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Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[Trekkin]

Narrative-heavy systems are not for everyone or every group. If you look at the game as a contest against the DM that you have to win, of course you’ll find ways to abuse it. You don’t have to force yourself to play these kind of games if they’re out of your comfort zone - I like DnD and crunchy RPGs a lot too, maybe more than narrativeish games, but I can dig both.

True, though it's funny how people who dislike narrative games always assume an infinitely permissive GM and other players willing to go along with whatever nonsense they're proposing to "break the game." Yes, you can ignore all the parts of TechNoir that deal with the logic of using certain vectors for applying certain adjectives. You can also play Pun-Pun in D&D. Every system is ultimately an agreement between everyone at the table; if everyone wants to do stupid things, no rule is going to stop them.

[scriver]

Past. Listen. Maybe we're... joking around?

[Mephisto]

Anyone want a $99 1000-page pdf?

[birdy51]

Crikey. No. Hard pass, no.

[MrRoboto75]

Crikey. No. Hard pass, no.

But that's 10 cents per page!

[Cruxador]

Crikey. No. Hard pass, no.

But that's 10 cents per page!

More pages doesn't necessarily mean more value, it typically just means worse editing. Especially if that's for the core system.

And since it's Monte Cook, it'll somehow manage to be bizarre without being interesting.

[Digital Hellhound]

It claims to be a roleplaying game of surreal fantasy, but the most surreal thing about it is the price. The description just seems kind of vague and unclear, with lots of goofy-sounding terms and nothing to really draw you in deeper. Is there a novel or two included in those thousand pages? I can’t imagine there being enough interesting content for all that.

[Jimmy]

Skimmed the pictures.

Tentacles. Tentacles everywhere. Lady's umbrella? It's got tentacles. Hedge maze? Surprise: it's full of tentacles. Ghost? Tentacle feet. Dude sitting in a chair? You think it's tentacles, but actually it's snakes! Gotcha!

Bet there's a way to play a character that's composed of a statistically improbable percentage of tentacles.

Hey, what do tentacles and companies that charge $99 for PDFs have in common?

They've both got suckers.

[Trekkin]

And since it's Monte Cook, it'll somehow manage to be bizarre without being interesting.

Having read the preview, that's more or less what we've got: it just throws weirdness at you until you go numb to it, then brags about how cool and surreal it is, but it never quite hits the mark because there's nothing normal to contrast it with. It's all so alien that it becomes boring -- and that's a huge problem in an RPG, because it means the players are deprived of common reference points to figure out what they can do in the game.

See, if you were to sit down at my table and I handed you a sheet and said "You're playing an archer. There's a dragon attacking the town you're in. What do you do?" you have at least some existing sense of what you can do; there's buildings to take cover in, the thing flies and breathes fire, and your best bet for fighting it is probably with a bow. It may not be clear mechanically how to take cover or draw a bow, but there's at least a clear starting point for what you might want to do in the narrative. If, on the other hand, I tell you you're playing a vislae who's had their vertula kada misaligned from their Crux Qualia by the !8'^_^'@#-287 [a dozen other new terms] you're going to need explanations of all of those before you can figure out if that's even good or bad, let alone what to do about it. That's going to suck up time like crazy, and the explanations here only raise more questions -- which sounds great, but it's still just me talking. There's no gameplay yet.

The up-front cost of playing this thing would be untenable in reading time even if it were free.

EDIT: Incidentally, the physical version costs $252. It has a statue in it. I have no earthly idea who needs 30 pounds of stuff to play an RPG. I also don't want to know who needs to spend $216 more to have a campaign written for them (well, "customized" for them.)

[pikachu17]

Hey, in a world where there are goblins, elves, dwarves, and kobolds, but humans don't exist, what words would they use instead of "humanoid", "humane", Etc?

[Trekkin]

Hey, in a world where there are goblins, elves, dwarves, and kobolds, but humans don't exist, what words would they use instead of "humanoid", "humane", Etc?

[race doing the classifying]oid, presumably. Elfoid, dwarfoid, etc.

[Egan_BW]

Or just say fuck it and use humanoid.
You're not playing the game in the same language as the characters are supposed to be speaking anyways, so you may as well use words you're familiar with.

[IcyTea31]

Go up a taxonomic rank and call them primatoids? Or if you want a less scientific word for your fantasy setting inhabitants to use, maybe something like "thinking beings" or even just "folk"?

Edit: further ideas: "two-leggers", "ones who speak".

[Kagus]

Bipeds, if you wanna use something dumb and nonspecific. Or you could pull a Diogenes and call them plucked chickens.

[Telgin]

Folk or just people would be the obvious choices.  If you want to get sophisticated, sapients or sophonts are words you could use.