I wonder if Roberto watched any other reviews about Candle Obscura? Everyone made the same points about the safety tools, mental health diatribe, and how certain modernday-isms don't fit 1920s themed horror.
Hard to review a game that is incomplete. They can put in pages on moralizing mental health but they forget to include the death mechanics, in a 'horror' game. The nerve of these 'professionals'.
Yes. Exactly, after you get four scars you get to retire apparently, basically you get rewarded for failing. A huge indication of what the game is actually about. It’s a joke.
After having watched your review of Candella Obscura, I feel that I have a greater understanding and appreciation of your position, Jim. Your explanations of how the utopian society of this part of the Illuminated Worlds setting is a sort of uncanny valley of human societies, given what we know of human history and how material conditions have a vital effect on how they develop, was quite enlightening. Often times, when utopias are presented in film and novels, the horror aspect comes from what it takes to maintain those societies in the first place, whether it's Soylent Green being made of people, a hidden culling of the population performed in service of a eugenics agenda, the complete outlawing and destruction of art and expression for the sake of keeping the populace at an emotional equilibrium, or having the population hooked up to a simulation without their knowledge for the sake of using them as a power source. The horror of the utopia is that it is actually a dystopia, but the populace is either too asleep to notice or too committed to maintaining the status quo.
Right, and that would have been a better spin for this work, perhaps the investigators making hard choices to sever supernatural 'cancer' in the populace to preserve the larger whole.
the problem with the setting is that while fantasy changes the world and it's functionality, human nature always remains the same. because if you change it whatever story you end up with becomes extremely strange and alien. it's such an omnipresent concept that we usually take it for granted. worlds like candela break that rule, they take the aesthetics of fantasy but are actually social fiction. the thing seems nonsensical because humans themselves are different, which is the one thing fantasy never actually touches.
Spot on! A Horror setting without bigotry is like cutting all the meat from the bone. And very refreshing to see your arguments that these aspects enriched Lovecrafts work or even made it possible from the start (which I highly agree) instead of the usual reflex many others have by flatly crying loudly how racist he was without reflecting that this xenophobia was actually the spark for his stories about the fear from the unknown. Bravo! 🤟
Frankly, I prefer your review style as opposed to the generic "I like or dislike it because [mechanic of choice] is so good/bad." You really get into the meat of what makes games and their themes work, and bring up what made other successful (or unsuccessful) games, or authors, really anything that's relevant to what is being reviewed and you contrast why you like these things with genuine passion and understanding which is a huge part of why I enjoy your content. As to Candela Obscura itself. It just comes off as another product in the production line of bland, fairly corporate games that do nothing but decry the titans of the genre whose shoulders they stand upon. Combined with their rather insufferable "good people don't use these tropes or themes in their games" it just comes of as pushy nonsense. Maybe if the book spent more time on what is actually horrifying in their world instead of ensuring we know what isn't, there would be more to actually play with. As it stands it's just this superficial and bland nonsense that just lacks any real soul because it didn't come from a place of horror and what the author genuinely found horrifying was actively avoided
Your hat game is, once again, on point. I feel any reviewer has a choice to either, provide some sort of basis for their opinions..... a stream of consciousness/short narrative explaining critiques, foibles and thereby opinions, or ignore that completely and simply stick to "meat and potatoes" reviews that are perhaps more accessible....but also mundane and lacking insight.. I would rather, by far, understand the perspective of the reviewer as I can then align any commentary towards my own subjectives likes and dislikes and make a far more informed choice. You don't owe an explanation for your perspective, but the fact that you choose to incorporate one (or several) adds a great deal of versimilitude over less thoughtful and nuanced evaluations.
To be fair to Roberto, it’s a critique, not a how to, that many game reviews do. Within the critique, many online reviewing, the appropriately contracted, OC, questioned the game on the heavy handed safety rules (including some usually associated with that “wing” of the hobby; commented on the beauty of the book layout and artwork, while questioning the organization; and finally many puzzled on how to review as the game was quite incomplete from a rules and game running advice perspective At the end of the day most suggested CoC or Vaesan might be a better direction to go as the “horror” is built into the game, not just stated “this is a horror game”. So TLDR - Roberto was right, but in the same way as complaining a cheese shop doesn’t sell fish.
I haven't watched your review of Candela Obscura yet as I stumbled upon this video first. I just wanted to say that I appreciate your take on horror. I'd love to hear your thoughts on Algernon Blackwood. He seems to me to be a rather well-adjusted chap who is also a mystic, and yet he chose to write his stories that explore his mystical and psychical ideas largely in the shape of ghost stories. I've always thought it odd that he seemed to want to write somewhat scary stories about, as he saw it, real aspects of the world that were overall rather wonderful. But perhaps I'm way off. Anyway, I'm minded to agree with you on how the mechanics of Powered by the Apocalypse get in the way of immersion. And, as much as I enjoy writing stories; that's not what I look for in roleplaying games - I want immersion; I want to approach the virtual world with the ambitions of my character, not of myself as a co-author. And I certainly agree with you that removing too much of human psychology and sociology from a fantasy world does more to harm immersion - in either roleplaying or storytelling - than overtly fantastical elements. But I'm probably a lot more open to pushing the boundaries of how much we can clean up certain specific social features from the virtual theatre of play; be it racism, sexism, ableism, or whatever else might stand in the way of enjoyment for some players. Such things could, to some degree, be kept off stage perhaps. This was a very thoughtful and well-presented piece, thank you for it!
Why thank you. I also think in this (and other cases) historical or quasi-historical settings being sanitised erases darker chapters of our history that we probably shouldn't eliminate or ignore.
Horror is personal.it depends on what scares you. Putting boundaries in as "safety tools" is going to lessen horror. On the other hand, we are playing a game, so limits based on consideration are not out of line. Tough to define how this works. I would not enjoy playing in a game where the horror is based on any aspect of sexuality, well simultaneously recognizing that that reduces the scope for horror and makes the game less immersive to some degree. I guess knowing what's not going to happen does limit the scope of the horror.
Jim, I think that “owning your shit” also depends on the context, the game you’re playing and whom you’re playing with. I ran a game of Aberrant with close friends years ago where a key plot point was “victim of CSA has erupted as a super and is killing everyone who watches the videos of her abuse”. What I didn’t know was that one of my players had been a victim of something similar and me springing it on them completely without warning made them feel intensely unsafe and triggered a PTSD attack. Based on that, future games involving that player avoided that subject because the person is our friend and we want them to feel safe and comfortable around us.
@@TesteTrekkie and that's when you leave the table. Accommodations can be made later, but people are imposing these impossible rules in other situations like stores and cons
@@PostmortemVideo And the person in question did leave the table, and the room. We stopped the game because they were visibly shaken, on the verge of tears and I was worried about my friend. In terms of a lot of the safety tools bandied about I agree with you that most of them, particularly the X-card, are worse than useless in the context of a pick-up store game or a convention game with strangers. One tool that I have totally embraced in terms of convention\pick up games is game content description - I absolutely give a general movie rating and a broad list of content e.g. R18+ game, body horror, mind control, sexual content. Another place my thoughts diverge is in terms of stores, clubs and conventions being able to regulate the kind of games that are run in their facilities. These are often open and/or shared aural spaces and not many people want to hear about what the male ogre does to the female elf he's captured (actual example). One local convention strikes the right balance IMHO. For reference, it is run in a local high school over a long weekend. Games run in the main hall, around kids and the public, have to maintain a PG rating or lower. Games that are run in individual classrooms can have any rating up to R18+ but the organisers have a list of 10 content items that they ask you to tick if your game goes above an M rating. That way, we don't expose people in public to extreme material without their consent while still allowing GMs to run more adult games for those players that make an active choice to participate.
It's telling that novelists who are passionate about injustice, prejudice, and so on don't write stories in which those things simply don't exist. If they did, we wouldn't have novels like Darkness at Noon, Untouchable, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc, that confront such issues head on. Movies and other art forms likewise. Yet roleplaying designers usually balk at the challenge and instead retreat into sanitized let's-pretend universes created for escapism. Don't they think that roleplaying can be treated as an art?
Yes indeed, i do not always agree with everything in your reviews, but i always enjoy them exactly because you take the time to explain the logic under your takes. I agree with you about candela obscura. I watched critical role's actual play with the system and it was quite entertaining, so i got the book. I didn't like it, for several reasons. They seem to have a lot of second-order observation concerns, which may make sense for them as content creators, by i'm having none of that at my table. My players are the only ones that matter when we play, i don't know why we would need to pretend that some all seeing eye is watching and judging us. If anything rpgs should be an escape from that, to me at least.
"there are dragons is as true as having a favored pronoun" - maybe Roberto is on to something? I think he has forgotten about Chekhov's gun though, if you are going to change reality you really should have a reason for doing it.
@@PostmortemVideo You and Alan Moore as two points on the English line of defence against the threats and horrors from Outside. And/or possibly the selective filtering conduit of just the right kind of impulse threat and horror that we need in these decaying times. ... can we also just add, with the "but my dragons"... even though your rebuttal is absolutely indubitably correct and relevant, we also need to add the extra layer to that argument of: "but it's NOT today's modern world these fictions are SUPPOSED to be depicting or reflecting, it's a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT world, what the hell is wrong with you clueless mentally over-localised idiots"? ... don't forget that the Federation was also very anti-transhumanism. On the one hand, we hate Khan. On the other hand, it also meant they hated everything Enhanced Barclay could do for the Federation. Improved propulsion technology better than warp or transwarp, for a start.
I came here to learn about proper whisking techniques when making what chefs call "true English custard", but all I learned about was your review techniques. I have a mild opinion about your not liking the PbtA games, which is not custard or even custard adjacent, but I will share them regardless. It's a dice mechanic and a reversed way of explaining the "who does what when" of RPGs. It is Traveller only explained as "when your character does this, do X" rather than "do X whenever your character wants to do this kind of thing". Horror and aspiration are at odds with each other, regardless of dragons. Here, of course, I mean in terms of custard.
Candela Obscura is like a roller coaster built for people that may not like drops, going fast, being upside down, or some combination. It goes 35 mph in a straight line to keep everyone from getting frightened, but wants to still call itself a roller coaster. What comes out is a thematically boring, low horror, homogenized book. Couple this with a relatively simple (some would say boring) game system and you get a very forgettable product. I unfortunately got wrapped up in the hype and ordered the collectors edition. #regrets
The problem is, that Candela Obscura achieves exactly what it was meant to do, it is just that this goal is not what many a Horror TTRPG Player expects, much less actually wants. The key I think lies in a Call of Cuthulhu oneshot Critical Role ran in 2019. Various disclaimers and behind the scenes stuff makes it quite clear that there is a desire for playing the genre, if not even the specific game, but it becomes absolutely impossible considering that it may be perceived as endorsement of the works of a man that is the worst kind of person the CR team can envision. A racist bigoted classist elitist man, who draws upon his distaste for the foreign, the ugly and the disturbed in his writing and never saw any comeuppance for his positions during his lifetime and never significantly changed his point of view, but instead is revered in nerd circles for the astonishing body of work he created. Candela is basically a rules light sanitized version of a mythos-verse horror, which by definition does not infringe upon topics of sexism, chauvinism (national and genderized), ableism or cultural appropriation, stripping itself perhaps deliberately in its explicitness of the stuff that Lovecraft defined as the basis for horror fiction (as outlined in his 1927 essay ''Supernatural Horror in Literature'').
I haven't looked at Candela Obscura [C.O.] (and likely never will). Your objection seems to, in part, be (if I may word it my way) that sanitizing all of the objectionable ideas out of a horror game renders the game inert, or impact free. After putting in this much time on the subject, you may not feel like dwelling on it any longer, but i still want to ask anyway: how would YOU insert the necessary "enuit" (Lol) back into the game? Perhaps a better question might be: what is the single most important element that could be put into the C.O. game--be that a game mechanic; a tonal element such as environment or maguffin; or maybe a villain that personifies a particular kind of sociopolitical view--say perhaps hatred (to the point of willingness to commit horrific acts) of a certain group, ethnicity, religion, etc. Or a sociopath's ability to manipulate. Or a gruesome habit or desire? Honestly, these days the trope of "there is a necromancer that lives on the edge of town who wants something (power, wealth) and is reanimating corpses for an army to meet his aims", this has become almost a trope in DnD, and inspires little to no emotional response from players. Such a villain is not an event in itself: its just Thursday... But if the villain wants to, say for example, have sex with all the reanimated corpses--so he may father the prophecied undead messiah--that could add a touch of the grue. Then the characters find out that their 15 year old cousin who died last month, is part of the next batch, and then perhaps the players themselves are now personally horrifies and so thus personally motivated to deal with the problem. Of course, the people who designed C.O. would never be caught dead (lol) using the sex part of that equation, even though that is the only part of it that would inspire anything more than morbid curiosity from most modern players... I seem to be saying that most modern players are jaded as hell... Anyway, is rhere a simple fix for the game that will make it do what you think it should do?
i have alot of the same problems with WOTC now. all productions are so heavily pasteurized so it cant offend anybody that THERE IS NO EVIL LEFT TO FIGHT. a severe lack of conflict other than, its in the monster manual , or the stat block says evil, guess your enemies . ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The Liberal and woke attraction to modern interpretations of the Cthulhu mythos, and by extension Lovecraft, is fascinating. I think there's something deeply psychological about it. The version of the mythos that these people tend to be attracted to is full of tentacles and corruption that they are supposed to be repelled by, but I actually think it titillates them. This is as opposed to the actual writings of Lovecraft, which were almost entirely evocative rather than gruesomely descriptive. Beyond that I think there is something in the cold cosmicism of Lovecraft that's really what the modern "I f***ing love science" liberal/leftist identifies with. Not in its cold rationality, but in their own deep anxiety about being alive at all.
nah, lovecraft just got too popular. social parasites always move towards existing trends and lovecraftian horror got massified to the point of being overdone for a while.
You can accept dragons, elves, and talking trees, but you can't accept a 2021 BMW 5 Series 530i with optional heated seating in your medieval fantasy world? Why are you so bigoted?
I had very weird experience with CO. You have the "woke" crowd that creates a world that's so devoid of any prejudice it's bland and boring and safe, and then you have the "woke" players who make their rainbow character and then... get offended that my character is not impressed. Oh, you are a strong female-presenting young person with "unconventional" preferences who is out and about dealing with supernatural threats instead of staying in the kitchen? Well, so is my landlady. You are not that special.
The game sounds like a socialist utopia. Roberto seems to be finding reasons to defend that very same socialist utopia. Maybe this has more to do with woke than RPG. The only truth is the game will stand or fall on unit sales alone. If people buy in, it will survive. If not it won't. I for one, will not be buying it. The background seems bland and insipid.
I agree with you about how bad Candela Obscura is, but that is not the point. I agree with Roberto about how you review games, you bring pointless statements like "I don't like Bladerunner 2049 Je ne sais quoi" Or "I don't like to have success on a 6" reviews where everything is negative and we don't learn about the game, but about that you are probably fixated with the same system for years I guess D100 or something. As I said before it would be positive if you talk about the games you like, because you are not going to convince the fans of narrative games that those are bad. Every person likes the dice they like, or the crunchyness they like, and when you review with a score you are not being impartial, and these reviews comes across like you are doing them because the games are trending, not because you enjoy them.
I do talk about games I like, and I strive for impartiality on the objective portions. I've always played a broad smorgasbord of different kinds of games, including more narrative focused games, but there's a difference between more of a focus on narrative, and no longer being a roleplaying game. I've also given context (and mathematics!) as to why the 'succeed on a 6' doesn't work for me. There's always hope you can educate someone out of a blind alley they've cornered themselves in. Yes, my reviews come down (partially) to my opinion, so they're 'for' those who share my tastes, but are broader in appeal because I do contextualise and explain those opinions.
Nobody should waste time watching videos. Just click the pop up that blocks half the video to go buy products. 🙄 Why are people putting those pop ups all over videos? 🤬 Only video review I did not understand was Baron Munchasen. Many too much British humor that got lost in translation there. For the most part your frustration during a review, or lack 9f frustration since you seem to be a person without must sounds of levity in your voice, carries more weight than your words about how you feel about a certain part during a review. The words just pinpoint the good or bad parts that caught your eye. Some things, like Chaalt X Cards are not things that can give a review. Look for similar lack of completion and try to review MOTU RPG that came out in the 1980s. Boy, that was unplayable. 😂
I wonder if Roberto watched any other reviews about Candle Obscura? Everyone made the same points about the safety tools, mental health diatribe, and how certain modernday-isms don't fit 1920s themed horror.
Hard to review a game that is incomplete. They can put in pages on moralizing mental health but they forget to include the death mechanics, in a 'horror' game. The nerve of these 'professionals'.
Yes. Exactly, after you get four scars you get to retire apparently, basically you get rewarded for failing. A huge indication of what the game is actually about. It’s a joke.
After having watched your review of Candella Obscura, I feel that I have a greater understanding and appreciation of your position, Jim.
Your explanations of how the utopian society of this part of the Illuminated Worlds setting is a sort of uncanny valley of human societies, given what we know of human history and how material conditions have a vital effect on how they develop, was quite enlightening.
Often times, when utopias are presented in film and novels, the horror aspect comes from what it takes to maintain those societies in the first place, whether it's Soylent Green being made of people, a hidden culling of the population performed in service of a eugenics agenda, the complete outlawing and destruction of art and expression for the sake of keeping the populace at an emotional equilibrium, or having the population hooked up to a simulation without their knowledge for the sake of using them as a power source. The horror of the utopia is that it is actually a dystopia, but the populace is either too asleep to notice or too committed to maintaining the status quo.
Right, and that would have been a better spin for this work, perhaps the investigators making hard choices to sever supernatural 'cancer' in the populace to preserve the larger whole.
I don't always agree with you, but I always appreciate how articulate these rants are. You do a good job with this kind of content I think.
Makes complete sense. Keep on keeping on. Sanitised horror seems paradoxical to me personally.
Turns out having something larget to struggle against tends to make for a more worthwhile end result.
the problem with the setting is that while fantasy changes the world and it's functionality, human nature always remains the same. because if you change it whatever story you end up with becomes extremely strange and alien.
it's such an omnipresent concept that we usually take it for granted.
worlds like candela break that rule, they take the aesthetics of fantasy but are actually social fiction.
the thing seems nonsensical because humans themselves are different, which is the one thing fantasy never actually touches.
Spot on! A Horror setting without bigotry is like cutting all the meat from the bone. And very refreshing to see your arguments that these aspects enriched Lovecrafts work or even made it possible from the start (which I highly agree) instead of the usual reflex many others have by flatly crying loudly how racist he was without reflecting that this xenophobia was actually the spark for his stories about the fear from the unknown. Bravo! 🤟
zang indeed, well spoken @Grim
I like your reviews and how you lay them out. If nothing else, they are DIFFERENT than the rank and file.
Frankly, I prefer your review style as opposed to the generic "I like or dislike it because [mechanic of choice] is so good/bad." You really get into the meat of what makes games and their themes work, and bring up what made other successful (or unsuccessful) games, or authors, really anything that's relevant to what is being reviewed and you contrast why you like these things with genuine passion and understanding which is a huge part of why I enjoy your content.
As to Candela Obscura itself. It just comes off as another product in the production line of bland, fairly corporate games that do nothing but decry the titans of the genre whose shoulders they stand upon. Combined with their rather insufferable "good people don't use these tropes or themes in their games" it just comes of as pushy nonsense. Maybe if the book spent more time on what is actually horrifying in their world instead of ensuring we know what isn't, there would be more to actually play with. As it stands it's just this superficial and bland nonsense that just lacks any real soul because it didn't come from a place of horror and what the author genuinely found horrifying was actively avoided
Your hat game is, once again, on point.
I feel any reviewer has a choice to either, provide some sort of basis for their opinions..... a stream of consciousness/short narrative explaining critiques, foibles and thereby opinions, or ignore that completely and simply stick to "meat and potatoes" reviews that are perhaps more accessible....but also mundane and lacking insight.. I would rather, by far, understand the perspective of the reviewer as I can then align any commentary towards my own subjectives likes and dislikes and make a far more informed choice.
You don't owe an explanation for your perspective, but the fact that you choose to incorporate one (or several) adds a great deal of versimilitude over less thoughtful and nuanced evaluations.
To be fair to Roberto, it’s a critique, not a how to, that many game reviews do.
Within the critique, many online reviewing, the appropriately contracted, OC, questioned the game on the heavy handed safety rules (including some usually associated with that “wing” of the hobby; commented on the beauty of the book layout and artwork, while questioning the organization; and finally many puzzled on how to review as the game was quite incomplete from a rules and game running advice perspective
At the end of the day most suggested CoC or Vaesan might be a better direction to go as the “horror” is built into the game, not just stated “this is a horror game”.
So TLDR - Roberto was right, but in the same way as complaining a cheese shop doesn’t sell fish.
"Cheddar?"
"Fresh out, Sir."
I haven't watched your review of Candela Obscura yet as I stumbled upon this video first. I just wanted to say that I appreciate your take on horror. I'd love to hear your thoughts on Algernon Blackwood. He seems to me to be a rather well-adjusted chap who is also a mystic, and yet he chose to write his stories that explore his mystical and psychical ideas largely in the shape of ghost stories. I've always thought it odd that he seemed to want to write somewhat scary stories about, as he saw it, real aspects of the world that were overall rather wonderful. But perhaps I'm way off.
Anyway, I'm minded to agree with you on how the mechanics of Powered by the Apocalypse get in the way of immersion. And, as much as I enjoy writing stories; that's not what I look for in roleplaying games - I want immersion; I want to approach the virtual world with the ambitions of my character, not of myself as a co-author. And I certainly agree with you that removing too much of human psychology and sociology from a fantasy world does more to harm immersion - in either roleplaying or storytelling - than overtly fantastical elements. But I'm probably a lot more open to pushing the boundaries of how much we can clean up certain specific social features from the virtual theatre of play; be it racism, sexism, ableism, or whatever else might stand in the way of enjoyment for some players. Such things could, to some degree, be kept off stage perhaps.
This was a very thoughtful and well-presented piece, thank you for it!
Why thank you. I also think in this (and other cases) historical or quasi-historical settings being sanitised erases darker chapters of our history that we probably shouldn't eliminate or ignore.
@@PostmortemVideo It would be unwise to ignore them all the time; but also not much of a life to reflect upon them at all times.
Horror is personal.it depends on what scares you. Putting boundaries in as "safety tools" is going to lessen horror. On the other hand, we are playing a game, so limits based on consideration are not out of line. Tough to define how this works. I would not enjoy playing in a game where the horror is based on any aspect of sexuality, well simultaneously recognizing that that reduces the scope for horror and makes the game less immersive to some degree. I guess knowing what's not going to happen does limit the scope of the horror.
And hopefully, you would own your shit and bow out if the game was based around those concepts.
Jim, I think that “owning your shit” also depends on the context, the game you’re playing and whom you’re playing with.
I ran a game of Aberrant with close friends years ago where a key plot point was “victim of CSA has erupted as a super and is killing everyone who watches the videos of her abuse”.
What I didn’t know was that one of my players had been a victim of something similar and me springing it on them completely without warning made them feel intensely unsafe and triggered a PTSD attack.
Based on that, future games involving that player avoided that subject because the person is our friend and we want them to feel safe and comfortable around us.
@@TesteTrekkie and that's when you leave the table. Accommodations can be made later, but people are imposing these impossible rules in other situations like stores and cons
@@PostmortemVideo And the person in question did leave the table, and the room.
We stopped the game because they were visibly shaken, on the verge of tears and I was worried about my friend.
In terms of a lot of the safety tools bandied about I agree with you that most of them, particularly the X-card, are worse than useless in the context of a pick-up store game or a convention game with strangers.
One tool that I have totally embraced in terms of convention\pick up games is game content description - I absolutely give a general movie rating and a broad list of content e.g. R18+ game, body horror, mind control, sexual content.
Another place my thoughts diverge is in terms of stores, clubs and conventions being able to regulate the kind of games that are run in their facilities.
These are often open and/or shared aural spaces and not many people want to hear about what the male ogre does to the female elf he's captured (actual example).
One local convention strikes the right balance IMHO. For reference, it is run in a local high school over a long weekend.
Games run in the main hall, around kids and the public, have to maintain a PG rating or lower.
Games that are run in individual classrooms can have any rating up to R18+ but the organisers have a list of 10 content items that they ask you to tick if your game goes above an M rating.
That way, we don't expose people in public to extreme material without their consent while still allowing GMs to run more adult games for those players that make an active choice to participate.
@@PostmortemVideo Also to add because sometimes my brain forgets to add the positive bits- love your content, please keep making more.
It's telling that novelists who are passionate about injustice, prejudice, and so on don't write stories in which those things simply don't exist. If they did, we wouldn't have novels like Darkness at Noon, Untouchable, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc, that confront such issues head on. Movies and other art forms likewise. Yet roleplaying designers usually balk at the challenge and instead retreat into sanitized let's-pretend universes created for escapism. Don't they think that roleplaying can be treated as an art?
I always feel a little pretentious saying so, and I love 'low art', but I do believe games can be art and that it's something to aspire to.
Yes indeed, i do not always agree with everything in your reviews, but i always enjoy them exactly because you take the time to explain the logic under your takes. I agree with you about candela obscura. I watched critical role's actual play with the system and it was quite entertaining, so i got the book. I didn't like it, for several reasons. They seem to have a lot of second-order observation concerns, which may make sense for them as content creators, by i'm having none of that at my table. My players are the only ones that matter when we play, i don't know why we would need to pretend that some all seeing eye is watching and judging us. If anything rpgs should be an escape from that, to me at least.
"there are dragons is as true as having a favored pronoun" - maybe Roberto is on to something? I think he has forgotten about Chekhov's gun though, if you are going to change reality you really should have a reason for doing it.
Are you some kind of wizard or warlock, time traveller possibly..? 🤔
I have been called 'Hobo Gandalf'.
@@PostmortemVideo 😆👍
@@PostmortemVideo You and Alan Moore as two points on the English line of defence against the threats and horrors from Outside. And/or possibly the selective filtering conduit of just the right kind of impulse threat and horror that we need in these decaying times.
... can we also just add, with the "but my dragons"... even though your rebuttal is absolutely indubitably correct and relevant, we also need to add the extra layer to that argument of: "but it's NOT today's modern world these fictions are SUPPOSED to be depicting or reflecting, it's a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT world, what the hell is wrong with you clueless mentally over-localised idiots"?
... don't forget that the Federation was also very anti-transhumanism. On the one hand, we hate Khan. On the other hand, it also meant they hated everything Enhanced Barclay could do for the Federation. Improved propulsion technology better than warp or transwarp, for a start.
Reminds me of Naboo from The Mighty Boosh.
I came here to learn about proper whisking techniques when making what chefs call "true English custard", but all I learned about was your review techniques.
I have a mild opinion about your not liking the PbtA games, which is not custard or even custard adjacent, but I will share them regardless. It's a dice mechanic and a reversed way of explaining the "who does what when" of RPGs. It is Traveller only explained as "when your character does this, do X" rather than "do X whenever your character wants to do this kind of thing".
Horror and aspiration are at odds with each other, regardless of dragons. Here, of course, I mean in terms of custard.
Curious on your opinions of the Genesys system, narrative based dice?
Not a fan of novelty dice, but I'll see if I can borrow a copy to get a look.
Keep up the good work
Candela Obscura is like a roller coaster built for people that may not like drops, going fast, being upside down, or some combination. It goes 35 mph in a straight line to keep everyone from getting frightened, but wants to still call itself a roller coaster. What comes out is a thematically boring, low horror, homogenized book. Couple this with a relatively simple (some would say boring) game system and you get a very forgettable product. I unfortunately got wrapped up in the hype and ordered the collectors edition. #regrets
Honestly it sounds more like the commenter had a problem with you rather than your review and his comment was working backwards from there.
The problem is, that Candela Obscura achieves exactly what it was meant to do, it is just that this goal is not what many a Horror TTRPG Player expects, much less actually wants.
The key I think lies in a Call of Cuthulhu oneshot Critical Role ran in 2019. Various disclaimers and behind the scenes stuff makes it quite clear that there is a desire for playing the genre, if not even the specific game, but it becomes absolutely impossible considering that it may be perceived as endorsement of the works of a man that is the worst kind of person the CR team can envision.
A racist bigoted classist elitist man, who draws upon his distaste for the foreign, the ugly and the disturbed in his writing and never saw any comeuppance for his positions during his lifetime and never significantly changed his point of view, but instead is revered in nerd circles for the astonishing body of work he created.
Candela is basically a rules light sanitized version of a mythos-verse horror, which by definition does not infringe upon topics of sexism, chauvinism (national and genderized), ableism or cultural appropriation, stripping itself perhaps deliberately in its explicitness of the stuff that Lovecraft defined as the basis for horror fiction (as outlined in his 1927 essay ''Supernatural Horror in Literature'').
I want your sunglasses.
Got them from glasses direct, prescription to help ward off cataracts!
I haven't looked at Candela Obscura [C.O.] (and likely never will). Your objection seems to, in part, be (if I may word it my way) that sanitizing all of the objectionable ideas out of a horror game renders the game inert, or impact free. After putting in this much time on the subject, you may not feel like dwelling on it any longer, but i still want to ask anyway: how would YOU insert the necessary "enuit" (Lol) back into the game? Perhaps a better question might be: what is the single most important element that could be put into the C.O. game--be that a game mechanic; a tonal element such as environment or maguffin; or maybe a villain that personifies a particular kind of sociopolitical view--say perhaps hatred (to the point of willingness to commit horrific acts) of a certain group, ethnicity, religion, etc. Or a sociopath's ability to manipulate. Or a gruesome habit or desire? Honestly, these days the trope of "there is a necromancer that lives on the edge of town who wants something (power, wealth) and is reanimating corpses for an army to meet his aims", this has become almost a trope in DnD, and inspires little to no emotional response from players. Such a villain is not an event in itself: its just Thursday... But if the villain wants to, say for example, have sex with all the reanimated corpses--so he may father the prophecied undead messiah--that could add a touch of the grue. Then the characters find out that their 15 year old cousin who died last month, is part of the next batch, and then perhaps the players themselves are now personally horrifies and so thus personally motivated to deal with the problem. Of course, the people who designed C.O. would never be caught dead (lol) using the sex part of that equation, even though that is the only part of it that would inspire anything more than morbid curiosity from most modern players... I seem to be saying that most modern players are jaded as hell... Anyway, is rhere a simple fix for the game that will make it do what you think it should do?
Still just a Storygame in the end. Who cares what the story is about.
i have alot of the same problems with WOTC now. all productions are so heavily pasteurized so it cant offend anybody that THERE IS NO EVIL LEFT TO FIGHT. a severe lack of conflict other than, its in the monster manual , or the stat block says evil, guess your enemies . ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Of every review ive seen candela obscura is just a poorly copied blades in the dark in a really pretty book.
The Liberal and woke attraction to modern interpretations of the Cthulhu mythos, and by extension Lovecraft, is fascinating. I think there's something deeply psychological about it. The version of the mythos that these people tend to be attracted to is full of tentacles and corruption that they are supposed to be repelled by, but I actually think it titillates them. This is as opposed to the actual writings of Lovecraft, which were almost entirely evocative rather than gruesomely descriptive. Beyond that I think there is something in the cold cosmicism of Lovecraft that's really what the modern "I f***ing love science" liberal/leftist identifies with. Not in its cold rationality, but in their own deep anxiety about being alive at all.
nah, lovecraft just got too popular.
social parasites always move towards existing trends and lovecraftian horror got massified to the point of being overdone for a while.
You can accept dragons, elves, and talking trees, but you can't accept a 2021 BMW 5 Series 530i with optional heated seating in your medieval fantasy world? Why are you so bigoted?
I had very weird experience with CO. You have the "woke" crowd that creates a world that's so devoid of any prejudice it's bland and boring and safe, and then you have the "woke" players who make their rainbow character and then... get offended that my character is not impressed. Oh, you are a strong female-presenting young person with "unconventional" preferences who is out and about dealing with supernatural threats instead of staying in the kitchen? Well, so is my landlady. You are not that special.
I love the setting and the simplicity of the systems. I can't stand the political correctness - but we'll just skip that extremism when we play.
The game sounds like a socialist utopia. Roberto seems to be finding reasons to defend that very same socialist utopia. Maybe this has more to do with woke than RPG. The only truth is the game will stand or fall on unit sales alone. If people buy in, it will survive. If not it won't. I for one, will not be buying it. The background seems bland and insipid.
I agree with you about how bad Candela Obscura is, but that is not the point. I agree with Roberto about how you review games, you bring pointless statements like "I don't like Bladerunner 2049 Je ne sais quoi" Or "I don't like to have success on a 6" reviews where everything is negative and we don't learn about the game, but about that you are probably fixated with the same system for years I guess D100 or something. As I said before it would be positive if you talk about the games you like, because you are not going to convince the fans of narrative games that those are bad. Every person likes the dice they like, or the crunchyness they like, and when you review with a score you are not being impartial, and these reviews comes across like you are doing them because the games are trending, not because you enjoy them.
I do talk about games I like, and I strive for impartiality on the objective portions. I've always played a broad smorgasbord of different kinds of games, including more narrative focused games, but there's a difference between more of a focus on narrative, and no longer being a roleplaying game. I've also given context (and mathematics!) as to why the 'succeed on a 6' doesn't work for me. There's always hope you can educate someone out of a blind alley they've cornered themselves in.
Yes, my reviews come down (partially) to my opinion, so they're 'for' those who share my tastes, but are broader in appeal because I do contextualise and explain those opinions.
Nobody should waste time watching videos. Just click the pop up that blocks half the video to go buy products. 🙄 Why are people putting those pop ups all over videos? 🤬
Only video review I did not understand was Baron Munchasen. Many too much British humor that got lost in translation there. For the most part your frustration during a review, or lack 9f frustration since you seem to be a person without must sounds of levity in your voice, carries more weight than your words about how you feel about a certain part during a review. The words just pinpoint the good or bad parts that caught your eye.
Some things, like Chaalt X Cards are not things that can give a review. Look for similar lack of completion and try to review MOTU RPG that came out in the 1980s. Boy, that was unplayable. 😂