What are the merits of a nobledark steampunk setting ala Dishonored

>framing villains and sending them to salt mines where they’re worked to death is somehow more moral than murder
>the game will talk down to me if I just stab them instead
The games morality meter is fucking retarded. It’s the worst part of those games.

Sick of this meme. The game doesn't do that unless you've been going around murdering people willy-nilly.

You can kill every assassination target and still get a low chaos ending without any additional effort.

"Nobledark" is the worst of all buzzwords

iirc the morality system in the game is based mostly on how many people you kill. It's all rats and plagues, so shooting a single noble in the face doesn't really affect the overall game.

Nobledark is where the world sucks but the efforts of a few dedicated individuals can turn the tide

Grimbright is where the world is generally nice, but you're powerless to do anything about it on a scale any larger than an individual victory. Pretty rare.

If you kill every target (only like 10 guys who are all terrible people that conspired to murder the Empress) but don’t harm a soul otherwise you still get the High Chaos ending and the boatman will openly judge you as an even worse person than your “victims”.

>Nobledark is where the world sucks but the efforts of a few dedicated individuals can turn the tide
So 40k is Nobledark now? Guilliman is slowly but surely making things better and his actions definitely make a difference.

Yes, actually. Even 1d4chan, for all its faults, is correct here.

You're looking at the Dishonored High/Low Chaos system wrong. The point is not that you only killed 10 people, the point is that they were killed at all.

For example, if a shadowy, silent assassin was slowly killing off members of the Trump administration, moving a little higher up the chain every time, there would be chaos throughout the entire country.
However, if instead of the person being found dead, it was found that they were fucking little kids, that person's removal from office would be generally approved of and considerably more public. There would be whispers of conspiracy among the group being targeted, but it's much harder to point fingers when the person was doing something wrong to begin with.

It's not morality, it's chaos. Why the fuck do people always call it a morality system, when the game never fucking mentions morality or implies that it's supposed to be some kind of morality system?

>prominent politicians found murdered in a brothel
Major news story, people freak out, contributes to the breakdown of law and order in the city

>prominent politicians suddenly leave town and aren't heard from again
Of course wealthy fuckers are leaving the city, it's a shithole right now.

>when the game never fucking mentions morality or implies that it's supposed to be some kind of morality system?
Except that’s wrong. Characters talk down to you and call you a bad person if you go High Chaos.

Because I want to instigate a discussion?

High chaos makes the city's state and outlook a good bit worse.

High Chaos actions make the city a worse/harder place for everyone. Yknow, increased guard, more death etc. It's not that you did the 'wrong' thing but that you did something that made everyone else worse off.

The way to think about is- does murdering everyone you see (or at least all the guards) help improve the stability of a plague ridden city filled with social unrest that’s on the brink of total anarchy?

>If you kill every target (only like 10 guys who are all terrible people that conspired to murder the Empress) but don’t harm a soul otherwise you still get the High Chaos ending
Doubt.jpg

Have you tried it? Because I have, and have gotten it. I believe to be exact the game works based on a total percentage of the population dead. I think you can only let like 10% of the games population bite it before you get to the last level, at which point you are locked in to your ending.

Did you get high chaos, or medium chaos?
Because if you got high chaos for only killing the assassination targets, I have to assume you poisoned the still, were seen a lot, and/or left bodies low or exposed.

Low Chaos. Because really- who thought contaminating a medicine still during a plague would lead to the good ending?

I really wish people would stop calling Dishonored steampunk.

Oh. I thought you were saying that you killed only the targets and got High Chaos.

Dunno about 1, but I killed all targets in 2. Got a low chaos ending.

My first play through is how I want to see the story go. I always figured that Daude would raise more than an eyebrow at some other faction using powers. It seems like a bad business plan to let them live to instruct others.

>However, if instead of the person being found dead, it was found that they were fucking little kids, that person's removal from office would be generally approved of and considerably more public.

It would more likely be met with widespread resistance of the people who actually pay republican congressmen and politicians.

Whalepunk.

Dishonored's world can never turn better since all their industries, transportation, shipping, food production etc are tied to a resource that is almost exhausted.
Completely exhausting the supply of whale oil will also probably doom the world, so there's that.

but thats wrong, whale oil was just a crutch since we see that wind power can generate similar results

wind power only works for static structures, whale oil is needed for portability
also killing the last whales will just merge the real world with the void

and? the void isnt even so bad

>If you kill every target (only like 10 guys who are all terrible people that conspired to murder the Empress) but don’t harm a soul otherwise you still get the High Chaos ending and the boatman will openly judge you as an even worse person than your “victims”.
Literally untrue. Killing only your targets means killing six (6) people, seven if you include the optional target, Daud. If you actually play the game instead of chatting shit and making up stuff to complain about like a child, you'd know how fucking stupid you are for not understanding the mechnics at all

Hunting whales will become non-sustainable long before they killed the last one though.

Why’s that?

Except we see in 2 they are already researching alternative energy, wind to be exact to some success. Plus nothing says they don’t have your typical coal and oil.

youtube.com/watch?v=tO6JXEhpC58

I've always fancied running a game set in a steampunk setting where the players are members of the lower classes revolting against their high octane steampunk overlords personally.

>DUDE LETS DESTROY OUR FRANCHISE BY REPLACING OUR COOL MAIN CHARACTERS WITH A FEMALE NIGGER
>SHEQUAN JUST BUILT A KILLER NEW RIG AND IS GOING TO L33T ROXOR DAT SHIIIIT

>replace
>she stars in a fucking dlc

>REPLACING
Fucking idiot.

both main games are about the caldwins, both dlc are about the whalers. As bummed as I am that you dont get to play as old man Daud Billie is an established and fairly major character.

They don't use steam.

I unironically wish there was a magic tool that indicated whether someone has actually watched/played/consumed the piece of media they are talking about

Oh look a troll.

For a single DLC?

Anyway this is all off-topic.

What do you think of a nobledark steampunk setting? What elements work, which don’t? How would you handle going about it?

>How would you handle going about it
the advancement in technology was a double edged sword, with many using the newfound stuff to oppress and subjugate their fellow man, carving out blasphemous affronts to nature from the bones of the earth.

but that isnt everyone, the common man is still good if somewhat powerless, and not all of those who have are without conscience

How do the heroes go about fixing things?

reform

>Too bad it gives you the bad end.
This is really the worst thing about Dishonored as a game, in my opinion. It gives you all this cool shit to do and then tells you that you can never do 90% of it if you want the good ending.

If a game has cool features, it should damn well be encouraging players to explore those features to the max, or at least give players plenty of room to play with them. And while Dishonored does let you play with them, it then punishes you with a bad ending if you do so. That's just bad design.

Depends on how you want the world to be dark.
If you want a more cautionary message on technology, present the negative consequences of misuse of it, such as pollution, oppression, destruction, and endangerment. Note that your story should suggest that the technology used isn't all bad and has uses that benefit people. Give examples of people using technology responsibly for good.
If you want a more optimistic message on technology, show the ugliness of nature, including human nature. Show how technology has reduced the need for people to do amoral things such as steal or overwork. Create scenarios of how people have cheated death thanks to technology. Remind people about why nature isn't so pretty with things such as fauna and disease. Just make sure that you recognize that technology can turn bad if it falls into the wrong hands.

That's what saving is for.
youtube.com/watch?v=W9N_d2KuY7A

>it's another /pol/ gets triggered every time something reminds them that black people exist episode

Except this is completely wrong, and every speedrun of the game results in a low chaos ending because they only kill the targets

I'm just starting to play the first game, although I've seen a playthough of that before. Personally my way of getting my murder-kicks while still staying Low Chaos is to go for a Ghost run and whenever I'm detected I get to massacre whoever did it and whoever heard them messily before reloading. Cathartic, at least.

You can get that from them typing, you just have to not be an idiot yourself.

For me, it’s less about the tech (the tech is more for coolness factor) it’s that I think the themes (which include tech, but also colonialism, industrialism, rational thought, the role of government) are ones you don’t see in standard fantasy fare, and that it allows for bigger scale as well (not accounting for end of the world fantasy’s).

As for the nobledark aspect, I think it ties well to the era that was very optimistic about the future, but had its own grim realities.

40K is tone-deaf horseshit.

>So 40k is Nobledark now?
all the good 40k stories have always been nobledark.

Does a good grimdark setting require people to be stupid, or is stupidity something that most of us stubbornly deny in real life and grimdark is just being realistic about it?

As a history major, I can say life sucks, but not nearly as much as edgelords think. If real life was grim Dark, we’d all have nuked ourselves to oblivion, and that’s after everyone became a 1984 police state with intact racial slavery, and every church being dedicated to some baby-sacrificing evil god.

Despite all the crazy we are pretty set right now. Starvation and disease are almost erased as concepts, we have the fewest wars in history, and fewer people are dying in them.

I’d say we live in a noble dark world.

Actually, Dishonoured's Chaos system is super lenient. You have to kill at least 20% of all humans in a level to get High Chaos, and 50% of all humans in the game to get locked into the High Chaos ending.

I know this from experience. I bumbled through Dishonored 1 like a super-powered Mr. Bean, killing dozens of people, and only ended up in High Chaos because I mistakenly assumed that killing Weepers didn't affect the score (they do), and killed a bunch of them in Daud's mission.

Does anybody recommend Dishonored 2? I skipped it because I didn't like what Bethesda was doing with pre-release review copies.

I generally don't like grimdark or superdark settings. If the world sucks, the people suck, and there is little anyone can do about it, then I have no reason to invest myself in the setting.

To get to another topic, I heard that Monster Girl Encyclopedia is apparently really grimdark. I decided to look for myself and I can see why. How does writing with a ronery boner create such a hopeless setting?

I recomend it but on the cheap. It’s fun but I feel there isn’t too much to it.

MGE was inspired by MGQ which was purposefully grimdark (God there wanted to start over and genocide what was already there.)

MGEs author though I think just wanted to make a status quo that he wouldn’t have to adjust. But I don’t think it’s grimdark, more dark grey vs. light grey.

As dumb as it may sound, the world we live in is grimdark. Life sucks for the majority of people in the world, and the actions of a dedicated individual can't really affect the lives of others in a positive way outside of a very limited fashion. Sure, someone like Jimmy Carter can spend years working on eradicating Guinea worms from the face of the earth, but in the end it doesn't address the fact that the people who live in those areas affected are still poor and will, by and large die poor and with a lower quality of life compared to those that live elsewhere.

I think you are missing the point. For me, it’s not whether individuals can change things, but whether or not things CAN be changed, and for the better. And they demonstrably can.

You can’t look at the state of the world a thousand years ago and say that the lot of the average person hasn’t improved.

All I can say is that Nobledark is the shit.
I love grim, spooky enviroments and Horrific enemies as much as I love honest folk doing their best and larger than life altruist heroes.
Veeky Forums needs more nobledark.

...

It’s also just rather unrealistic that in a shit scenario, nobody would try to make things better, since everyone would be mad at how shit it is.

Did you buy the DLC?

When Dishonored first came out I actually felt it was kind of ripping off Unsounded, which is the setting I'd rather play in desu. But getting into the game and DLC made me see it as its own thing. I still think it has a suspicious amount in common with Unsounded though.

No, nobledark is the world is shit but individuals can bring great change. Not necessarily for the better.
grimbright is the opposite, the world is p great but the individual isn't going to change much of anything.

Honestly, I think we could do with redefining these terms. Maybe adding in an extra word, either Fixed or Unfixed, to show whether or not the world can be changed by the individual. Thus WH40K would become Fixedgrimdark, and Dishonored would become Unfixednobledark.

Well how would an unfixed grimdark setting work?

The reveal about the supernatural stuff and the Khert didn't happen until after the game was published though

People can change small parts of the world for the better, but only temporarily as they will fall to the narrative entropy which holds sway over the grander setting. Dark Souls for example (at least the first two games).

What reveals are you talking about? 2012 is up to Chapter 5 or 6 in Unsounded I think. Tons of info was either in the comic or disclosed by the author at that point.

>W40K is Noblebright...
What happened?

Sci-Fi doesn't use science and that doesn't stop us for calling it so.

>Sci-Fi doesn't use science
Have you ever read extra-hard/mundane science-fiction?
Hell, I've read soft sci-fi that for example had an entire chapter dedicated to using real physics and chemistry to escape a wrecked spaceship.

>Have you ever read extra-hard/mundane science-fiction?
Most Sci-fi is just technobabble. Not that it's bad because of that but that's what it is.
I was thinking more in mass consumption Sci-Fi than hard Sci-fi literature. Which is a very small market.

This is precisely why, hard/soft is a terrible categorisation system. Instead we should use Natural Sci-Fi / Social Sci-Fi on a two-axis graph. Y+ Axis is Natural and X+ is Social, something like A Fall of Moondust would be top-left, Star-Trek would be bottom-right, and Foundation would be top-right.

But that doesn't roll in the tongue so well, user.

Nat-Fi / Soc-Fi isn't that bad. Maybe generalise a hybrid of both down to Hyb-Fi.

You guys are making me want to play.

I heard it is kinda like Thief but with more magic and shit?

>Nat-Fi / Soc-Fi
uh

The first game is great and definitely worth it. You can get it on sale right now for a few pounds (or your regional equivalent) on basically any platform. DLC is a must-have too, has some of the best level design in modern gaming.

Dishonored 2 ,however, I wasn't a fan of. And I haven't played DotO because of that.

Can only post via replies for some reason so continuing from here.

To post on topic rather than argue about terminology.

Dishonored's world is a great setting, with plenty of room to homebrew if you were to directly take it. You've all the elements there for almost any kind of campaign in Dunwall alone (especially if set following the most-positive ending of Dishonored 1). As to what campaign I would run in Dishonored's setting, it would be an exploration campaign. Where you take up the task of seeking out civilisation on Pandyssia. The isles being such a small world by comparison, the mystery brings a million theories to the mind about what could lie within the unknown. Especially with the occult being such a core part of the setting.

I just found Nat-Soc sort of amusing mate.

I usually call it Whaleoilpunk. Half jokingly. But also halfseriously.

Althought the change in climate between Gristol and Serkonos is ridiculous, so one would have to include a reason as to why Pandyssia isn't just a desert below the tropic of cancer. I'd include a gulf-stream equivalent heating Serkonos akin to the one heating the UK.

Gotta remember that spending too long on Pandyssia literally drives you insane iirc, which i think is a cool concept

I don’t know, that seems a pointless difference.

>does murdering everyone you see (or at least all the guards) help improve the stability of a plague ridden city filled with social unrest that’s on the brink of total anarchy?

Yes.

I have a few ideas.

I’d take the isles and split it off into a few factions. A ‘continental’ region extending from the polar region in the north to the south, former home of numerous colonial empires, it’s now under an absolute monarchy that’s ala Prussia/Napoleanic France. Then there’s a tsarist Russia area that’s stayed independent thanks to mostly being Tundra. And your bog standard British empire that is the second major power, and stayed independent since the first power has a shit Navy. Then there are all the colonial power in exile, plus some minor island holdings the British power seized.

I was imagining a fascist takeover happening over the British faction, and things spiraling from there.

This just sounds like alternate history instead of anything actually Dishonored.

Nah. There's plenty of internal strife as it is. No need to ruin the setting by turning it into your alt-history fanfiction.