They're a brilliant application of early Doctor Who's low budget making it hard to do good special effects: Cybermen are people in cyborg life support systems.
So you can see the actor in the costume and it's on purpose; it's bulky and clunky and the machinery is largely external because there's still a person taking up the inside space.
New Who has really lost sight of this. Like, completely.
The horror of the Cybermen is not that they're inhuman--it's that they're still human underneath.
Daleks are living blobs of hate in weaponised wheelchairs; Cybermen are people who will do--and have done--anything to survive.
Now in New Who, they've reversed it: you could have become a Cyberman in Old Who, but in New Who it's the Daleks who can turn you into one of their own.
Reconstruction of the original appearance of the Cybermen, from the missing episode (but audio is original):
(Cybermen change almost every time we see them: they're individuals upgrading and adapting to their environments with whatever parts they have at hand, so keeping the same costume for everyone everywhere everywhen is ridiculous.)
I'm running an Earthdawn campaign and the party's current adversary is an unNamed Horror. In Earthdawn, Horrors fall somewhere between a demon in D&D and an Elder God in Cthulhu. It's important that this one be unNamed, because without a Name, it can't really grow or change too much, and it kno...
@BESW Sure, but the question is ultimately: "Can anyone come up with other ways I can get them to Name the horror?" - which is "list all the devices and permutations I have available to me" effectively, which even in Fate is a lot
that's different from "what is a good way?" or etc
I've been playing WoD pen and paper for some time, but had to change my gaming group. Now I'm playing Pathfinder.
Thanks to my GM I'm allowed to play a kind of WoD werewolf. We have a concept of a Barbar / Oracle skinwalker, but the real problems starts with porting the auspices.
How can I port...
I am a fairly new DM and I recently got some of my friends to start a campaign with me as DM using Pathfinder.
One of the players has been really trying hard to make it an enjoyable adventure, as well as helping others get into the role playing. After another player showed him a were-crocodile,...
If the question is: "How can I replace dice rolling with chainsaw juggling to make combat more thrilling?", "Don't" is a pretty reasonable answer because it will lead to catastrophe, but if your reason for saying "don't" is some concern over power levels, fittingness, etc, that "don't" is really "I think your version of fun is bad and you should stop having that kind of fun"
The correct way to respond to that is to tell them how to do it. If it doesn't work all that well, show them as much, and be helpful and offer something like "Have you tried just making a regular non-WoD werewolf instead? Here's how you'd do it" etc etc
What makes cyberman scary is that they are just doing it to survive and just keep going and going and going. Daleks, OTOH, are screwed up little balls of hate with big guns.
:17344211 Ahahaha! I had fun playing Kender. To properly play their subconscious kleptomania, whenever we were around a group of NPCs, I'd ask the DM if anything "fell into my pockets"... leaving the target & loot entirely up to the DM...
can we just take a moment to appreciate the fact that the Kender race probably should have been the most evil race in the game but isn't because of writer fiat?
(hey I just noticed I did that tumblr speech pattern in that ole' message)
but seriously they are basically the greatest neutral evil race in the game
@Adeptus have you seen the Kender description with red writing all over it?
Then insert a race into a game. Never name them. Play them as abhorrently evil psychopathic race, play them completely faithfully to Kender but give them a sort of grimdark Mordor-ish trapping. Take them seriously the whole time. Await the day, if it arrives, when my players realise the antagonists are Kender.
Record the psychological damage inflicted for science.
who think a race full of annoying kleptomanics who don't acknowledge their own thievery at any cost is ok to call good aligned because they "don't like hurting people"
3.5 alignment is mostly defined with vague, subjective descriptions; when it's specific and objective, it's contradictory. There are no winners in that debate.
So, to me, The D&D alignment debate is: ç„¡, unask the question.
If you want to bash Kender, it's more productive to do so on the level of "Who thought this was going to be fun for anyone except the Kender?" They're a solo character concept in a system that assumes group play as the default paradigm.
@BESW this is a large part of what I meant when I said they were unacceptable in any game I would play
they give any player who is playing them an excuse to steal from people, and constantly be doing so at that
heck, they would be expected to
stealing from the other players, and even stealing from NPC's can easily turn into a problem both in the game itself, and depending on the group, at the table.
@trogdor When I played Kenders, I just occasionally reminded the DM to see what I'd "picked up"... and if it was something belonging to another player, I'd give it back & say I was "looking after it for them". To me, that's how to make Kenders minimally annoying to the rest of the group.
Kender always struck me as just halflings with a few annoying additions that seem to spring from the fevered madness of some author or other who somehow thought said additions would be fun-and-not-annoying-at-all
There was recently, as a single example, a question asking how to recognise "good RP" in order to reward it. A view was put forward that this was system-agnostic.
You've been here nine months longer than I have; you have 6.5k more rep and you've asked three more questions that I have. I figured you'd have at least ten of those things already.
Cleric on Cleric multiclassing! Unashamed proficiency bonus stacking! You won't believe what Inspired this Fighter! This sexy Rogue sure knows how to use his Advantage! Wizard's Burning Hands!
When can this be considered decided? http://meta.rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/4885/is-god-machine-a-good-tag?rq=1 Noone has said it is a good idea to have this tag. except its creator in comments and me suggesting it might be good in the question. Can I destroy the tag now?
@BESW Your spoil-lair is one of the top two active site-featured chat rooms. I almost clicked on it. :P
@Oxinabox post an answer saying something like: "Community consensus seems to indicate it's not necessary and going to be problematic. I'm going to destroy this tag in 5 days unless there's any major objection."
if you arent used to RPG.SEs tags youll just be like if I am in anyway new Ill tag it with new-gm vs. problems specifically with or because of a new gm
@Oxinabox answer; new votes, attracts attention, lets people comment on it totally independently, and if you get a bunch of upvotes and no other response that's gonna feel reaffirming
The behaviors of my group will never cease to amaze me. Party attacks a small orc outpost, they weren't really expecting trouble, so not on high alert. They sneak into a tower and dispatch two of them. They had a table setup with a card game. The party immediately becomes curious what they were playing, how to play it, and what the objective of the game was.
If I keep tossing out vivid details for darn near anything, surely they will eventually stop thinking that the only items of importance are the ones I can describe in detail.
That or I have to start describing items Dwarf Fortress style. The Flower pot is made of bone, studded with bone, carved with images of bone, inlaid with bone.
Most of my group are used to video game RPGs. Where they hold tab and look for the highlighted items in the room to see what is important. If everything is equally detailed, they have to actually use /logic/ and /reason/ to figure stuff out.
Although we've adopted the trope of typing Loading in the chatbox when it takes a little while to prepare a description.
And moving between modules in the adventure path is now referred to as INSERT DISC X.
These tight iron cuffs can fit over the wrists of any Large or smaller humanoid.
When placed on a helpless humanoid, they make the captive more docile and compliant. The prisoner never attempts to escape of its own volition and agrees to any reasonable request unless it makes a DC 11 Will saving throw.
I recently marked a question for moderator attention because it was too specific to a given player's particular social situation. It was seemingly removed shortly thereafter - and I thought that was a good decision. I caught it early and it had gotten little attention.
But then I see this questi...
http://meta.rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/4848/do-we-need-the-adventure-writing-tag?cb=1 Part of the "Adventure Writing" could be suitable for Worldbuilding?
@waxeagle @BESW The question about the GM who took things too far with his group in a "gritty" game.
I see that during my long absence Myx has still not learned how to be a professional or, indeed, how to use objective data instead of houserules and anecdotes
Instead of repeating my usual rant about how his crap info is actively worsening the site I'm just going to let you envision my six previous rants and then just ask you to imagine me rubbing my temples while smoking a cigarette while I repeat t hem.
@Zachiel Kryan has had much more time to get sick of Myx's crap than I have.
I can't recall when you did left exactly, mostly on the wossname of having talked to you on #Legend, but we had our 5e discussion moved to its own room, which I'm not following too much.
@MadMAxJr Someone on #Legend ran a game of it just because. It was determined that the only acceptable reason to run 5e is because you hate both yourself and all of your friends and you want them to leave you alone to wallow in your own despair.
I mean, it's still D&D, which I know some folks have issues with...but not expecting the new edition of D&D to be D&D is like expecting the Pope to stop being Catholic
I can't judge a system that just released that heavily. I'd like to see it simmer for a while. Also most of my current group just got the hang of PF and they don't need system shock.
@waxeagle The TL;DR version is that the stats of the published monsters vastly outscale PCs, encounters in published adventures are super poorly designed with a skew towards lethality, sloppy writing, poor wording on abilities and clear and vibrant class imbalance that punishes classes in a way that makes 3.PF look like FATE
@Lord_Gareth tbh, #1 isn't particularly true, at least not for all playstyles. #2, true at L1, not so much after that. #3 sloppy writing...partly by design, but I can see what you mean. #4 I think this may be overblown, at least until we've seen more of the math.
@lisardggY Whyever would you think that? Paizo interfaces with the bossman if they need to interface with anyone, which is hardly ever. The only thing Paizo as a company cares about is that we continue to meet the standards required in their compatibility license
Other than that, anything we publish is on our own heads
@lisardggY I'll dig up links in a bit, but I'm involved in the Path of War project, just wrapped up Bloodforge (that's in the layout phase) and am doing open testing for my Wilder content.
@MadMAxJr To be fair it was something like four years of writing that got to the phonebook.
ENVY INTENSIFIES. Alas, even though I sometimes feel like RPGs is my only field of expertise (maybe along M:tG and some videogames), I'm pretty sure writing games or supplements isn't my subset. Sloppily discussing about game theory is.
Had a moment with Bloodforge where I think I broke my co-worker's mind.
Dude's a longtime player, relatively new designer, working with him to improve his skills/grammar. He asks, "So how long have you been playing?" And I get kinda shy and admit that I have yet to actually play a single session of Pathfinder, to which I got this: "What? Wait, what? No! How can you have not played and know more about the system than the people who write it?"
People of the chat, can you lend me your combined brains for a moment? I'm trying to improve my question on Inherent bonus math by level and I want to reduce the number of variables in the problem. Given that I have an initial Int that might be even or odd, one age category +1 at any point during character growth and at most +5 from a skill, do you see any event where starting from the odd value is a good thing, provided I'm optimizing for high level and the money for a +5 tome is going to be less than pocket change?
@Lord_Gareth tabletop. Pencil & Paper. Live (not to be confused with LARPs)
@Zachiel why are items not a thing? if 3.5, you don't get retroactive skill points, but you can still figure out when each level of +Int item becomes available and give yourself more skill points that way
@Zachiel but for maximizing skill points, have you taken Nymph's Kiss and are you human?
Man, both of those things would be great if they'd ever worked before.
Oh wait, they didn't
We've had that conversation before, Wax. There's no 'out' for me here. I'm not an objective party, and Myx has his mod status to protect him from casual accusations.
The people with the power to remove him don't observe enough to see the problem
@KRyan Items don't influence skill point gain in 3.5e. And yes I'm working with the case where those bonuses are better spent elsewhere.
@KRyan Let's say I'm not optimizing the whole character, I'm just willing to spend money in the most skill-efficient way, all the rest being not optimized for buying ranks.
@KRyan yeah yeah I'm just saying "how do I optimize this?" Because all the rest can be optimized retroactively and, save for feats, it's retoactive.
Items don't anyway. Only your natural Int is counted for when calculating skill points. Inherent bonuses just happen to be "and you're magically more intelligent, instant effect".
@Metool Some part of it might have been inferred from every NPC statblock I've ever seen, but I'm looking for the page to see if it contradicts my idea.
> Use your character’s current Intelligence score, including all permanent changes (such as inherent bonuses, ability drains, or an Intelligence increase gained at step 4, above) but not any temporary changes (such as ability damage, or enhancement bonuses gained from spells or magic items, such as a headband of intellect), to determine the number of skill points you gain.
@waxeagle I can go to chat.stackexchange.com/?tab=favorite, or I get it in the "other rooms you're in" sidebar if I'm not in any other rooms. Is there any other way?
I'm running an Earthdawn campaign and the party's current adversary is an unNamed Horror. In Earthdawn, Horrors fall somewhere between a demon in D&D and an Elder God in Cthulhu. It's important that this one be unNamed, because without a Name, it can't really grow or change too much, and it kno...
I've been playing WoD pen and paper for some time, but had to change my gaming group. Now I'm playing Pathfinder.
Thanks to my GM I'm allowed to play a kind of WoD werewolf. We have a concept of a Barbar / Oracle skinwalker, but the real problems starts with porting the auspices.
How can I port...
