Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I would consider it very mild bullshit, just because by RAW Disguise is penetrated by Perception. To oppose it with Knowledge should probably be at some sort of a penalty.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

So basically perception to see through the disguise, then knowledge depending on whether or not the player saw through it? That seems fair.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Why do people keep making Powered By the Apocalypse games?

I realized that I haven't read the webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons in over a year, and in the interim the comic's creator released a PbtA game for their comic.

I found out it was a PbtA based product, but I've still taken a look. I can't really tell how close this is to the common of PbtA games, but it does state that typical "Bears Appear" results are something that shouldn't happen on "easy/clear successes" (whatever the hell that means).
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Post by schpeelah »

Judging__Eagle wrote:Why do people keep making Powered By the Apocalypse games?

I realized that I haven't read the webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons in over a year, and in the interim the comic's creator released a PbtA game for their comic.

I found out it was a PbtA based product, but I've still taken a look. I can't really tell how close this is to the common of PbtA games, but it does state that typical "Bears Appear" results are something that shouldn't happen on "easy/clear successes" (whatever the hell that means).
It does seem kind of appropriate, though. K6BD is a pretty crazy ride through a setting overstuffed with cool but irrelevant detail, things don't really hang together and aren't supposed to because 99% of the lore is explicitly a lie. Being dragged through your MC's ad-hoc bullshit is a pretty good equivalent.

Nailing things down enough to have a functional game would make it a very distant echo of the comic. I'm not convinced you can have a decent game of K6BD in anything other than Munchhausen.
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Post by Prak »

I'm betting it's because it's easy to write for PbtA's non-system, and easy to get newbies to give it a shot since you can elevator pitch the entire game.
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Post by Ice9 »

Prak wrote:I'm betting it's because it's easy to write for PbtA's non-system, and easy to get newbies to give it a shot since you can elevator pitch the entire game.
Yep. Easy to write up, and doesn't require as much familiarity with the setting from the players, since the archetype sheet serves as somewhat of an info-dump.
Also has a fair amount of mechanical 'texture' for how rules-light it is, which some people like.
Last edited by Ice9 on Wed May 24, 2017 11:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Prak »

I've gotten hooked on the American Gods adaptation, enough so that I got impatient and bought the book even though I don't do much book reading these days. Kind of like the idea of playing in the world of American Gods.

So the annoying question is- what system/game would be a good fit? I'm not sure what the game would ultimately be, but I could see something where players play people like Shadow, hired by various gods, and then told to work together.

I could see Mage or Scion being a decent way to play the gods, but I don't know that there's enough magic flying around to justify even their hand wavey magic systems if people are playing humans hired by the gods (but I'm only 200 or so pages into the book, so feel free to tell me otherwise). Any suggestions? I'm expecting Feng Shui to be one of them. Fate could work, since it's set up to be fairly genre/setting agnostic.
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Post by Mechalich »

Prak wrote:I've gotten hooked on the American Gods adaptation, enough so that I got impatient and bought the book even though I don't do much book reading these days. Kind of like the idea of playing in the world of American Gods.

So the annoying question is- what system/game would be a good fit? I'm not sure what the game would ultimately be, but I could see something where players play people like Shadow, hired by various gods, and then told to work together.

I could see Mage or Scion being a decent way to play the gods, but I don't know that there's enough magic flying around to justify even their hand wavey magic systems if people are playing humans hired by the gods (but I'm only 200 or so pages into the book, so feel free to tell me otherwise). Any suggestions? I'm expecting Feng Shui to be one of them. Fate could work, since it's set up to be fairly genre/setting agnostic.
Would people hired by the gods even have any actual powers? My memory of American Gods is rather hazy, but as I recall Shadow and fellow mortal travelers don't really have any powers save those granted by exposure to the gods and/or various magical items.

So what you would need is a system that can represent a wide range of spiritual entities of considerable variation in corporeality and power level and one that can represent magical items in a wide variety while having PCs who are largely mortal. You could do that using the Storyteller system - Mage has rules for a wide variety of spirits and magical items in relevant splatbooks - but I wouldn't exactly recommend it for all the general reasons regarding the Storyteller system.
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Post by Username17 »

My big problem with the American Gods book, and the reason I haven't touched the show, is that I found all the characters intensely unlikeable. I didn't actually want any of them to win and didn't care about their struggles or trials.

That said, I don't recall the POV character being able to do very much. He was more of a Lynchian protagonist, where he was "some guy" who sort of wandered around poking at things while weird shit happened. There didn't seem to be any particular rules to how the magic powers of the old or new gods worked, which pretty much put them on the level of supernatural creatures in World of Darkness.

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Post by Prak »

I actually rather like Wednesday and Shadow, hell, Mr. Nancy, too. But to each their own.

Yeah, so far as I've seen, mortals have no magic, other than whatever is going on when Shadow makes it snow. Hell, Wednesday doesn't even use any magic to rob the bank. The most magical things going on so far in the book or the show is Laura coming back, the scenes with Anubis (so far inexplicably judging both an actual khmetic woman and white, modern american, ambiguously judeochristian Laura) and the things the new gods do. I could imagine that people working for the new gods might have a lot more going for them from their patrons.
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Post by Starmaker »

The book is a thinkpiece about millennials run through a lens flare filter and mashed together with an anti-modern, pro-measles vagina egg screed. Ew.
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Post by hyzmarca »

The wayI look at it is that the Gods aren't objects of worship, they're products of worship.W Mr. Wednsday is an Odin, but not the Odin. There is no the Oden, just different interpretations of the idea of Odin.

All of these Old Gods are present in America because America has immigrants from all parts of the world, immigrants who believed in them. And the American versions of those Gods were basically spawned by those immigrants.

The Old Gods are being displaced by the New, because Wealth, Fame, and Men in Black UN Chemtrail Black Helicopter New World Order Shadow Governments. are what people believe in now.
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Post by Starmaker »

This conflates belief as in supernatural belief / worship and belief as in awareness of observable reality. When you're encouraged to root against observable reality and for bullshit fantasy that did not make people's lives better, there's no way to make that shit smell like roses. Darwinism isn't a religion. Magnetic optics isn't a religion. Linear algebra isn't a religion.

Someone was interviewing Ray Bradbury once and complimented him on the portrayal of the evils of censorship in Fahrenheit 451. And Bradbury said, "no fucking way, you got it all wrong. I meant to show that television is bad. TV is evil and inherently anti-book and it will send goons to murder the few remaining people who still uphold the undying truth that there's nothing better than to curl up with a good PAPER book and sniff your own asshole." Gaiman is this except still alive.

Also (this is why I'm surprised Prak likes the show / book), Gaiman flat out lies about history and chickened the fuck out of an accurate portrayal. The #1 supernatural entity worshiped in the US, and the #1 enemy of the old gods (whether American-born or not), is Jesus fucking Christ. Jesus killed Native American gods, Jesus killed Eurasian and African gods in their home countries (okay, some of them like the three Arabian sisters were killed by Jesus's dad, but Americans by and large believe Jesus is his own dad, so there) and he's the #1 enemy of modernity in the US.

If the old gods have anything going for them, it's them having been patrons of technology and industry in the ancient world. If they're to be positive characters I can root for, they have to take up their portfolios and punch Jesus in his incestuous child-raping dick. Odin the god of telecom, Chicomecoatl the god of agriculture, Eostara the god of Planned Parenthood.

(edit/addendum, because I'm really fucking pissed)

Nothing has done more for promoting the cults of old gods than technology. I'd posted (probably in MPSIMS) before how Soviet Hardhat kids were expected to have a good grasp of (an extremely sanitized version of) Egyptian and Greek mythology. That was made possible by people writing, printing and distributing children's books. If you're shopping around for a god to worship, you use the interwebs with content sourced from books written by ethnographers and archaeologists, and if you're looking for fellow worshipers, you use facebook and craigslist, and before that the classifieds.

Christianity on the other hand is a great reason for the old gods to band together. Zeus fought Mitra, Jupiter fought Baal and Melqart, Anansi and Tengri had no contact whatsoever, Hindus and Parsi have the others' gods moonlighting as their own demons. But Christianity hurt them all, and it labels them all "heathen" / "pagan" / "heretic" / "satanic", it's what provides a reason for American Arjuna and American Spenta Mainyu to team up and punch Archangel Michael in the face.
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Post by virgil »

Starmaker wrote:Also (this is why I'm surprised Prak likes the show / book), Gaiman flat out lies about history and chickened the fuck out of an accurate portrayal. The #1 supernatural entity worshiped in the US, and the #1 enemy of the old gods (whether American-born or not), is Jesus fucking Christ.
It's confirmed by Gaiman in an interview regarding American Gods IIRC, that US Jesus is absolutely the biggest god in town. The implication is that all of the adventures and conflicts by the various gods in the book are functionally divine hobos in an alley fighting over trash pickings, their activities are too far beneath the notice to get interference from the big wigs in America's pantheon.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I just saw the preview scene with Vulcan, who's apparently recast himself as the American god of guns, and I have to say that he should probably be up there with JC, given how the gun nuts are a death cult that out-human-sacrifices the Aztec empire and everybody just accepts that as how we live now.
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Post by Ice9 »

angelfromanotherpin wrote:I just saw the preview scene with Vulcan, who's apparently recast himself as the American god of guns, and I have to say that he should probably be up there with JC, given how the gun nuts are a death cult that out-human-sacrifices the Aztec empire and everybody just accepts that as how we live now.
Interesting you should mention that -
American Gods wrote:There were car gods there: a powerful, serious-faced contingent, with blood on their black gloves and on their chrome teeth: recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs.
I think that for the 'new gods' to be down in the alley hobo-fighting with the old pantheons, we have to assume that deaths don't give the same kind of oomph that intentional sacrifices do.
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Post by Mechalich »

Ice9 wrote:I think that for the 'new gods' to be down in the alley hobo-fighting with the old pantheons, we have to assume that deaths don't give the same kind of oomph that intentional sacrifices do.
If you interpret the setup of American Gods in the animist sense and utilize the framework for spirits presented by MtA, the various entities in American Gods are high-ranking astral umbrood - representatives of certain archetypes that people acknowledge in their lives, and the struggle in the novel/show represents a struggle for control of those archetypical spaces between older representatives and modern ones: so the Storyteller is fighting with TV and the ancient fertility goddesses are fighting with pron and so on.

Meanwhile Jesus and co. are off being representations of Prime and are an entirely different class of spirits that don't care in the slightest what those old-timey archetypes of stuff are doing because they're busy being all concerned with morality and shit.

So we have one group representing concepts and another representing virtues and their sources of power don't really overlap. This is super-kludge, but it's the way I would go if you were going to run the setting as a game.
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Post by Starmaker »

virgil wrote:
Starmaker wrote:Also (this is why I'm surprised Prak likes the show / book), Gaiman flat out lies about history and chickened the fuck out of an accurate portrayal. The #1 supernatural entity worshiped in the US, and the #1 enemy of the old gods (whether American-born or not), is Jesus fucking Christ.
It's confirmed by Gaiman in an interview regarding American Gods IIRC, that US Jesus is absolutely the biggest god in town. The implication is that all of the adventures and conflicts by the various gods in the book are functionally divine hobos in an alley fighting over trash pickings, their activities are too far beneath the notice to get interference from the big wigs in America's pantheon.
I can accept an author's interview as a source if it provides a valid alternate perspective on the book (even if I personally disagree). But this is not a valid perspective. American Gods without US Jesus is like a sitcom in 1943 Leningrad without the siege.
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Post by virgil »

[shrug] I feel it was valid. There are good stories out there that don't invoke the biggest player on the stage, and just being reminded he's around and with the power being proportional to number of people and sacrifices, I can totally imagine the hobo interpretation.
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Post by Prak »

Well, the book mentions Jesus, and the fact that there are, just like any of the old gods, a lot of Jesuses (though, the quote that is explicit on that matter comes from the show)-
American Gods, book, Shadow and Jacquel wrote:"It's going to be a white Christmas," said Shadow as he pumped the gas.
"Yup. Shit. That boy was one lucky son of a virgin."
"Jesus?"
"Lucky, lucky guy. He could fall in a cesspit and come up smelling like roses. Hell, it's not even his birthday, you know that? He took it from Mithras.
(...)
"So, yeah, Jesus does pretty good over here. But I met a guy who said he saw him hitchhiking by the side of the road in Afganistan and nobody was stopping to give him a ride. You know? It all depends on where you are."
American Gods, Show, Shadow and Wednesday wrote:Mr. Wednesday: "You've got your White Jesuit Jesus, your Black African Jesus, your Mexican Jesus and your swarthy Greek Jesus."
Shadow: "That's a lot of Jesus."
Wednesday: "Well there's a lot of call for Jesus, so there is a lot of Jesus."
Later, in the book, they meet Eoster, and a big deal is made about the fact that while people know her name, more or less, and the old traditions still survive in the form of modern Easter traditions, they don't know her. She's doing comparatively well, but it seems like it's somewhat empty. So, think about how many Jesuses there are in America, and how many ways to worship him there are, any given Jesus is probably somewhat content, but still nothing compared to, say, Media, who mentions that people worship and sacrifice at her shrine every fucking day.
American Gods, book, Shadow and Media wrote:"Who are you?" asked Shadow.
"Okay," she said. "Good question. I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore."
"You're the television? Or someone in the television?"
"The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to."
"What do they sacrifice?" asked Shadow.
"Their time, mostly," said (Media, as Lucy Ricardo). "Sometimes each other." She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gun smoke from their tips."
On the other hand, the one not down Gaiman's pants, one does have to wonder how much modern belief actually sustains Media and Mr. World and Technical Boy, when these are concepts that we may recognize but never named, and don't acknowledge as people, in the way that Odin or Eoster were. Maybe the book addresses this, I'm only 460 pages in. Maybe it doesn't, the old gods are the POV characters. The New Gods seem fat and vivid and happy, much like Eoster, so maybe they just have different expectations. The core idea of the book, beyond being a fantasy allegory of immigration, is that gods need belief and they need it in the form of worship and proscribed rituals. Wednesday is very disdainful of pagans, though the one they meet in the book is a strawman, not exactly a pagan so much as what one might call a spiritual feminist. But the fact that people aren't, say, sacrificing to Huitzilopochtli, or Odin (assuming that was ever a thing, which is apparently debated and if they did it was as a part of war making), does seem to affect the quality of belief.

This all a lot of words to say that while Jesus does comparatively well in America, we're probably not counting all the Christmas and Easter christians towards his faith-feast. If non-Catholic, non-Orthodox worship is any good to Jesus at all it's probably a specific Protestant Jesus.
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Post by SlyJohnny »

Starmaker wrote:The book is a thinkpiece about millennials run through a lens flare filter and mashed together with an anti-modern, pro-measles vagina egg screed. Ew.
What is this nonsense? The book doesn't side with Wednesday's people over vaccinations and modern conveniences. Did you just read a synopsis or a sample and come to a ridiculous conclusion based on nothing, or?
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Post by virgil »

Is it a good idea to run a 'surprise' encounter with the party where their characters are in an alternate timeline, possibly switching between that and the regular/original in the same session, letting memories cross-over for both? Any pitfalls I should avoid?
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Post by deaddmwalking »

First thing that springs to mind - if the players are going to need two versions of their character, you'll need to help make sure that happens. For that reason, it might be easier if the 'alternate characters' are completely different, but if you provide different characters the players will be uncertain of their abilities.

There are definitely pitfalls. What if a character dies in one timeline? Does it matter?

There's also the question of why the players have both sets of memories.
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Post by virgil »

deaddmwalking wrote:First thing that springs to mind - if the players are going to need two versions of their character, you'll need to help make sure that happens. For that reason, it might be easier if the 'alternate characters' are completely different, but if you provide different characters the players will be uncertain of their abilities.
The idea I had would be the only difference is equipment (alternate timeline versions have only one piece of gear); which at 6th level, shouldn't involve too much prep to switch between the two.
There's also the question of why the players have both sets of memories.
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Post by mlangsdorf »

I just did something similar where the PCs branched timelines, and alternated encounters between the two. I had to track resource use between the two timelines (so the wizard cast spells A, B, C on timeline 1 but had cast B, C, D on timeline 2) but it wasn't too hard. It certainly made for a surreal experience, especially when they saw themselves in the distance doing things they'd already done.

If your players are open to experimentation, I'd certainly do it. It was fun and weird. I don't think I'd do it for too long (mine was 3 sessions and 6 combat encounters) but for a brief period it's interesting.
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