Nobilis

I mean, I've read through the core and though it seemed cool, but it seems like one of those games that no one would actually play despite the interesting concept.

Oh. In that case yeah, third edition is probably the one I have. Had weird deviantart stuff in places.
Are the systems of the different editions appreciably different?

thebuildershands.wikidot.com/start

I played it once a long time ago

The site is still up

There are several long-running sessions around, actually. Just to name one of the most notable:
>forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?615181-Nobilis-Mean-Everything-to-Nothing
And here's an entire site dedicated to cataloging various things about the setting and has numerous campaigns archived:
>nobilis.me/campaigns

The game has a pretty decent following all in all.

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>deviant art stuff
Some of it was literally deviant art stuff if I recall. Like plagiarized and shit, or traced at the very least There was a big fiasco when the new edition dropped.

Wasn't helped due to the fact that the original 'artist' and the publisher acted like major dicks about the whole thing. Seriously, the entire shitshow with 3rd Edition can almost squarely placed on their heads along with their own ineptitude.

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>A general
Generals are killing Veeky Forums. We need more threads like this, where random anons can just come in and talk.

Can I get a high level overview?

It's Birthright.

Players are godlike embodiments of concepts with power over thinks that fall within their domain. Main conflicts are just power struggles between opposing concepts and loose aliances of similarly aligned ones.
Mechanically simple, narrative heavy game. Conflict is resolved by wagering limited resources.

Oh yeah, and there's also the demonic eldritch entities of pure unbeing hailing from the Not beyond Creation that seek to unmake absolutely everything as the Big Bads for the entire setting. Can't forget those.

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Why do people like Excrucians? I haven't read Nobilis but I have read Chuubo and the text seems to treat the people who want to end all of reality in a whimsical manner that really bothers me. Then again, everything is treated with whimsy in Chuubo and without proper gravitas.

Everything is whimsical in Chuubo, and somewhat in Nobilis, but it's made explicitly clear in Nobilis itself that No, the Excurcians aren't your "friends" or "compatriots", and to think otherwise is the absolute height of stupidity. Fantastical they may be, borderline Sailor Moon villains as well, but do remember that whilst they share all the 'quirky' traits you'd see from villains in a mahou shoujo show, they are also embodying all of the horrific aspects of said villains and are ALL universally pure Evil and desire the absolute unmaking of all created things.

Hell even the 'nicest' Excrucians (as in, the ones that are allowed to freely roam Creation), have the blood of literal countless on their hands.

I have no fucking clue what any of this means.

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That's usually what happens when one talks about Excrucians, yes.
>Iolithae Septimian: "But of course, that's one big 'ol lie though. Just like how all of Creation is a Lie too!"

The enemies of Nobilis (godlike embodiments of concepts) are Excrucians and Excrucians want to murder reality. Excrucians are also sometimes silly.

Nobilis is a game where you take the role of a Noble, a god like being who controls an aspect of reality, any aspect, from gravity, to distance, to cars, to fields, to cereal, to blankets, to cheap toys found in fast food kids meals, whatever aspect of reality you can think of, a noble can be the one in charge of that.
The Nobles are given their power by Imperators, beings that have control over multiple aspects, and are actual gods, or things close enough.
The Nobles task are to fight the Excrucians, beings from beyond creation that wish to wipe out all of existence for various reasons.
The game is like Exalted, but cranked up to eleven right out the gate. A Noble from the start can do insane things, reality is your toy box, to a degree mind you, and you only get greater from there. Because of such a scale, battles would of course be mind boggling, and they are, but in Nobilis it is really hard to kill your foes, not impossible, but Nobles, Imperators and Excrucians are REALLY hard to kill, which means battles come down to not trying to kill each other, but abuse your abilities to fuck with reality and beat your foes in a less than direct way. Think of it like Stand battles on a godly scale.
The Excrucians are not the only foe, but they are the main enemies, but any foe or problem you would face would be sufficient to threaten gods, and the world as a whole.

>Excrucians are also sometimes silly.
Extremely so. In fact, I think the only Excrucians who are played completely seriously are the Strategists, which is to be expected given that they have EVERYTHING.

Meant hate, but the typo works oddly well too.

Well everything in Nobilis is silly, isn't it? The average Noble is a god that lounges around in their personal pocket world, probably sipping wine and eating the highest quality foods while posing dramatically and waxing poetically to their servants, right?

Some of them do that, whilst others have been so utterly broken by the war for existence that they really isn't give a shit about anything anymore. And others are just straight-up jerkasses.

Yes what Veeky Forums really needs is another molasses-slow general for a game nobody actually plays

>LULNOBODBYACTUALLYPLA-
user, we have a fucking general for Exalted of all things, and that game is literally unplayable in most cases, even moreso than Nobilis is. What's your fucking point here?

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How powerful would the Power of Infrastructure be? What about Architecture?

How would you even run something of this scale? I can't imagine a Nobilis sandbox, so sessions of this would probably be structured right? Maybe not a railroad, but pre-planned challenges at least? Improvising reality bending things sounds difficult.

From what I've read, sessions are basically, give a bunch of Nobles a problem, and then let them loose to try and solve it.

Nobilis is closer to an interactive story than it is a traditional role-playing game. So long as the Hollyhock God/DM is creative and imaginative with things, anything can fly. Hell, it's fully possible for Nobles to plant a new World Ash (read: Multiverse) if they so wish. Not to say that they would succeed or anything, or that they should even so much as attempt to do so (as the Imperators would come down on their asses HARD), but it's possible.

As nice as it would be to discuss less common stuff more often, I just assume that if other people wanted to talk about playing risus or pendragon then they would. Generals are for when shit is flooding the board and making it impossible to discuss other stuff, its not the lack of a general preventing me from discussing Everyone is John, its the lack of discussion to be had, so yeah, we don't really need a general for everything.

I am kinda interested myself, I've heard plenty of cries of "unplayable garbage" and the like but never really given any example of how the game plays out.

How is exalted unplayable?

Is this a game about nobles? or 40k Navigator houses?

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The utterly insane mechanics that have torn apart more than one gaming group (knowing from experience) for one thing. And then there's the intricacies of said mechanics and then the other game mechanics that are needed in order to even use those aforementioned mechanics, and then you get into the artifact and "Charm" usage bit of it all, and shit just spirals into utter chaos and insanity very, very, VERY quickly.

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No, it's about gods of specific aspects banding together to fight against entropy, in the vein of the Vertigo Sandman comics.

It is a game about Nobles, but in the game Nobles are gods who have power over aspects of reality.

>Utterly insane
>Complex

Nigga, everything in Exalted is pretty simple. You just need to remember them. Once you memorize them, they're piss easy. All the mechanics are very well defined.

The Borg? How bad is she really? And what's wrong with the Exalted Fair Folk except for being almost nothing like advertised by the fandom?

>He still plays 2e

2.5E is fucking baller just ignore everything the devs have actually written and never play Solars or Lunars it's great Dragon Blooded, mortals and gods are fun.

I found her pretty comprehensible, but fans complained pretty hard. I suspect that a large portion of the problem that people have digesting her is that she tries to stat out fluff instead of putting things into an easily digestible matrix. If you follow the fluff first and can track that then you have no problems. If you're looking for a set of tables, directly or indirectly, then you're going to have a rough time.

>t. brainlet babby

>play Exalted
>but don't play Exalts

>Using le "EBINBRAINLET" meme
Almost as bad as soyfuckery at this point in all honesty.

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>t. soyboy brainlet too dumb to play Exalted

The only thing more important than being smart enough to play Exalted is being smart enough to not play Exalted.

Nobilis is a game wherein you play a "Noble", a functionally divine being with control over an aspect of reality. "Knives", "Betrayal", "Boundaries", etc.

Your main activities involve political machinations and occasional metaphysical confrontations with other Nobles, as well as being called Excrucians, who come from the Void beyond Existence, and wish to unmake Existence that the Void may endure again. They do this by attempting to destroy Estates (the facets of reality that Nobles control.). Chipping away at existence by unmaking facets of it.

The effects permitted to your Noble extend to the metaphorical, so conflicts are somewhat like the scene in Sandman where the Devil tries to play "reality" with Dream. As the Noble of Knives, I can leave my foe's plans "teetering on the knife's edge", I can cause his allies to become "knives in his back", or I can summon 10,000 knives and throw them at him. I can also redefine what a knife MEANS, or IS, if I will it.

It's generally considered quite...a complicated game.

Every time I see or hear about something from Nobilis, I'm reminded of a Mary Sue self-insert character from an old play-by-post site I was on. That and "LORD ENTROPY!111!!1!1!!!!1!!" are all that comes to mind.

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Well to be fair Lord Entropy literally commands the powers of desecration, destruction and scorn.

It's not so much scorn that I feel for Lord Entropy as it is amusement and a sort of ironic enjoyment that would inevitably fall apart were I to forsake my status as an outside observer and actually partake in a game of Nobilis. I can't really bring myself to take a villain who's described as being "so evil that his hands drip blood when he's just hanging out watching a basketball game" seriously.

The power of Infrastructure could cause every road system in existence to function improperly. Like, you turn off the exit and end up 40 miles from where the roundabout is supposed to be.

They control every dam, bridge, toll booth, everyone who works on them or in their design. The concept of maintaining and working on an internal support system for an organization. They could delete the concept of "employees" or 'man-hours'.

Architecture could do most of that in regards to physical structures and their compositions.

In general, Powers of ideas are "stronger" than those of physical phenomena, unless that phenomena is particularly symbol-laden.

Lord Entropy is halfway a joke. On the next page there's a picture of him at a basketball game looking menacing with his hand dripping blood while normal people play basketball behind him. The game does not take itself 200% seriously.

No, the point I'm making is that all that complication is kind of self inflicted if you still play that edition
Unless you mean to imply that 3e is also just to complex to play, in which case pretend I just posted a smug anime girl instead

Quoting my post for reference.

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I'd like to believe that, but Poe's Law is in full force here for me, and I'm not sure making such a seemingly massively important character for the universe 50% a joke is a wise idea. I'm perfectly fine with some silliness here and there (I'm a cancerous memelord so it'd be hypocritical if I wasn't), however, it's still probably not the best way of handling his writing from a narrative perspective.

That's kind of the point: he is the anti-divine. He does not inspire awe or respect. He's every edgelord's first character, and every euphoric atheist's first love. He is the voice that convinced Timothy McVeigh that the song that should be played MOST in his Bradley is "Bad Company", by the band Bad Company, off of their album Bad Company.

He's a Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain. He probably goes around in a pure black or white suit, hands dripping blood, with hair the opposite color. He probably swaps which one is which on a weekly basis.

And for all that, despite being the universe's biggest wanker and poser, he's still the most powerful entity in Creation.

the great white book has a more serious take on him overall if you want that. But the great white book has a different tone in general. Nobilis 3e's descriptions of the Light, the Dark, and Heaven and Hell are all great, though.

Holy shit, I was right.

Oh, Lord Entropy isn't a villain, he's the current guy in charge of the Imperators. Nobilis is a game where you and your allies are trying to keep everything from being wiped out of existence, but most Nobles and Imperators are not good people, Lord Entropy being the prime example. You can be a Noble who is a complete dick, or just outright evil, but you are still a protagonist because you are fighting against complete annihilation

Ah. My mistake.

I'll probably look into that whenever I have the time. For curiosity's sake if nothing else.

I want to play this but all of my friends have better taste in games than me, so, nothing doing.
That's all I wanted to say.

Lord Entropy certainly isn't a good guy, and he's comically evil and needlessly cruel to a degree most just cannot match, but he's one of the most powerful beings in all of Creation, and it's been prophesied that he's the one who may finally win the war against the Not and best the Spawn Of Harumaph (if he doesn't join them first, that is). He's a petty and horrendously evil asshole first and foremost, but nobody can really DO anything about that.

Hell, this is the same guy who made the Windlower Law, seemingly for no reason other than to be a dick about one particular concept.

I'm sober, so let me take another run at this.

Her approach to game design is very whollistic, and you have to digest her work in a similar fashion in order to comprehend it. If you do what most players and GM/DM/STs do and skim it for crunch and bits of fluff instead of committing to just sit down and digest it then you're going to have a bad time. On the other hand if you just sit down and read it cover to cover then you're going to have a substantially less difficult time.

>FIERCE IMAGINATION
>INTENSE ROLEPLAYING

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You’re an idiot. Exalted is far from unplayable. You act like you’re stuck in 2014.

>Exalted is far from unplayable
Certainly. And I imagine having to manage numerous Charms and the like, each with intricate abilities and effects that have to be put down pat equals "playability" for you? Nevertheless, this isnt the thread to talk about how playable/unplayable Exalted is, this is a Nobilis thread. Go to the Exalted general if you want one of those debates.

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Who the fuck actually play this shit anyway? i don't see any.

This game sounds legitimately awful

Samefagging is usually frowned upon user.

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Look at the IP counter, you fucking retard.

Anyone else have any examples of diceless systems? Like from any genre?

Last time I checked, it was still at 36 previously. So I font know what youre beef is, Pablo.

Chuubo. Amber Diceless. Lords of Olympus. The common thread seems to be that once you get at a high enough power level, diceless play where resource allocation is the focus instead of a random cancel of failure makes sense.

Is he trying to save money on christmas presents by driving away his friends?

Look at the time in my first post, no wonder why no ones play this shit considered that its player being so fucking retard.

I don't even play the game, user. I just know it from second-hand experience (and having read a decent amount of second edition myself). Also, there are many people who may Nobilis, probably more than those who play other such games. You just seem to be mad that people are coming along in a a thread to discuss this instead of whatever pseudo-political bait thread you could spew out.

I didn't even talk about any political shit and i guess i'm right about no one playing this shit LMAO.

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Oh hey, I played Alexander in that game. That was literally a decade ago!

Is this a seriously published illustration?

Actually no. It's just amongst The only Excrucian art to be found on the net. Which is sad.