Basements & Beards- Analogue Gaming Thread

[ebin namefag]

So DHI is a game studio now? :3

Always were.
You may have heard of something called Violent Semen Inferno we made a couple years back.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

You should check out our upcoming Dickstarter for the OSR game Bards & Betrayals.

[Le Redditeur]

Our board game will be featured on a n9ght show before Spoony will ever be.

Speaking of board games, I'm eyeing a Catan Complete Edition, but it's costing an arm and a leg here. Does anyone know if the expansions are worth a premium over the price of the basic game?

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

I'd say the only must-have is Seafarers. Allows for more variety while not cluttering up the core gameplay. Maybe also the extra players expansion.
Cities & Knights might be your jam if you like pimping out cities, but I feel it adds lots of extra shit and fiddly bits. Maybe if you've grown bored of the regular game.
No idea about Traders & Barbarians. Seems to be a collection of scenarios and extra rules.

[wulfenlord]

Catan don't need no expansions imo, maybe the 5-6 player upgrade for a large gaming group, but everything else is distracting gimmick. Now Carcassonne needs the first expansion to be fully enjoyable.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Exalted: Essence, or how less autism can help you get more shit done.

Ever heard of Exalted? It's like the weebshit spinoff for the World of Dorkness, set in some hyper-mythical, oversized version of China (with a dash of Japan, of course), where players take the role of Exalted, basically demigods. Think Dynasty Warriors with the power levels of DBZ and a dash of Green Lantern (actually managing to kill an Exalted usually results in his essence fucking off to look for a normie to embiggen). Also there are buster swords and giant robots because why not.
Naturally this is still somewhat associated with the World of Dorkness, so you can't have too much fun. Besides a "Great Curse" (aka a chance of going fucking apeshit), all Exalted except for the Dragon-Blooded (the weakest of the bunch, but also the only ones who can make more of themselves; also they're basically in charge of the Not-Chinese Empire) are either outlawed or so obscure they'd be hunted all the same. Spamming your powers in broad daylight without Dragon-Blooded Privilege basically guarantees a visit from a Dragon-Blooded Death Squad.

Also typical for World of Dorkness, the mechanics are a bit of a mess. Combat in at least the first two editions basically involves throwing literal buckets of dice at each other until one side runs out of energy to fuel various perfect defenses, and every single type of Exalted is more convoluted than one type of WoD critter because the writers of Exalted are obsessed with writing down entire forests of convoluted, sometimes non-Euclidian skill trees.
Also some of the lore can be edgy to the point of stupid. The origin of demons in 2nd edition is somehow more fucked up than the Man-Made Beherit from Berserk.

Enter the most recent 3rd edition. It fixed quite a few things, especially with regards to combat (by literally ripping off Dissidia for some reason), though it was also rather controversial in other aspects.
3rd edition basically changed the entire art style of the game, opting for a more "realistic" style as opposed to the faux-animu style of the previous editions. Also has a bit of tracing here and there but hey, that's what the World of Dorkness crew is all about.
More controversial are the Charms (aka the various powers you need all those skill trees for). 3rd edition is drowning in Charms for every little Wuxia trick you can think of, and then some.
Furthermore all the Charms are described using natural language, aka there's no separation between fluff text and the cold, hard rules, which you should usually avoid when writing a tabletop RPG since this can make it really hard to figure out what a power is actually supposed to do.
Also for some reason Charms related to crafting basically have you play a mobile game with pen and paper, where you generate points to then transform into a higher tier of points until you have enough points for the type of artifact you want to create. I guess they didn't want even a single category of Charms with less than 50 Charms to choose from.

Probably because there are so many Charms, and because every type of Exalted needs his own forest of skill trees, the release schedule for more Exalted types is a bit... slow. 3rd edition came out in 2016, and as of now there are playable rules for 3 of the 1o Exalted types.

Or you can just buy Exalted: Essence now, which is a lot more streamlined, has less nickel-and-dime Charm autism, and actually includes all Exalted types in one book

[Kugelfisch]

WoD was the gay vampire and werewolf shit, right?

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Gay vampire, werewolf and wizard shit - and those are the less retarded options.

(Unless you're just playing Hunter: The Vigil to be a gay-monster-bashing special forces bloke)

[Kugelfisch]

Still gotta deal with the gay shit. No thanks.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Did you know that "tribal" is problematic? The cultural consultants at Wizards of the Coast said so.

“Multiple consultants recommended we stop using the language, so we decided to change it”

Cool story.

...likely referencing the harmful connotations often baked into the use of ‘tribal’.

Which is why natives still use the term.

At best, it thoughtlessly trucks in an understanding of largely non-white tribal societies as inherently primitive and naive to ‘modernity’. At worst, it evokes Western empires’ long history of treating indigenous people as savage and uncultured, often excusing the genocide and imperialism inflicted upon them.

The new fantastic word is "typal". No idea if it has any meaning, but it has like the same number of syllables. Cool.

Rosewater explained in his Twitter thread that the change affected ‘internal vocabulary words’ only. While official blogs and other articles might mention it, MTG will avoid the use of either in rules text.

That's totally not confusing at all.