Not taking over the world, ensuring that human civilization survived in some form. They pretty much asumed that they'd lose the fight and mankind would be reduced to a few scattered groups of survivors.Berkserker wrote:Granted, saving the world from Scion was their main thing, but they had side things going on, and figuring out how to take over the world was one of them.
[OSSR] Aberrant
Moderator: Moderators
Cauldron was entirely occupied with their main goal and handling the fallout of their fuckups en route to achieving it. They're probably primarily responsible for the weirdly formalized no-kill honor code and sundry other odd rules, but their political goals start and end at "maximize number of living parahumans, do not get convicted of crimes against humanity." Their projections apparently said that parahumans would inevitably wind up in charge and they wanted to have that happen without a war. Or at least that's how they sold it to the Triumvirate, who were all more than a little unhappy with some parts of their methods. Then for ineffable reasons of her own the Simurrgh completely fucked them over like a year before the story starts.
Actually, come to think of it, she does have a motive for fucking up parahuman organizations that aren't the Protectorate big time, has attack notations relating to the King's Men, discredited the yangban and murdered one of their potential bosses, and had numerous known catspaws and her brother involved with the whole Brockton Bay scenario. So actually "Worm doesn't have a Teragen analogue because Endbringers murdered them" seems rather plausible.
Actually, come to think of it, she does have a motive for fucking up parahuman organizations that aren't the Protectorate big time, has attack notations relating to the King's Men, discredited the yangban and murdered one of their potential bosses, and had numerous known catspaws and her brother involved with the whole Brockton Bay scenario. So actually "Worm doesn't have a Teragen analogue because Endbringers murdered them" seems rather plausible.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
-
Berkserker
- 1st Level
- Posts: 41
- Joined: Fri Feb 06, 2015 11:05 am
God bless having narrative causality codified in a single character.
But yeah, SEELE Cauldron seems more like Project Utopia than Teragen, only without the sterilization.
But yeah, SEELE Cauldron seems more like Project Utopia than Teragen, only without the sterilization.
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
Chapter Six: Drama
This is the chapter that actually has all the rules for actually doing stuff in it. As WW veterans have come to expect at this point it’s located near the back of the book.
The chapter begins with 6 pages of examples of various rolls for skill-based things you might do, each with short examples, rules for how it might be resisted (ex. shadowing is resisted by awareness), and even occasional notes on how common powers might benefit certain actions (ex. having claws makes climbing easier). This stuff is all fairly standard, fairly inoffensive, and very useful for anyone not familiar to the storyteller system, which at least in theory ought to be many plans of Aberrant. This is quite possibly the best section of the entire book.
The remaining 28 pages of the chapter are devoted to combat, damage, and other suitably messy activities. Oh boy, time to pull on the tyvek suit and dive in.
Aberrant claims to separate close combat, ranged combat and armored combat into different things. In practice, it's all really the same combat system. This system is built on a skeleton of the oWoD combat system but contains a number of significant changes, making it very much its own unique system.
Combat is divided into turns, each lasting a hypothetical 3 seconds. This is standard Dex+Wits, but characters with Mega-Dexterity and certain other tricks just plain get to go first. Everyone declares their action at the beginning before doing anything, and then actions occur in order, You get to move and attack or defend. Doing anything more requires multiple actions. You can delay your turn order, and also you can abort to a new action if circumstances change - though this carries costs. The vast majority of characters will have only the one action per turn without splitting dice pools, since powers that provide extra actions are rare (Temporal Manipulation, which is sufficiently costly that if you take it you won't have much else).
if the GM allows time manipulation, they have no one to blame but themselves
Attacks are very similar to oWoD except Dex is not king, merely duke. You role Dex+Melee, Dex+Martial Arts, and Dex+Firearms, but critically, Strength+Brawl to hit. That means hulking tanks do not need high dex to hit you, or to have sufficient dice to split their dice pools and maximize their mega-strength damage auto-successes across many attacks.
this is a devastatingly effective tactical approach in Aberrant
In fact, splitting you attack into multiple actions makes a lot of sense. There's no passive defense stats in Aberrant: one success = a hit. And, the game arbitrarily caps the number of extra-successes you can roll over to damage at 5. In a sense, this is a precursor of the 'always flurry' approach in Exalted.
Attacks deal damage as normal for WoD, based on Strength, or weapon dice pool, or the formula for whatever quantum power you have chosen to unleash. Damage is either bashing, or lethal, or aggravated (aggravated damage is almost impossible to soak except with very specific powers, but it’s difficult to output much of it since it requires a specific extra). Unlike WoD attacks though, many attacks in Aberrant deal both flat levels of damage and have a damage dice pool. This includes anyone attacking with Mega-Strength and most offensive powers.
As noted when talking about powers, Novas can dish out disgusting quantities of damage. Like in almost every WW game you have a very limited supply of health levels: in this case 8. It is possible to get more, and Aberrant is actually relatively generous in this regard, but most people won't buy more than a handful. As a result, attacks have an absurdly high lethality should they connect. There are two ways to avoid obliteration: not get hit, or soak. Not getting hit is hard, since if you declare your action as a dodge you can't attack, and if multiple people attack you're going to run out of dodges, blocks, and parries pretty much instantly - even going full defense is going to bleed your dice pool out pretty fast. You probably won't even be allowed to dodge or block area effects at all. As such, avoiding hits isn't a matter of high dexterity and high dodge rolls, its dependent upon innovative strategies to avoid being targeted at all or to be completely untouchable by some attack form. Examples including shrinking like Ant-Man, using hypermovement to attack and run past from beyond your opponent's range, and various other tricks.
one way to become hard to hit, generally more effective than dodging
To those unwilling to rely on creative powers to avoid being targeted, the only real option is to stand there and take it. Aberrant provides a variety of means to increase your soak to stratospheric levels so this is a viable option. Soak is not rolled in Aberrant, it is simply subtracted off the total damage dice pool before damage is rolled. Soak subtracts from automatic levels of damage first and dice second, which means that attacks that yield giant piles of dice to roll are actually better at piercing soak due to the math. However, successful attacks do get to roll 1 die for damage even if the damage pool is exceeded by soak. This means that even ridiculously high-soak characters are vulnerable to being swarmed under by hordes of bugbites, though the game does suggest an optional rule that Novas should ignore mundane damage sources like guns if their soak is more than double the total damage. Which is good, because otherwise a single marine company can nominally exterminate the most powerful nova on the planet.
this should probably not be a major gameplay feature
Defensive powers are not optional in Aberrant, characters who don't pump their soak up at least a little are barely more durable than an ordinary human (lethal soak of 1 or 2 doesn't amount to much) and can be easily gunned down by mere mortals. High soak also has the benefit of not having to take defensive actions, allowing you to spend more time on offense.
The problem is that characters tend to accumulate soak in idiosyncratic and unequal ways, leading to huge variance between the defensive capabilities of the party.
For an example of how Aberrant's attacks and defenses interact in weird and funky ways, I'll use the Fantastic Four as a case study (because they're well known, all have defensive powers, and all are relatively easy to build using Aberrant). This illustrates the rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock nature of combat outcomes.
trying to make them fight in Aberrant isn't as bad as this movie, but still pretty bad
Reed Richards beats the Thing, who can't hurt him and he can ultimately asphyxiate. Reed then loses instantly to the Human Torch, getting burned to a crisp by a single attack. He stalemates Susan Storm, as neither can hurt each other. The Human Torch and the Thing stalemate, as the Torch can't burn the Thing but he can just fly away. The Thing beats Susan Storm, eventually, as she runs out of quantum to maintain her forcefield against a suitably relentless onslaught of clobbering, though if she simply turns invisible and runs away it’s a stalemate. The Storms versus each other comes down to who burns quantum faster and gets in a free attack once defenses can't be maintained.
The key point of these encounters: you don't need a single die roll to resolve any of them. The RNG is utterly irrelevant. So is the long list of combat maneuvers in this chapter, as one or two die differences in attack or damage are fucking meaningless. An attack will either work, or not, the situation where you might hit for some non-lethal quantity of damage is rare, and most commonly will be that frustrating single die of damage for failing to penetrate soak. So really, you might as well not bother rolling at all and wasting your time. You're playing rocket tag anyway, but with funny color-coded rockets that only work if they match the target. This presents a massive problem for encounter design though, as an antagonist appropriate for one member of the party is likely ignorable by another member and utterly smears a third.
Choose Your Superpower!
This gets even worse when considering that mental attacks use a completely different system of attack and soak based on willpower - making psychic shield non-optional unless the GM is willing to agree not to use them - and that there are other unusual powers that can completely bypass your soak in order to kill you, like Temporal Manipulation's Age Alteration, or the offensive utilization of Warp.
In fairness to Aberrant, this is supposed to be a superhero game inspired by comic books and Marvel and DC generally operate on some level of plot-armor mediated rocket tag, but the system is hell to actually try and play and is much more complicated and clunky then it needs to be to render the reality of the system's rocket tag nature. And, of course, rocket tag is a major impediment to telling collaborative stories that last more than a handful of combats. Considering this game is supposed to be about deep and involved efforts to uncover worldwide conspiracies and probe the nature of a peculiar transhumanism, a system that didn't bleed lethality through every pore might have been more fitting with the themes. Not that anyone wants to play WW's version of the superhero genre.
Next Up: the storytelling chapter and appendix.
This is the chapter that actually has all the rules for actually doing stuff in it. As WW veterans have come to expect at this point it’s located near the back of the book.
The chapter begins with 6 pages of examples of various rolls for skill-based things you might do, each with short examples, rules for how it might be resisted (ex. shadowing is resisted by awareness), and even occasional notes on how common powers might benefit certain actions (ex. having claws makes climbing easier). This stuff is all fairly standard, fairly inoffensive, and very useful for anyone not familiar to the storyteller system, which at least in theory ought to be many plans of Aberrant. This is quite possibly the best section of the entire book.
The remaining 28 pages of the chapter are devoted to combat, damage, and other suitably messy activities. Oh boy, time to pull on the tyvek suit and dive in.
Aberrant claims to separate close combat, ranged combat and armored combat into different things. In practice, it's all really the same combat system. This system is built on a skeleton of the oWoD combat system but contains a number of significant changes, making it very much its own unique system.
Combat is divided into turns, each lasting a hypothetical 3 seconds. This is standard Dex+Wits, but characters with Mega-Dexterity and certain other tricks just plain get to go first. Everyone declares their action at the beginning before doing anything, and then actions occur in order, You get to move and attack or defend. Doing anything more requires multiple actions. You can delay your turn order, and also you can abort to a new action if circumstances change - though this carries costs. The vast majority of characters will have only the one action per turn without splitting dice pools, since powers that provide extra actions are rare (Temporal Manipulation, which is sufficiently costly that if you take it you won't have much else).
if the GM allows time manipulation, they have no one to blame but themselves
Attacks are very similar to oWoD except Dex is not king, merely duke. You role Dex+Melee, Dex+Martial Arts, and Dex+Firearms, but critically, Strength+Brawl to hit. That means hulking tanks do not need high dex to hit you, or to have sufficient dice to split their dice pools and maximize their mega-strength damage auto-successes across many attacks.
this is a devastatingly effective tactical approach in Aberrant
In fact, splitting you attack into multiple actions makes a lot of sense. There's no passive defense stats in Aberrant: one success = a hit. And, the game arbitrarily caps the number of extra-successes you can roll over to damage at 5. In a sense, this is a precursor of the 'always flurry' approach in Exalted.
Attacks deal damage as normal for WoD, based on Strength, or weapon dice pool, or the formula for whatever quantum power you have chosen to unleash. Damage is either bashing, or lethal, or aggravated (aggravated damage is almost impossible to soak except with very specific powers, but it’s difficult to output much of it since it requires a specific extra). Unlike WoD attacks though, many attacks in Aberrant deal both flat levels of damage and have a damage dice pool. This includes anyone attacking with Mega-Strength and most offensive powers.
As noted when talking about powers, Novas can dish out disgusting quantities of damage. Like in almost every WW game you have a very limited supply of health levels: in this case 8. It is possible to get more, and Aberrant is actually relatively generous in this regard, but most people won't buy more than a handful. As a result, attacks have an absurdly high lethality should they connect. There are two ways to avoid obliteration: not get hit, or soak. Not getting hit is hard, since if you declare your action as a dodge you can't attack, and if multiple people attack you're going to run out of dodges, blocks, and parries pretty much instantly - even going full defense is going to bleed your dice pool out pretty fast. You probably won't even be allowed to dodge or block area effects at all. As such, avoiding hits isn't a matter of high dexterity and high dodge rolls, its dependent upon innovative strategies to avoid being targeted at all or to be completely untouchable by some attack form. Examples including shrinking like Ant-Man, using hypermovement to attack and run past from beyond your opponent's range, and various other tricks.
one way to become hard to hit, generally more effective than dodging
To those unwilling to rely on creative powers to avoid being targeted, the only real option is to stand there and take it. Aberrant provides a variety of means to increase your soak to stratospheric levels so this is a viable option. Soak is not rolled in Aberrant, it is simply subtracted off the total damage dice pool before damage is rolled. Soak subtracts from automatic levels of damage first and dice second, which means that attacks that yield giant piles of dice to roll are actually better at piercing soak due to the math. However, successful attacks do get to roll 1 die for damage even if the damage pool is exceeded by soak. This means that even ridiculously high-soak characters are vulnerable to being swarmed under by hordes of bugbites, though the game does suggest an optional rule that Novas should ignore mundane damage sources like guns if their soak is more than double the total damage. Which is good, because otherwise a single marine company can nominally exterminate the most powerful nova on the planet.
this should probably not be a major gameplay feature
Defensive powers are not optional in Aberrant, characters who don't pump their soak up at least a little are barely more durable than an ordinary human (lethal soak of 1 or 2 doesn't amount to much) and can be easily gunned down by mere mortals. High soak also has the benefit of not having to take defensive actions, allowing you to spend more time on offense.
The problem is that characters tend to accumulate soak in idiosyncratic and unequal ways, leading to huge variance between the defensive capabilities of the party.
For an example of how Aberrant's attacks and defenses interact in weird and funky ways, I'll use the Fantastic Four as a case study (because they're well known, all have defensive powers, and all are relatively easy to build using Aberrant). This illustrates the rock-paper-scissors-lizard-spock nature of combat outcomes.
trying to make them fight in Aberrant isn't as bad as this movie, but still pretty bad
Reed Richards beats the Thing, who can't hurt him and he can ultimately asphyxiate. Reed then loses instantly to the Human Torch, getting burned to a crisp by a single attack. He stalemates Susan Storm, as neither can hurt each other. The Human Torch and the Thing stalemate, as the Torch can't burn the Thing but he can just fly away. The Thing beats Susan Storm, eventually, as she runs out of quantum to maintain her forcefield against a suitably relentless onslaught of clobbering, though if she simply turns invisible and runs away it’s a stalemate. The Storms versus each other comes down to who burns quantum faster and gets in a free attack once defenses can't be maintained.
The key point of these encounters: you don't need a single die roll to resolve any of them. The RNG is utterly irrelevant. So is the long list of combat maneuvers in this chapter, as one or two die differences in attack or damage are fucking meaningless. An attack will either work, or not, the situation where you might hit for some non-lethal quantity of damage is rare, and most commonly will be that frustrating single die of damage for failing to penetrate soak. So really, you might as well not bother rolling at all and wasting your time. You're playing rocket tag anyway, but with funny color-coded rockets that only work if they match the target. This presents a massive problem for encounter design though, as an antagonist appropriate for one member of the party is likely ignorable by another member and utterly smears a third.
Choose Your Superpower!
This gets even worse when considering that mental attacks use a completely different system of attack and soak based on willpower - making psychic shield non-optional unless the GM is willing to agree not to use them - and that there are other unusual powers that can completely bypass your soak in order to kill you, like Temporal Manipulation's Age Alteration, or the offensive utilization of Warp.
In fairness to Aberrant, this is supposed to be a superhero game inspired by comic books and Marvel and DC generally operate on some level of plot-armor mediated rocket tag, but the system is hell to actually try and play and is much more complicated and clunky then it needs to be to render the reality of the system's rocket tag nature. And, of course, rocket tag is a major impediment to telling collaborative stories that last more than a handful of combats. Considering this game is supposed to be about deep and involved efforts to uncover worldwide conspiracies and probe the nature of a peculiar transhumanism, a system that didn't bleed lethality through every pore might have been more fitting with the themes. Not that anyone wants to play WW's version of the superhero genre.
Next Up: the storytelling chapter and appendix.
Last edited by Mechalich on Wed Jan 20, 2016 5:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
Chapter Seven: Storytelling
This chapter begins with a section of fairly standard boilerplate ‘how to run the game’ advice. It’s a median level of WW pretentious, though that accelerates hard when they mention Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet as classical inspirations for creating a story. This stuff is also very generic. They name-drop Seven Samurai and Alien, but utterly fail to mention X-men or any comic book property at all.
your game is not inspired by this. Do not be delusional!
a little honesty would have been helpful
The pretentiousness gets really bad when they start talking about theme. The claim is that Aberrant is about Power as a theme. They go on to ask the obvious, will absolute power corrupt absolutely question, completely oblivious to the fact that their game mechanics already answered is over a hundred pages back: yes, because taint you morons. All the novas go insane! You know this, you wrote it into the Trinity timeline. Divis Mal is the mad prophet who brings forth the new universe! The power overwhelms the human, and control is lost by those in control as the novas gain power and the Utopia conspiracy collapses. The game mechanics determine the answer to these questions, they are fucking known.
you cast this on your game, you told us, stop pretending you didn't
The mood, conflict, and plot segments are less dumb, mostly by being more generic, but they constantly use language and tone suitable for WoD games to talk about everything related to Aberrant. And yes, the setting actually is grimderp-y as fuck in its canonical metaplot interpretation, and really in any version that retains Taint by RAW, but what I cannot understand is why they made this game. The general go to for super-powers is pulp action, not grimdark ruminations on the price of power. I mean sure, it’s possible to do the latter very effectively (ex. Yuki Yuna), but while such stories may be engrossing to watch they are generally not fun to play. Tortured color-drained Man of Steel superman isn’t fun, even when it’s good, which this system isn’t.
no one wants to adventure inside this movie
Some more generic device about actually running things around the table and knowing the system follows. Then they get into how to gather a group together. They organize this around the various factions in the game and how you might run each one. Some of this advice is fairly stupid, but it least gives out a few prompts. It could be worse.
And it gets worse. They follow up this batch of practical advice with a deep dive into the crazy with a hilarious sidebar about realism and Aberrant having a ‘mostly realistic’ default. This is a giant grayed-out window into how WW fundamentally misunderstands the game they have created and what sort of actual goals novas can reasonably embrace. They’re right that Aberrant isn’t a superhero game – it’s not, it’s a game about a one-way path of forced transhumanist evolution with the intent of achieving godhood. The archetypical Aberrant character isn’t Cyclops, or Magneto, or even Apocalypse: it’s Sarah Kerrigan.
this is the archetypical Nova
character progression proceeding as design intends
Seriously: she begins her story as human with enhanced powers that a secretive government society forces her to brutally control, she’s then betrayed by that society, embraces her emotions, and passes through a chrysalis to emerge into a new form. That form is flawed, she backtracks, is briefly returned to humbler beginnings and sanity only to undergo chrysalis again to a more perfected version of her ideal, and eventually undergoes a final transformation where she merges with an elder god, ascends to godhood, and then pretty much literally tells the universe to fuck and goes on to make her own.
and we conclude here
And that’s the vision that the Teragen book ultimately kind of sorta manages to lay out. You mission, in Aberrant, is to survive long enough to achieve quantum 10, transform into an all-powerful vaguely Lovecraftian vision, buy the ‘Universe Creation’ power (it’s in the player’s guide, seriously), and rule the spawn of your dark imaginings as an eternal divinity.
That’s quite the journey. It’s the only one that’s really possible in that it’s the only one that preserves player agency. Anything else and your just a pawn in the scheme of faceless factions you don't care about and that don’t even have the courtesy to lord big dick NPCs over you, you just can’t do anything about them.
And the funny thing is, the hero’s (or antihero’s depending on perspective) journey of Kerrigan is totally something you could build a suitably weird game around. I would totally play Cthulhu: Instar I, but that game is almost totally divorced from the expectations of a comic book style superhero game. Thematically, Aberrant is built around a huge bait and switch, one that’s only partially evident in this core book. Without the Teragen book this game is woefully incomplete and has essentially nothing to offer, because all of its potential storylines are stunted.
Speaking of pretentiousness, this chapter includes an ‘Advanced Storytelling’ section that talks about using flashbacks, dream sequences, parallel stories, and other BS. It is totally a waste of space and leads to the strong suggestion that the people chosen to make a game nominally based on comic book tropes hated comics.
The chapter does end with a not completely horrid section. Titled ‘When it all Goes to Hell’ which manages to at least dance around the admission that players will occasionally (often) behave as homicidal murderhobos and that at Aberrant’s power level this is hard to restrain. And then they proceed to talk about fudging dice roles, but doing it in a balanced way. Well, acknowledging the problem is step one, so points for that at least.
That's basically it for the corebook. There's an appendix with a long list of weapons, vehicles, drugs, and other useful toys. Some of this is mildly creative – like having stats for using a truck as a melee weapon – and they do include a bunch of generalized military hardware in an acknowledgement of the kind of shitstorm properly built novas can unleash.
There’s a woefully inadequate listing of sample scrubs (basically all mortals with varying levels of firearms competency) and a grand total of 3 sample novas, none of whom have any combat stats actually calculated, and none have any appreciable power. Not one of the numerous characters mentioned in the setting material has a stat write-up of any kind, so if you want to use any of them in a story you’re on your own. In fact if you want to utilize any opponent that's not a basic mortal, you have to build it yourself.
Finishing this up I'm not especially angry at Aberrant so much as vastly disappointed. This is just such a non-game. There's not really anything here to get excited about, so its hard to get mad. The pitch is incredibly generic, and even though its a lie and the actual meaning of the game is something else that happens to be such a niche thing that I don't care about it much. The mechanics are bad, but they're fairly typical White-Wolf bad, and its mostly bad in the way oWoD games were bad plus a few cumbersome add-ons. The really frustrating part is not that Aberrant was a failure, but that WW tried not once but twice more to make super-hero power level games using the storyteller system. That's an absolute microcosm of the company's failures right there.
Aberrant is probably only marginally less playable than VtM or other oWoD games, admittedly not very playable, but there's very little reason to play it. The setting is uninteresting, the central conspiracy is boring, and while the Teragen allow you to play as crazed murderhobos, most gaming groups are capable of doing that without a system acting as their official cheering section.
This chapter begins with a section of fairly standard boilerplate ‘how to run the game’ advice. It’s a median level of WW pretentious, though that accelerates hard when they mention Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet as classical inspirations for creating a story. This stuff is also very generic. They name-drop Seven Samurai and Alien, but utterly fail to mention X-men or any comic book property at all.
your game is not inspired by this. Do not be delusional!
a little honesty would have been helpful
The pretentiousness gets really bad when they start talking about theme. The claim is that Aberrant is about Power as a theme. They go on to ask the obvious, will absolute power corrupt absolutely question, completely oblivious to the fact that their game mechanics already answered is over a hundred pages back: yes, because taint you morons. All the novas go insane! You know this, you wrote it into the Trinity timeline. Divis Mal is the mad prophet who brings forth the new universe! The power overwhelms the human, and control is lost by those in control as the novas gain power and the Utopia conspiracy collapses. The game mechanics determine the answer to these questions, they are fucking known.
you cast this on your game, you told us, stop pretending you didn't
The mood, conflict, and plot segments are less dumb, mostly by being more generic, but they constantly use language and tone suitable for WoD games to talk about everything related to Aberrant. And yes, the setting actually is grimderp-y as fuck in its canonical metaplot interpretation, and really in any version that retains Taint by RAW, but what I cannot understand is why they made this game. The general go to for super-powers is pulp action, not grimdark ruminations on the price of power. I mean sure, it’s possible to do the latter very effectively (ex. Yuki Yuna), but while such stories may be engrossing to watch they are generally not fun to play. Tortured color-drained Man of Steel superman isn’t fun, even when it’s good, which this system isn’t.
no one wants to adventure inside this movie
Some more generic device about actually running things around the table and knowing the system follows. Then they get into how to gather a group together. They organize this around the various factions in the game and how you might run each one. Some of this advice is fairly stupid, but it least gives out a few prompts. It could be worse.
And it gets worse. They follow up this batch of practical advice with a deep dive into the crazy with a hilarious sidebar about realism and Aberrant having a ‘mostly realistic’ default. This is a giant grayed-out window into how WW fundamentally misunderstands the game they have created and what sort of actual goals novas can reasonably embrace. They’re right that Aberrant isn’t a superhero game – it’s not, it’s a game about a one-way path of forced transhumanist evolution with the intent of achieving godhood. The archetypical Aberrant character isn’t Cyclops, or Magneto, or even Apocalypse: it’s Sarah Kerrigan.
this is the archetypical Nova
character progression proceeding as design intends
Seriously: she begins her story as human with enhanced powers that a secretive government society forces her to brutally control, she’s then betrayed by that society, embraces her emotions, and passes through a chrysalis to emerge into a new form. That form is flawed, she backtracks, is briefly returned to humbler beginnings and sanity only to undergo chrysalis again to a more perfected version of her ideal, and eventually undergoes a final transformation where she merges with an elder god, ascends to godhood, and then pretty much literally tells the universe to fuck and goes on to make her own.
and we conclude here
And that’s the vision that the Teragen book ultimately kind of sorta manages to lay out. You mission, in Aberrant, is to survive long enough to achieve quantum 10, transform into an all-powerful vaguely Lovecraftian vision, buy the ‘Universe Creation’ power (it’s in the player’s guide, seriously), and rule the spawn of your dark imaginings as an eternal divinity.
That’s quite the journey. It’s the only one that’s really possible in that it’s the only one that preserves player agency. Anything else and your just a pawn in the scheme of faceless factions you don't care about and that don’t even have the courtesy to lord big dick NPCs over you, you just can’t do anything about them.
And the funny thing is, the hero’s (or antihero’s depending on perspective) journey of Kerrigan is totally something you could build a suitably weird game around. I would totally play Cthulhu: Instar I, but that game is almost totally divorced from the expectations of a comic book style superhero game. Thematically, Aberrant is built around a huge bait and switch, one that’s only partially evident in this core book. Without the Teragen book this game is woefully incomplete and has essentially nothing to offer, because all of its potential storylines are stunted.
Speaking of pretentiousness, this chapter includes an ‘Advanced Storytelling’ section that talks about using flashbacks, dream sequences, parallel stories, and other BS. It is totally a waste of space and leads to the strong suggestion that the people chosen to make a game nominally based on comic book tropes hated comics.
The chapter does end with a not completely horrid section. Titled ‘When it all Goes to Hell’ which manages to at least dance around the admission that players will occasionally (often) behave as homicidal murderhobos and that at Aberrant’s power level this is hard to restrain. And then they proceed to talk about fudging dice roles, but doing it in a balanced way. Well, acknowledging the problem is step one, so points for that at least.
That's basically it for the corebook. There's an appendix with a long list of weapons, vehicles, drugs, and other useful toys. Some of this is mildly creative – like having stats for using a truck as a melee weapon – and they do include a bunch of generalized military hardware in an acknowledgement of the kind of shitstorm properly built novas can unleash.
There’s a woefully inadequate listing of sample scrubs (basically all mortals with varying levels of firearms competency) and a grand total of 3 sample novas, none of whom have any combat stats actually calculated, and none have any appreciable power. Not one of the numerous characters mentioned in the setting material has a stat write-up of any kind, so if you want to use any of them in a story you’re on your own. In fact if you want to utilize any opponent that's not a basic mortal, you have to build it yourself.
Finishing this up I'm not especially angry at Aberrant so much as vastly disappointed. This is just such a non-game. There's not really anything here to get excited about, so its hard to get mad. The pitch is incredibly generic, and even though its a lie and the actual meaning of the game is something else that happens to be such a niche thing that I don't care about it much. The mechanics are bad, but they're fairly typical White-Wolf bad, and its mostly bad in the way oWoD games were bad plus a few cumbersome add-ons. The really frustrating part is not that Aberrant was a failure, but that WW tried not once but twice more to make super-hero power level games using the storyteller system. That's an absolute microcosm of the company's failures right there.
Aberrant is probably only marginally less playable than VtM or other oWoD games, admittedly not very playable, but there's very little reason to play it. The setting is uninteresting, the central conspiracy is boring, and while the Teragen allow you to play as crazed murderhobos, most gaming groups are capable of doing that without a system acting as their official cheering section.
Aberrant had awful, broken mechanics - but so did V:tM.
I think that it was also a good guess on the emerging Zeitgeist. As a society we've been moving away from Anne Rice / the Lost Boys / Buffy / Twilight, and towards X-files / Memento / Hunger Games / the 5th Wave / Fringe. Obviously X-files predates Buffy (the TV show), but overall, the 21st century has seen a shift in the direction of paranoia and alienation, more than sexy emo vampires moping.
Now, an X-files game in and of itself (likewise a Hunger-games RPG) doesn't have the requisite hooks for an RPG. So it makes sense to mash it up with superheroes (I never actually watched Heroes - did it have a secret reveal?), or wizards or something.
Done well - and I'm not talking about game mechanics, I'm talking about factions and templates and character hooks - I think it would have been a successful game. Aberrant lacks the spark and appeal of V:tM - and so it was a failure. But like Exalted, the basic pitch: you are superheroes but are you secretly puppets of the evil conspiracy? - had some legs.
I think that it was also a good guess on the emerging Zeitgeist. As a society we've been moving away from Anne Rice / the Lost Boys / Buffy / Twilight, and towards X-files / Memento / Hunger Games / the 5th Wave / Fringe. Obviously X-files predates Buffy (the TV show), but overall, the 21st century has seen a shift in the direction of paranoia and alienation, more than sexy emo vampires moping.
Now, an X-files game in and of itself (likewise a Hunger-games RPG) doesn't have the requisite hooks for an RPG. So it makes sense to mash it up with superheroes (I never actually watched Heroes - did it have a secret reveal?), or wizards or something.
Done well - and I'm not talking about game mechanics, I'm talking about factions and templates and character hooks - I think it would have been a successful game. Aberrant lacks the spark and appeal of V:tM - and so it was a failure. But like Exalted, the basic pitch: you are superheroes but are you secretly puppets of the evil conspiracy? - had some legs.
Chaosium rules are made of unicorn pubic hair and cancer. --AncientH
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek
I misspoke.
s/requisite hooks for an RPG./requisite player archetypes for a dominant RPG (like V:tM, Shadowrun or D&D.)
Basically, FBI Agents + The A Team are fine characters to play and your DM will have no trouble coming up with adventures once you sit down at the table. But someone is going to want to play a martial artist with magical glowing fists, or a steampunk gadget girl, or something and the cast of NCIS is never going to challenge a party of Rifts characters for mass-market appeal.
So you need to take the X-files, and add some twist, like making people superheroes or secretly wizards or something.
s/requisite hooks for an RPG./requisite player archetypes for a dominant RPG (like V:tM, Shadowrun or D&D.)
Basically, FBI Agents + The A Team are fine characters to play and your DM will have no trouble coming up with adventures once you sit down at the table. But someone is going to want to play a martial artist with magical glowing fists, or a steampunk gadget girl, or something and the cast of NCIS is never going to challenge a party of Rifts characters for mass-market appeal.
So you need to take the X-files, and add some twist, like making people superheroes or secretly wizards or something.
Chaosium rules are made of unicorn pubic hair and cancer. --AncientH
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
You need a hook to get people to pick up the book in order to sell books.
You need a hook to get people to tell series of stories with the characters the game creates in order to create long running games.
Vampire: the Masquerade had the first but it didn't have the second. Which was actually plenty to sell a lot of books. But the game actually worked pretty poorly table top, and was much better suited to the large LARPs where people stood around being cliquish and pretentious. Once you moved the scale up to like 80 characters, the harsh reality that the game made diverse coteries difficult to justify and hold together simply didn't matter. You were no longer constrained by the fact that it was hard to come up with a reason for a Ventrue and an Assamite to team up story after story by simply not doing that. The Ventrue clique would be mostly Ventrue with a couple of hangers-on and that would be that.
-Username17
You need a hook to get people to tell series of stories with the characters the game creates in order to create long running games.
Vampire: the Masquerade had the first but it didn't have the second. Which was actually plenty to sell a lot of books. But the game actually worked pretty poorly table top, and was much better suited to the large LARPs where people stood around being cliquish and pretentious. Once you moved the scale up to like 80 characters, the harsh reality that the game made diverse coteries difficult to justify and hold together simply didn't matter. You were no longer constrained by the fact that it was hard to come up with a reason for a Ventrue and an Assamite to team up story after story by simply not doing that. The Ventrue clique would be mostly Ventrue with a couple of hangers-on and that would be that.
-Username17
-
Josh_Kablack
- King
- Posts: 5318
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
- Location: Online. duh
Secrets reveled by the original run of Heroes:DrPraetor wrote: (I never actually watched Heroes - did it have a secret reveal?), or wizards or something.
1. The viewing public finds Hayden Panettiere really hot.
2. Zachery Quinto can seriously act.
2a. Masi Oka and Jack Coleman, aren't far behind.
3. Writer's Strikes kill serial drama
Secrets revealed by Heroes Reborn:
1. It's possible to cash in on nerd nostalgia much faster than previously
thought.
2. It doesn't even require the big names from the first series.
3. Josh is a sucker.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Wed Jan 20, 2016 10:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
-
Whipstitch
- Prince
- Posts: 3660
- Joined: Fri Apr 29, 2011 10:23 pm
I steal pro rasslin' terms when plotting out the shit I want to lure my players into. As a rule, if you can't quickly and easily create a "They fight crime!" pitch for your game, you'll have problems getting it off the ground.
E.G.:
Shadowrun
Gimmick: He's from Big Trouble in Little China, she's from Escape from New York!
Angle: They fight commit crime!
E.G.:
Shadowrun
Gimmick: He's from Big Trouble in Little China, she's from Escape from New York!
Angle: They fight commit crime!
bears fall, everyone dies
I seriously don't think that Rifts has 15.7 million simultaneous viewers.DrPraetor wrote: something and the cast of NCIS is never going to challenge a party of Rifts characters for mass-market appeal.
Navy Death Squad is extremely popular.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Wed Jan 20, 2016 9:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
What's weird about White Wolf's repeated failures to make a superhero game is that they already had a superhero game people wanted to play by the hundreds of thousands. Fucking Vampire.
But instead they threw a temper tantrum every time anyone wanted to play Vampions, and they kept making incomplete and shitty games that were nominally for superheroics and then shitting all over everything in the process. What the fuck?
-Username17
- He's the vampire from Interview with a Vampire, She's the vampire from Blade!
They fight crime!
But instead they threw a temper tantrum every time anyone wanted to play Vampions, and they kept making incomplete and shitty games that were nominally for superheroics and then shitting all over everything in the process. What the fuck?
-Username17
-
Whipstitch
- Prince
- Posts: 3660
- Joined: Fri Apr 29, 2011 10:23 pm
I've only watched the first two seasons, but in the Season 2 it was revealed that superhumans existed all the way back into the ancient Japan, and that there is a number of conspiracies based around or run by the families and ancestors of the current characters.DrPraetor wrote: (I never actually watched Heroes - did it have a secret reveal?), or wizards or something.
Oh thank god I'm not the only person who does this. Only I see PCs and NPCs through their gimmick and use Dusty finishes sparingly.Whipstitch wrote:I steal pro rasslin' terms when plotting out the shit I want to lure my players into. As a rule, if you can't quickly and easily create a "They fight crime!" pitch for your game, you'll have problems getting it off the ground.
E.G.:
Shadowrun
Gimmick: He's from Big Trouble in Little China, she's from Escape from New York!
Angle: They fight commit crime!
And since we've been on a WW kick recently (and AS is built more towards the horror side than the superhero side), what would a proper Vampire game that owned being Vampions look like? Or any WW game, for that matter? WtA with less deviant parentage?
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
It is so very strange. There's seems to be this absurd idea across all these games that the only kind of stories that matter are ones about intrigue and politicking and everything else isn't art somehow. Which is not only stupidly pretentious, it's just flat out wrong.Frank Trollman wrote:But instead they threw a temper tantrum every time anyone wanted to play Vampions, and they kept making incomplete and shitty games that were nominally for superheroics and then shitting all over everything in the process. What the fuck?
But even the Teragen book, which is about forced transhumanism and the development of personal godhood, spends more time on internal political struggles than anything else. Who cares which slightly different approach to global terrorism Divis Mal chooses - you're trying to go through chrysalis so you can eat the sun!
It had several, some of which are mutually contradictory.DrPraetor wrote: (I never actually watched Heroes - did it have a secret reveal?)
Heroes actually had a secret reveal problem.
You see, the first season was all about all of these slowly learning about their powers and about the big secret conspiracy and the crazy serial killer. And the story is really compelling because it just tantalizes you with these tiny tiny glimpses. But in the end it draws all to a head and everything is revealed, there are no mysteries left.
Which is the point. Each season was supposed to be an anthology, following different characters. But the characters and actors from Season 1 became super popular. So instead of dumping them, they decided to rehash the formula and set up a new big mystery with even deeper conspiracies. And that might have worked if not for the writers strike.
And they repeat this every other season because they can't think of a new formula. Which is why it became horribly stale.
-
Silent Wayfarer
- Knight-Baron
- Posts: 898
- Joined: Sun Jun 21, 2009 11:35 am
-
Occluded Sun
- Duke
- Posts: 1044
- Joined: Fri May 02, 2014 6:15 pm
I will note that even X-Files didn't do X-Files correctly - for all the excellent episodes, the show's creator had no idea what the ultimate conspiracy was.
Getting to the point where that was obvious to everyone included a lot of really great TV. But when the show, and the movies, failed to reveal any kind of ultimate metaplot, people lost patience.
As much as WW was annoying with their metaplot, I'll give them points for trying to have some kind of coherent story to their games. They failed big time, but they did at least make an effort.
Getting to the point where that was obvious to everyone included a lot of really great TV. But when the show, and the movies, failed to reveal any kind of ultimate metaplot, people lost patience.
As much as WW was annoying with their metaplot, I'll give them points for trying to have some kind of coherent story to their games. They failed big time, but they did at least make an effort.
"Most men are of no more use in their lives but as machines for turning food into excrement." - Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
The problem with the X-Files wasn't the lack of Metaplot. It was the need to continueally add on to it. Because once the conspiracy was fully revealed, that would be it, the show would be over.Occluded Sun wrote:I will note that even X-Files didn't do X-Files correctly - for all the excellent episodes, the show's creator had no idea what the ultimate conspiracy was.
Getting to the point where that was obvious to everyone included a lot of really great TV. But when the show, and the movies, failed to reveal any kind of ultimate metaplot, people lost patience.
This is a problem with every show that's about a single huge mystery.
I must agree.Silent Wayfarer wrote:I always thought Miracleman did Aberrant better than Aberrant.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Thu Jan 21, 2016 11:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.