Sorry but I'm now invested in the story of Parmi, the kobold chambermaid who fought off a goblin she found under the bed and cleaned up the mess afterwards.
Her master did not beat her that day, so she got better at chambermaiding. This let her advance her Occupational Level, and multi-occupation into Assassin (as befitting her dagger skills). She killed her master, escaped, and realized her true talent-creating and then hiding bodies. With this skill she killed abusive masters (most of them), rescued a bunch of chambermaids, and forged a guild of undetectable freedom-fighters. After all, nobody notices the maid…until she mops the floor with you.
He likely got 10 Advancement points per page, meaning at 800 pages he would have had 8000 advancement points or just enough to be a level 4 writer. The additional pages were him trying to get to level 5, but he gave up once he realices he would have to make up more than another 1400 pages of this to get there.
@@justelliot4870 I mean, minus the overt horniness this is basically the kind of game Ben would make isn't 't it. Sources cherrypicked to agree with existing beleifs about race, gender and society. No critical thought put into making sure things work together beyond if it is cool. The insistence on morality being objective and those who practice immoral things either aren't aware or know its bad and do it anyways. The massive ego driving it. Add some random ass Vore premises to symbolize abortion and you essentially have a Ben Shapiro story generator
I think the absurdly sluggish advancement might have its origins in one of those newbie RPG-er comments where one asks "Hey, how can a 300-year-old elf and a 19-year-old human be at the same level?" And in the game maker's goal to make """realistic""" setting and mechanics, F.A.T.A.L. says, "They're not, and never can be."
Earliest editions and D&D attempted to give an answer to this, stating that while they live longer, it actually means they have a more relaxed outlook on life, as they have plenty of time to learn such things. More part of their culture. Whereas humans do things very fast from their perspective. Also age was a thing so generally everyone started at any age that was mature for their species, or at the very least a young adult close to maturation.
@@janehrahan5116 kinda, in practice for a variety of reasons, humans don’t do much overshadow demihumans, they more so come off as a different sort of role. Generally Demihumans are multiclassing and humans can’t multiclass. And most every race has a class they can get up to at least “name level” in, which is where you stop getting the most benefit from your class, and some of them can advance endlessly, like half orc assassins or half elf Druids. Not to mention the racial abilities of which humans get none in exchange for all the benefits. Generally humans are more desirable but I wouldn’t call them strictly better.
This game reminds me of that sketch of a guy trying to play realistic DND with siri as DM. No matter what he does, siri always answers "you have died of the plague."
I like you would have to climb like billions of mountains to reach max level. Also would climbing the same mountain count cause there wouldn’t be enough mountains in the real or this fantasy world to get close to max level
You have a fisherman, a skinner, and a butcher in a party. After catching, skinning, and butchering 100,000 fish, the fisherman is now level 4, the skinner is level 9, and the butcher is level 2. Perfectly balanced!
@16:16 "FATAL has this reputation for being comically over-complicated but it's not. It's comically over-saturated." I like the assessment. Also, "e-daddy" is the best term ever.
“Roll for breathing. You died of dysentery” -fatal You know, I can’t help but think back to my old pathfinder skull and shackles party. We were pirates who had a policy about slavers. We wouldn’t toss them overboard until everybody got a turn to kick them!
The last entry on the miscast table for spells is accidentally casting the spell FATAL, which kills everyone in the whole world on the spot. Considering every mage is a potential walking apocalypse you wonder why magic isn't the most heavily restricted and supervised activity in that world. Also, how anyone ever figured the spell FATAL out and what it does without actually using it at least once.
Having the PCs race to stop some supreme nihilist from casting a "kill the world" spell: I'm pretty sure that shows up at least once in Elder Evils. Global politics revolving around people with access to world-killing magic, complete with politicians concerned about the "FATAL gap": Interesting satire, though somewhat cliche Mages having to be very careful, because a miscast has a theoretical chance of killing the world: Kind of cool, if possibly tricky to run well. Sticking the Deplorable Word on the player spell list, and on the spell fumble table, and not doing anything with it: Roughly the level of thought that went into FATAL.
I know this is an old comment but, I'm pretty sure nobody knows there's a spell that can kill everyone in the world, because it's never happened before
@@Momoko_Sweetie Okay but if it's a one in a thousand chance to cast Fatal every time a spell messes up, how likely is it that thousands of years have passed without it happening yet?
@@jamielattin9182 Counterargument: everyone who once lived has already died to said spell, making it so no one is actually conscious about it, as it ends all life
36:07 - Oh, wow. OK, let's see how this plays out at the high end. At Level 20: A mountaineer has climbed over 524 thousand mountains, A chambermaid has cleaned well for 52,428,800 days (or ~143,640 years, which is already impossibly impressive before you remember that _they can only have that job until they're ~30),_ A dicemaker has to make over 500 million dice (the equivalent of ~4,000 average-sized trees all used only for dice, with no wastage), A fisherman has to catch over 5 billion fish, and A butcher has to *successfully* butcher over 26 billion animals. (Getting every rabbit, cow, pig and deer in the world would only get you ~10% of the way there, to give you an idea of how absurd that is). In practice, a Lv 6 Chambermaid would be about to lose their job from "old age", a dicemaker *might* reach L7 when they retire after a life in the craft, and a butcher could maybe make it to lv2 before they reach their twilight years. (That's ignoring the square root rule.)
He could be someone really cool to play, if, after his father sold his mother to slavery, he renounced his whole family, and now his major motivation is to find and save his mother, on the way having to unlearn all the awful shit he learned from his slaver upbringing, and to find her, having to gain the trust of slaves, people who would have a very good reason to hate and fear him.
Yeah it's a really interesting backstory for an absolutely horrible character - you can either lean into it and just have them be an evil slaver dickbag, or you can try to redeem them and make them realise how awful slavery is, and how much of a terrible person their father was. Definitely the seeds there of a really interesting character.
I looked at the random magic effect table, and I shit you not, there was literally a whole ass half page section of “the target/caster begins worshipping the (insert race) god of .” No, not the god of (insert domain). The god of . It’s literally blank. Not filled in. Just a space and a “.” It’s wild.
This game, if it can be called one, is so fascinating. The way it's presented here feels like it's supposed to be a medieval bitlife simulator, which is kind of a fun concept, except it acts like an adventure fantasy. I think the saddest thing is that there are parts of this system I'm looking at like, "hey, THAT could be a game!" but the book immediately does a U-turn into a completely different genre. Slave sex ttrpg could be a game you play with your partner, and "totally accurate life simulator" is a brand of game that could also exist, but putting them together is just jarring. The same is true of the occupation system; the idea of building a character who just has a job and has to do that job could be fun for something like a townbuilding RPG or something more negotiation-based like Vampire: The Masquerade, but all it really amounts to is "You are fisherman. Go fish." In a very ironic way, the designer's superiority complex has resulted in a game with no real concept behind it. It's a game designed to be his masterpiece, not a masterpiece designed to be a game.
There keeps being little things that I think are fascinating concepts to have in a ttrpg and are kind of cool. But then the author instantly makes it weird, and surrounds it with even more weird things. Like he stumbled onto a cool idea, but couldn't stop thinking with his second head long enough to not ruin it.
@@acorr14 I think so too, like the body part system could work if it were less complicated. Like having only five parts, and instead of instant dismemberment or death, the body parts were crippled. Actually being able to choose a bodypart could also be useful, as is making accuracy- Fallout, I'm describing Fallout.
I'm going to assume you haven't read the original book and are making a judgement based purely on these videos. The videos censored most of the disgusting stuff in the book, presumably because not doing so would've got them age restricted or demonetised. The game isn't fascinating nor does it have anything interesting to offer. It's just vile.
I love how you can instantly tell the kind of tabletop gamer that the designer is when they tell the Aedile to specifically take from the rich/lucky characters to make sure they're within to "maintain game balance" but for characters that have gotten similarly *unlucky* (which confers WAY larger maluses than the equivalent benefits for being extremely lucky) he's just like "Oh, well, I guess you were just unlucky, haha, it's just a role-playing game so just deal with it and have fun anyways :)" Calling this person a grognard would be an insult to grognards everywhere. Even the most unflattering versions of that stereotype *try* to have fun, even if their vision of fun is misaligned with others'. This designer can't even just let luck be luck! Lucky players get punished by getting forced by their power-tripping GMs to be yoinked right back into the MEAN system and the unlucky players don't even get THAT.
The MEAN system actually serves no purpose, because do you really WANT the 1 in 10,0000 roll to EVER happen? The extreme tails of the probability curve don't need to exist, and are in fact bad. For example, do you really want a DnD character that has a natural 3 stat?
@@blkgardner I could imagine a theoretical spherical cow in a vacuum somewhere who might want to experience those extreme ends of the probability curve every once in a while, but the mean gamer (pun intended) most likely wouldn't. If the game wasn't so hostile to those lucky (or unlucky) to fall outside of the bell curve, it might even be a fun little experiment to see how one could potentially do anything with a really fantastic or really shit statistic. Granted, I could describe pretty much all of FATAL with that, couldn't I? "It might be a fun little experiment to try and see if we can even play FATAL" was something me and my drunk friends tried to do back in college, and it went about as well as you'd expect. Got through character creation and realized there's just no reason to even do anything with them since the system is so half-baked.
Imagine your father selling your own mother into slavery. And you just being *completely fine with that*. A part of me was really hoping the travelling around aspect was to find his mother, but nope, it's to find a human being he can buy as property and then force to mate with him. BECAUSE WHY THE HELL NOT.
So, if an assassin sneaks through a heavily fortified and guarded fortress and expertly shanks the enemy overlord without anyone noticing and then makes a flawless getaway, they won't get any XP for that if nobody put a bounty on that guy's head as that puts a times zero modifier on the XP calculation. Also, does it only count of the bounty is specifically promised to the character or does it also count if it's on a Western-style wanted poster? What happens if their patron reneges on the contact and refuses to pay up for it, does that retroactively remove all the obtained XP? Fatal really is a fount of really badly-thought out RPG mechanics.
Calling card maybe? It's stupid, but like, if you leave a pack of gummy bears at the site of each assassination, maybe the "gummy bear killer" gets a bounty, which means you can level.
I'm imagining a situation where a party member offers an obscenely high bounty for every level 1 goblin as they encounter them, with no intent to pay out--the game (as far as I can tell) never specifies that the bounty needs to be paid out, just that you use the bounty amount for the calculations. Of course, the spirit of the book would require the adele to shut that down, but rules-as-written it's legal
@@deathstinger13 Or you know, if the XP reward only requires a bounty to be put on something but not any money to exchange hands, the assassin could just put a bounty on any kill he makes himself, like a million FATALbucks for any ant in an anthill he's about to kick.
19:10 im actually astounded that FATAL had the self control to make Goblins "storybook-like" and restrained, rather than horrific little rape monsters. Like, this Goblin excerpt is something you could use in an actual D&D game.
Its simple, none of the creators had a goblin fetish. And their ego was probably too fragile to consider putting the creature also known for being pathetic and small into the absurd rape-centric "attractiveness" scale.
@@drago3036 And that's how you know this came out before Goblin Slayer (although the trope likely predates that in porn by many years). These guys would be HUGE fans.
legit the only positive i saw from this game , and thats just because i have a soft spot for the little green goobers :3 (i have played many a goblin in dnd 5e). it really does seem to be a "the writers thinly veiled fetish" type of game imo , ESPECIALLY with the whole sexual characteristic system.
A lot of this reads like an edgelord version of Dwarf Fortress, but then I remember it's somehow meant to be played at a tabletop by humans and not a computer-controlled simulation, and I can feel brain cells dying
One of the big issues with the Race Anakin, is they have wings but given no info on if they can fly. The only mention of their wings is that crap shoot ability where they have larger wing and thus a larger body mass etc. But it says nothing about flight. I agree with our host here, it seems like he forgot this was a game
Anakim are depicted as having wings in the official art, but according to the rulebook, most Anakim don't have wings. At character creation, the player roles 1d10 to determine how many supernatural traits their character has, and then they role a d100 to determine each trait. One of those traits is wings with a wingspan of 2d8 feet, and if the wingspan is greater than 10 feet the Anakim can fly. So basically, there is only about a 5% chance that any particular Anakim has wings, and even then those wings are more likely than not to be just for show.
@mirrorzone5224 ah yeah, that was probably it. Honestly it was so much to wade through. About a 100 different options for random characteristics. The weirdest one was people who came near your Anakin would have to make a saving throw or crave butt $ex.
@@mirrorzone5224I'm sorry you read this hard enough to actually comprehend the madness... How many sanity points did you lose? This is the RPG version of reading "The King in Yellow"...
Usain Bolt can sprint at 27mph. Average walking speed is 3mph. Which means according to Fatal, Usain could walk 6.7 mph. Crawl on his hands and knees at just under average walking speed, and he could wrigle like a worm toward you at an astonishing 1.4mph.
6.7 MPH is on the low end of a racewalk speed. This is absolutely doable for a complete freakshow like Bolt or any other Olympic class track athlete. That's the really interesting thing about the numbers that crop up in FATAL... a lot of them are quite reasonable because of the MEAN SYSTEM(TM). The high end of human performance equates to the high end of human performance. Let's not talk about Ogre dong circumference though...
It's crazy how many strange and illogical things come up even just watching videos about FATAL. On my list from this series include: - For seemingly no reason, Light Elves have a very high chance of bisexuality. I assume there's a very academic and logical reason behind it and not because the author found horny elves to be funny. - Female labourers are paid 1/4 that of male - The absolute hate the author has against zombies. Like, they went out of their way to ensure it wouldn't happen, stating they are presumed to not exist, the deceased are burned, and embalming cannot exist because this world is Europe-adjacent and embalming was created in Egypt.
I mean Just on Assassin. In order to level, an assassin needs to train under a higher leveled assassin. Where did the first level 2 assassin come from?
I was very confused _why 3d10 of all things?_ right up until I saw the probability curves and noticed that 3 is the minimum number of dice you need to form a bell curve. Because 'obsessed with bell curves' is one of the author's most consistent traits at this point.
People can’t learn things without practicing them, therefore I can’t increase my riding skill unless I actually have ridden. Because it is that riding that canonicaly causes the skill to go up.
"It kinda feels like the game wants the Aedile to be the groups daddy dom" why did you have to find the one singular way to make this game sound almost appealing
It's not even good math exercise. It's nothing but addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, with like one square root tossed in. It would get tedious very quickly
This whole thing seems almost more like the design doc for a video game than a tabletop.... All the trillion things that need to be kept track of make the shape of a system that might be ok, if there were a machine doing the thinking and rolls in the background. At least, it would be potentially okay if there weren't so many outright missing bits and things that require -DM- Aedile fiat in the moment.
@@gadgetgecko1776Omg rimjobmod, Omg rimjobmod. Randy where is my Cowboy hat, where is my Cowboy hat.🫄🫄🫄👅🫄👅🫄👅🫄👅. Ate without a Table?🥐🥐🥐. ATE WITHOUT A TABLE? -3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3--3-3-3-33-3--3.
One thing I remember about a discussion of the game-- specifically multiclassing-- is that if you have multiple professions that gain experience from the same activity (such as combat), it looks like you can double up on advancement points, and there are like five or six professions that gain experience by dealing combat damage.
Aaawwww... you didn't go into the absolute stupidity that was the magic system 🤣 Got to love the "best result" where you blow up the entire planet on a bad roll, which thankfully ends everybody's suffering.
The advancement system kinda just fucking hurts to look at, because there's so obviously a solid concept here for tracking occupational skill level... That the creator just fucking abandoned 15% of the way through. Like, the advancement point gain-rates of jobs being different *and* distinctly tied to actions of that job is legitimately a cool way to track these things and have some ludonarritive cohesion between mechanics and story. But then he only wrote up one way to gain skill for all jobs and fucked off to write something he actually wanted to, like nipple length attractiveness factors or being forced at gunpoint to let ogres and trolls be player races. Like it's not even half-assed normally either, you'd expect that the chambermaid would also get points for successfully pleasuring the master, since that's explicitly part of the job description, but... No. This system might be the least developed in the entire game, because dude does nothing with the framework he made, not even anything to just say his game did it like with other unfinished systems. Bro cared so little about the advancement system he didn't even wanna *brag* about it, which, as we have seen, is *the entire point of making the game.* The only thing this system is here to do is show off the fact he's apparently racist against butchers too? For some reason? Although the fact you need to master 104,857,600 dance moves to be considered a dance master is admittedly pretty funny. Like mastering 52,424,300 Dance moves makes you a really skilled dancer, but everyone still knows you're not *that* skilled and could do better.
What hurts even more is that there isnt even any actual progression. Sure, numbers go up but they dont actually mean anything. The chambermaid cleans stuff and gets points, but the only thing you are allowed to invest these points into is the cleaning skill. Which I assume just means youll have a higher chance to get a satisfactory result at cleaning each day. But that doesnt mean anything. Its even more obvious with the dancer. You have to master new dance moves to level up, but how do you actually do that? And what is the benefit of knowing new dance moves? The assasin even states that you have to learn new techniques in order to level up. But, what techniques are they? How do you learn them? This whole system is just so ... backwards. You dont level up to learn new stuff, instead you have to learn new stuff in order to level up. At that point whats even the value of the levels If you apparently dont even need them to learn new abilities?
See, I think this game wanted to be the Dwarf Fortress of TTRPGs, 2 years before Dwarf Fortress but whatever, but forgot the one key difference: The computer does all the busywork. Like, imagine you load up Dwarf Fortress, or even a relatively "simple" roguelike like Nethack, but instead of letting the computer do all the rolls yourself, you do them by hand. Simply generating a level, which takes the computer a few milliseconds, would take minutes of checking tables, rolling for monsters, fitting pieces together, and so on. Attacking is simple enough, but what about attacking while wielding a slippery weapon? Or throwing an item into a crowd? Or casting a spell? Or just, you know, walking and trying to keep track of hunger, food spoilage, current conditions, monster actions, and so on.
I was just thinking the combat was as complex as Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode, except that's an unpolished side mode to a game that's already best known for being fiendishly meticulous with simulating everything it can about its world, and mostly unpolished because you combat involves picking which body part you hit with what weapon or body part (or at least it did, haven't checked the Steam version adventure mode yet), and the game still mercifully does most of the work for you.
There's some things in the mechanics that could be interesting for a cRPG after some rebalancing - I actually like the ideas behind the combat flow, it strikes me as a more advanced version of Fallout 1/2 called shots, and the skill progression and learning curves aren't that far away from, say, Elder Scrolls once you actually use half a brain to balance those. But a computer to track the seventeen body parts for you is absolutely required.
It's amazing how this whole experience provides such a clear, concise description of the person writing it. It's so easy to visualize the kind of godmodding, power-tripping GM would write this. The kind of person who isn't interested in telling an interesting story together, or playing an exciting, unpredictable game, or crafting some grand adventure, but just wants to be in any position of power and lord it over other people as much as possible. The fancy title for the GM (but not the players of course), the systems ensuring players almost never get to have big, cool moments of their own, the players having almost no control over anything in character building, the book just up and recommending the GM *actively take away* players' progression if they feel like it... Honestly puts the dizzying set of rules into a whole new context. Like the usual for the "ehm uh b-but historical accuracy though :(" crowd, it's rules and standards that need only be enforced when it's convenient for the people going on about them. And what better way to regularly screw your players by having a giant list of asinine rules so massive to ensure it's impossible for the players to remember it all in gameplay? That way you can, at any given time, just conveniently remember some rule that shuts down your players from doing anything so they get shat on by a troll or whatever, and it's technically within the rules.
You aren't incorrect but the author is worse than that. These videos give far too generous picture of the author. Much of the worst aspects (racism, sexism, rape fantasies) wasn't included so as to not have the video age restricted or demonetised. If you dare read the review of the game by Darren Maclennan, but I warn you the details in that review are sickening
Oh boy, this entire series was a deconstruction of a motorway pile up; just when you think its all over, another car full of half arsed sections, brainrotting takes, and overcomplicated mechanics, comes careening in and you explain why it has made things so much worse than we thought it did. I'm glad, and slightly concerned, that you've talked about this crime against RPGs in detail so that no one watching will make something as awful as FATAL (hopefully).
@@kschwal RaHoWa is as bad, for different reasons. Although, the priest who made the game didn't get anywhere near as far into his own system, and made his supposed master race the weakest group in the game, on accident. You could theoretically play F.A.T.A.L., you have to basically make half the game in order to play RaHoWa.
I appreciate for once someone saying "actually, putting horny stuff in your game is cool, just FATAL sucks at it". Due to some *less savoury types* and general prejudice, a lot of the community seems averse to any such content in games, so it's nice to see someone challenge that notion.
There's nothing *wrong* with it per se, but most people don't have the kind of relationship with their friends where they're comfortable roleplaying sex acts with each other, even less so if it's a group of strangers. To me, sex in RPGs is like taking a dump, or brushing your teeth - there's nothing wrong or bad or weird about it, it's a perfectly normal, natural thing that undoubtedly exists in this world, but it's not why we're here and you don't need to roleplay your character taking a shit. Obvious disclaimer, you do you, if you're comfortable doing ERP with your buddies at the weekend during your TTRPG sessions then good for you, I'm certainly not trying to say you shouldn't, but I don't think it's necessarily prejudice to not want to roleplay that stuff.
I'm confused on how large the market is for people who want to play a sex RPG, are OK with intensive sexism racism, homophia and like 40 other types of bigotry, AND also willing to slog through more maths than the IRS deals with. I'm suspecting maybe it's JUST the writer.
@@HMJ66 Let me clarify. It is absolutely not prejudice to not want to roleplay out sexual scenes in a given group or at all. But I do think it's prejudice to consider ERP in tabletop in general to be a bad thing that should be avoided or otherwise "weird". Having boundaries is good and it's what good ERP and RP in general relies on. Talking about sexuality like it's some weird thing for perverts instead of a thing many groups can enjoy is, however, just inconsiderate and often stems from some conservative ideas about sexuality. (I'm using "weird" and "perverts" to specifically mean their derogatory judgemental implications, I absolutely would describe some of the people I like as "weird perverts")
33:46 So after *15 minutes* of going through that combat with the goblin the reward is... absolutely nothing? I'm not even sure if I should be shocked or not surprised at all.
I started making a system that was based on "realistic" body mechanics. Basically, you don't have hit points, but rather that you bleed and get sepsis and pain that is the major killer. Also scars and losing limbs, disease that attacks organs etc etc. That was the core focus of the system and I liked the idea. It is hard to implement, but I think it goes rather well. HOWEVER. I have three design philosophies around this entire creation process. The first is I ask myself "Over the course of an adventure, will this ever be useful in determining the outcome of the success of the adventure?" The second is "Is this actually a fun mechanic for the GM and the player to interact with?" (Fun can be vague, since it is not FUN for a player to get a disease, but it can be exciting at least) The third is "Do not make it more complicated than it needs to be, just for the sake of being complicated." So for instance, a bowl disease and proper nutrition is important for the outcome of an adventure. That is step one Step 2: Is it fun or exciting to consider your characters bowl movement? Well, not really. Keep it vague at best. Step 3: Don't make it complicated. Do you have to know how much your character shits on average based on their BMI? No, you just need to know if they are in pain and/or can function daily. So a bowl disease is simply painful and can reduce relevant stats (All stats are based on your bodily/mental health, so you have a harder time doing everything) All penalties are also only applied once in a simple "injury". Disease, poison, wounds, infections and more are all "injury" to body and mind. Some are permanent, some are temporary. Example. You are stabbed in the leg. Bodily injury gives pain, bleeding, "structural weakness". Pain reduces everything equally, bleeding increases "blood loss" and blood loss reduces everything equally. "Structural Weakness" makes any action using that part of the body have a penalty as well. So a stab in the leg makes it harder to walk and kick specifically, and harder to do everything else on top of it due to pain and blood loss. It is a clunky system, I agree, but I feel that is a necessity when it comes to "realistic" systems. All you can do is streamline it. But to bring it back to the video, FATAL adds "complex" systems without any reason for them to exist. It is not relevant for the adventure to know how much shit you have in your bowls at any given time and if it would EVER become relevant, the GM can come up with their own way to measure it.
such a health system probably wouldnt work well in an rpg where you go on adventures, but could work better in a different genre. For example the colony sim videogame rimworld
The game designer in me can see some merit here - as the execution crashes and burns like a zeppelin full of high explosives. Heavily center-weighting and eliminating lucky rolls means the players need to manipulate the situation (not dice) to succeed. If you can't fight at range, or win against multiple opponents - don't try, set traps and lure the enemy in. Most dice less games I'm aware of are like this - players always pass a certain threshold, but beyond that they need to change the event or expend a limited resource. Multiple initiatives per weapon could be a strategic idea of inflicting a death by 1000 fast cuts vs slow heavy attack. Ablating armor deals with the issue of characters being unable to contribute to a fight against a well protected opponent. A game where players get smarter, but characters don't really advance could be an interesting idea. It ties back to what I mentioned on the last video of a guiding spirit stuck with the mortal they got, not the hero they want.
@@danielgaffney6690 Honestly this applies to a lot of games. Rifts has some very interesting ideas, but its a super powers and cyberpunk game with magic and giant robots running off a system best described as mid 80's house rules for a 1970s game. You can see how each individual system is an improvement on something at the time (magic based on energy pool not per day, tank armor being on a different HP scale than people, ascending armor class, more variety of skills than D&D, etc.) but all together its a quagmire. GURPS has plenty of inspirational books, but you need to be an actual engineer to build vehicles in the system.
Oh yeah the skill checks are something I _almost_ like. I hate how in systems like 5e your luck matters much more than your skills, especially at low levels. You end up in situations where characters aren't able to shine at the things they're supposed to be good at while others blunder into the solution because they rolled well, and I like when characters feel specialised and get to do their thing. So the idea behind FATAL's system doesn't annoy me, but of course the execution is... like every other system in the game. I love Cyberpunk RED's skills for this though. It's a d10 based system where base characters can have +14 to the skills they really specialise in right from character creation, and skills that are way outside your character's wheelhouse will have something like a +4. It actually feels like you're trained in these skills because you can consistently pull off routine checks and your companions will struggle to even accomplish basic tasks without you. It becomes important for the party to have things like that one guy who's great with cars, the one who's good with medicine, with technology, with street talk, etc. Characters have really strong identities through the things only they can do. When someone dies you feel the hole in the party mechanically because not just anyone can do the same job if they roll well enough. You're rolling d10+4. It doesn't matter how lucky you get when you need a 30. But even that's not entirely true because RED has some absolutely explosive luck to shake up that consistency in ways FATAL could never dream of. If you roll a 10, you roll _again_ and add that to your total roll. If the medtech's the one bleeding out and _you,_ the rockerboy with no medical training, are the only one who can save them... it's unlikely, but never say never because even with a +4 you could still roll 20 or higher. It makes people performing beyond their limits very possible but not as easy as it is in systems like 5e. That ended up being a LOT of words for a youtube comment, I guess I have more thoughts than I realised on skill checks :]
I tried to make a character to follow along to experience the absolute agony required, but after my character ended up with a negative strength score in character creation, I gave up. This series was delightful to watch and the most thorough review of this abomination of a tabletop gaming system. If a competent editor got ahold of it (and was underpaid as there's no price anyone could put on going through such hell), I think the rulebook would boil down to about 80 pages rather than the length of an average gaming rulebook.
The sheer rate of failstates you can run into during character gen is hilarious. There's the like, "accounted for" fail states, like rerolling until you get a profession you can actually do, but then yeah, there's like, negative stats, physics anomalies like someone having a negative anal circumference, the staggering possibility of a Dwarf dying of old age on the spot, ect. The liklihood of making a broken character, not like, broken in the sense that this character won't work in an rpg, but in that this character physically cannot exist in a way that the game can handle, is WAY too high. Older editions of D&D, it was like, THEORETICALLY possible for a character to result in a corpse during character gen, but this typically required specific combinations, and extremely rare dice rolls. Here, there's like a solid 15, 20% chance that SOMETHING has gone wrong.
....do I want to know how many animals a Level 20 butcher had to have butchered ? Cause I have a sneaking suspicion those numbers will be *slightly* unrealistic.
The lowest I have seen in the comments 13.1 billion animals. So let’s assume we have a god that can butcher at 1 animal a second, which obviously could never happen but screw it. So it would take 31 years of straight butchering to get max level, no rest, no eating, no adventuring BUT WAIT, cause that’s a lie. That would be if it was only 1 billion second, so times that by 13 to get 403 years of straight butchering. And reminder that if you could somehow butcher an entire animal in only a single second.
I don't know why YT recommended this series to me 7 months late, or why I clicked on it when I was there for the first round of FATAL and have spend the rest of this time hoping nobody would ever mention it again, but I'm glad I did. This is the best actual explanation of the... thing I've ever seen, and I hope it elevates the FATAL discourse. (Which we should never have again, thanks.)
You know, as hilarious and on the spot as the MacLennon/Sartin review of FATAL is, I never fully realized just _how_ bad it was. Like I knew it was hot garbage, but I never realized just how big the pile of garbage was until I looked at this video. Most people will just point out the unnecessarily long process it takes to make a character or how edgy it is or how there's a table that makes you roll a 1d1,000,000, but hearing you cover how much of a failure at game design that it is outside of character creation as well as inside makes me realize just how screwed up it is. And if it was something the author made in college, defended for a few years, and then had the maturity to look back at even 20 years down the road and realize "Oh wow, I really messed up", then it's one thing, but the fact that this guy will not only defend it, but vehemently attacks others who DARE to criticize this "masterpiece" of a game that I don't even think people would play ironically, let alone the people he seems to associate/play with would find fun, is probably the worst part about this entire thing
The fact i sat through THREE HOURS of you describing how the character building works and you speedrunning explaning your character build that took you literally hours to do makes me wanna fist fight everyone who thought this was a good idea.
FATAL was made by that one dude in school who would talk about making a game like GTA but you could do *anything*. And by that, he doesn't mean interacting with a living world that responds to your actions, he means... all the worst shit you can imagine.
I went cross-eyed during the explanation of the combat. I would say, "fuck this game," if I wasn't worried about having to hear an overly convoluted explanation for the rules that would have to be comprehended in order to "fuck this game." I think I have a migraine.
Yeah very much so. A lot of this is very much coming across as a kind of dom and sub play thing rather than an actual RPG; kind of like DnD but with the assumption that the DM will do arbitrary decisions to make things much harder for the player at any moment as a way to punish them or reward them or to control them.
It is as the (awesome) Runequest was written by a drunk and high braindead incel in hell, than retranslated through several dead languages and curated by a fashist. I salute you for going thru this essentially twice and educate us on this piece of sh..art. at least i know what it is about and can gladly forget about its existence again.
You know how in DnD sometimes people make characters who are farmers or blacksmiths and don’t have a reason to go off adventuring? And then the DM has to deal with that to get them to freaking start the game? In Frankly Awful, Trashy, Asinine Lore, that’s DESIGNED INTO EVERY CHARACTER.
I have to say, after watching several of your videos, I greatly appreciate that your analysis of things does seem to have some original thought to it, beyond just echoing old rpg discourse on a topic or repeated stale memes.
The character concept section is fascinating, because it's, like... a pretty standard part of literally any RPG book ever, but unlike literally every other RPG ever... you really don't get to decide ANYTHING about who your character is. You don't even get to pick their name or personality. You generate a character, and then assemble a concept of who that character MUST be based on what was generated. It honestly could just be that, when writing up the sample character, he just rolled up a character, and... happened to get a slave trader. Because that's absolutely a thing that could've randomly happened during character creation. And after generating it, he looked at what was generated, and just described what the character would naturally be like based on their census data, statistics, and randomly generated personality (temperament and disposition). Like, when you started out this series, you had literally no actual INTENTION as to what sort of character you were making. Not even "we're going to make a fighter". You just started rolling dice. But despite that, if someone did the leg work, they could form a surprisingly detailed profile of who Parmi the Kobold Chambermaid is as a narrative element of a story. Considering the fact that, at no point during character creation, did you actually put a single thought into what you wanted your character to look like, an artist would have no trouble drawing the character you created just by looking at your character sheet.
In a rare stroke of this game actually doing something decent, there's enough detail that an artist would be able to draw Parmi without much ambiguity on the design details
There's some part of me that sees the appeal of the simulationist aspects of this game, like the various defenses and fulcrum points on weapons, even the "become a random person in this setting character building, but ONLY if a computer handles all the backend. As it stands this game is Dwarf Fortress for psychopaths with all the complex behind-the-scenes math done by hand
Wow. I’ve been slightly curious about this game for years. Thank you for doing the dirty work so I never ever ever feel the need to consider looking into it again.
This game has a spell called *Lesser* Holocaust. It's a 50 mile wide fire explosion that does 4d100*10 damage. There's also just the spell Fatal, which kills everything on the world instantly, with no buts.
After basically watching all four parts of this odyssey, through this clusterfuck of a game, i can only be somewhat impressed... Just the sheer amount of systems and tables and "balancing" that has no reason to be this detailed or would ever come up if anyone actually wanted to play this, is just kinda impressive...
@@zigmenthotep Well apparently there's a computer program that does it for you. Not that I can find a download. Besides, a few friends, a discord call, Tabletop Simulator. I'm sure we could find some way to make it not completely unbearable.
I was put in mind of a new system called Quintessence that does something similar to this game's practice modifier in it's Endeavour system. In essence, the game has a bunch of powerful special moves the players can custom build using a number of tables. They require a number of successes to pull off, usually around 7 to 11 and so can take a number of in-game steps of time to complete. Once you do, the action goes off and you do the thing. It's the systems way of handling spells above a cantrip or trick shots or calling upon a contact for something potent. The benefit of this is that it gets easier with every success. You gain a point of XP for every successfully enacted Endeavour, and then you also reduce the number of required successes by 1, to a minimum of 4, a doable but not 100% guaranteed amount. It's a lovely way of incorporating practice that encourages players to do so whenever they feel they can.
I have had some vague ideas for making a ttrpg system coupled with a world floating and idly fermenting in my brain for a good part of the decade, thanks to you and this shitstorm I have at least some outline of shit not to do. I also agree that the learning curve is one pretty bright idea in the sea of darkness which I would like to see competently executed. As to the rest of the system, to hell with it.
I'm so used to this being a more """realistic""" and presumably low magic fantasy game that I almost get whiplash when you do mention there's magic in this system.
As somebody who likes DnD and wanted to modify it or make a micro-TTRPG or smth along the lines of that, this is HIGHLY educational, well argumented, and you genuinely gave the game a chance literally EVERY TIME. You didn't just look at it and went "Is trash", no, you wanted to make the most conclusive diss of all time. And I love that, because creative media doesn't have just a formula for success or appeal (even if people can tell you otherwise), but bad media almost always does! And we got the formula for this L eating, ratioed game. A mix of 1) Half assed + 2) Mismanagement of both their time and resources, as well as yours + 3) Doesn't attain it's own goals, be it fetishistic, historically accurate nor a game + 4) Hyperinflated ego of author/s + 5) Lack of awareness + 6) Lack of play testing + 7) Over reliance on a GM that doesn't get what even you are trying to say + 8) Over reliance on the kind of math only a computer should calculate, literally beyond cruchy. Thank you so much for this video series as it was both entertaining, educational, and helpful!
The rule about only leveling once even if you gained enough XP to level twice goes back to a house rule by Gary Gygax. The way Gary would explain it, a player should have to play at least one session at each level of experience.
I wrote my diploma work (which is much shorter, but not much denser with information... It doesn't contain any racism or sexism though, only some militarism) in a few weeks, and it was while trying to keep it together with a full-time job and full-time studying. If he didn't have any of these while creating this piece of maculature... Yeah, a few weeks is quite possible.
So for the mountaineer advancement rule, what definition do we use? I kind of like the 1 meter of prominence above sea level rule which is a definition that is technically calculable on planet Earth. That is going to get me some experience really fast anywhere besides Israel, Death Valley, or The Netherlands. So I kind of need you as my aedile to make a detailed topo map for every single place or roll a D1000 to determine height above sea level which will make some weird looking places.
37:00 so what you are saying is that a dwarf, aged at 1d1000, has a considerable chance of beginning the game at the maximum level - potentially even in multiple occupations if we consider Scholar.
The random magical effects list is, at least to me, the most interesting read in the book. It is 2000 entries long and there is a surprising amount of variety in them. You'd expect it to be a bunch of "This random spell is cast" or "This mundane item appears" (which there are a few hundred entries like that), but the majority of them are uniquely strange. Here are a few that I found by scrolling randomly through the list: 1. 2 gay ogres appear within 3d10 feet and begin butt-plugging as if tomorrow will not exist [sic] 721. All characters within 3d10 feet must go to the nearest mountaintop and build a cottage (Oddly pleasant for Fatal) 1051. Citizens in this kingdom pay taxes based on their genital size: bigger is cheaper 1053. Citizens in this kingdom use children as currency for 3d10 hours 1057. Daily, the caster must drink the next liquid touched or acquire a Random Mental Illness (If you touch like, molten glass then are you going to have to drink molten glass every day for the rest of your life or risk getting some freaky paraphilia?) 1099. The caster becomes a vagicidal maniac, and attempts daily to force a vagina to kill itself (????????????????????) 1157. The caster is unbelievably happy, which provokes all within 3d10 feet to attack the caster (No being happy in this game) 1447. The nearest master treats their apprentices like they actually value them for 3d10 days. 1518. The next hypothetical statement said by the caster becomes a factual statement 2000. Within a radius of 3d100 feet, this area now restores virginity Entries 820 to 902 are exceptionally strange, as all of them are unfinished. They read: "All characters within 3d10 feet now worship the [race] god of ." There are over a dozen for Bugbears, a few for black dwarves, elves, most of the races in the game, but all of them are unfinished. Only the section for worshiping human gods is finished.
I'll be honest: In theory, a random-rolled party of mixed useful skills, some hulking ogre killing machine and a milkmaid could be fun. Could. Maybe. If it were not also, like, this...
Would probably be more fun to run character creation by making a character for a more normal game and then running FATAL's random magic misfire table a couple times for things that happened to your character growing up, and try to think about how that would effect your character's backstory.
This looks painful to play and run too, if you can even figure out how to do that in the first place But honestly, getting a pat on the head and being called a "good girl" every time I roll well does sound pretty awesome
Sorry but I'm now invested in the story of Parmi, the kobold chambermaid who fought off a goblin she found under the bed and cleaned up the mess afterwards.
She now has to be made in a much better system.
...Maid RPG.
Honestly I just want Parmi to be happy.
@@1redrider100one must imagine Parmi, happy
she's just fucking doing her best
Her master did not beat her that day, so she got better at chambermaiding. This let her advance her Occupational Level, and multi-occupation into Assassin (as befitting her dagger skills). She killed her master, escaped, and realized her true talent-creating and then hiding bodies. With this skill she killed abusive masters (most of them), rescued a bunch of chambermaids, and forged a guild of undetectable freedom-fighters. After all, nobody notices the maid…until she mops the floor with you.
This series is likely to represent the most fun anyone has ever had with FATAL. We *demand* the Magic System video, when you've recovered.
It's absolutely crazy how this guy wrote 900+ pages with one hand
At minimum 20% copy paste. But yeah, it's impressive in it's own warped way.
While also having his head between his legs
It's been confirmed that there were multiple authors, and this was deduced back in the day. So at least some amount was just rewriting with one hand.
Dictation. That would explain all of the moans and “oh yeah, that’s it baby” scattered through the text. (Yes, he said dic).
He likely got 10 Advancement points per page, meaning at 800 pages he would have had 8000 advancement points or just enough to be a level 4 writer. The additional pages were him trying to get to level 5, but he gave up once he realices he would have to make up more than another 1400 pages of this to get there.
"Lets say that our character is walking." sound like assuming our character is performing some extreme sport in FATAL world.
it feels like the start of a Ben Shapiro meme
Roll a d10 for the distance of each step
@@rightleft527no, roll 5 d10 and divide by 5. That's more realistic!
@@justelliot4870 I mean, minus the overt horniness this is basically the kind of game Ben would make isn't 't it. Sources cherrypicked to agree with existing beleifs about race, gender and society. No critical thought put into making sure things work together beyond if it is cool. The insistence on morality being objective and those who practice immoral things either aren't aware or know its bad and do it anyways. The massive ego driving it.
Add some random ass Vore premises to symbolize abortion and you essentially have a Ben Shapiro story generator
I think the absurdly sluggish advancement might have its origins in one of those newbie RPG-er comments where one asks "Hey, how can a 300-year-old elf and a 19-year-old human be at the same level?" And in the game maker's goal to make """realistic""" setting and mechanics, F.A.T.A.L. says, "They're not, and never can be."
With the square root of your age being your starting level a dwarf can very reasonably start at or over level 20.
Earliest editions and D&D attempted to give an answer to this, stating that while they live longer, it actually means they have a more relaxed outlook on life, as they have plenty of time to learn such things. More part of their culture. Whereas humans do things very fast from their perspective. Also age was a thing so generally everyone started at any age that was mature for their species, or at the very least a young adult close to maturation.
@@kaylaa2204 also all non-humans had hard capped levels (except for theif), this meant that humans were just giga chads.
@@kaylaa2204As late as D&D 3.5, elves had a starting age of 110 plus a few more depending on the complexity of the chosen starting class.
@@janehrahan5116 kinda, in practice for a variety of reasons, humans don’t do much overshadow demihumans, they more so come off as a different sort of role. Generally Demihumans are multiclassing and humans can’t multiclass. And most every race has a class they can get up to at least “name level” in, which is where you stop getting the most benefit from your class, and some of them can advance endlessly, like half orc assassins or half elf Druids. Not to mention the racial abilities of which humans get none in exchange for all the benefits.
Generally humans are more desirable but I wouldn’t call them strictly better.
This game reminds me of that sketch of a guy trying to play realistic DND with siri as DM. No matter what he does, siri always answers "you have died of the plague."
To be fair to siri that is historically accurate to the bubonic plague in Europe
Guys named Nick during the bubonic plague:
😀
Imagine climbing 30 mountains and being like "yeah, I'm a level 3 mountaineer"
Literally just a medieval hiker
I like you would have to climb like billions of mountains to reach max level. Also would climbing the same mountain count cause there wouldn’t be enough mountains in the real or this fantasy world to get close to max level
@@godlikecedar7877 Also do you only get XP for a "completed" mountain? So if you go 4/5s of the way and down, you get nothing?
Also
What if you just... Find some tiny boring lame mountain and climb it over and over again?
40
You have a fisherman, a skinner, and a butcher in a party. After catching, skinning, and butchering 100,000 fish, the fisherman is now level 4, the skinner is level 9, and the butcher is level 2. Perfectly balanced!
You forgot to mention that the character were a bug bear, dark elf, and dwarf who are racist against each other they would just kill each other
@@godlikecedar7877My money is on the Butcher.
hahahahahahahahahahahaha omg
@@CommissarMitchYou clearly haven’t made enemies with any fishermen
@@guiltygearalonecompl Eh, he can't even swim. Odds are, he just falls into the water one day and drowns on his own.
@16:16 "FATAL has this reputation for being comically over-complicated but it's not. It's comically over-saturated."
I like the assessment.
Also, "e-daddy" is the best term ever.
“Roll for breathing. You died of dysentery”
-fatal
You know, I can’t help but think back to my old pathfinder skull and shackles party. We were pirates who had a policy about slavers. We wouldn’t toss them overboard until everybody got a turn to kick them!
My poop collector levelled up. I multiclass into King. - FATAL
IS THAT AN OREGON TRAIL REFRENCE ???
D•mn, sounds like a tight crew.
@@BobMcBobJr The Aedile said no, sorry
The last entry on the miscast table for spells is accidentally casting the spell FATAL, which kills everyone in the whole world on the spot. Considering every mage is a potential walking apocalypse you wonder why magic isn't the most heavily restricted and supervised activity in that world. Also, how anyone ever figured the spell FATAL out and what it does without actually using it at least once.
Having the PCs race to stop some supreme nihilist from casting a "kill the world" spell: I'm pretty sure that shows up at least once in Elder Evils.
Global politics revolving around people with access to world-killing magic, complete with politicians concerned about the "FATAL gap": Interesting satire, though somewhat cliche
Mages having to be very careful, because a miscast has a theoretical chance of killing the world: Kind of cool, if possibly tricky to run well.
Sticking the Deplorable Word on the player spell list, and on the spell fumble table, and not doing anything with it: Roughly the level of thought that went into FATAL.
It's nice to think this whole creepy world just ended so we don't have to think about it ever again.
I know this is an old comment but, I'm pretty sure nobody knows there's a spell that can kill everyone in the world, because it's never happened before
@@Momoko_Sweetie Okay but if it's a one in a thousand chance to cast Fatal every time a spell messes up, how likely is it that thousands of years have passed without it happening yet?
@@jamielattin9182 Counterargument: everyone who once lived has already died to said spell, making it so no one is actually conscious about it, as it ends all life
It's like all the worst parts of every edition of D&D, pseudo-academia, and causal internet sexism combined; and then made many times worse.
Nah, you're ignoring the casual racism too!
You get a +3 for your next Testicular Fortitude roll for making it so far into this trashfire.
Because of you he made the save for my testicularuse totarshush
Finally, I can cast the spell Testicular Torsion and not be laughed out of the room
Imagine creating a grand campaign and adventure for your FATAL group, only for them to roll Chambermaids and Laborers.
Fortunately, we find out, according to the advancement section you can just "decide" to change your occupation, with no penalty!
@@joshuawinestock9998 then what was the point of any of this???? I want to scream
@@Romanticoutlaw funnily enough, that actually *was* the point!
36:07 - Oh, wow. OK, let's see how this plays out at the high end. At Level 20:
A mountaineer has climbed over 524 thousand mountains,
A chambermaid has cleaned well for 52,428,800 days (or ~143,640 years, which is already impossibly impressive before you remember that _they can only have that job until they're ~30),_
A dicemaker has to make over 500 million dice (the equivalent of ~4,000 average-sized trees all used only for dice, with no wastage),
A fisherman has to catch over 5 billion fish, and
A butcher has to *successfully* butcher over 26 billion animals. (Getting every rabbit, cow, pig and deer in the world would only get you ~10% of the way there, to give you an idea of how absurd that is).
In practice, a Lv 6 Chambermaid would be about to lose their job from "old age", a dicemaker *might* reach L7 when they retire after a life in the craft, and a butcher could maybe make it to lv2 before they reach their twilight years. (That's ignoring the square root rule.)
Honestly that trade slaver character backstory sounds really good, but for a villain to defeat, not someone I would want to play
He could be someone really cool to play, if, after his father sold his mother to slavery, he renounced his whole family, and now his major motivation is to find and save his mother, on the way having to unlearn all the awful shit he learned from his slaver upbringing, and to find her, having to gain the trust of slaves, people who would have a very good reason to hate and fear him.
Yeah it's a really interesting backstory for an absolutely horrible character - you can either lean into it and just have them be an evil slaver dickbag, or you can try to redeem them and make them realise how awful slavery is, and how much of a terrible person their father was. Definitely the seeds there of a really interesting character.
I looked at the random magic effect table, and I shit you not, there was literally a whole ass half page section of “the target/caster begins worshipping the (insert race) god of .” No, not the god of (insert domain). The god of . It’s literally blank. Not filled in. Just a space and a “.” It’s wild.
The character has stared into the abyss, passed straight through nihilism and out the other side into the loving arms of absurdism.
“What god do you worship?”
“ “
“Oh my god how did you say nothing out loud”
"a wizard. i hate ----ing wizards"
"well you shouldnt ---- them then" replied the second, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes
no you don't get it. "of " is the name of the god
You suffered for our pleasure. What a hero
This game, if it can be called one, is so fascinating. The way it's presented here feels like it's supposed to be a medieval bitlife simulator, which is kind of a fun concept, except it acts like an adventure fantasy.
I think the saddest thing is that there are parts of this system I'm looking at like, "hey, THAT could be a game!" but the book immediately does a U-turn into a completely different genre. Slave sex ttrpg could be a game you play with your partner, and "totally accurate life simulator" is a brand of game that could also exist, but putting them together is just jarring.
The same is true of the occupation system; the idea of building a character who just has a job and has to do that job could be fun for something like a townbuilding RPG or something more negotiation-based like Vampire: The Masquerade, but all it really amounts to is "You are fisherman. Go fish."
In a very ironic way, the designer's superiority complex has resulted in a game with no real concept behind it. It's a game designed to be his masterpiece, not a masterpiece designed to be a game.
I have a print of a ttrpg about racoons trying to drive a car that is more smooth and intuitive than performing any one menial action in FATAL.
@@VecTron5because the person who made it had an actual core idea and design philosophy behind it
There keeps being little things that I think are fascinating concepts to have in a ttrpg and are kind of cool.
But then the author instantly makes it weird, and surrounds it with even more weird things.
Like he stumbled onto a cool idea, but couldn't stop thinking with his second head long enough to not ruin it.
@@acorr14 I think so too, like the body part system could work if it were less complicated. Like having only five parts, and instead of instant dismemberment or death, the body parts were crippled. Actually being able to choose a bodypart could also be useful, as is making accuracy-
Fallout, I'm describing Fallout.
I'm going to assume you haven't read the original book and are making a judgement based purely on these videos. The videos censored most of the disgusting stuff in the book, presumably because not doing so would've got them age restricted or demonetised. The game isn't fascinating nor does it have anything interesting to offer. It's just vile.
I love how you can instantly tell the kind of tabletop gamer that the designer is when they tell the Aedile to specifically take from the rich/lucky characters to make sure they're within to "maintain game balance" but for characters that have gotten similarly *unlucky* (which confers WAY larger maluses than the equivalent benefits for being extremely lucky) he's just like "Oh, well, I guess you were just unlucky, haha, it's just a role-playing game so just deal with it and have fun anyways :)"
Calling this person a grognard would be an insult to grognards everywhere. Even the most unflattering versions of that stereotype *try* to have fun, even if their vision of fun is misaligned with others'. This designer can't even just let luck be luck! Lucky players get punished by getting forced by their power-tripping GMs to be yoinked right back into the MEAN system and the unlucky players don't even get THAT.
The MEAN system actually serves no purpose, because do you really WANT the 1 in 10,0000 roll to EVER happen? The extreme tails of the probability curve don't need to exist, and are in fact bad. For example, do you really want a DnD character that has a natural 3 stat?
@@blkgardner I could imagine a theoretical spherical cow in a vacuum somewhere who might want to experience those extreme ends of the probability curve every once in a while, but the mean gamer (pun intended) most likely wouldn't.
If the game wasn't so hostile to those lucky (or unlucky) to fall outside of the bell curve, it might even be a fun little experiment to see how one could potentially do anything with a really fantastic or really shit statistic.
Granted, I could describe pretty much all of FATAL with that, couldn't I? "It might be a fun little experiment to try and see if we can even play FATAL" was something me and my drunk friends tried to do back in college, and it went about as well as you'd expect. Got through character creation and realized there's just no reason to even do anything with them since the system is so half-baked.
Imagine your father selling your own mother into slavery.
And you just being *completely fine with that*.
A part of me was really hoping the travelling around aspect was to find his mother, but nope, it's to find a human being he can buy as property and then force to mate with him.
BECAUSE WHY THE HELL NOT.
timestamp?
@@gidofter_lukge I don't remember but it's in the video.
Not just fine with it, but taking it as an important lesson and viewing your father as being in the right.
@@StarkMaximum Yeah, you have to be a particularly messed up individual to write something like that.
@@gidofter_lukge 51:16
So, if an assassin sneaks through a heavily fortified and guarded fortress and expertly shanks the enemy overlord without anyone noticing and then makes a flawless getaway, they won't get any XP for that if nobody put a bounty on that guy's head as that puts a times zero modifier on the XP calculation. Also, does it only count of the bounty is specifically promised to the character or does it also count if it's on a Western-style wanted poster? What happens if their patron reneges on the contact and refuses to pay up for it, does that retroactively remove all the obtained XP? Fatal really is a fount of really badly-thought out RPG mechanics.
Whereas the fisherman can catch and release to net lots of AP
Calling card maybe?
It's stupid, but like, if you leave a pack of gummy bears at the site of each assassination, maybe the "gummy bear killer" gets a bounty, which means you can level.
I'm imagining a situation where a party member offers an obscenely high bounty for every level 1 goblin as they encounter them, with no intent to pay out--the game (as far as I can tell) never specifies that the bounty needs to be paid out, just that you use the bounty amount for the calculations. Of course, the spirit of the book would require the adele to shut that down, but rules-as-written it's legal
imagine an Assassin paying someone off to put out a cosmically big bounty, thus metagaming themselves to the levelcap in one go
@@deathstinger13 Or you know, if the XP reward only requires a bounty to be put on something but not any money to exchange hands, the assassin could just put a bounty on any kill he makes himself, like a million FATALbucks for any ant in an anthill he's about to kick.
19:10 im actually astounded that FATAL had the self control to make Goblins "storybook-like" and restrained, rather than horrific little rape monsters. Like, this Goblin excerpt is something you could use in an actual D&D game.
Goblin Slayer wasn't out yet. I guarantee he would have gone that direction now.
Its simple, none of the creators had a goblin fetish. And their ego was probably too fragile to consider putting the creature also known for being pathetic and small into the absurd rape-centric "attractiveness" scale.
@@drago3036 And that's how you know this came out before Goblin Slayer (although the trope likely predates that in porn by many years). These guys would be HUGE fans.
legit the only positive i saw from this game , and thats just because i have a soft spot for the little green goobers :3 (i have played many a goblin in dnd 5e). it really does seem to be a "the writers thinly veiled fetish" type of game imo , ESPECIALLY with the whole sexual characteristic system.
@@hm9892 Ain't nothing thinly veiled about it.
A lot of this reads like an edgelord version of Dwarf Fortress, but then I remember it's somehow meant to be played at a tabletop by humans and not a computer-controlled simulation, and I can feel brain cells dying
Yeah this feels like when you strip out the systems a game runs on and try to do it analog. While also being super sexist and racist
Thank you for soldiering through this series. I really appreciate it.
One of the big issues with the Race Anakin, is they have wings but given no info on if they can fly. The only mention of their wings is that crap shoot ability where they have larger wing and thus a larger body mass etc. But it says nothing about flight. I agree with our host here, it seems like he forgot this was a game
Anakim are depicted as having wings in the official art, but according to the rulebook, most Anakim don't have wings. At character creation, the player roles 1d10 to determine how many supernatural traits their character has, and then they role a d100 to determine each trait. One of those traits is wings with a wingspan of 2d8 feet, and if the wingspan is greater than 10 feet the Anakim can fly. So basically, there is only about a 5% chance that any particular Anakim has wings, and even then those wings are more likely than not to be just for show.
@mirrorzone5224 ah yeah, that was probably it. Honestly it was so much to wade through. About a 100 different options for random characteristics. The weirdest one was people who came near your Anakin would have to make a saving throw or crave butt $ex.
@@mirrorzone5224I'm sorry you read this hard enough to actually comprehend the madness... How many sanity points did you lose? This is the RPG version of reading "The King in Yellow"...
I kinda wanna see what that race might be like in a system that actually makes sense like dnd or something
@isaacorr3180 honestly it's basically a tiefling with extra steps. So it wouldn't be hard
Usain Bolt can sprint at 27mph.
Average walking speed is 3mph.
Which means according to Fatal, Usain could walk 6.7 mph.
Crawl on his hands and knees at just under average walking speed, and he could wrigle like a worm toward you at an astonishing 1.4mph.
Horrifying
😂😂😂
Like A.K.I's weird snake crawl move.
I laughed so hard at that mental image.
6.7 MPH is on the low end of a racewalk speed.
This is absolutely doable for a complete freakshow like Bolt or any other Olympic class track athlete.
That's the really interesting thing about the numbers that crop up in FATAL... a lot of them are quite reasonable because of the MEAN SYSTEM(TM). The high end of human performance equates to the high end of human performance.
Let's not talk about Ogre dong circumference though...
It's crazy how many strange and illogical things come up even just watching videos about FATAL.
On my list from this series include:
- For seemingly no reason, Light Elves have a very high chance of bisexuality. I assume there's a very academic and logical reason behind it and not because the author found horny elves to be funny.
- Female labourers are paid 1/4 that of male
- The absolute hate the author has against zombies. Like, they went out of their way to ensure it wouldn't happen, stating they are presumed to not exist, the deceased are burned, and embalming cannot exist because this world is Europe-adjacent and embalming was created in Egypt.
I mean
Just on Assassin.
In order to level, an assassin needs to train under a higher leveled assassin.
Where did the first level 2 assassin come from?
@@aprinnyonbreak1290 It's assassins all the way down.
Because the elves are fey.
@@AnalogDrift ambiguously fey
No zombies? Got it. First campaign, attack of the zombies!
So that's 52.4BILLION animals butchered to reach level 20. Imagine the dice rolls.
No, it's only 13.1 billion... assuming that advancement point values are cumulative.
Oh thank god only 13.1 billion 😮💨
@@GHOSTJMOONnow you have to spend less time as a fucking factory farm (an ENTIRE factory farm) from the modern day to hit level 20.
It never mentions the type of animal. Boil ants, hit those levels in seconds.
@@equidistanthoneyjoy7600 That's not really butchering though.
Gonna have to get a magnifying glass and a very tiny knife for this.
You talked me into it.
Starting a fatal campaign soon!
I wish you the best in your terrible venture
NO!!!
Godspeed you fool, godspeed
How’d it go?
@@mathinvitti7954probably still making characters
I was very confused _why 3d10 of all things?_ right up until I saw the probability curves and noticed that 3 is the minimum number of dice you need to form a bell curve.
Because 'obsessed with bell curves' is one of the author's most consistent traits at this point.
He likes bell curves cause they look like a boob
39:29 yes, very realistic, people are not allowed to learn new things unless those new things are things they’ve already done.
People can’t learn things without practicing them, therefore I can’t increase my riding skill unless I actually have ridden. Because it is that riding that canonicaly causes the skill to go up.
"It kinda feels like the game wants the Aedile to be the groups daddy dom"
why did you have to find the one singular way to make this game sound almost appealing
*Bap* No, down!
There has to be better ways to get your rocks off with your dommy DM daddy (consensually ofc)
@@Treeeboy This entire game's actually fun part can be defaulted to "BAM, NO GO TO HORNY JAIL"
I'm sure someone's done that more sensibly and with better game design somewhere on itch
ignoring all the abhorrent rapey fantasy, this rpg is like a maths exercise book
It's not even good math exercise. It's nothing but addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, with like one square root tossed in. It would get tedious very quickly
For all equations assume a perfectly cylindrical anus with a circumference of d
This whole thing seems almost more like the design doc for a video game than a tabletop.... All the trillion things that need to be kept track of make the shape of a system that might be ok, if there were a machine doing the thinking and rolls in the background.
At least, it would be potentially okay if there weren't so many outright missing bits and things that require -DM- Aedile fiat in the moment.
Yea, the systems with body parts having individual HP and armour values reminded me of rimworld
@@gadgetgecko1776Omg rimjobmod, Omg rimjobmod. Randy where is my Cowboy hat, where is my Cowboy hat.🫄🫄🫄👅🫄👅🫄👅🫄👅. Ate without a Table?🥐🥐🥐. ATE WITHOUT A TABLE? -3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3-3--3-3-3-33-3--3.
@@gadgetgecko1776 I was thinking of Kenshi but it's effectively the same shit - FATAL should be on PC (except it really, REALLY shouldn't be)
Solve for y on a tightness graph?
Finally a good use for that high-school algebra.
One thing I remember about a discussion of the game-- specifically multiclassing-- is that if you have multiple professions that gain experience from the same activity (such as combat), it looks like you can double up on advancement points, and there are like five or six professions that gain experience by dealing combat damage.
Aaawwww... you didn't go into the absolute stupidity that was the magic system 🤣 Got to love the "best result" where you blow up the entire planet on a bad roll, which thankfully ends everybody's suffering.
The advancement system kinda just fucking hurts to look at, because there's so obviously a solid concept here for tracking occupational skill level... That the creator just fucking abandoned 15% of the way through.
Like, the advancement point gain-rates of jobs being different *and* distinctly tied to actions of that job is legitimately a cool way to track these things and have some ludonarritive cohesion between mechanics and story.
But then he only wrote up one way to gain skill for all jobs and fucked off to write something he actually wanted to, like nipple length attractiveness factors or being forced at gunpoint to let ogres and trolls be player races.
Like it's not even half-assed normally either, you'd expect that the chambermaid would also get points for successfully pleasuring the master, since that's explicitly part of the job description, but... No.
This system might be the least developed in the entire game, because dude does nothing with the framework he made, not even anything to just say his game did it like with other unfinished systems.
Bro cared so little about the advancement system he didn't even wanna *brag* about it, which, as we have seen, is *the entire point of making the game.*
The only thing this system is here to do is show off the fact he's apparently racist against butchers too? For some reason?
Although the fact you need to master 104,857,600 dance moves to be considered a dance master is admittedly pretty funny.
Like mastering 52,424,300 Dance moves makes you a really skilled dancer, but everyone still knows you're not *that* skilled and could do better.
What hurts even more is that there isnt even any actual progression.
Sure, numbers go up but they dont actually mean anything.
The chambermaid cleans stuff and gets points, but the only thing you are allowed to invest these points into is the cleaning skill. Which I assume just means youll have a higher chance to get a satisfactory result at cleaning each day. But that doesnt mean anything.
Its even more obvious with the dancer. You have to master new dance moves to level up, but how do you actually do that? And what is the benefit of knowing new dance moves?
The assasin even states that you have to learn new techniques in order to level up. But, what techniques are they? How do you learn them?
This whole system is just so ... backwards. You dont level up to learn new stuff, instead you have to learn new stuff in order to level up. At that point whats even the value of the levels If you apparently dont even need them to learn new abilities?
See, I think this game wanted to be the Dwarf Fortress of TTRPGs, 2 years before Dwarf Fortress but whatever, but forgot the one key difference: The computer does all the busywork. Like, imagine you load up Dwarf Fortress, or even a relatively "simple" roguelike like Nethack, but instead of letting the computer do all the rolls yourself, you do them by hand. Simply generating a level, which takes the computer a few milliseconds, would take minutes of checking tables, rolling for monsters, fitting pieces together, and so on. Attacking is simple enough, but what about attacking while wielding a slippery weapon? Or throwing an item into a crowd? Or casting a spell? Or just, you know, walking and trying to keep track of hunger, food spoilage, current conditions, monster actions, and so on.
I was just thinking the combat was as complex as Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode, except that's an unpolished side mode to a game that's already best known for being fiendishly meticulous with simulating everything it can about its world, and mostly unpolished because you combat involves picking which body part you hit with what weapon or body part (or at least it did, haven't checked the Steam version adventure mode yet), and the game still mercifully does most of the work for you.
@@dominiccasts I do like that DF has the option to target. You can just attack or target their front left canine.
There's some things in the mechanics that could be interesting for a cRPG after some rebalancing - I actually like the ideas behind the combat flow, it strikes me as a more advanced version of Fallout 1/2 called shots, and the skill progression and learning curves aren't that far away from, say, Elder Scrolls once you actually use half a brain to balance those. But a computer to track the seventeen body parts for you is absolutely required.
The part where it's trivially easy to become a world-class scullery maid or whatever, but it means nothing, that is so Dwarf Fortress it hurts
This feels like it was designed for mathletes to competitively solve all calculations in "real time," like some kind of shitty gameshow
I’ve never heard the word “mathletes” it’s now one of my new favourite words
@@mistermangoman69My school used to participate in a lot of mathematics competitions and this word was somewhat common!
As someone who really loves math, these "mathletes" sounds like the most insufferable people on the planet
As a former mathlete no this sounds boring as hell
It's amazing how this whole experience provides such a clear, concise description of the person writing it. It's so easy to visualize the kind of godmodding, power-tripping GM would write this. The kind of person who isn't interested in telling an interesting story together, or playing an exciting, unpredictable game, or crafting some grand adventure, but just wants to be in any position of power and lord it over other people as much as possible. The fancy title for the GM (but not the players of course), the systems ensuring players almost never get to have big, cool moments of their own, the players having almost no control over anything in character building, the book just up and recommending the GM *actively take away* players' progression if they feel like it...
Honestly puts the dizzying set of rules into a whole new context. Like the usual for the "ehm uh b-but historical accuracy though :(" crowd, it's rules and standards that need only be enforced when it's convenient for the people going on about them. And what better way to regularly screw your players by having a giant list of asinine rules so massive to ensure it's impossible for the players to remember it all in gameplay? That way you can, at any given time, just conveniently remember some rule that shuts down your players from doing anything so they get shat on by a troll or whatever, and it's technically within the rules.
You aren't incorrect but the author is worse than that. These videos give far too generous picture of the author. Much of the worst aspects (racism, sexism, rape fantasies) wasn't included so as to not have the video age restricted or demonetised. If you dare read the review of the game by Darren Maclennan, but I warn you the details in that review are sickening
Oh boy, this entire series was a deconstruction of a motorway pile up; just when you think its all over, another car full of half arsed sections, brainrotting takes, and overcomplicated mechanics, comes careening in and you explain why it has made things so much worse than we thought it did. I'm glad, and slightly concerned, that you've talked about this crime against RPGs in detail so that no one watching will make something as awful as FATAL (hopefully).
Honestly, I don't þink it's even physically POSSIBLE to make someþing as bad as it.
Not even on purpose.
and then someone staggers out of one of the cars and starts mumbling racial slurs at you
@@kschwal RaHoWa is as bad, for different reasons. Although, the priest who made the game didn't get anywhere near as far into his own system, and made his supposed master race the weakest group in the game, on accident.
You could theoretically play F.A.T.A.L., you have to basically make half the game in order to play RaHoWa.
@@kschwalholy shit hi kschwal
I appreciate for once someone saying "actually, putting horny stuff in your game is cool, just FATAL sucks at it".
Due to some *less savoury types* and general prejudice, a lot of the community seems averse to any such content in games, so it's nice to see someone challenge that notion.
Book of erotic fantasy is one of the best DND 3.5 third party materials. At the very least the breeding chart is basically just cannon now.
@@janehrahan5116 It is pre-Paradox White Wolf, isn't it?
You'd kinda expect some kind of quality from them.
There's nothing *wrong* with it per se, but most people don't have the kind of relationship with their friends where they're comfortable roleplaying sex acts with each other, even less so if it's a group of strangers. To me, sex in RPGs is like taking a dump, or brushing your teeth - there's nothing wrong or bad or weird about it, it's a perfectly normal, natural thing that undoubtedly exists in this world, but it's not why we're here and you don't need to roleplay your character taking a shit.
Obvious disclaimer, you do you, if you're comfortable doing ERP with your buddies at the weekend during your TTRPG sessions then good for you, I'm certainly not trying to say you shouldn't, but I don't think it's necessarily prejudice to not want to roleplay that stuff.
I'm confused on how large the market is for people who want to play a sex RPG, are OK with intensive sexism racism, homophia and like 40 other types of bigotry, AND also willing to slog through more maths than the IRS deals with.
I'm suspecting maybe it's JUST the writer.
@@HMJ66 Let me clarify.
It is absolutely not prejudice to not want to roleplay out sexual scenes in a given group or at all.
But I do think it's prejudice to consider ERP in tabletop in general to be a bad thing that should be avoided or otherwise "weird".
Having boundaries is good and it's what good ERP and RP in general relies on.
Talking about sexuality like it's some weird thing for perverts instead of a thing many groups can enjoy is, however, just inconsiderate and often stems from some conservative ideas about sexuality.
(I'm using "weird" and "perverts" to specifically mean their derogatory judgemental implications, I absolutely would describe some of the people I like as "weird perverts")
This sounds like how i assumed d&d worked before I actually learned how to play d&d
48:56 Assignments I did during the class before the one where I had to present it turned out far better than these rules.
This whole rabbit hole has been so captivating. I have been wondering how this game would stand up with all those rolls. Yikes.
33:46 So after *15 minutes* of going through that combat with the goblin the reward is... absolutely nothing?
I'm not even sure if I should be shocked or not surprised at all.
I started making a system that was based on "realistic" body mechanics. Basically, you don't have hit points, but rather that you bleed and get sepsis and pain that is the major killer. Also scars and losing limbs, disease that attacks organs etc etc. That was the core focus of the system and I liked the idea. It is hard to implement, but I think it goes rather well.
HOWEVER. I have three design philosophies around this entire creation process.
The first is I ask myself "Over the course of an adventure, will this ever be useful in determining the outcome of the success of the adventure?"
The second is "Is this actually a fun mechanic for the GM and the player to interact with?" (Fun can be vague, since it is not FUN for a player to get a disease, but it can be exciting at least)
The third is "Do not make it more complicated than it needs to be, just for the sake of being complicated."
So for instance, a bowl disease and proper nutrition is important for the outcome of an adventure. That is step one
Step 2: Is it fun or exciting to consider your characters bowl movement? Well, not really. Keep it vague at best.
Step 3: Don't make it complicated. Do you have to know how much your character shits on average based on their BMI? No, you just need to know if they are in pain and/or can function daily.
So a bowl disease is simply painful and can reduce relevant stats (All stats are based on your bodily/mental health, so you have a harder time doing everything)
All penalties are also only applied once in a simple "injury". Disease, poison, wounds, infections and more are all "injury" to body and mind. Some are permanent, some are temporary.
Example. You are stabbed in the leg. Bodily injury gives pain, bleeding, "structural weakness". Pain reduces everything equally, bleeding increases "blood loss" and blood loss reduces everything equally. "Structural Weakness" makes any action using that part of the body have a penalty as well.
So a stab in the leg makes it harder to walk and kick specifically, and harder to do everything else on top of it due to pain and blood loss.
It is a clunky system, I agree, but I feel that is a necessity when it comes to "realistic" systems. All you can do is streamline it.
But to bring it back to the video, FATAL adds "complex" systems without any reason for them to exist. It is not relevant for the adventure to know how much shit you have in your bowls at any given time and if it would EVER become relevant, the GM can come up with their own way to measure it.
such a health system probably wouldnt work well in an rpg where you go on adventures, but could work better in a different genre. For example the colony sim videogame rimworld
@@gadgetgecko1776 funnily enough I did base it a bit on Rimworld, yes.
Can you imagine being a laboror, completing 200 million projects to get to level 20, just to get nothing
The number of times I yelled "WHY would you need to ROLL FOR THIS" is astonishing
I think the guy who wrote FATAL disliked the video (since, as I write this, there is only one downvote).
The game designer in me can see some merit here - as the execution crashes and burns like a zeppelin full of high explosives.
Heavily center-weighting and eliminating lucky rolls means the players need to manipulate the situation (not dice) to succeed. If you can't fight at range, or win against multiple opponents - don't try, set traps and lure the enemy in. Most dice less games I'm aware of are like this - players always pass a certain threshold, but beyond that they need to change the event or expend a limited resource.
Multiple initiatives per weapon could be a strategic idea of inflicting a death by 1000 fast cuts vs slow heavy attack. Ablating armor deals with the issue of characters being unable to contribute to a fight against a well protected opponent.
A game where players get smarter, but characters don't really advance could be an interesting idea. It ties back to what I mentioned on the last video of a guiding spirit stuck with the mortal they got, not the hero they want.
Fatal feel like it would be a really cool game if only it wasn't fatal
@@danielgaffney6690 Honestly this applies to a lot of games. Rifts has some very interesting ideas, but its a super powers and cyberpunk game with magic and giant robots running off a system best described as mid 80's house rules for a 1970s game. You can see how each individual system is an improvement on something at the time (magic based on energy pool not per day, tank armor being on a different HP scale than people, ascending armor class, more variety of skills than D&D, etc.) but all together its a quagmire. GURPS has plenty of inspirational books, but you need to be an actual engineer to build vehicles in the system.
Oh yeah the skill checks are something I _almost_ like. I hate how in systems like 5e your luck matters much more than your skills, especially at low levels. You end up in situations where characters aren't able to shine at the things they're supposed to be good at while others blunder into the solution because they rolled well, and I like when characters feel specialised and get to do their thing. So the idea behind FATAL's system doesn't annoy me, but of course the execution is... like every other system in the game.
I love Cyberpunk RED's skills for this though. It's a d10 based system where base characters can have +14 to the skills they really specialise in right from character creation, and skills that are way outside your character's wheelhouse will have something like a +4. It actually feels like you're trained in these skills because you can consistently pull off routine checks and your companions will struggle to even accomplish basic tasks without you. It becomes important for the party to have things like that one guy who's great with cars, the one who's good with medicine, with technology, with street talk, etc. Characters have really strong identities through the things only they can do. When someone dies you feel the hole in the party mechanically because not just anyone can do the same job if they roll well enough. You're rolling d10+4. It doesn't matter how lucky you get when you need a 30.
But even that's not entirely true because RED has some absolutely explosive luck to shake up that consistency in ways FATAL could never dream of. If you roll a 10, you roll _again_ and add that to your total roll. If the medtech's the one bleeding out and _you,_ the rockerboy with no medical training, are the only one who can save them... it's unlikely, but never say never because even with a +4 you could still roll 20 or higher. It makes people performing beyond their limits very possible but not as easy as it is in systems like 5e.
That ended up being a LOT of words for a youtube comment, I guess I have more thoughts than I realised on skill checks :]
19:11 Wait that goblin lore actually seems creative and could make for fun encounters. Why is it in Fatal?
@@bauz5565Read it and must say, it sounda way too wholesome for it to be fatal
I tried to make a character to follow along to experience the absolute agony required, but after my character ended up with a negative strength score in character creation, I gave up. This series was delightful to watch and the most thorough review of this abomination of a tabletop gaming system. If a competent editor got ahold of it (and was underpaid as there's no price anyone could put on going through such hell), I think the rulebook would boil down to about 80 pages rather than the length of an average gaming rulebook.
The sheer rate of failstates you can run into during character gen is hilarious.
There's the like, "accounted for" fail states, like rerolling until you get a profession you can actually do, but then yeah, there's like, negative stats, physics anomalies like someone having a negative anal circumference, the staggering possibility of a Dwarf dying of old age on the spot, ect.
The liklihood of making a broken character, not like, broken in the sense that this character won't work in an rpg, but in that this character physically cannot exist in a way that the game can handle, is WAY too high.
Older editions of D&D, it was like, THEORETICALLY possible for a character to result in a corpse during character gen, but this typically required specific combinations, and extremely rare dice rolls. Here, there's like a solid 15, 20% chance that SOMETHING has gone wrong.
I can only assume the creator put together some kind of insane joke and we haven’t found the punch line
....do I want to know how many animals a Level 20 butcher had to have butchered ?
Cause I have a sneaking suspicion those numbers will be *slightly* unrealistic.
Those mountains the mountaineer gains 100 AP for climbing, the butcher has created hundreds of them from the bones of his victims
26 BILLION ANIMALS BUTCHERED
other comment says 13.1 billion
Well... have you ever seen a level 20 butcher with your own eyes? Have you? No?
I rest my case.
The lowest I have seen in the comments 13.1 billion animals. So let’s assume we have a god that can butcher at 1 animal a second, which obviously could never happen but screw it. So it would take 31 years of straight butchering to get max level, no rest, no eating, no adventuring
BUT WAIT, cause that’s a lie. That would be if it was only 1 billion second, so times that by 13 to get 403 years of straight butchering. And reminder that if you could somehow butcher an entire animal in only a single second.
I don't know why YT recommended this series to me 7 months late, or why I clicked on it when I was there for the first round of FATAL and have spend the rest of this time hoping nobody would ever mention it again, but I'm glad I did. This is the best actual explanation of the... thing I've ever seen, and I hope it elevates the FATAL discourse. (Which we should never have again, thanks.)
Its a shame you didnt look at the spells, theyre so funny
Late to the party here, but I read the spell list. Holy shit they run the gamut of really cool to just.......why? Lol
You know, as hilarious and on the spot as the MacLennon/Sartin review of FATAL is, I never fully realized just _how_ bad it was. Like I knew it was hot garbage, but I never realized just how big the pile of garbage was until I looked at this video. Most people will just point out the unnecessarily long process it takes to make a character or how edgy it is or how there's a table that makes you roll a 1d1,000,000, but hearing you cover how much of a failure at game design that it is outside of character creation as well as inside makes me realize just how screwed up it is. And if it was something the author made in college, defended for a few years, and then had the maturity to look back at even 20 years down the road and realize "Oh wow, I really messed up", then it's one thing, but the fact that this guy will not only defend it, but vehemently attacks others who DARE to criticize this "masterpiece" of a game that I don't even think people would play ironically, let alone the people he seems to associate/play with would find fun, is probably the worst part about this entire thing
The fact i sat through THREE HOURS of you describing how the character building works and you speedrunning explaning your character build that took you literally hours to do makes me wanna fist fight everyone who thought this was a good idea.
35:02 doesn’t that make a chambermaid one of the most lucrative occupations?
FATAL was made by that one dude in school who would talk about making a game like GTA but you could do *anything*. And by that, he doesn't mean interacting with a living world that responds to your actions, he means... all the worst shit you can imagine.
I went cross-eyed during the explanation of the combat. I would say, "fuck this game," if I wasn't worried about having to hear an overly convoluted explanation for the rules that would have to be comprehended in order to "fuck this game." I think I have a migraine.
51:11 I'm getting the feeling that Mr. Byron Hall is a big fan of the Gor series.
Yeah very much so. A lot of this is very much coming across as a kind of dom and sub play thing rather than an actual RPG; kind of like DnD but with the assumption that the DM will do arbitrary decisions to make things much harder for the player at any moment as a way to punish them or reward them or to control them.
It is as the (awesome) Runequest was written by a drunk and high braindead incel in hell, than retranslated through several dead languages and curated by a fashist. I salute you for going thru this essentially twice and educate us on this piece of sh..art. at least i know what it is about and can gladly forget about its existence again.
You know how in DnD sometimes people make characters who are farmers or blacksmiths and don’t have a reason to go off adventuring? And then the DM has to deal with that to get them to freaking start the game?
In Frankly Awful, Trashy, Asinine Lore, that’s DESIGNED INTO EVERY CHARACTER.
I have to say, after watching several of your videos, I greatly appreciate that your analysis of things does seem to have some original thought to it, beyond just echoing old rpg discourse on a topic or repeated stale memes.
Yes, unlike the object of dissection, which is so unoriginal I think some shades of grey are more interesting to look at.
The character concept section is fascinating, because it's, like... a pretty standard part of literally any RPG book ever, but unlike literally every other RPG ever... you really don't get to decide ANYTHING about who your character is. You don't even get to pick their name or personality. You generate a character, and then assemble a concept of who that character MUST be based on what was generated.
It honestly could just be that, when writing up the sample character, he just rolled up a character, and... happened to get a slave trader. Because that's absolutely a thing that could've randomly happened during character creation. And after generating it, he looked at what was generated, and just described what the character would naturally be like based on their census data, statistics, and randomly generated personality (temperament and disposition).
Like, when you started out this series, you had literally no actual INTENTION as to what sort of character you were making. Not even "we're going to make a fighter". You just started rolling dice. But despite that, if someone did the leg work, they could form a surprisingly detailed profile of who Parmi the Kobold Chambermaid is as a narrative element of a story. Considering the fact that, at no point during character creation, did you actually put a single thought into what you wanted your character to look like, an artist would have no trouble drawing the character you created just by looking at your character sheet.
In a rare stroke of this game actually doing something decent, there's enough detail that an artist would be able to draw Parmi without much ambiguity on the design details
There's some part of me that sees the appeal of the simulationist aspects of this game, like the various defenses and fulcrum points on weapons, even the "become a random person in this setting character building, but ONLY if a computer handles all the backend. As it stands this game is Dwarf Fortress for psychopaths with all the complex behind-the-scenes math done by hand
Wow. I’ve been slightly curious about this game for years. Thank you for doing the dirty work so I never ever ever feel the need to consider looking into it again.
This series has given me a new found fondness for my own work. Thanks for showing what rock-bottom looks like.
I can’t believe it. A game where you literally have to roll to walk. I didn’t think it could be done.
This game has a spell called *Lesser* Holocaust. It's a 50 mile wide fire explosion that does 4d100*10 damage.
There's also just the spell Fatal, which kills everything on the world instantly, with no buts.
A spell that kills everything in the world.
Thats just Armageddon from Ultima VI, VII and underworld 1 & 2. :V
Watched this between last night and today. This makes Warhammer 40k and D&D 3.5e look appealing in comparison
But I love both of those.... WHY DO YOU HATE MATH?!
After basically watching all four parts of this odyssey, through this clusterfuck of a game, i can only be somewhat impressed...
Just the sheer amount of systems and tables and "balancing" that has no reason to be this detailed or would ever come up if anyone actually wanted to play this, is just kinda impressive...
You are a hero. Rest now, and know that your "great" enemy is slain.
Good to see you again, was starting to think that after 3 vids the game had some ill effects on your mind
I have now made it my life's goal to play this horrific travesty of a game *at least once.* Just to suffer.
Well, you might want to start making a character ahead of time. It takes awhile.
@@zigmenthotep Well apparently there's a computer program that does it for you. Not that I can find a download. Besides, a few friends, a discord call, Tabletop Simulator. I'm sure we could find some way to make it not completely unbearable.
You call that suffering, i would call it masochistic pleasure. I mean, why else would you put yourself through it? Good luck XD
I was put in mind of a new system called Quintessence that does something similar to this game's practice modifier in it's Endeavour system. In essence, the game has a bunch of powerful special moves the players can custom build using a number of tables. They require a number of successes to pull off, usually around 7 to 11 and so can take a number of in-game steps of time to complete. Once you do, the action goes off and you do the thing. It's the systems way of handling spells above a cantrip or trick shots or calling upon a contact for something potent.
The benefit of this is that it gets easier with every success. You gain a point of XP for every successfully enacted Endeavour, and then you also reduce the number of required successes by 1, to a minimum of 4, a doable but not 100% guaranteed amount. It's a lovely way of incorporating practice that encourages players to do so whenever they feel they can.
I have had some vague ideas for making a ttrpg system coupled with a world floating and idly fermenting in my brain for a good part of the decade, thanks to you and this shitstorm I have at least some outline of shit not to do. I also agree that the learning curve is one pretty bright idea in the sea of darkness which I would like to see competently executed. As to the rest of the system, to hell with it.
If nothing else, FATAL serves as a good example of what not to do in almost every aspect of game design.
I'm so used to this being a more """realistic""" and presumably low magic fantasy game that I almost get whiplash when you do mention there's magic in this system.
As somebody who likes DnD and wanted to modify it or make a micro-TTRPG or smth along the lines of that, this is HIGHLY educational, well argumented, and you genuinely gave the game a chance literally EVERY TIME. You didn't just look at it and went "Is trash", no, you wanted to make the most conclusive diss of all time. And I love that, because creative media doesn't have just a formula for success or appeal (even if people can tell you otherwise), but bad media almost always does! And we got the formula for this L eating, ratioed game. A mix of 1) Half assed + 2) Mismanagement of both their time and resources, as well as yours + 3) Doesn't attain it's own goals, be it fetishistic, historically accurate nor a game + 4) Hyperinflated ego of author/s + 5) Lack of awareness + 6) Lack of play testing + 7) Over reliance on a GM that doesn't get what even you are trying to say + 8) Over reliance on the kind of math only a computer should calculate, literally beyond cruchy.
Thank you so much for this video series as it was both entertaining, educational, and helpful!
15:29 fun fact: in order to get 0 on the pleasure index, you would need a bt of 69
(or 91)
28:44 so you carved a hole out of his upper torso yet
The rule about only leveling once even if you gained enough XP to level twice goes back to a house rule by Gary Gygax.
The way Gary would explain it, a player should have to play at least one session at each level of experience.
I wrote my diploma work (which is much shorter, but not much denser with information... It doesn't contain any racism or sexism though, only some militarism) in a few weeks, and it was while trying to keep it together with a full-time job and full-time studying. If he didn't have any of these while creating this piece of maculature... Yeah, a few weeks is quite possible.
I came for the roast of FATAL, but I was swayed by the roast of D&D.
So for the mountaineer advancement rule, what definition do we use? I kind of like the 1 meter of prominence above sea level rule which is a definition that is technically calculable on planet Earth. That is going to get me some experience really fast anywhere besides Israel, Death Valley, or The Netherlands. So I kind of need you as my aedile to make a detailed topo map for every single place or roll a D1000 to determine height above sea level which will make some weird looking places.
37:00 so what you are saying is that a dwarf, aged at 1d1000, has a considerable chance of beginning the game at the maximum level - potentially even in multiple occupations if we consider Scholar.
50:30 yes it is lmao
At least kind of maybe depending on rules that dont exist.
Thank you for trudging through this for our entertainment and information.
13:58 Familiarity penalties in GURPS work exactly like that. Though they are added on top of normal training/defaults.
The random magical effects list is, at least to me, the most interesting read in the book. It is 2000 entries long and there is a surprising amount of variety in them. You'd expect it to be a bunch of "This random spell is cast" or "This mundane item appears" (which there are a few hundred entries like that), but the majority of them are uniquely strange. Here are a few that I found by scrolling randomly through the list:
1. 2 gay ogres appear within 3d10 feet and begin butt-plugging as if tomorrow will not exist [sic]
721. All characters within 3d10 feet must go to the nearest mountaintop and build a cottage (Oddly pleasant for Fatal)
1051. Citizens in this kingdom pay taxes based on their genital size: bigger is cheaper
1053. Citizens in this kingdom use children as currency for 3d10 hours
1057. Daily, the caster must drink the next liquid touched or acquire a Random Mental Illness (If you touch like, molten glass then are you going to have to drink molten glass every day for the rest of your life or risk getting some freaky paraphilia?)
1099. The caster becomes a vagicidal maniac, and attempts daily to force a vagina to kill itself (????????????????????)
1157. The caster is unbelievably happy, which provokes all within 3d10 feet to attack the caster (No being happy in this game)
1447. The nearest master treats their apprentices like they actually value them for 3d10 days.
1518. The next hypothetical statement said by the caster becomes a factual statement
2000. Within a radius of 3d100 feet, this area now restores virginity
Entries 820 to 902 are exceptionally strange, as all of them are unfinished. They read: "All characters within 3d10 feet now worship the [race] god of ." There are over a dozen for Bugbears, a few for black dwarves, elves, most of the races in the game, but all of them are unfinished. Only the section for worshiping human gods is finished.
40:19 more likely it has you yell at them for rolling well and forcing them to re-roll
I'd love to see you tear apart my own complicated alpha TTRPG some day. These videos have been super well made and insightful.
I'll be honest: In theory, a random-rolled party of mixed useful skills, some hulking ogre killing machine and a milkmaid could be fun.
Could.
Maybe.
If it were not also, like, this...
Would probably be more fun to run character creation by making a character for a more normal game and then running FATAL's random magic misfire table a couple times for things that happened to your character growing up, and try to think about how that would effect your character's backstory.
your suffering is appriciated
Bravo for finishing this series!
Ah, that's why it's called "FATAL". It kills the interest of anyone wanting to try it out.
This looks painful to play and run too, if you can even figure out how to do that in the first place
But honestly, getting a pat on the head and being called a "good girl" every time I roll well does sound pretty awesome
Oki, calm down. 😆
If it's the type of guy that enjoys running this game... you don't want a "good girl" from him
@@exantiuse497 you probably don't have a choice, being tied up in his basement, anyhow
@@thosebloodybadgers8499 someone should tie me up in their basement fr
@@thosebloodybadgers8499 Honestly? Being tied up in a basement... Sounds really good to me