What does Veeky Forums think of the Holy Grail War as a setting? What do you think about the classes?

What does Veeky Forums think of the Holy Grail War as a setting? What do you think about the classes?

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The one with the adults was okay. The kiddie ones were super bad.

The setting feels very silly and the classes seem quite arbitary.

The anime about the adoptive father of (blank main character) was neat.

The setting shows promise, but of late the pandering got real and kind of shit.

I know way too much about this setting in general, and I think it has promise. Tried putting together a homebrew with a friend, but we got overambiscious.

Asymmetrical PvP and pairs form an interesting game, if you can find 4-14 players and keep everyone engaged in a game where most of the players could just be... out of the game after a point.

In order to do it, you need to decide on some things first.
>do Servant players pick their Servants?
>are Servants preconstructed or do players build them?
>what bullshit levels are we looking at?
Last one is difficult. I tend to think that anything outside the original and Zero is bumb as shit, even when it can be fun. Endless genderswaps, character design reuses, historical figures as loli, turning poets into reality-bending mages, and uninspired uses of cool figures. But honestly, gauge your group. Maybe your friends want nothing more than Caesar to be a little girl in thigh highs and a laser sword.

Classes are fine as long as your players know it won't be fair coming in. Assassin should be difficult and underpowered compared to the melee classes. Caster will have problems given at least three Servants will have significant resistances to them. And Berserker is perfect for that friend who wants to participate, but only really knows how to murderhobo.

And if PvP isn't your thing, change it. Holy Grail war isn't a free-for-all, but a team-based trial. Holy Grail War is actually a treasure hunt. Holy Grail War gives two or three masters multiple servants, making it a player versus NPC situation. Possibilities are endless.

I think you are overlooking a lot of great side material. The other light novel series are quite fantastic. Fate/Strange Fake is one of my favorites.

It's not possible to work as a setting, because players aren't anime characters.

Like, even in Fate/Zero, the characters didn't behave pragmatically all the time. Most of the time, they acted as was necessary for the story to progress. For instance, what would've happened if Tokiomi had gone:

> "Hey, I just set Kariya on fire. Better head down to finish him off, doot-doot-doot."

You'd have problems like:

> "Saber, I want you to blow up the building. Yes, that entire building? Oh, you don't want to? I don't care, I have a Command Seal. Nuke them."

Bam, two Masters dead and two Servants out of commission.

This won't work as a game, at all. Everyone would hold up in their mansions and no-one would ever sleep, because the first guy to let down his guard gets gibbed by Assassin. The first guy who goes outside gets shot in the head by Archer, and in the first mano-a-mano fight, Saber just charges the enemy Master, shrugs off all spells, and fucking cuts him in half.

PCs being PCs, they would all constantly backstab each other. It would be rocket tag taken to the extreme, like a game where the PCs were all mortals and their best buddies were Solar Exalted.

Tsukihime>Fate

This post is pretty retarded.

Go on, tell me how you're going to run a game. Are the PCs Masters? Are they the Servants? Either way, there's a huge power imbalance and PCs don't work well when one guy's in a subordinate position.

Also, you have a really small cast - 14 characters, at most, though you can pad it with non-Masters and other unique individuals. But if you're running it as a last man standing game (i.e. the way the Grail War is supposed to unfold) you're going to have a very, very short campaign.

Come on buddy, they're all normal humans in the setting with no connection to the grail war. We're running slice of life.

Then why is it a Holy Grail War setting?

>I watched Zero and now I think I know everything: the thread

>huge power imbalance

Not really. Masters are less useful in a fight, but they are still powerful mages, and more importantly have more knowledge and resources than the servants. Two players working as a team (one being the "leader" who has better knowledge skills and long-term sorceries, the other being a more combat focused unit with particular special abilities) isn't too disparate, and these could team up with another team for four players altogether.

Also, while some masters are just little kids and are paired with super strong servants, there are several examples of masters being even more combat-capable than their servants.

>Also, you have a really small cast
>though you can pad it with non-Masters and other unique individuals

There you go.

Tbf it and Fate-route are only major translated works that feature standard style heaven's feel (UBW is more focused on Shirou's ally of justice autism and last time I checked Fragraments translations were basically just couple summaries posted on boy's love) so they flocking around it is hardly surprising. Though wouldn't be too surprised if after Apo animu comes out we see increase in what does Veeky Forums think of 7 vs 7 servant wars-threads,

Yeah. While no Master should be able to beat characters like Authuria or Heracles, you could build a combat-oriented Master, or have a set of C-list Servants, or just interpret the setting differently. Characters in lore are states to be able to at least survive melee wig Servants.

Okay, that one had cools ideas. And it didn't make anyone a loli or anything. Madness canceling madness, the pale rider, and an unsung Assassin was cool. I enjoyed a lot of Extra too, but the side material goes down the bullshit hole more often than the main stuff.

>Nero's just... a blonde girl who built her NPs out of ponies and dreams I guess.
>Astolfo is a little boy. 'Kay.
>Shakespeare is a Servant with physical stats at least 10x the standard human level and magic and stuff. Uh, sure.
>Jack the Ripper is a little girl. In her pants.
>Joan of Arc is how powerful?
>everything about Grand Order.

Not that it's amazing story writing making Iskander 7'13", or Arthur a girl aren't bullshit out of context, but it's backed up by good writing (once the sex scenes were retconed away).

The jap who wrote it looked at DnD 3.5e for about 5 minutes and decided he wanted to make porn of it

Obligatory

Half of the point of the master/servant dynamic is that the servant makes sure the master doesn't die and the master tries to keep themselves alive as long as possible

So the servant protects the master from high magic while the masters beat the shit out of each other with less flashy shit

In theory anyway. Kiritsugu was/is an asshole

>Astolfo is a little boy. 'Kay.

Considering how he was an accomplished crossdresser in his myths so making him a trap isn't really the farfetched.

I am a big Type-Moon fan.

Nasuverse is great setting, but the Fate side of it has been done to death and I want the fuck out. You would think they were being cheeky and hilariously self-referential in Loli Jeanne Santa Alter, but the newest servant is Mysterious Heroine X Alter. After Genderbent Musashi. I am so fucking done

I like the theory where Fate Francis Drake switched places with Queen Elizabeth earlier on in their lives when the Queen got her face scarred.

so Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, was a trap and actually francis drake the whole time

Queen Elizabeth wasn't a bearded man, silly.

The mobage was kind of funny but then i realised they're unironically just pumping out fanservice characters for people to whale for

now I just ignore the shit

A good asshole.

Chaotic Asshole

No guns allowed

I really like the idea of the Holy Grail War, even if Fate is pretty stupid overall, and I'd love the play a HGW game, be it either an RPG or just online roleplaying

>mr lets lobotomize humanity because i've emotional maturity of 4 years old
>good

One would had thought that you figured that out when Shiki became 2 servants and Kerry went full janitor.

Dumb, but they do lampshade that as the Mooncell Grail actually fucking up on the regular. They didn't sell that as FD was a woman in drag so much as We Like Tits So The Grail Is Broken.

True, but if you've got a group that would like one version over the other, go for it.

Huh, never came across that when I was looking into him. Magic horse, moon visit, magic horn and lance, and all that. Though I don't like much about Apocrypha so maybe I just dismissed the design prematurely.

Been dying for more non-parody Nasuverse for a while now. I'm kinda resolved to never getting it, and just pouring over Fate, Taukihime, and KnK until there's just nothing else to jerk off to.

>Been dying for more non-parody Nasuverse for a while now.
Good parody Nasuverse is fine.

Carnival Phantasm never.

Angel Notes adaptation when?

Nah, it's based on his own homebrew system.
Also he worked on a Japanese RPG magazine making side material and adventure prompts

An HGW is a super cool idea, and the idea of resurrecting ancient heroes to do pokemon battles with is really evocative. As an RPG setting it has a few built-in problems though. What are your players going to be? What are they going to do?

The first idea that usually pops into peoples' minds is to run it as a PVP campaign where everybody makes two characters, a magus and a servant, and they just go at it, kill each other for the grail as they're supposed to. I've seen forum-based RPGs that attempted this. They all crashed and burned. The problem with them is that without the intervention of a writer, _every single fight_ leaves the other side dead. Every single one. And since the number of participants is capped at seven, that means that your whole campaign is going to consist out of six fights or less, and those fights will usually consist out of like one move. Everybody just uses their holy phantasm and it turns into a matter of whose HP beats whose. The loser is out of the game - even if the magus survives, a magus without a servant explicitly cannot win a grail war, and the player will just drop out since he no longer has a stake in it.

(It's also really demoralizing to spend a few hours crafting two characters and just have them blasted out of existence in the literal first minutes of play.)

Are you going to run it as a co-op campaign then? How? You have 4-5 players normally a and the wars have a cap of seven participants. And even with that you still have the problem that fateverse fights, sans plot convenience, are just too lethal, too much of a rock-paper-scissors. Without a writer forcing parties to disengage for no reason and putting in long slice-of-life scenes between battles, the campaign's going to be very brief and violent.

The idea is cool, but I have not seen how it could work as a tabletop game.

Nasu is terribly for TTRPGs because the sheer variety of power levels.
You can have characters capable of ending life on earth walking on the same street as someone like Shirou, and depending on compatibility and ressources Shirou could have a decent chance of winning.
The system would need to have high lethality but also good mechanics for dodging/blocking damage.

This. I'm sick of Fate, it's not even the most interesting Nasu setting

I guess as solution would be have 3 or 4 player teams and use the other pairs as narrative convenience.
If Saber and Lancer are duking out and it looks like they are going to kill each other the GM has Rider and Archer crash the party.

>Are you going to run it as a co-op campaign then? How?
There is literally a book about this.

You could do it like Aprocrypha and have all the players in a faction opposing an NPC one, but that doesn't fix the issue with the battles.

Having 5-6 players in Servant Master pairs, and the other participants being DM characters would help. Let them design a narrative, some possible twists, third parties to interrupt, pick enemy Servants and Masters to allow interesting but not broken interactions, and maybe some disappearing acts so as to not just have 6 fights max.

System I was working on would have had a block-parry-dodge rock-paper-scissors combat system, and enemies knowing your Sertant's name would allow them a combat and knowledge bonus.

And lethality would be good. High HP values, but penalties for having half and quarter HP so even damage to Servants matter, and the Servants that are notable for ignoring that damage are valuable.

But yeah, that level difference will be a turn-off for a lot of players. You'd have to pick either your players or Servant strengths carefully.

Not at all suitable for a group tabletop rpg.

According to Typemoon...

LAWFUL GOOD
Amakusa Shirou Tokisada
Bedivere
Chiron
Dr. Jekyll
Gawain
Florence Nightingale
Hippolyta
Ishtar
Joan of Arc
King Arthur
Marie Antoinette
Mashu Kyrielite
Merlin
Queen Nitocris
Quetzalcoatl
Rama
Saint George
Saint Martha
Sakata Kintoki
Solomon
Tristan
Xuanzang

NEUTRAL GOOD
Alexander the Great
Queen Boudica
Brynhild
Geronimo
Illyasviel von Einzbern
Karna
Robin Hood
Scáthach
Tawara no Touta
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Zhuge Liang

CHAOTIC GOOD
Astolfo
Attila the Hun
Beowulf
Euryale
Gilgamesh
Helena Blavatsky
Jing Ke
Leonardo da Vinci
Medusa
Minamoto no Yorimitsu
Miyamoto Musashi
Musashibou Benkei
Nero
Nikola Tesla
Paracelsus
Siegfried
Stheno
Toyotomi Hideyoshi

LAWFUL NEUTRAL
Achilles
Arjuna
Buddha
Cleopatra
Cú Chulainn
Darius III
King David
Diarmuid Ua Duibhne
Hector
Lancelot
King Leonidas
Oda Nobunaga
Solomon ibn Gabirol
Thomas Edison
Vlad III

TRUE NEUTRAL
Chevalier d'Eon
Enkidu
Fergus mac Róich
Fionn mac Cumhaill
Gaius Julius Caesar
Hans Christian Andersen
Inshun Hozoin
Maxwell's Demon
Okita Souji
Sakamoto Ryoma
Shakespeare
Spartacus

CHAOTIC NEUTRAL
Arash
Billy the Kid
Charles Babbage
Eric Bloodaxe
Frankenstein
Jaguar Man
Mata Hari
Mary Read
Mordred
Ozymandias
Romulus
Toyotomi Hideyoshi (Hashiba Hideyoshi)
Ushiwakamaru

LAWFUL EVIL
Charles-Henri Sanson
Hassan-i-Sabbah (Cursed Arm)
Hassan-i-Sabbah (King)
Hassan-i-Sabbah (Hundred)
Hassan-i-Sabbah (Serenity)
King Arthur (Alter)
King Arthur (Alter Lancer)
Queen Semiramis

NEUTRAL EVIL
Atalanta
Li Shuwen
Medea
Okada Izou
Sasaki Kojiro
Tamamo-no-Mae

CHAOTIC EVIL
Angra Mainyu
Anne Bonny
Caligula
Carmilla
Edmond Dantès
Edward Teach
Elizabeth Bathory
Francis Drake
Fuma Kotaro
Gilles de Rais
Goetia
Hyde
Ibaraki-douji
Jack the Ripper
Kiyohime
Lü Bu
Medb
Mephistopheles
Phantom of the Opera
Tiamat
Shuten-douji

The Grail Wars are in-universe supposed to be rigged & there are exceptions to every rule. It'd be an insane mess.

Having all the players participating in a grail war itself doesn't seem like it would be a good idea for a lot of reasons. One or two of them being a part of it while the others are just someone caught up in it could work I guess. The nasuverse itself would probably be fine as a setting though, since it's basically just weeaboo world of darkness until you get to the future shit

>CHAOTIC GOOD
>Gilgamesh
every time

...Tamamo and Atalanta really are Neutral Evil?

Is EMIYA a powergamer?

Remove Wormslut.

>self-centered borderline yandere and evil cat
>not evil

True Ego, more like.

That's a shit load of heroes.
How many grail wars have there been?

I only watched, like, two anime.

>Goetia attempts to give humanity true immortality.
>No death is what makes humanity, humanity.
I swear to Yaweh I hate fucking Solomon with every inch of my being and would've sided with Goetia.

Goetia is the hero humanity deserved.

There has always been atleast 1 Grail War in all timelines that exist.

You forget about chromatic dragons, boy? Or CON-based dragon breath?

>hating on based Kiritsugu 'I bring guns to a Mage war' Emiya

They literally blow up a building on screen. That's one of the first things that happens.

>Attila the Hun
>Chaotic Good
>Good
The fuck Nasu?

>How many grail wars have there been?

In the main continuity, there has been five official ones plus an unknown amount of copycat rituals. But the spinoffs happen in the future, so no one can tell.

In the main continuity, the fifth war was the last one.
In all the spin offs, it plays fast and loose with the rules.

Veeky Forums actually hammered out a few Servants a few years ago, but I'm too lazy to try to find the pastebins again.
I'm curious as to how any of them match up with the new heroes that may have been revealed, since that was as far back as Fate/Extra being new.

Kiritsugu, Shirou, Archer or Assassin?

EMIYA refers to the Archer specifically, nerdboy.

She's also a giantess that's voiced by Mamiko Noto.

Not anymore, it also applies to Assassin Kerry.

>Muh 6 billion

He cheated on his hot and loyal wife just to make himself feel bad.

I never got into the new shit. Damn, I guess I'm the secondary here.

How about changing the rules, as said?

One player is the master, the rest are servants, every master gets multiple servants. If you have seven players maybe the master is a weak NPC and every player is a servant. All other masters and servants are NPCs.
Also, if like me you think all the genderbending and weird versions of heroes are shit, just ignore Nasuverse and only use the concept of the Grail War in a generic urban fantasy setting. Make your own version of Arthur instead of lugging all the baggage from Arthuria. Also Nasuverse magic is pretty shit.

For system, any superhero system can work.

Fate: Grand Order is trash. Don't bother with it.

0 - 1
SN - 3
HA - 0.5 (parts of 3rd heaven's feel gets witnessed by Bazett)
Prototype & Fragments - 2
Grand Order - 1.5 (1 whole war + immediate aftermath of another one)
Extra - 1
Strange Fake - 1
Apo - 1
Koha-Ace - 1

Of course there are also number of grail wars that 'ven't appeared on screen so to speak so the actually number is quite bit higher.

I wasn't planning to.

She was going to die anyways. If you can't save 1 and are supposed to feel bad, but aren't, why not give yourself a reason to feel bad.

arranged wedding. it started as a business deal. further, she didn't care. swingers are a thing.

Iri was absolutely loyal, even when she had Saber fawning over her.

Yeah, as of Fate/Grand Order, and alternate reality Kiritsugu became a Counter Guardian like Shirou did, and because rules are very flexible things in Type-Moon, an alternate Irriesviel is summonable as a Caster.
And even Illya is getting in on it as a Saber, and I think Kuro gets to be an Archer.
So, the entire clan can be together.

Oh, and Rin has become possessed by a fertility goddess.

nasuverse runs on Bullshit over the top japanese spells and calcs

what a load of bullshit

Ishtarin pleases everything that has a penis.

Tbh a greedy whore getting possessed by a whore goddess is probably the least weird possession in GO.

>Win the Holy Grail War
>Wish for the Grail to never exist in all timelines that can and cannot exist.
>Grail ceases to exist.
>All timelines get pruned as humanity can't survive another 100 years + Grail Wars never occurring when they are supposed to.

Laugh at Angry Man Jew and Primate Murder for being incapable of doing their jobs better than a human.

Bring back TOHSAKA

TOHSAKA pleases Alaya for money!

Ohohohohoho!

Hey guys, what's going on in this thread?

>TFW Emprah and Sailor Moon's presence itself is enough to fuck with Nasuverse due to "LOL Willpower"

None of the Fate girls can compare to the True Ancestor.

Even Ciel is better than the girls of Fateshit, my dude. You shouldn't even compare Arc to them.

Which is exactly why they didn't go and turn her into yet another saberclone for the remake.

Saber was a mistake.

besides, this is and always will be Arc.

Isn't it getting anime this year ?

Already got it. It was an animated version of the intro.

They will turn her into a cocksleeve for Self-Insert though, just like they did Void (Shiki)

Its getting another OVA called Next Order.

>this entire thread

Secondaries, I swear.

In other news, I ran an homebrew campaign that was set in the Extraverse. The Servants were basically NPC.

One of the players ended up getting paired with Medb, the sorry fuck.

Tamamo only wanted to be a good wife. As for Atalanta... I don't recall a good reason to label her as evil.

>All those historical people just happened to be women.
>Leonardo Da Vinci actually was a guy, but chose to become a woman based on Mona Lisa when he was brought as a Servant.
Does Nasu have a fetish for genderbender?

What would you have to change about the setting in order for it to make a good RPG?

You're seriously asking that question? It's like asking is Takeuchi has a fetish for Saber.

>Implying that japanese doesn't love genderbender shit

>zero
>better than stay night
Zero was just as bad. What actually explores the setting is a more interesting way is the Kara no Kyoukai novels/films. They give you a much better idea of how magic works in the setting from the perspective of mages.

-Tone down the power levels.
-Tone down Noble Phantasm.
-Let the War have actual rules to follow.
-Keep everybody the correct gender.
-Keep history to real life for the most part.
-Magic for Masters has to be good in order to become a candidate for war and tone down the magic system.
-Remove historic/legendary figures eternally falling in love with highschooler cock.

KnK explores a different universe though, one with low human foundation value.

Everybody knows Fate's strong suit are the boys.

how about the reverse ?
the players are a bunch of mage cooperating with each others, and try to get the grail
you can even tweak the shit like each player get one command seal
it's not like the original setting makes any sense anyway, i think you should just take the premise and do whatever it inspires you