i just looked it up and jolty fucking shit how are most comments here about its mechanics rather than how it’s apparently Violent Misogyny: The Game
The Cypher system is one of the most ingenious, elegant, immersive, and flexible TTRPG systems ever created and I will die on this hill. If you want to escape D&D, Cypher is the way to go.
I have a morbid fascination with it, and one of the things that keeps dragging me back to it is the very weird ways in which it is, surprisingly, progressive. FATAL makes a distinction between sex and gender (though throws it away), and also recognises asexuality as valid (despite not understanding it).
It’s a racist, sexist rape fantasy simulator.
Shouldn’t the labels be swapped? Is common decency keeping F.A.T.A.L. from pursuing players? F.A.T.A.L. is antithetical to common decency. Decency keeps players away from F.A.T.A.L.
Dude. Just try Torchlite or Ironsworn.
I was tragically born without any common fucking decency (or maybe this is from being an unsupervised child on the early internet) but I’ve also heard the game is just horribly bad and unfun from a game design perspective.
Just know that character creation is reminiscent of the oldest D&D types, where you’d roll randomly. It is possible (I read a review of the game, not the system itself, thank god) to have a negative circumference of the anus.
Brb, rolling a new character called Paul th’ Prolapsed
5th dimensional bussy
Zigmenthotep on YouTube covered F.A.T.A.L as part of their “Let’s make us a character” series. It took four episodes, in a format that is usually one-and-done.
However bad you’ve heard the game is, I assure you it’s worse.
Ngl. I love lengthy character creation. I’d probably hate playing with such a complicated system tho… It sounds good for a sexy video game rpg tho 🤔 let the computer handle the calculations and all
It barely qualifies as a game, it’s like a recipe for a game, which only includes ingredients, but not how to bake it.
Also, if you do manage to play, it’s basically a rape simulator lol.
Also only white people exist because… “Historical accuracy”, while also giving all the fictional races accents based on human dialects.
The only game I’ve ever played with a more complicated character creation was the 5th edition of Hero System. There were a couple of steps that resemble calculus, but once you’re done you know exactly how your character will fair in a lot of situations. If character creation was a little easier it would be my favorite superhero RPG.
There are people here who’ve probably never seen the greatest review of the worst RPG of all time.
There is no God, and the proof of this can be found in a .pdf file from Fatal Games.
And for those who don’t have time, the only thing you need to know about FATAL is this; it’s an RPG made by the kind of people who stormed the capitol on Jan 6. Horrifically racist, sexist and queerphobic, and designed by people so fundamentally stupid and lacking in curiosity that they can’t get even the most basic of design concepts right, but so utterly obsessed with the idea of their own intellectual superiority that they keep trying to reinvent every single wheel.
Some friends and I once got drunk and made FATAL characters. After 4 hours we gave up. We still weren’t done. There’s no decisions to make, character gen is 100% random roll. It’s just so badly designed that even rolling your base attributes takes forever.
By the point where we stopped the dice had informed me that I was playing an 8 year old lesbian prostitute, and understanding how that’s even possible reveals the depths of the awfulness at work here.
My character was 8 because you have to roll for age, and these morons decided it was a good idea for people to be able to random roll adventurers who are literal babies. Yes, 0 years old is an option. Newborn barbarian warrior, off to save the world.
My character was a lesbian because the dice said she was a girl, and the system said I had to roll for sexual characteristics, like breast size. Gross. Of course, the system also applied a massive downward adjustment to her breast size for being, y’know, an actual child. So she was an A cup. For those of you wondering how an 8 year was an A cup, it’s because these geniuses remembered to include an age adjustment but didn’t remember to actually include an option on the table for “I haven’t fucking hit puberty yet you disgusting perverts.”
Anyway, the reason we’re talking about this hypothetical child’s hypothetical breast size (thanks FATAL, God you suck so much) is because you then have to roll for sexuality, and for women this is modified by breast size! I am not shitting you, this is how unbelievably fucking awful this game is. Every big titted lesbian you’ve ever met doesn’t actually exist according to FATAL. I swear to God even the Rimworld guy had more brains than this.
And she was a prostitute because you roll for your career, but the careers all have stat minimums. Don’t meet the minimum, roll again. And being 8 gave her huge penalties to her stats, so the only career in the entire book she actually qualified for was prostitution.
If you feel like throwing up right now I completely understand.
My favorite thing about fatal is that you can read several reviews of it, all will be summed up vety similarly, but it induces a verbose disgust that leads to every review being a distinct archive of points where each reviewer got sufficiently pissed off at the creator of the game for publishing it.
For all I hear of the misogyny, of which I trust the reviewers is abundant, every review leaves me thinking that this man believes things about men that should offend the entire human species.
I miss the person I was prior to having read this.
What a terrible day to be literate
I read this in the voice of Mr. Cody. That was the only way I could get through it.
I had to force myself to keep reading this.
Is that the one where you roll for anal circumference?
It is, and that’s somehow one of the least offensively bad things about it.
That’s pretty funny
Thank you Mr Abyss, for staring back at me.
Thanks for the write up, it sounds like it’s maximum value is as kindling…
But what’s wrong with the RimWorld dev, am I ootl here?
Rimworld was originally coded so that all women were at least slightly bisexual, if not fully gay, while all men were either gay or straight. According to the creator - who vociferously defended this stance claiming it was based on “research” - bisexual men like me don’t exist.
That’s honestly just the start of the rabbit hole. The game was hardcoded so that men always prefer younger partners and women always prefer older partners. Also women were eight times less likely to be willing to hit on someone. This is, to be clear, supposed to be a scifi game set in the future, but modelling sexual politics apparently taken from 1980’s TV.
There’s an amazing breakdown of the whole thing here; https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rimworld-code-analysis
You can find the creator of Rimworld in the comments defending all of his nonsense and making a total ass of himself in the process. Unfortunately the rest of the comments are a total shit show because the average gamer simply does not have the mental maturity needed to handle critical analysis deeper than “graphics bad”.
I’m told they eventually changed some of this stuff after enough backlash, years later, for whatever that’s worth. Maybe the creator actually did some learning and growing, and if so, good for them.
“How RimWorld’s Code Defines Strict Gender Roles”, it’s catnip power words for the polar outrage mafiosi camps.
That weird comment, my sides.
I don’t know why I haven’t heard about it, but it’s very fascinating to see dev’s biases leaking into their product just like that.
voroxpete@sh.itjust.works said in Just don’t: > According to the creator - who vociferously defended this stance claiming it was based on “research” - bisexual men like me don’t exist.
I, too, spent much time 15 year ago sitting at the back of the bus reading Savage Love on my way to work. Research scientists, unite!
Harping on rimworld, One of the most moddable games ever made, for the creator not understanding the depths of human sexuality is a little obtuse to say the least.
There are a lot of things that people won’t understand and there are so many mods to resolve this it seems silly to expect the creator to “get it”.
I’ve been around gay and trans people my entire life but I still don’t think that I fully understand human sexuality or our cultural relationships with gender norms.
Undoubtedly if I were to architect something like Rimworld I would get it wrong but I hope I would have the foresight to leave an amendment process so that it could be modded into fitting with people’s understanding in the future.
Either you straight up did not understand the comment you responded to or you’re trying to move the goalposts.
Either way, poor form
My issue isn’t with the mechanics; yes, I’m sure that stuff can be modded.
My issue is with the idea that I should give my money to someone who will actively defend the claim that I do not exist.
Put it this way; if there were no non-white people in Rimworld, and the reason why was because the creator firmly believed that by the time humanity gets to space white people would have “won the race war and exterminated all the scum” would you still feel comfortable giving that person your money just because “I can mod that out”?
I actually feel better about having pirated the game instead of paying for it. It also explains why the base game and all the DLC are around the same price and it never fucking goes on sale.
Jesus. I thought Lamentations of the Flame Princess was bad…
I didn’t even get into how the underlying system is abysmally bad even when you try to strip away all the gross shit.
Like, stats are generated by rolling 10d100/10-1. Yes, you read that correctly. Then there are five derived attributes generated as an average of four base stats, so if something modifies a base stat you have to recalculate the derived stat, but then those derived stats also set things like your carry weight, so you have to recalculate that and… It’s exhausting.
Combat is atrocious. There are criticals, but they have no relation to each other, so you can cleave through someone’s appendix and their belly button but leave everything in between untouched. Magic requires you to roll to see if you say the words correctly. The whole thing is an ungodly nightmare.
Magic requires you to roll to see if you say the words correctly.
I hate this kind of realism for the sake of realism
FATAL is, somehow, simultaneously a masterclass in realism for the sake of realism, and also the most unrealistic game ever made. There is a specific stat for how many words per minute you can speak, a stat for the longest word you know, and a stat for how far back your earliest memory is. But also, the system uses the concept of “humors” as something that actually has real-world effects, has the aforementioned critical system where you can crit individual organs but leave the surrounding organs unscathed, the ability to roll up a 4 year old with B-cups, and all kinds of other absolutely deranged nonsense that has no business whatsoever calling itself realistic.
Oh, and if your character’s intelligence is low enough, you get to roll to see if they have “R****d Strength”. So that’s great.
It’s like one dark corner had a walkabout to poll all the other dark corners for ideas, Jesus Christ on a cracker
The one thing FATAL has going for it is how terrible it is. Any improvement would make it not so perfectly horrible, and thus not as good.
I guess it could be sped up with a computer just generating the random character
Yes, but then you’d have to actually play FATAL, and you really don’t want that.
I don’t want to sacrifice coders to insanity, like some sort of slaneshi torture program
deleted by creator
Honestly FATAL isnt even fun to read its just mad cringe. Like the most in depth look into the mind of an incel.
Yeah, basically a complete listing of the kind of “jokes” edgy internet dweebs made and then checked to see the reaction before they decided if they meant it or not.
It’s not even a fucking rpg since everything is a diceroll. It’s like pen and paper progress quest.
Roll for the pen. Also roll for the paper.
Could you clarify your instructions? I’m smashing two small loaves of bread together but nothing’s happening.
You nees to roll the rolls.
It’s ALWAYS a horror show with FATAL. I’ve blocked EVERY group that invites people to fatal and my life is better for it. Mr Lake and Mr Foot? (no first names) Rot in prison you creepy fuxks.
I would make a joke about kissing my ass, but discussions about FATAL often include a need for anal circumference. No thanks.
There are groups that actually play FATAL? Terrifying.
At this point I feel the rpg culture should be firmly separated again from the mainstream only to have the mainstream stand between itself and this kind of awfulness.
For as long as the hobby’s existed, “RPG” has been quietly misread as “roll-playing” and “games” like this shite are examples of that confident ignorance given form. 🤷🏼♂️🤢🤪
How about some RIFTS? 😈
I absolutely love the world(books) from RIFTS™. The system itself is… Painful.
Though playing Palladium RPG did help me to understand how it was supposed to be functional, in some ways anyway.
Palladium was foundational to everything in RIFTS and it was clear the overlap was just supposed to be implied knowledge, especially from the later rulebooks.
I just wish someone would combine TMNT & Other Strangeness’s character creation (any animal etc.,) with Spore or some other creature creation engine in a CRPG.
it’d be tough to balance but holy hell would that be something fun
It was a bit need you had to pick and choose what to do with.
Your cyber knight with AR and SDC hitpoints is dead the second a child brings out a Wilks laser pea shooter with a full eclip
But in an SDC environment that same cyber knight is an absolute terror.
The world building through Erin Tarn is what makes the books entertaining even when you don’t even play it IMHO
I would just casually read the rule books for fun. I had binders of Palladium NPCs with mapped towns and cities.
No campaign ever got off the ground, but it did develop my love of worldbuilding.
Gonna recommend Red Markets again to everyone. There’s a bunch of stuff in there about like, negotiating new jobs and prices and stuff, which is cool, but the combat and everything is all boiled down to a single dice roll. One Black d10, one red d10. Add any modifiers, and if black is higher than red, you succeed. In combat, if it hits, the black shows how much damage and the red shows what body part. This makes combat soooooo much more fluid than most of the DnD games i’ve played.
