains in your game have targets painted on their foreheads, there’s absolutely no reason the meatpunks shouldn’t just steamroll the Supervisor (who is the only Nazi in town) as soon as the GM says, ‘You’re in Bunkerville, what do you do?’ Interviewing suspects is pointless, exploring is pointless, trying to put together a timeline of the disappearances is pointless, searching for clues is pointless. Every second you’re not beating up the Supervisor is a minute you’re actively choosing to waste.

This brings up another point. Usually, in mecha games, or even games with mecha that don’t revolve around them, the authors go to a bit of effort to make the mecha feel special.

In Exalted, only Exalts (who are themselves vanishingly rare) can pilot warstriders, and outside of that, gathering enough magical materials to make one in the Second Age is all but impossible. In Pacific Rim, you need to be able to handle the psychic stress and be drift compatible with someone else who can handle the stress. In 40k, you need a whole council of special psychics to pilot a Titan and losing one would be an insurmountable loss to whichever side lost it. In Voltron, you need to be one of the five Chosen Ones who exist in the entire universe. Even Steven Universe, which is as dumb as hell, treats the huge, 100ft. tall combat-monster-goddess fusions as something special that not everyone can maintain or pull off.

Here, the Nazi Regime mass-produces battle mechs and hands them out to every citizen - the gay married couple both have battlemechs, so the Reich is directly arming (and housing, and employing, and granting rights to) the queer people they’re supposedly trying to wipe out. Additionally, the Supervisor has no guards, soldiers, or overseers, and Bunkerville has no cops, so there’s no reason the town’s adults (all of whom have mechs) couldn’t have easily ganged up and murdered him or at least tried to find the reason for the disappearances on their own.

I get that in an RPG the NPCs have to be a little bit useless to give the main character’s agency, but this is on a whole other level. It even cheapens your victories immensely, since killing a Nazi mech pilot is immaterial, literally anyone can replace them. The mechs aren’t special, and it doesn’t even take special training to be a pilot, so any kid from the Reich can hop into one and start swinging with the best.

The rest of the information we’re given is set up sandbox-style. We get a brief description of the town, each enemy and how they’ll act in combat, each of the town’s residents, and each location the characters can visit. Nothing special here, but it's where I mined most of the information above.

Alright, KF buckle up. I’m about to talk to you about feminism.

Of the twelve named characters, two are female (or perhaps I should say female-identifying). That’s… not a great ratio considering that this game is supposedly written by queer women who want to center women in their writing.

Both of these female characters lack personalities and defining traits, and their lives revolve wholly around men. Their names are Paula and Jessica, and I’ll talk about them one at a time.

Paula is a farmer who was previously married to Rhys, the town cook. However, in the description of the town, we’re told that meals are prepared and eaten communally, so like a paragraph later they already forgot what they wrote, and Paula is the main breadwinner of the family (another single income success story from the Reich). Rhys cheated on Paula, leading her to divorce him. The townsfolk respond by kicking her out of her house (she lives in an apartment on the third floor of Alexander’s home) and celebrating Rhys as a friend to all. Rhys is given Paula’s three-story home where he lives rent-free while she presumably still pays for it.

Interestingly enough, Rhys was part of the farmer’s attempt to unionize, despite not being a farmer, with Paula having been sidelined from it entirely. So... the man in a marriage is given authority on pretty much everything, including the profession his wife works at, and he’s in the right even if he’s an adulterer. Okay. This is actually the closest they’ve come to writing literally any kind of material oppression or inequality into the setting (and it’s perpetrated by our queer heroes!), but I think the authors are so fucking stupid that that wasn’t their intention. It’s just another failure to examine their own biases.

Anyways, here’s how Paula talks and acts, her entire life revolves around her ex-husband, she doesn’t even have a personality:

paula.png


Jessica is a Nazi priestess, and she’s a pastor for the Reich’s state religion, the Church of the Roaring Sky. Okay cool, so the Nazis allow women to be priests and hold positions of religious authority. They’re already doing better than the punks in this regard.

Interestingly enough, despite being a Nazi, Jessica is given a name, pronouns, and a backstory - breaking the rule against giving specific details about them. We’re told she was brought here by the Supervisor to replace the previous priest after he went missing. Jessica is loyal to the Fourth Reich and is in love with Supervisor. Her entire personality revolves around him. Here are the bullet points about playing her (and they couldn’t even come up with a final one! That’s just an action that she takes):

jess.png


It’s pretty telling how these weirdos view women
 
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Sobble said:
Yeah, I saw that in, I think, the review thread? It's a great idea that immediately sets up conflict/gives the characte's something to fight for.

Unfortunately, it's a great idea which is why it's not in this game.

So, EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER actually does something I like. In the adventure, there’s a full-page breakdown about what will happen assuming the player characters don’t interfere. This is organized by time, beginning at noon on the day the meatpunks go to the bar and ending at dawn the next day. This is honestly a relatively good bit of writing (even if it’s documenting a stupid fucking adventure). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been reading a D&D or Pathfinder module that devotes this huge amount of pagecount to an NPC’s rich inner life and thought to myself, ‘yeah, my players are not going to care about this’. Only to have the adventure hinge on you interrogating some dude about his missing wife or something and never bothering to think about what happens if you don’t.

Here, we’re told how it’s all going to go down without the players there, roughly:

  • Alexander leaves/escapes the bar and goes home.
  • One of the Ghost’s victims is not quite dead and manages to fight his way free of the monster’s lair, only to die of his injuries in the town square.
  • Two more people are kidnapped, one of them Alexander.
  • The Supervisor takes control of the Ghost’s faceless victims and kills off a collaborator.
  • A tornado starts to form, the townspeople seek shelter.
  • The Supervisor has the Ghost burrow into the town hall’s tornado shelter and kill everyone inside.

That’s cool and all, but when the villains in your game have targets painted on their foreheads, there’s absolutely no reason the meatpunks shouldn’t just steamroll the Supervisor (who is the only Nazi in town) as soon as the GM says, ‘You’re in Bunkerville, what do you do?’ Interviewing suspects is pointless, exploring is pointless, trying to put together a timeline of the disappearances is pointless, searching for clues is pointless. Every second you’re not beating up the Supervisor is a minute you’re actively choosing to waste.

This brings up another point. Usually, in mecha games, or even games with mecha that don’t revolve around them, the authors go to a bit of effort to make the mecha feel special.

In Exalted, only Exalts (who are themselves vanishingly rare) can pilot warstriders, and outside of that, gathering enough magical materials to make one in the Second Age is all but impossible. In Pacific Rim, you need to be able to handle the psychic stress and be drift compatible with someone else who can handle the stress. In 40k, you need a whole council of special psychics to pilot a Titan and losing one would be an insurmountable loss to whichever side lost it. In Voltron, you need to be one of the five Chosen Ones who exist in the entire universe. Even Steven Universe, which is as dumb as hell, treats the huge, 100ft. tall combat-monster-goddess fusions as something special that not everyone can maintain or pull off.

Here, the Nazi Regime mass-produces battle mechs and hands them out to every citizen - the gay married couple both have battlemechs, so the Reich is directly arming (and housing, and employing, and granting rights to) the queer people they’re supposedly trying to wipe out. Additionally, the Supervisor has no guards, soldiers, or overseers, and Bunkerville has no cops, so there’s no reason the town’s adults (all of whom have mechs) couldn’t have easily ganged up and murdered him or at least tried to find the reason for the disappearances on their own.

I get that in an RPG the NPCs have to be a little bit useless to give the main character’s agency, but this is on a whole other level. It even cheapens your victories immensely, since killing a Nazi mech pilot is immaterial, literally anyone can replace them. The mechs aren’t special, and it doesn’t even take special training to be a pilot, so any kid from the Reich can hop into one and start swinging with the best.

The rest of the information we’re given is set up sandbox-style. We get a brief description of the town, each enemy and how they’ll act in combat, each of the town’s residents, and each location the characters can visit. Nothing special here, but it's where I mined most of the information above.

Alright, KF buckle up. I’m about to talk to you about feminism.

Of the twelve named characters, two are female (or perhaps I should say female-identifying). That’s… not a great ratio considering that this game is supposedly written by queer women who want to center women in their writing.

Both of these female characters lack personalities and defining traits, and their lives revolve wholly around men. Their names are Paula and Jessica, and I’ll talk about them one at a time.

Paula is a farmer who was previously married to Rhys, the town cook. However, in the description of the town, we’re told that meals are prepared and eaten communally, so like a paragraph later they already forgot what they wrote, and Paula is the main breadwinner of the family (another single income success story from the Reich). Rhys cheated on Paula, leading her to divorce him. The townsfolk respond by kicking her out of her house (she lives in an apartment on the third floor of Alexander’s home) and celebrating Rhys as a friend to all. Rhys is given Paula’s three-story home where he lives rent-free while she presumably still pays for it.

Interestingly enough, Rhys was part of the farmer’s attempt to unionize, despite not being a farmer, with Paula having been sidelined from it entirely. So... the man in a marriage is given authority on pretty much everything, including the profession his wife works at, and he’s in the right even if he’s an adulterer. Okay. This is actually the closest they’ve come to writing literally any kind of material oppression or inequality into the setting (and it’s perpetrated by our queer heroes!), but I think the authors are so fucking stupid that that wasn’t their intention. It’s just another failure to examine their own biases.

Anyways, here’s how Paula talks and acts, her entire life revolves around her ex-husband, she doesn’t even have a personality:

View attachment 2233544

Jessica is a Nazi priestess, and she’s a pastor for the Reich’s state religion, the Church of the Roaring Sky. Okay cool, so the Nazis allow women to be priests and hold positions of religious authority. They’re already doing better than the punks in this regard.

Interestingly enough, despite being a Nazi, Jessica is given a name, pronouns, and a backstory - breaking the rule against giving specific details about them. We’re told she was brought here by the Supervisor to replace the previous priest after he went missing. Jessica is loyal to the Fourth Reich and is in love with Supervisor. Her entire personality revolves around him. Here are the bullet points about playing her (and they couldn’t even come up with a final one! That’s just an action that she takes):

View attachment 2233547

It’s pretty telling how these weirdos view women
Click to expand...
I’m starting to think this was written by queer “women”.
 
Galder's Tower is only two 10x10 feet rooms at 3rd level, it is miniscule. If you were given the option of furnishing it at will you could do something with bunk beds to cram an okay number of people in one room, but the furniture options are fixed, so good luck fitting a party in the one bed it provides per story.
 
Galder's Tower looks like a very half-assed attempt to replace Leomund's Secure Shelter (which appears to have been removed in 5E for some reason).

The only thing Galder's Tower has going for it is the ability to cast it with additional floors, but compared to Secure Shelter, it's not near as impressive.

You conjure a sturdy cottage or lodge made of material that is common in the area where the spell is cast. The floor is level, clean, and dry. In all respects the lodging resembles a normal cottage, with a sturdy door, two shuttered windows, and a small fireplace.

The shelter has no heating or cooling source (other than natural insulation qualities). Therefore, it must be heated as a normal dwelling, and extreme heat adversely affects it and its occupants. The dwelling does, however, provide considerable security otherwise—it is as strong as a normal stone building, regardless of its material composition. The dwelling resists flames and fire as if it were stone. It is impervious to normal missiles (but not the sort cast by siege engines or giants).

The door, shutters, and even chimney are secure against intrusion, the former two being arcane locked and the latter secured by an iron grate at the top and a narrow flue. In addition, these three areas are protected by an alarm spell. Finally, an unseen servant is conjured to provide service to you for the duration of the shelter.

The secure shelter contains rude furnishings —eight bunks, a trestle table, eight stools, and a writing desk.
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I still remember an argument where everyone was talking about how once those spells were cast the PC's were just invulnerable and nothing could happen to them. That they provided 8 hours of rest and tough shit for any plot the GM had.

I mentioned that the spell Leomund's Tiny Hut was fairly well known, and that BBEG trackers would notice that everyone's tracks stopped and a Detect Magic would show the hut. So any evil guy worth their salt would just pile up wood underneath it and light a big ass fire with all the evil guys sitting around sharpening swords. Maybe scatter some caltrops around and bring in big dogs with big teeth to boot.

Oooh, suddenly I'm a killer DM.

Faggots.
 
Jet Fuel Johnny said:
I still remember an argument where everyone was talking about how once those spells were cast the PC's were just invulnerable and nothing could happen to them. That they provided 8 hours of rest and tough shit for any plot the GM had.

I mentioned that the spell Leomund's Tiny Hut was fairly well known, and that BBEG trackers would notice that everyone's tracks stopped and a Detect Magic would show the hut. So any evil guy worth their salt would just pile up wood underneath it and light a big ass fire with all the evil guys sitting around sharpening swords. Maybe scatter some caltrops around and bring in big dogs with big teeth to boot.

Oooh, suddenly I'm a killer DM.

Faggots.
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Jeez.

I mean, I've talked about Secure Shelter being a tough nut to crack, but 'tough' is not the same as 'invulnerable'.

Tiny Hut is also not invisible. The dome of force is opaque (unlike, say, Wall of Force). So they don't even need to find it with Detect Magic. It also doesn't protect against scrying, missiles (though inhabitants have total concealment) or AOE spells. 5E wimped out and made the force dome block magical effects, but it's actually smaller than it was in PF/3E (5E's is a 10' radius rather than 20').

You want a better hideaway? Git gud and cast Magnificent Mansion, bitches.
 
Jet Fuel Johnny said:
I still remember an argument where everyone was talking about how once those spells were cast the PC's were just invulnerable and nothing could happen to them. That they provided 8 hours of rest and tough shit for any plot the GM had.

I mentioned that the spell Leomund's Tiny Hut was fairly well known, and that BBEG trackers would notice that everyone's tracks stopped and a Detect Magic would show the hut. So any evil guy worth their salt would just pile up wood underneath it and light a big ass fire with all the evil guys sitting around sharpening swords. Maybe scatter some caltrops around and bring in big dogs with big teeth to boot.

Oooh, suddenly I'm a killer DM.

Faggots.
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Everyone knows if the DM likes to do sweeps that you do the Tusken Raider trick of spoofing tracks, then do a rope trick into your pocket dimension at an earlier point in said tracks and make traps in a few other random spots. And to always have at least part of the party up in shifts in case.

Killer DM would be to counter the party exactly or send in the monster twice the CR they should be able to kill tbh.
 
If you want invincible nap time for your arcane casters in 3.5, Rope Trick from level 8 onwards would fit your needs. Fucking off to a pocket dimension whose entrance is safe even from most divination spells is a lot safer than making a magical force structure on the material plane. If your party has to many heads, prepare 2 of them, at level 8 you aren't using your level 2 spells in combat much for the most part(If you are a spontaneous caster with the Versatile Mage feat you can just burn up 4 level 1 spell slots instead). It's perfect for dungeons and caves crawling with monsters.
 
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