I really hate when I'm writing a book and then all of a sudden my characters start throwing racial slurs at eachother and having massive orgies at really inappropriate times for absolutely no reason whatsoever except for the time period I set the story in being a fantastical take on bloody medieval Europe 🥺 If only someone could have done something to stop it all from happening in the first place😔😥 RIP to my MC, Grognog the Racially insensitive Kinder-Fresser, cancelled but not forgotten 😭😭
I mean, in FATAL, 1. One of the possible accidental results of grabbing someone (right in the battle) is rape 2. Rape with sufficiently thick penis deals lethal damage. Penis length-based damage isn't specified tho
Another funny non-playable F.A.T.A.L race- (whatever they call the equivalent of) Wood Elves. Why? The further they are from their forest home in miles, the greater debuff they get to EVERY ROLL. Good luck going on an adventure
Also, the dwarves turn to stone if exposed to direct sunlight. So you basically play human, Anakin, and possibly a very mellow Kobold who was cast out due to being less sadistic than his peers.
See I was getting a giggle at the this until "The Racial Hatred Table" and I just started to cackled. This whole game is a car crash from beginning to end and I love you for sharing it.
"no special abilities like invisible gnomes" Doesn't this book feature Dwarves who can shapeshift into butterfly and hamsters and Anakim who have shit ton of abilities you need to roll on a table?
Even the Child Guzzlers have a special abilitie. Also, what exactly counts as a special abilitie? Aparently flying does not count, but being invisible does?
The funniest/worst part of the game is that you have to roll for your marriage relationship and if you roll on “Happy Marriage” but you are in a homosexual relationship it forces you to reroll
The author is so self conscious in the armor that changes your race.... he's specifically like "no black 'manhoods' ain't bigger..... but Asian and Jewish 'manhoods' are way smaller."
The correct "bake" is to say the phallus of their favourite group is civilized. Bigger barbaric and smaller well, smaller. Failure at even basic mental gymnastics.
"Racism!" "Misogyny!" "Cannibalism!" "Rape!" "Random dice rolls!" *_"By your powers combined, I am Captain FATAL!"_* Total side note, I can't help but notice the kinder-fresser voice ability assumes children listen or obey their parents.
you forgot "Obsessive References!" No seriously the amount of obscure reference material quoted in this RPG is honestly impressive. And disturbing. There's no way Byron didn't suffer from some form of obsessive disorder or autism. He put some real effort into quoting every messed up article about the middle ages he could.
This weird obscure niche video is the moat thoughtful dissertation on f.a.t.a.l. I have ever seen. Everyone points towards the anal circumference stat and racism armor, but this is the first I've heard of the general racism table, the personal racism rolls, and the slurs section. This game drips with 19th century scientific racism, I half expect to roll for bumps on the skull.
This was series was incredible for actually looking deeper than "lol the game has badly thought out sexual mechanics" to fully appreciate how EVEN WORSE the rest of it is put together, and all the other ways the author's issues are baked into it.
Thinking about it logically, it is not really that shocking. Making shocking and attention grabbing content is possible even with the smartest dudes. Being a vile monster of a human being is also possible (cough Schrödinger cough).
I mean, doesn't have to mean much, there are a lot of historians out there who mostly talk crap and are still stuck in the state of research of the 50s.
Look, if you can't take Aristotele's word that girl ogres are dumber than boy ogres, how can you ever know what historical accuracy is? He's a scholar!
The most whiplash moment for me while reading the system is seeing all the disgusting and edgy things contrasted to an ability that lets your fart deal AoE damage. So much for being a mature tabletop rpg for adults.
_"Huh. This seems pretty crunchy and awkward so far, but I don't see why it's the worst. The super in-depth ability score system is kind of cool, in a weird number dork sort of way, and the averaged d100 rolls, while incredibly awkward, are kind of a fun way to balance random stats!"_ *"To reroll your stats, you must take a random mental illness."* _"Ah... I see."_
Oh and those rerolls are supposedly going to be higher than average . . . _implying people with "mental illnesses" (many of which the game offers are better classified as different flavors of paraphilia) are better than average at things than people without them._ That is a very weird implications, but it ain't even in the top 40 for this game methinks.
I didn't read the whole book but I did at one point read through multiple chapters. Perhaps the most hilarious part was the chapter on crime and punishment. Not only did it talk about some of the most heinous crimes one could fathom, but while some were given one paragraph per race, the act of SA was given at least an entire page, much of it was tangentially related stuff like the historical statistics behind the act and not about the actual sentences for it. That alone tells you all you need to know about this abomination.
-remove christianity -explicitly limit the playable races to "smaller than giants" -add a race of biblical giants Impeccably consistent! Ddit: as a replier pointed out, nephilimi are from the old testament thus also in judaism thus not dependent on christianity, and potentially they were present in pagan religions round that part of the world
Nephilim were originally demigods; for example, in book of giants Gilgamesh was said to be nephilim. Later, when judaism became monotheist in 600s bce., they were changed into descendants of angels. Trey the Explainer has made good, deep video about nephilim. I highly recommend it if you want to know more.
@@yvonetubla7682 fundamentalist atheist? In what way? Let me guess; anyone who doesn’t just believe same as you is fundamentalist, since they hurt your fee-fees... After all, both studies and theists' own behavior has shown that your version of your god *is you* - same opinions, values, likes, dislikes, etc.
@@valivali8104 people dont convert from theism to atheism they convert from fundamentalist christian everything is literal with no understanding to fundamentalist atheist with even less rationality and understanding
Damn. There are a lot of 5s in that table. How the fuck is a party of 4 characters of randomly rolled races going to exist in this system without killing each other immediately.
Either a very generous GM who doesn't enforce that table to a draconian degree, four very lucky rolls on that individual racism table or, the most likely answer, "that's the neat part: they don't".
Step 1: The party meets Step 2: PVP (famously loved in TTRPGs) Step 3: Whoever dies rerolls their characters Step 4: Repeat until your party can work together
Well, it's just rEaLiStIc that people of different races couldn't cooperate at all. That's why the Greeks all banded together against the Persians, and no major city-states sought for the Persians to stick it to other city-states. It's also why empires in racially-diverse areas like the Mediterranean (with whites, [slur for Africans], and [slur for Muslims] living one boat ride away from each other) were absolutely impossible. And history in other places _definitely_ isn't full of anything that might contradict my thesis.
31:31 I was not aware the black people have glow in the dark eyes visible for three miles. You learn something new everyday I guess. What great realism.
My first thought reading that was equipping an ENTIRE army of like a hundred thousand with it and just having them stand outside of a camp 3 miles out in the dead of night.
Creator: this is my super hyper realistic scholarly simulation of real medieval Europe. Creator: also, no burials, just cremations, because burial was invented by the Egyptians and i dont want any non-european influences in my setting.
Borderline speculative fiction. Wasn't most history and myth of Europe passed down as verbal tradition making it next to impossible to know for sure what things were really like before they were Christianized by Rome?
@@Ryu1ify Well, a lot of Christianization of mainland Europe was actually not done by Rome but by already christianized Irish missionars. But yes, we don't know much about the pre-christian mythologies and there are a lot of myths and misconceptions out there. There are some Runestones and stuff like that, but most of our knowledge is based on writings by christian authors like Snorri Sturluson and highly biased accounts of different regional cults by the Romans for example. And a lot of the more known fairytales and things like that are entirely early modern or even victorian inventions.
@@AbstractTraitorHero Mostly better because you've got a bunch of people all remembering the thing. Depending on how strictly you're meant to recite it, you've then either got multiple people who can check each other on a miswording or a misremembered segment and fix it back to the correct one, or you've got a bunch of forks that you can basically check the evolution of to reconstitute the original from the common elements. Meanwhile you generally only have ONE written source, usually started from an oral tradition that got written down, so you can't really crowdsource a verification for that written thing unless they're really diligent at citation and the citations survived instead of existing as fragments quoted in other texts if at all. (it's fascinating, really)
Nah, that's the wackiest part. A layperson will look at stats and get away with stupid ideas like these, but being a statistician means analyzing potential biases and understanding how one might arrive at weak results. Think of it this way: An ignoramus might read crime stats and believe that certain people are "more violent and criminal". A statistician will know to account for generational wealth, where they live, institutional bias, etc. The same ignoramus looks at wealth distribution and says "this kind of religion has many rich people, they must be greedy", a statistician (any scholar) knows the story of how in the middle ages Christians were discouraged by weird interpretations of the Bible not to deal with money, so inevitably the people who took these kinds of jobs were the largest non-Christian minority. And I'm not even starting to get into the Bayesian side of things. In short: If a character is interesting enough to "star" in a TTRPG, they won't be average.
@@alvedonarenNot if the author is also a massive troll and spent half a decade attempting to write something screwed up just to slap the "OGL" label on it.
F.A.T.A.L. is basically Fear & Hunger if Miro lacked any and all self-awareness. And if it was a TTRPG instead of an RPG maker game (Ironically Fear & Hunger started off as a homebrew TTRPG).
Are there rules for it I can find? I've said that the only thing this system could almost be used for was a funger campaign, but I wanna see if there's even a better alternative in that regard
This comment hit the nail on the head. Fear and Hunger would make an incredible tabletop RPG. You have to wonder where F.A.T.A.L. went wrong in comparison with how similar some of the concepts are, sometimes it feels like the author's narcissism bleeds edginess into this book/TTRPG. While I've loved FoH for being masterfully dark, F.A.T.A.L. fell into incredibly distasteful territory while attempting to make something avant-garde. I now wish to play a (proper) dark fantasy TTRPG world unlike this one after thinking about FoH in this format because of this comment haha
Not gonna lie I was bracing myself for that slurs reveal (completely forgetting what they were from when i skimmed this before) and I was so disappointed.
Not even a now-classic "knife ears" These things always were deeply personal and dehumanizing. The knife ears thing at the surface level seems like a reference to their one differentiating body part, like "don't trust those ears, they'll cut ya." But there's a deeper bit of lore of how it proposes that goblins and elves are related because they both have pointy ears. That elves are just another type of monster. Real-world slurs normally fall out of fashion as time changes or they just lose their novelty/shock factor. "Moon cricket" being an example, one out of thousands I'm deeply ashamed in the author not respecting one of the tools of his people! Slur rotation is a necessary tactic in order to get these dehumanizing memes to catch on and spread
@@BMoser-bv6kn. . . You know you might have a point, I'm surprised they didn't include a "evolution of slurs in culture" table to the game, it seems very in-character for the author.
I've only ever heard faint references to FATAL, and always assumed it was shunned because of it's eexcessive sexual content. I can now see from just this one video that it goes far, far deeper than that.
This sounds like a game written by a 16 year old. Someone old enough to be aware of certain words, but not old enough to understand how to use those words in the correct context. Someone mentally immature enough to think this stuff was 'cool' or 'edgy'. Please tell me the authors weren't grown-ass men. Oh boy, did you save the 'best' till last. Those excised paragraphs actually, as in literally, made my jaw drop. Wow. Just wow.
It is horrifying, but I feel like you are dramatizing it a bit. Anyone can throw together messed up concepts and call it a day, even adult men. It is not exactly incomprehensible that someone would set out to make a game that is just full of awful, horrible, rancid and no good content.
Any time I find someone talking about FATAL, I have a knee jerk reaction where part of me is all, ""Well, I think it should be fine to make kinky games, even ones with adult violence in them". And then I get reminded immediately of some of the details of FATAL and go "but not like that". FATAL is an object lesson in how NOT to make a self-indulgent game that you actually intend to share with any other human being. It's... so bad... The sexism, the racism, the "I'm so smart and my game is so REAL" wankery...
I think even something like this has a right to exist and be shared with other people into kinky edgy shit. What is really problematic is how the authors keep insisitng that the game is "historically accurate" because then it crosses from edgy fiction into propaganda
@@JohnathanJWells Yeah. Trying to justify his edgefest as being super real and accurate and the smartest way of making a game system is... "I wanted to include racism because the real world has racism" Okay, though the WAY you included it is messed up. "I wanted to include all my sexual preferences as baked in rules of the world because they're the 'normal' preferences to have." Okay fine, though people who have different preferences are going to be questioning that. "I've made THE BEST game and if you disagree with anything I'm doing here's an ancient Greek philosopher to prove you wrong." ...dude what no. "It's historical/mythological!" No. No nope nah.
And like, maybe I out to make this clear and out in the open: I in no way think this should be BANNED. I don't think people should be forbidden to write a bigoted edgefest of a game/story/artwork. I'm absolutely going to judge them over it, though.
I mean It's one thing for a game to accommodate, or even indulge in some erotic role play. In FATAL, you will engage in mutually nonconsensual sex probably within the first two or three combats.
I literally did this whole process once with some friends online as an april fool's joke and pretended we were making "Homebrew" D&D characters, nobody there had actually played D&D OR even heard of FATAL beyond it being "this really bad game". We never played an actual round and it took two hours.
unfortunately, this is the actual, real-world etymology for the word "slave". slavs were often taken as slaves in medieval Western Europe, so the word shifted in meaning in some languages, English included. check an etymological dictionary if you think I'm bullshitting. so yeah, slavery has been with us for a long time. it seems our flawed morality evolved in a direction from "it's OK to kill and enslave anyone" to "only other families" to "only other tribes/nations" to "only other races" to "nobody". sadly, some of us are still trying to wrap their heads around these advanced, highly complex ethical propositions...
@@JohnSmith-ox3gy he's just concerned with having enough living space! Drang nach Osten, Lebensraum and all that. I'm pretty sure there's a scholarly source on this written by some Austrian dude. can't seem to find his book in any of the stores though, weird 🤔
Christianity was so core to the Christian Middle Ages idk how you could make an accurate game without it. Like the system of governance and power was split between secular and church authority, that’s a massive part of actual medieval politics and life. Women covered their hair bc of religious ideals; people didn’t drink milk half the year (they had almond milk) for religious reasons. Idk man. I can’t think of a single aspect of medieval European life not touched by Abrahamic religion in some way
You can when you think "accurate" means "as grimdark as possible" and Christianity has too much talking about donating to the poor, (attempting to) limiting wars between the faithful and stuff like that, which would make it less grimdark. Now, they can just pick all the "grimdark" parts of medieval christianity and justify it by "accuracy" (even if GREATLY exaggarating), while all the less grimdark stuff can be removed because "they were Christian influences")
I'm 25 minutes in and whoever wrote this book is a cinemasins guy. I can just feel it oozing out. "Oh, the only four light elves in this town just happen to be friends? That's unlikely. *Ding*" As if people who share similar traits wouldn't find comfort in the familiarity. Even if we're shotgunning fantasy realism, the writer's philosophy for the party is flawed in that it just assumes that race, gender, etc. wouldn't play a part in the group forming.
@@szczepanfiefiorka2107 He means that FATAL is set up with the assumption that most races are violently racist towards others, so the notion of Elves only being friends with other Elves is actually completely sensible.
I love how the game explicitly recommends you don't play as a woman, but only makes vague references to the party "not getting along" for race, when over half the races eat humans, two of whom specifically eat children, more than one of them are blinded by daylight, one turns to stone in daylight, and all of them will almost universally attack each other on sight. Yeah, playing as a woman is going to be so much worse for my social prospects in this fantasy setting than playing as the race who loves slavery, or the race that can't exist in sunlight, or the race that loves to eat babies.
In some old D&D settings, Orcs are described similarly to these trolls and ogres, plundering human cities, raping their women, keeping survivors as slaves. Basically all of that. Orcs in classic D&D are violent, and understandably feared by humans. And cited as the reason why there are half orcs in the first place. But even so, you know what D&D had the sense to consider? That because of how Orcs are presented, they would not make good player characters. In fact, it even goes out to say that most Half-Orcs look more or less human to the untrained eye. It specified this for a reason, because they would be discriminated against the point of unplayability otherwise. FATAL doesn't seem to understand this. The real world doesn't have a concept of player characters, but our game does. And in this sense, a player should be playable. The same reason in classic D&D players couldn't be dragons, orcs, ogres, trolls, because these were designated as enemies, monsters, because of how the material presented them. You don't play a race that is known to eat another player race. It would never occur. If they have such a hardon for realism, why is it even possible, even likely at that, that the human eater can travel with humans? At the start of watching this I thought "I wonder if this is salvageable. It might have some good ideas in there" and there's a few I'm seeing but the way they're implemented is fucked up beyond all repair.
In thousand days a broken clock is right two thousand times. In thousand pages this game is right just a handful. I wonder if anyone has made it trough character creation with this game.
"You don't play a race that is known to eat another player race" Yeah if you're a COWARD Catch me playing a mantis who devours chunks from the flesh of his slain enemies 😤
I'm glad newer D&D editions are moving away from restrictive lore like this. A lotta monstrous races (orcs, goblins, Yuan-ti and especially Drow) are the kinda "monsters" that sound (and often are) fun to play as until you realize a strict DM would restrict you to evil alignments and make majority races murder-hobos to you for the sake of "accuracy" (and an especially draconian DM might force you to play as a sadistic raider or slaver because that's what the game implied all of your selected race inherently were).
"You don't play a race that is known to eat another player race." Catch me having played a mantis paladin that ripped the flesh from the corpses of his slain enemies
Something I appreciate a lot in a review/analysis is to meet the media - even awful media - on it's own terms. It's way more interesting to criticise something like FATAL for what is is and what it's trying to be than to solely laugh at it's misguided intentions. This said, I feel like I've spent 5+ hours planning out a build in 5e. This would be a nightly project for me for MONTHS. Seeing "enunciation" listed as a subtrait under "Dexterity" make me clap. edit: I nearly screamed at "whenever 1 is seen". This was the age of microsoft messenger so I guess that stylistic choice makes sense.
Man, it's like the designers were just almost every flavor of That Guy/Problem Player rolled into one: The racist, the sexist, the megaperv, the guy who just can't stop himself from mixing his fetishes into everything, the guy who cares about the rules too much, the Chaotic Stupid guy, the Dunning-Kruger effect "genius", the guy who always has to bring politics into everything, the edgelord, etc.
So they have you roll your species, with a 41% chance that you eat people and cannot possibly have a non-antagonistic social role in demi-human societies, and like an 80% chance that different sentient species absolutely revile each other, but then they discourage randomly rolling for sex because the gender roles that would be imposed by society would be a huge problem for female adventurers (allegedly, I don't think this would actually be as huge an issue as some might think. Female travelers existed in medieval Europe and owning weapons would have been the norm. It would actually be in trying to stop being an adventurer, settle down, and integrate into anything but the highest or lowest wrung of society that gender roles would be very limiting. Someone wandering around as a pilgrim or merchant or fantasy adventurer or something really would not run into nearly the same limitations as someone trying to make ends meet at any level above serfdom and below inherited absolute power, living permanently in a rural or urban settlement, where gender roles would actually be a big problem.
The main problem seems that the authors wanted to make a Dark Fantasy setting were the evil comes from human darkness rather than supernatural evil, but lacked the courage and brains to do it properly and retreated to this scholarly bs to cover their backsides. Also they were sex obsessed. That said the set up isn't a bad idea for campaign but needed to handled more directly and more honestly about what they wanted to do.
Funny thing: all male specimens depicted are circumcised. Something very, very rarely done in Europe. Call it nitpicking, but for a game so steeped in gritty fantasy, hrmpf realism, it is obviously immersion breaking for a European viewer like me. Kinderfresser Ogres aren't even a thing. All Ogres eat children. It's like dividing people into subclasses like Coke Drinker. Btw. Ogres aren't a European thing. Trolls are. But hey... This game has literally no understanding of anything it writes about. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. It made the roll backwards, beeing so bad swinging back to be entertaining.
@i.cs.zamodits That's what's always confused me about this point, which I've heard before. It's a French word, I believe, and if France isn't part of Europe I don't know what else they could be. Sure, it's derived from the name of an Etruscan god, but nobody's talking about a Mediterranean ruler of the underworld when they're talking ogres
@@Eidenhoek in fact, the etruscans were, if anything, _more_ european than modern europeans, most of whom are indo-european, which, despite the name, is an ethnic group which didn't originate in india or europe, but central asia
Oh boy I can't wait to see more of this lol. I've known about Fatal for a while but naturally I haven't really felt a need to look much further into the details of it as my brain usually just shuts off once things start getting super racist and such. But framing it through the process of how you make an actual character in this stupidly absurd system does make it more digestible and you do a good job of breaking down the absurdity along the way.
18:46 Who would have guessed that’s not even accurate to mythological kobolds who where mostly house and mine spirits in some form of contract with the houses owner. Acting as supernatural servants ether willingly or through some fairy tale style bind. Thus even if we had to take the stupid slavery angle. The other way around would make more sense.
Funniest thing is tthat it's pretty old, so when it was made, rolling dice on apps would not be so common. Imagining creating a character for F.A.T.A.L. with physical dice, pen and papper, and probably a calculator too.
As someone who's into history, I always get annoyed when people use "realism" as an excuse for constant gratuitous rape and racism because "that's how things were at the time" which is absolutely not true. Now I'm not going to claim that racism or sexism didn't exist in medieval Europe, but the point I'm trying to make is that applying modern values to medieval settings is nonsense, as not only are these issues extremely complex and nuanced to begin with, but people's concepts of ethnicity and gender were so different to what they are now that it is a pointless endeavour to try and equates them to modern sensibilities. Trying to discuss medieval ethics and morals in current day is like trying to discuss the finer point of a culture we've never even visited once. For one, the concept of people identifying as being part of the same "race" because of their skin colour is an extremely modern one (and won't you know it, one largely pushed by racist groups). If you were in medieval times and tried telling Norsemen that they are culturally related to, say, Angles because they both have light skin, they would have laughed in your face and probably split your skull open (okay, maybe not that second part although you would have had it coming). So ironically, people in the Middle-Ages were aguably simultaneously more and elss racist than modern times, because people didn't consider their neighbour kin just because they had similar skin tones but by the same token, that also meant that White Europeans didn't consider dark-skinned people as any more foreign than they did those living next to them. Also, the idea that there were no non-Caucasians in Europe and that justifies erasing them from your setting (which in turn suggests that Medieval times only existed in Europe, I guess?) is just factually untrue. Yes, obviously it wasn't as common as it is now, but Black, Middle-Eastern or Asian people absolutely existed in Europe including some who permanently resided there. And no, it wasn't entirely because of slavery (especially not in the Middle-Ages). Commerce, diplomatic envoys, academic exchanges and simple curiousity about other cultures were already a thing at the time, you know. And yes, it was relatively common for non-Caucasian people to be featuredy feature in medieval European art and literature. As for gender, obviously gender norms were enforced much more strongly than they are today but again, there's a lot of nuance to take into consideration, especially as it could change quite drastically from one culture to the enxt, especially since, as I alluded to earlier, it wasn't nearly as unified as it is today. So while defying gender norms was often seen as unacceptable in those times, I don't think it's entirely fair to say that medieval people viewed women as possession, as female roles were often regarded highly as well and women being involved in a much wider variety of trades than one might expect. And rest assured, rape was absolutely viewed as detestable and something only the weakest and most cowardly of men would do even in medieval times.
@@dusksentry5836 Thank you! I appreicate the kind response. Do keep in mind that I am not a professional historian, though, so make sure to look some up if you want more in-depth knowledge on the topic. There's three channels I particularly appreciate on RU-vid: - Miniminuteman, who is an archeology graduate who debunks nonsense historical conspiracy theories and makes original mini-documentary videos. - Artifactually Speaking, ran by a veteran archaeologist who discusses various, usually fairly obscure topics, often directly from archaeological sites. - History of Everything Podcast which, as the name implies, discusses all sorts of historical as well as current geopolitical topics, and occasionally reviews historical films/TV shows, particularly ones that claim to accurately depict individuals and events. I'm sure there's plenty more, just make sure they are reliable (because of course, there's also a lot of bollocks being spewed on YT)
Not gonna lie, this comment made two interesting questions pop in my head: 1) How did the previous 500+ years before the colonial age affect how those colonial powers handled the natives living in those colonies? 2) Did the ability to travel further distances more easily have any effect on modern ideas of race?
You've lead me down a dark path here. I never knew about FATAL, now I can't tear my eyes away, probably because I know 13 year old me would have found this nightmare compulsive, and 13 year old me was a complete jerk. I'm very grateful that I was born 20 years too early for this book, or, ugh. I do think the profound ickiness of Race in this game (and indeed others) might be slightly lessened by the use of the word Species instead. It's the same (pointless) effect, but it doesn't map so disturbingly to the real world. But as you say, the intention here is very much not that. Excellent Tasha Yar reference, BTW.
Finally a comment pointing out the star trek reference ^^ A lot of 13 year olds would certainly be drawn to these sorts of works too! It's the game's dark nature, but it's attempts at realism were definitely this game's downfall. Species would've been too mild for this author.
I feel you on the "species" thing; even if all offered "races" were supposed to be very related to humans for some reason, a work could simply make Elves, Dwarves and the like all evolutionary offshoots of humans. The fossil record does suggest such species existed in the past, even if they all died out/got homogenized into _Homo Sapiens_ at some point. So yeah, I think calling them fantasy species over fantasy races is a lot more fitting, and can lead to some fun world-building (since with how evolution works fantasy creators can get really creative with what caused the divergence).
I have a very quiet hate-on for the use of "race" to mean "sentient species" in so much fantasy. I find it very silly. I'm not sitting around quietly raging about it or anything but it *is* frustrating.
The moment this crossed my front page my heart dropped. I fear the dark taint (hehe) that is FATAL will never be cleaned from my algorithm unless it is bathed in the cleansing light of god’s wrath.
This feels like the kind of game where the real game is just sitting there making a character with your friends while drinking and repeatedly proclaiming, "Surely it can't get worse than this." In between wondering aloud."What the hell were they thinking?" And laughing at the sheer craziness of it all.
18:25: Mythological accuracy note-legendary kobolds were spirits, often depicted as animals, flames, or candles rather than humanoid beings. Some were household spirits like brownies, others lived on ships and helped sailors, and still others haunted caves and mines. Kobolds didn't enslave people, in part because they didn't have an organized society, or at least not one that storytellers knew about. I got all of this off of Wikipedia. Wikipedia didn't exist in the earliest months of FATAL's development, which is probably when the devs did their "research," but if they bothered to research kobolds in any depth they probably could have learned at least some of it. Instead, they made up a subterranean slaver race. For some reason.
I salute you sir, I've heard that F.A.T.A.L characters can take over 10 hours to create because it makes you roll for EVERY ASPECT. Fine, a bit of randomness is fine but if you make it all random you're more likely to get a character who can't tell their ass from their thumb than someone who can actually go on an adventure, the creator of this sounds like a specimen to play with.
@@Orinslayer I think that was something provided early on in the days the game first came out. A program to create characters with. Classic text-mode DOS program I always have a soft spot for those, which makes me a little conflicted
Not every aspects... My friends and I were playing Warhammer Fantasy, we rolled everything randomly for fun, and the girl of the group started that she wanted to roll for her boobs size. Obviously there isn't such a thing in WF. Jokingly, I said "hey, we could roll on the F.A.T.A.L. tables", and she thought it was a good idea... No matter HOW MUCH we tried to explain how fetid this game was, she wanted to roll her tits and MANY other bodily stats using F.A.T.A.L... And also insisted so much about it that we also did it... Uggh. At least it was only some parts, not the whole thing, we were still playing Warhammer Fantasy. Anyways, the book has MULTIPLE pages and tables about basically every body part and body function. Including the infamous anal circumference, how long your fingers are FOR EACH HAND, and many other stupid shit. But there's NOTHING about balls size nor sperm volume. You'd expect that a troglodyte like the author of this cesspool of filth would want to drown females in cum or something, but nope. You get your dick size and that's it. Compared to how unnecessarily detailed the rest of the body is in that book, it's just surprising there's nothing about testicles. Anyways I rolled a 2 inches dick and the highest score for anal circumference (20 inches IIRC), which weirdly came into play one time...
If the author works in an office, the women absolutely teach women starting there the route to avoid his cubicle. Also; wants to be "scientifically accurate", rolls for humors. Fuckin LOL
Additional note for Races: Elfs are also absolutely unplayable. They reduce their stats for every Mile they are away from their home forest, meaning before every roll you have to triangulate that distance to update ALL OF YOUR STATS. Also you die if any stat falls to zero. So no traveling adventures for you, only stay in the vicinity of that forest. Pretty much everything besides humans are unplayable in this game, making 70% of characters unplayable, just by their race
I'd really like to know how to envision a character with 0 enunciation but 200 something "rhetorical" charisma. Or with 0 facial charisma and 200 bodily attractiveness. So something like being able to string the most beautiful poetry and the most convincing political speeches together, but constantly mumbling, stuttering and falling over one's own words. "Faw---mmm--score 'n,umm, uhh, un twenny---eeeeeh-years a-a-go..." O yeah, and being the mother of all butterfaces.
Wouldn't facial charisma be how well you can sell a lie? Like you could be drop dead gorgeous but if you can't keep a lie hidden in a poker face you are cooked. Doesn't really matter though this would be problem #178362 of this system.
Came here after watching Cam Sandwich's "worst board game mechanics" video since this popped up in my recommended after that. Gotta say this looks absolutely terrible. One thing I sort of like though is the amount of complexity in the stats (minus the sexism, racism, etc.), however it really seems like something suited more to a video game than a tabletop experience, and even then, *that* many dice is pretty unreasonable.
I have to say my friend, I really do enjoy your work that you do on building a character. I may not always agree with your views on certain games or points of games, but I love how you display a fair point on them no matter what. But I have to say with this video your talents on providing a fair view, they were tested and showed why I enjoy your content. Cuz I couldn’t do something like this without just telling people it’s trash. My hat is off to you🤘. Now on to part two of this game lol
I managed to stumble upon your channel and saw "Let's make a Character" and I got really excited because I love unique and fun character builders. So I decided from the onset to make a character alongside you. The Anakim aren't the only thing the creator wanted to bang. The amount of numbers and back and forth one has to do to get the numbers. During the Gender modifiers, as a male character it only modified the small percentages by a SINGLE point. And when dealing with such large numbers, I highly doubt it will matter in the long run. But my guy had to be thinking to himself "Aw yeah, and I'm gonna make guy's Drive +3%, and Women's -3%, Because it's statistically proven in this source-". Either way. I'm going to see this through to the end because I hate myself. So if you find my comments on the next video's, you're free to follow along on my journey with me. So far I have a Male Human, who is very ugly, fairly strong, pretty dextrous, and kinda dumb. Not posting numbers here.
@puffnisse He became a Slave Hewer to a Serf Soldier Master and is built like a truck with like 143 Str and 114 Physical Fitness, but his Bodily Attractiveness and Facial Charisma were both less than like 70.
What you said at the beginning about Fatal being bad because of a combination of negative qualities is so accurate. I have came across games with a worse world (Wraeththu), games with worse rules (VTNL) and games that are unplayable (RaHoWa and HYBRID) but Fatal is a perfect combination of all negative qualities a TTRPG can have.
In the middle of watching this, but I do like the idea of rolling stats for sub-abilities first and then taking the average to be the base ability stat
Ah yes, I remember some 7 or 8 years ago my friend and I jokingly took our first steps into FATAL by both creating characters...they were also our last steps into FATAL
He mentioned the ones like ogres and trolls were eliminated immediately due to their eating and raping of humans being a (frankly their only) defining trait of their culture, but said that others were also unplayable for reasons he'd get into. I'd presume that was one of the reasons he'd get into
I would buy an Oglaf RPG so fast, they're leaving money on the table by not making one. Like, they could absolutely get away with 4 pages of sex rules that make absolutely no sense.
@@zigmenthotep I would add a stat to the Oglaf RPG that is only for role playing, the entire entry starts with the name: Gay Stat Followed by the explanation, which starts with a note by the Creator: "No not that Gay we are using the Ye Old English dictionary definition of it according to the Oxford English Dictionary!" and a scan of the dictionary with the part in question highlighted: (old-fashioned) happy and full of fun. So if your stat is low you need to roleplay like your character is depressed if it is high you are the opposite.
Where do bad folks go when they? They don't go to heaven where the angels fly. They go a lake of fire and play F.A.T.A.L campaigns 'till the Fourth of July!
If I had a month, I don't think I could fully articulate all my issues with this book and this is only part one. Hoo boy, we're in for one hell of a ride.
I love the idea of an RPG where you have no say in your character’s stats, design, personality, or even choices! I hate playing the game myself, I’d rather roll dice and do nothing at all.
Holy hell, the more I learn about FATAL the less I respect anything about it. It seems like what you'd get if D&D first edition, the Dark Universe TTRPGs, a proper kinky/fetish game system, a pile of dubious relics of academia and the intrusive thoughts of a racist, nerdy 16-year-old into a blender, then strained out all of the good attributes of all the above components (in case they survived in the resulting radioactive slurry). I can see why everyone mocked this thing, even in 2004.
FATAL for me is an amazing case study on what makes a TTRPG bad. Because we all have our own preference on what makes a game good. Some like the social aspects of Vampire The Masquerade, while others prefer the Teamwork Hero Questing of Pathfinder 2e. FATAL in my opinion does so much wrong that, even if you were to edit out all the unnessecary offensive stuff; you would be left with a below avarage TTRPG with a supricingly deep combat system.
