It was this big coffee table looking book with photos of Bernini sculptures standing in for art, right?

That game where you play emo godlings?

The copy I saw had nice illustrations inside.

It's a clever little game in an enormous (and lovely) package. Nice typography, great layout, adequate art, gorgeous but awkward format. I think it could have been done in about forty pages, 6x9 and gotten a ton more play.

Quote from: Simlasa;362429That game where you play emo godlings?

No, not really.  But if you're looking for an excuse to use the term "emo", knock yourself out.

Quote from: Halfjack;362430I think it could have been done in about forty pages, 6x9 and gotten a ton more play.

It did, in fact, originally -- the little pink Pharos Press edition.  It's the version I personally prefer, though the great white art book is much prettier.

So, tdd -- do you want to know about the system or the setting?  I can run down the former pretty well, but I always diverged from the canon setting.  I'm confident that GrimGent can (and will) give you a much better idea of the latter.

!i!

Quote from: Ian Absentia;362431No, not really.  But if you're looking for an excuse to use the term "emo", knock yourself out.It did, in fact, originally -- the little pink Pharos Press edition.  It's the version I personally prefer, though the great white art book is much prettier.

So, tdd -- do you want to know about the system or the setting?  I can run down the former pretty well, but I always diverged from the canon setting.  I'm confident that GrimGent can (and will) give you a much better idea of the latter.

!i!

Just the basics.  Back when I had an online game store (yes) at the wholesaler they had a stack and it caught my eye.  Not so much so that I'd have burdened my stock with it - this was during the great d20/OGL created die-off of RPGs in general.

Well, the Great White Book (GWB) was the revised and expanded edition of the original game, which was a POD offering in a digest-sized hardback, the Little Pink Book (LPB).  The GWB was really very lovely, much better organised and with some really good art (and no definitively bad art), but it really was an ungainly beast that didn't translate well to the game table.  I invariably used my LPB as a game table reference.

The system itself falls into the category of "resource management".  Each player takes the role of a being that holds power over an aspect of the world.  The amount of power that a character holds determines how many Miracle Points he has to perform miraculous feats, and the degree of miraculousness determines how many points must be spent.  As the game is diceless, the uncertainty for the player arises largely from not knowing how he should pace the performance of miracles, and how best to apply them.  The GM bears the burden of figuring out how much of a challenge to throw at the players to make them burn their Miracle Points without either overwhelming them or underwhelming them.

It's honestly a pretty neat game, but it requires a lot of buy-in to the concept on the part of both the players and the GM, and also requires a great deal of intuitive improvisation between players.  In other words, it's not the easiest game to get together off the cuff.

!i!

So it's like exalted but without the pocky?

Sorry, I had to.  Anyway, that sounds kind of interesting but probably outside the scope of what I'd play.  Thanks for filling me in.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;362446So it's like exalted but without the pocky?

Sorry, I had to.

Nah, that's all right.  I'll take the comment seriously for a moment, though.  It's really very, very little like Exalted -- it takes place in the contemporary world, and is more like Neil Gaiman's Sandman or American Gods, or Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light.  It doesn't play well to being a crazy combat fest.

I didn't even get the "pocky" reference.

GrimGent will almost surely be along in a bit to give you a much more thorough and sublime summary.

!i!

-with extra buthurt.

I think you did a good job explaining the gist of the game, Ian, but although I really dig the game, I find some of it's concepts difficult to grok. This may because of the way it's expressed - Psuedoephedrine mentioned the twee-ness of the writing - but also because I'm lousy at system. Whenever Grim (or you) talk about the game, I go, "ah, ok" but I've never been able to actually work out my Spahire & Steel campaign.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Ian Absentia;362431No, not really.  But if you're looking for an excuse to use the term "emo", knock yourself out.

Touchy.
You listed 'Sandman' as one possible insight into it... and I'd definitely see 'Sandman' as 'emo godlings'... among other things. It's not meant as a complete insult...
I've also seen people on RPGnet compare it to 'The Whispering Vault'... though I don't quite get the similarity except that the PCs have a lot of power and fight to protect 'reality'... or something.

Too bad it's pretty much unavailable for a thorough read.

Quote from: David R;362453...although I really dig the game, I find some of it's concepts difficult to grok.

In the months that followed the release of the GWB, there was some really OCD dude on RPG.net who incessantly hounded every thread about Nobilis, and especially every post by James Wallis, complaining that Hogshead needed to produce a simplified, smaller, paperback version of the game that the average gamer could afford (the GWB came out at close to $50 US).  The hounding was so severe that Wallis cited it among his eventual reasons to bag the gaming world.

I bring this story up only because, although I thought the OCD dude was an incredible prick at the time, I'm sorry to say that he may have been proven right.  Even as someone who enjoys the book, I have to say that Nobilis is a needlessly difficult game book to penetrate.  The decision to make it a big ol' art book that's awkward to handle at the table and costs a pretty penny at the outset was a chancy gamble, and I don't think it paid off.  Coupled with the challenging setting material and the fact that rules and fluff are thoroughly intermixed throughout the book made the game effectively inaccessible to many interested players and almost everybody else.

It'd be an interesting experiment for someone to strip out all of the real mechanics and present them in a streamlined book with only the barest setting and none of the fluff pieces.

I'd like that.  I'd run Amber with it.

!i!

Quote from: Simlasa;362456Touchy.

Enh.  "Emo" is one of those terms that has had so much baggage attached to it, and suffered from so much semantic drift, that it's rendered effectively useless.

!i!

Looks like there's a pretty comprehensive entry at wackypedia.

God damn that game sounds depressing.

G'ah, that's a pretty bad wiki article.  For starters, the author (or one of the authorship committee -- one of the things I hate about Wikipedia) throws out the term "Karma-based" in the first paragraph without any explanation of what the hell that means.

But, yeah, I won't defend the setting of Nobilis any more than I'd defend the setting of, say, the World of Darkness, except to say that I never played it the way it's written.

!i!