Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Reelya]

Huh, I never knew anything about it until today. I am not knowledgeable enough for tabletop games (Monopoly and Warhammer being one of the few I know) so I can't really talk about the subject. But I can talk about video games and books. 

to give you an idea of the F.A.T.A.L RPG's level of shitness:

- there is a boob-size trait for women which is inversely proportional to intelligence

- the rules are detailed enough to cover how much stuff you can cram in a babies asshole. You have to roll how loose your orifices are and it has age-modifiers going down to newborn baby. A high-rolling baby character could fit a lot.

- you need to solve quadratic equations to have sex, yet there are no dating rules

- random spell fumbles cause you to fistfuck the nearest humanoid, grow giant testicles 100 feet across, or ejaculate hundreds of mini-me clones out of your penis, then the clones run amok. Among like 100 other fumbles. There's pages and pages of dumb tables like this.

- there's cursed armour of "negrous nicompoopery" which turns you into a caracature of a black person - fat lips, big ass, low intelligence.

Plus ... this isn't even the worst part. The worst part is the main rules are complete shit and nonsensical.

[My Name is Immaterial]

Oh, yeah, FATAL! I actually once tried to run a game of that here! Character creation is next to impossible, and making an actual usable character sheet is one of the most difficult things I have done.

[MrRoboto75]

Isn't the character sheet like 13 pages long or something

and 90% of that is mostly pointless information.

[Strife26]

Dune, by Frank Herbet. A seminal classic science fiction novel.

Ender's Game, by Arthur C. Clarke. Another seminal classic science fiction novel.

The Color of Magic/The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett. The first two books in the Discworld series, and so close to my heart, it's where my username comes from.

The Call of Cthulhu, by HP Lovecraft. Probably his most famous work, but not my favorite, honestly. (It's really great for getting a taste of his work, but I prefer The Horror at Red Hook, despite its racism, because the urban terror is much more compelling for me, and the mystery is a bit better. For something a little less racist, I'd recommend Dagon or At The Mountains of Madness, because they're both much better at filling you with cosmic dread.)

The Name Of The Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss. A classic fantasy saga, written for a Post-Harry Potter era. Literally everyone I've met who's read it has loved it.

Ender's Game is by Orson Scott Card, actually. I heartily recommend the parallel novel to it, Ender's Shadow. Really interesting to be able to go back over the events of Ender's Game with a different (and, in my opinion, better) protagonist.

[Flying Dice]

Lotta recs I could make, but start with this: anything by Vernor Vinge. For the interconnected ones, read A Fire Upon the Deep -> A Deepness in the Sky -> The Children of the Sky. His other novels are secondary but still very worthwhile. Without even a shadow of a doubt he's the best contemporary science fiction author out there.

Dune, by Frank Herbet. A seminal classic science fiction novel.

Ender's Game, by Arthur C. Clarke. Another seminal classic science fiction novel.

The Color of Magic/The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett. The first two books in the Discworld series, and so close to my heart, it's where my username comes from.

The Call of Cthulhu, by HP Lovecraft. Probably his most famous work, but not my favorite, honestly. (It's really great for getting a taste of his work, but I prefer The Horror at Red Hook, despite its racism, because the urban terror is much more compelling for me, and the mystery is a bit better. For something a little less racist, I'd recommend Dagon or At The Mountains of Madness, because they're both much better at filling you with cosmic dread.)

The Name Of The Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss. A classic fantasy saga, written for a Post-Harry Potter era. Literally everyone I've met who's read it has loved it.

Ender's Game is by Orson Scott Card, actually. I heartily recommend the parallel novel to it, Ender's Shadow. Really interesting to be able to go back over the events of Ender's Game with a different (and, in my opinion, better) protagonist.

Though fair warning to steer clear of pretty much everything else Card wrote. Not unlike Dune, Ender's Game is one of those "really good core novel, a couple good followups, everything else is liquid dogshit".

[Harry Baldman]

Cosmic Banditos by A. C. Weisbecker, a lesser-known but entirely hilarious novel about quantum mechanics, substance abuse and banditry in the Mexican wilderness.

VALIS by Philip K. Dick, a fascinating novel about fictionalized religious experiences, mental illness and living information. Can recommend A Scanner Darkly for drug abuse, madness, isolation and dystopia.

For that matter, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - really easy read, pretty funny and an interesting chronicle of its time, has great imagery as well.

[MrRoboto75]

Dune, by Frank Herbet. A seminal classic science fiction novel.

Ender's Game, by Arthur C. Clarke. Another seminal classic science fiction novel.

The Color of Magic/The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett. The first two books in the Discworld series, and so close to my heart, it's where my username comes from.

The Call of Cthulhu, by HP Lovecraft. Probably his most famous work, but not my favorite, honestly. (It's really great for getting a taste of his work, but I prefer The Horror at Red Hook, despite its racism, because the urban terror is much more compelling for me, and the mystery is a bit better. For something a little less racist, I'd recommend Dagon or At The Mountains of Madness, because they're both much better at filling you with cosmic dread.)

The Name Of The Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss. A classic fantasy saga, written for a Post-Harry Potter era. Literally everyone I've met who's read it has loved it.

Ender's Game is by Orson Scott Card, actually. I heartily recommend the parallel novel to it, Ender's Shadow. Really interesting to be able to go back over the events of Ender's Game with a different (and, in my opinion, better) protagonist.

Though fair warning to steer clear of pretty much everything else Card wrote. Not unlike Dune, Ender's Game is one of those "really good core novel, a couple good followups, everything else is liquid dogshit".

Speaker for the Dead and whatever the third book was were a real drug trip.

[Strife26]

Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets are the good ones, in my opinion.


Unfortunately, Shadow of the Giant is a pretty mediocre way to cap the series.

[Flying Dice]

Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets are the good ones, in my opinion.


Unfortunately, Shadow of the Giant is a pretty mediocre way to cap the series.

That's about where I'd draw the line myself, yeah.

[Tawa]

Spoiler: FATAL derail (click to show/hide)

My own favorite-to-hate parts of FATAL:

- There's seventy pages of classes, most of them utterly mundane things like "dicemaker" and "delouser". Character classes that are actually worth a damn are blatantly segregated into good versions and bad versions based on your stats and social status; for example, there's Warrior, then there's Knight, and the Knight is objectively better but can only be taken if you're a noble or have high stats. Mage is objectively superior to every other wizard class, but requires insane stats to take. Sorta like the wonderful 90s computer RPG Darklands, only it's incredibly shit because you don't get to decide anything for yourself. Better yet, the creator apparently forgot this when defending the game, insisting that the boring classes like Warrior aren't intended for players to take.

- Experience gain is based on your class and the things that class should be doing. It takes a clerk 83 years to hit level 2, because they get 1 XP per month of clerk'ing. Barbers get 1 XP per 10 beards shaved, but delousers get 5 XP per beard deloused. Bandits can reach level 20 by stealing from each other. For bonus points, the creator, in spite of his love of math, didn't really think ahead when he decided that experience needed to level up doubles with each level.

- Despite his juvenile fascination with sex, the creator seemingly didn't want anyone to have it. Engaging in sex calls for solving a quadratic equation, and determining how many children a woman is pregnant with calls for a d1,000,000 roll.

- The creator also claimed that the game was "historically/mythically accurate". It is neither. He pulls from completely random sources all over the board to justify his hastily-put-together misogynistic power fantasy; he cites two-star books on Roman history with names like "Reign of the Phallus" to illustrate his pseudo-medieval setting, and his justification for making women inherently stupider than men in the rules is frickin' Aristotle.

- Highlights of stat generation include:
    - Your BMI is independent of your height and weight
    - Your nipples are quite likely to be like half an inch long
    - Rolling max physical attractiveness as a woman gives you a 19" waist and 36" hips without additional modifiers
    - Geometry is the highest level of math a character can learn
    - Babies' anal circumference penalties are so large they are likely to have negative rectum sizes
    - You have to roll for your birthday, and the roll is skewed toward the 17th of the month

Anyway, in terms of recommendations: it's not exactly an underrated classic or whatever, but Hamlet is probably my favorite Shakespeare play. It's the kind of work you can find something new in every time you read it, as well as having some of my favorite bawdy jokes that don't make sense anymore. It's also rather lacking on the "wacky antics" front a number of his plays have (like the porter scene in Macbeth,) which is a plus in my opinion.

Beowulf is an excellent poem. It's an Anglo-Saxon work about a Geatish warrior who battles monsters terrorizing Denmark and Götaland. One of the more interesting aspects is the author's aim to reconcile his Christian beliefs with the pagans he's writing about.

The Alexiad is a good read in terms of historical nonfiction. Written about the Byzantine emperor Alexios Komnenos by his daughter Anna, it describes the history of the ERE during the High Middle Ages, providing a unique perspective on a number of things, from Byzantine perception of the First Crusade to the role of women in the Empire.

[MrRoboto75]

I'd argue that plays (esp. Shakespeare) are meant to be seen, not read.

[Reelya]

Isn't the character sheet like 13 pages long or something

and 90% of that is mostly pointless information.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Hey man, the length and thickness of your anal pubes isn't pointless. The real point here is that I made that up, but I'm not 100% sure that the game doesn't track that information among everything it tracks. The fact that it's plausible that F.A.T.A.L would track that, if they'd thought of it, says it all.

[Tawa]

I'd argue that plays (esp. Shakespeare) are meant to be seen, not read.

Oh, definitely. I daresay I experienced Hamlet on a new level when I watched the Branagh version.

That said, they tend to get lumped in with books rather than films or TV when their literary merits are considered, so they're fair game for reading recommendations in my book.

[My Name is Immaterial]

Ender's Game is by Orson Scott Card, actually. I heartily recommend the parallel novel to it, Ender's Shadow. Really interesting to be able to go back over the events of Ender's Game with a different (and, in my opinion, better) protagonist.

Oops! Looks like I'll have to run down and drop off my nerd card first thing tomorrow morning.

[Paxiecrunchle]

From what I have read I would highly recommend anything from Elizabeth Hand or Charles Stross, I would starting with Winterlong and Neptune's Brood but personally I have never read a poor work from either of them.