Nobilis

That sounds much worse than regular Advanced Time Wizards.

What's so bad about the OCs?

You play as a character based on a concept, like the God of Blueberries or the God of Neoliberalism, who was randomly uplifted to the pantheon and stuck in a divine terrorist cell with the other player characters to do missions on behalf of one of the factions of Creation.

>divine terrorist cell

hehehe

It's not exactly inaccurate.

I shit you not, the best explanation of Nobilis, both setting and mechanics I ever saw was on the fucking Katawa Shoujo forums. Someone made a mission out of introducing everyone to the game and their explanations were actually shockingly good. He peppered them with detailed examples of character creation and mechanics using characters/situations from the visual novel (i.e. stating Shizune Hakamichi as the Power of Competition). It was crazy.

One of the themes of the game is that the protagonist faction fighting to preserve the universe is in many ways much worse than the villains

For example, the worst thing the Excrucians will do is erase things and people from existence. Meanwhile the "good guys" maintain several hells where they send millions of people to be tortured for completely random reasons

>made it throught Noumenon

Seriously?

Actually wonder how the domino mechanic works in play. I'm a sucker for non-standard randomisation mechanics.

The secret in the end of Noumenon is either the most brilliant of infuriating you'll ever read in a gamebook.

None of it makes sense. There is no secret. The whole trip is deliberately a mishmash of surreal, profound seeming images. The players make whatever they want out of it, and whatever they do, the GM smiles coyly and in the end, tells them they were right.

If you made it through Noumenon then Nobilis is a cakewalk.

So basically whatever the players end thinking is really going on, the DM supposed to run with that and act like they've 'worked it out'?

That's actually less pretentious than I was expecting.

Is this as pretentious as the reviews make it sound?

Pretty much, yeah. So long as what they come up with sounds suitably clever, I assume. But basically anything.

Forget Nobilis, did anyone understand ANYTHING AT ALL about Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine?

As someone who owns the book - yeah, still potentially fun though. Mostly depends on what you do with it.

It's MORE.

There's this guy called Chuubo, Eddie has this marvellous wish granting engine...

Eddie?

He's got the Engine, yeah.

>download PDF
>It's 1024 fucking pages
>character creation is buried under like 800 of them
>Actually, is that even character creation?
>I'm not sure there are character creation rules
>all written in a conversational tone which is amusing to read but makes figuring anything out an absolute fucking nightmare
>where the fuck are the mechanics
>how do I do things
>what the shit is going on
>what the fuck
>fuck

Yeah, no thank you.

ks.renai.us/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3050&hilit=Nobilis

There ya go. Note this was all written back during the demo days, before anyone knew about the actual plot of the VN and all the community did was speculate about Misha's disability and how hard Hanako's father raped her.

Shizune: Power of Competition
Emi: Power of Sports
Rin: Power of Art
Lilly: Power of Tea
Hanako: Power of Scars
Hisao: Power of Heart by their powers combined...

Nurse is an Imperator. Kanji's an Excrucian.

Grognards hate the shit out of it since no dice rolling is involved.

yeah? you play as a storybook character with defined character arcs (literally you have cards where you write down your goals) and narrating how you commit to those goals gets you advancement.

The system's the same as nobilis. You assert willpower (usually related to skills you have) to make things happen that aren't half-assed. you could half-ass, to lesser results, of course.

basically you play as some kid who wants to open a bakery and you spend your afternoons out of magic wizard school renovating an old home. that's your progression. when it's complete, you have your bakery done, but need a new goal. like "make it the most popular in town" or "invite friends over for an opening party".

nobilis is weird alien shit and chuubo's can be too but it's very much just figures in a strange world living their usual (and sometimes strange) lives.

>It's 1024 fucking pages
>character creation is buried under like 800 of them

What? No it isn't. I have the PDF right here and character building is from page 47 to 62.

mediafire.com/download/bu8q776hy25rlv3/Chuubos_Marvelous_Wish-Granting_Engine.pdf

I'll be the first to say Chuubo's is a shit game, but don't make up lies about it

>don't make up lies about it
why wouldn't he, considering this thread is purely salty simulationist tears from the get-go?

isn't exactly lying, but is making a deliberately shit portrayal because he can't play anything that isn't Game of Thrones run in D&D 3.5.

Nobilis effectively has you playing as the Endless from Sandman; you have a domain that you rule over, given to you by the being that brought it to exist because your character is able to represent or defend it in some special way (ex: a girl with three personalities becomes the Noble of Water, because it spiritually aligns her with the water phases).
There's nothing "deviantart OC" about it unless you want to claim that any character above a certain power is automatically one, which is bullshit. As usual it lies on the player to not write shit, but it is definitely harder to write for Nobilis because of the unusual scale of things.

That said, the game does encourage you to write meaningful and far-impacting flaws for your characters; the basic bidding system works off of four stats that show what diving powers you can use for "free", with MP being payed to access higher levels and to overcome certain obstacles.
MP works somewhat like Fate points: it refreshes at certain standard points on it's own, but for anyone doing anything significant you have to work through your character's Bonds and Afflictions.
Bonds are like Fate Aspects in that they're generally true, and you can invoke them to help you be better at what they describe, but you aren't absolutely bound by them. Again like Aspects you get MP if a Bond would screw you over or cause you to do something stupid, and interestingly if you do something showing extreme dedication to what the Bond represents.

Afflictions are Geases/Curses/Facts about your character. they're true always and they can't easily be ignored or brushed aside. Like bonds they give you MP when they screw you over, and can do so much more easily. (cont)

>why wouldn't he, considering this thread is purely salty simulationist tears from the get-go?

Nobody in this thread has said anything of the sort.

>he can't play anything that isn't Game of Thrones run in D&D 3.5.

Again, you have no way of knowing this, nothing he said even hinted at it.

You're accusing other people of deliberately misrepresenting something, yet the only person obviously doing it is you.

so, to say
>Those with more can do more, always.
isn't true at all. Bonds and afflictions can be Manipulated for power without spending resources, playing to your or another characters defining features and fatal flaws, and if you get into Gifts (focused powers separate from the four ability paths) then you can have an extremely high level of reliable, reusable, power.
It doesn't matter as much as it seems like it would though.
One of the most common examples is how every character, if they spend the maximum amount of power, can shatter a planet with their bare hands.
and how generally useless this is.
While raw combat often does matter, it's almost never the whole of what you're fighting against, so while you can be infinitely strong and almost flawlessly invincible (for fairly cheap actually) it won't make you always win because punching won't help you resolve an apocalyptic love drama between gods, for example.
It's the classic superman plot, when you have supreme powers in one area, challenges will revolve around things where your power is no help and/or finding ways to apply your supreme power in a creative and useful way.

I stereotyped, because people who assume that you can't have a compelling story or character when high power levels are involved tend to do so for similar reasons.
I'd like to actually hear why he considers every PC to be a "deviantart OC" any more than any other PC from a system offering broad character customization.

I think a lot of the confusion here is because the top of the thread has the picture of the 2e version, which is a pretentious paperweight

the actually playable version is 3e, which is decent enough except for the fact that the illustrations are deviantart-tier shit

(pic related)

(pic also related)

(let's try this again. pic also related)

>2e
>book is a work of art, game is literally unplayable
>3e
>book is an abortion, game is fixed

Why are all traditional games like this?

to be fair, the shit tier of the art in 3e was at least 60% the publisher's fault for recommending an artist who turned out to be tracing touhou fanart, and then once everyone figured it out the resulting scramble to get replacement art with approximately zero time and zero dollars

>So for that end: can you please EXPLAIN Nobilis to me in human terms? I don't know if I'm just that stupid or the book is truly horrendously written but I just really can't make any up or down of it. An explanation may REALLY help.

Think of it as a WoD game: There's a hidden world out there to which you've been drawn to. And it's full of other people like you, with different cool abilities and interfactional conflict. And also there's some guys on the other side who are Bad News for everyone. But instead of being a vampire or a werewolf or whatever you are a god.

The author made all these parallels intentional and then made most of the associated pretentiousness tongue-in-cheek. To give just one example, the GM-equivalent is a Hollyhock God, - flowers have a lot of special meaning in the game, and Hollyhocks are associated with vanity and ambition, so it essentially translates to 'pompous asshole'.

Instead of the setting being urban fantasy it is more hidden epic fantasy. 'Being a god' is a far wider concept than being a vampire or whatever, what confuses people is what to do with it - you have the freedom to do whatever. This is easily one of the best games for roleplayers in a sense, but also the worst - because so much freedom is paralyzing. Most people look at the setting and then go 'ok, but what now'?

Ultimately, Nobilis players have to figure most of the premise, characters and setting of their games by themselves instead of being given much in the way of instructions, for better or worse. And that's a very counter-intuitive way of playing RPGs, which generates... well, threads like these. I do think that Veeky Forums is terribly unfair, though - after all, the whole game is essentially written by a single person instead of a few dozen, as D&D and WoD and Exalted are.

>"deviantart OC"

He was talking about the art, you fucking idiot.

The art is atrocious. Are you one of the devs?

>that art
Jesus fucking Christ. I've made OELVNs with people from Lemmasoft who drew better than that.

Oh the art, yeah the art is literal deviantart garbage since the author is and idiot and cannot stop getting scammed by chinamen so she has to take fan art for her books.

Little bit of blindness with reading it as applying to the player characters themselves, I'm just too used to Veeky Forums shitting on anything more narrative than GURPS as "free form Mary Sue deviantart etc"

You sound like a cunt. Are you that hypersensitive to someone criticizing some game?

>To give just one example, the GM-equivalent is a Hollyhock God, - flowers have a lot of special meaning in the game, and Hollyhocks are associated with vanity and ambition, so it essentially translates to 'pompous asshole'.
See, this is ironic, because normally, I'd think of someone who makes a game where the GM is called "The Hollyhock God" as being the freaking definition of pompous asshole.

Well, Chuubo's has... not... wholly... abominable art, for the most part.

>What? No it isn't. I have the PDF right here and character building is from page 47 to 62.
He was probably referring to the free draft, which is what most people produce when they try to google a PDF to pirate.

I'm hypersensitive to Veeky Forums saying that a game is shit if it doesn't have hard mechanics for scratching your ass.

There was a time when that was all that was out there, but now the full version is easy to find. Search chuubo's mediafire on one of the Veeky Forums archives and you'll find multiple shares.

Something which has only happened never.

It's the kickstarter draft. Backers got the corebook, first setting book and first campaign book (all unedited, but actually solid and written) all as soon as the goals were met.

So people already into Nobilis were never disappointed, they got what they wanted very early on. Even if the campaign hasn't been released yet (it's in layout, waiting for the last art pieces), we already have it and have talked a lot about it. So really, the big problem is, as usual, getting new people into the game.

narrative game threads get shitposted to death all the time, because "they're just freeform autists pretending to play RPGs"

But that didn't happen in this thread. No one even mentioned narrative systems until you did.

But it happens every time

>Ultimately, Nobilis players have to figure most of the premise, characters and setting of their games by themselves instead of being given much in the way of instructions, for better or worse. And that's a very counter-intuitive way of playing RPGs, which generates... well, threads like these.

Christ, RPGPundit fucking hated this game and ranted about it more than he usually rants about Forge/story games.

Which narrative games are worth playing? I've heard good things about Dogs in The Vineyard.

In 3E? Yeah, fuck that shit. 2E had a completely different aesthetic (but was a bit more muddled in the rules department).

All RPGs are 'narrative games',

...I don't want to get into this retarded debate. You know what I meant.

Technically, he's right. Someone mentioned it. And the faggot even admitted he did. Now stop being equally as much a faggot and stop talking to him.

Just like real life.