FATAL

Pun-Pun it is! So far, our guy isn't godly, but that name is just too good to pass up.

Also, I got rid of the folder.

...They can make concave lenses, but not convex? Forgive my lack of knowledge of glassesography, but wouldn't that just involve turning the lens around?

Dire Sloth: It's the other way around, but also, it has to do with the shape of the glass, not which way it's facing. Think of it in terms of both sides either bulging out (convex) or pinching inward at the middle (concave). One's harder to do than the other without cracking the glass.

... How the hell did this happen in this thread?

edited 15th Sep '09 8:57:50 AM by GoggleFox

Life would suck for me in the FATALverse.

Well, you know, besides the whole "being female" thing.

And the whole "being in the FATALverse" thing.

J Bridge, this may be a question that ends with my head going like the bloke from scanners, but could you send my a copy of fatal.pdf? I really want to see this with my own eyes. Great work so far btw; will be following this.

Sure. PM me your email address and I'll send it to you as an attachment.

I'm pretty sure that I can get you arrested for trafficking now.

Well, he could always get it through other means. Or he could just buy the book. Don't know where he'd get it, though. Maybe I should go down to the nearest RPG store and ask for it. See what reaction I get.

Actually, no. That's a bad idea and I can't run for long.

Dear Mother of God I'm really doing. With Bridge's permission, I too, will be rolling a FATAL character and joining this liveblog. Expect an update on my status tonight.

edited 16th Sep '09 9:21:17 PM by polymphus

Alright, let's get this going. For dice I'll be using the Hamete virtual dice server, since I don't have anything except D6 handy in the real world.

First up, roll D100 for race: 48. That means I'm a human. I'm slightly disappointed, but FATAL tells me 'the dice don't lie', so human it is.

While scrolling down to find my racial attributes I found an illustration that's almost impossible to describe, but I'll try. There's a pair of shocked looking dwarves attacking a naked, blonde Sharon Stone lookalike with terrifyingly huge calf muscles. Instead of arms, she has gigantic butterfly wings. One of the Dwarves is trying his best to kill a nearby rock, while the second is staring with a look of horror at her arse and is about to hit himself over the head with his own hammer. It's cliche to say, but what the hell: I am not making this up. Couldn't if I tried.

Aside from that, there seems to be a naked woman on every second page. Literally every second page.

Onto humans and I see this little gem: "Common male first names include John and Thomas." Common last names apparently include Hall, assume we want to play as Byron Hall. Considering that FATAL seems to have a huge boner for PC killing, that might not be such a bad idea...

And here's something else brilliant. Rolling age for humans is 4D100/4-30. I rolled this and got...-2.25 years of age. According to the FATAL PDF, they've arranged the equations so negative ages are totally impossible. Funny then, how I managed to roll one completely at random on my first attempt. Let's try again.

...

drumroll please...

37.75. I'll count that as a 38. That means I'm middle aged, which means I have 110% weight and 99% height. Height is rolled at 5"4. I'm 5"6 in RL, so that can't be that small can it? But according to FATAL, the average human male's height is 5"10. For every inch under, I get penalties. Let's take a look at this.

6" under gives me -24 pounds of weight, -18 Strength and -12 bodily attractiveness. My bloke is also 152 pounds, which is apparently just above average. I get +1 Strength for being 2 over. My BMI is 25, which means I'm overweight. Hooray!

Onto most attractive and repulsive features then. Most attractive is eyes, most repulsive is hair. Said hair is light brown. I'm moving onto skin colour and would like to point out something that's already come up: there are no black people in FATAL's world. The darkest skin colour is tan, which is 'the skin of a labourer'. My bloke rolled 10 on a D100, which means he's pale. There's a nice little note here saying that they 'rarely go outdoors.'

Let's recap. A fat, long haired basement dweller who might well have a surname like Hall. Hmm. This is getting more and more tempting.

Sweet mother of christ, the hair thickness table. I rolled another 10 ("thin and frizzy"), so -d12 to attractiveness. The dice really seem to hate this guy's hair. Rolled a 9 for the negative modifier. Moving along.

Roll for eye colour and get brown eyes, breadth is 32.4 inches, roll for eyesight is perfect natural vision yadda yadda. I'm up to page 47, and I'm leaving it there for the time being. My sanity can only take so much.

Poly

edited 16th Sep '09 9:54:38 PM by polymphus

So, wait, we can all just jump in and start rolling up characters in this thing?

37.75. I'll count that as a 38. That means I'm middle aged, which means I have 110% weight and 99% height. Height is rolled at 5"4. I'm 5"6 in RL, so that can't be that small can it? But according to FATAL, the average human male's height is 5"10. For every inch under, I get penalties. Let's take a look at this.

5'10" is the average male height...for a modern 20-to-30-year-old American in the mid-2000s.

Back then, the average height would have been something around 5'4".

edited 16th Sep '09 10:04:24 PM by WilliamWideWeb

I don't mind. In fact, I was thinking of playing a game over the fora once we get a ways through the book.

Also, I'd suggest using random.org for die rolls.

J Bridge, I think Fast Eddie would have a fit if you tried to run a game here. There are limits. :p

Aside, Random.org kicks ass for die rolls etc.

edited 16th Sep '09 10:13:13 PM by GoggleFox

Back then, the average height would have been something around 5'4".

When is "back then"? Average height's varied quite a bit over time, and populations in some parts of the medieval period approached modern heights. It's basically a function of quality of nutrition.

@Begoggled Fox: Right. I guess I'll ask him before we try anything. I don't think he has any objections to RPGs in general, though. the Maid RPG's been going smoothly. Or at least it was. I don't follow it.

So yeah. Anyway, if we do try to run a game, it won't be for a while. Not until I've read through the rules.

If we do do a Pb P thing, we should probably host it elsewhere and link with a great big warning sign to make sure people know just what they're heading over to. Character creation here should be fine though, right?

Nornagest: That and genetics. These are the Norsemen you're talking about here. Even in modern times they're huge. (Norway, average Male height, in excess of 5'10" and beating US Americans by about an inch; Sweden beats America by two inches).

edited 16th Sep '09 10:19:27 PM by GoggleFox

Further rolling, because I'm a sadist. How do you guys feel about By'ron Hell for a character name?

For facial features I rolled "mouth, protruding upper lip", which means I'm an egotistical asshat who loses D4 facial charmisa. Roll=3.

Hilariously at this point, FATAL decides to go into painful detail about the size, shape and colour of my character's nipples. I rolled a 0.6 inch areola with a 'light' colour. They're also half an inch in length. Yes, they're nearly longer than they are wide. Poor By'ron is a freak of nature with his tiny protruding nipples. He's like that mentos guy but without the charm. Oddly enough there's no bodily attractiveness penalty for mutantnipples, so he's fine. Also oddly, google chrome tells me I'm spelling 'colour' incorrectly, but 'mutantnipples' is fine. You learn something new every day.

My final roll for the time being: I rolled a 96 for tongue length, which means that not only does By'ron have freakish mentos nipples, he can touch the his chin with his tongue. He must get all the ladies.

Poly Out

6" under gives me -24 pounds of weight, -18 Strength and -12 bodily attractiveness.

Why would being short make a person less strong? Strength is in no way enhanced by height, on the contrary, the shorter you are, the stronger you're likely to be for the same weight.

Fun fact; the two strongest guys I know at my college are a tremendous Caribbean guy (about 6'6, 300 pounds) and a guy my height (5'8) who's maybe 190. The smaller guy is, in fact, able to lift more weight on every single exercise.

Desertopa: Because this is a game where the shape of your lips impacts your personality, being female hurts your Intelligence, you have to roll for phrenology, and you can gain "Retard Strength".

Besides, straight-up rolling a character for this game is probably a mistake, anyway. This game is clearly modeled on 1st or 2nd Ed AD&D, and the general rule of character creation was to just keep rolling for stats until you got the ones you liked. The odds of getting a seriously playable character from a system like this taking just a single roll-through is absurdly low (of course, everything in this game is so seperately random as to make it all a moot point, anyway.)

Granted, I have just enough Bile Fascination that I just might want to try rolling one of these things up, myself. A woman. If I'm going to send a train from the station just to derail it, might as well load it up with gasoline beforehand, and make it one Hell of a spectacular fireball.

I've never really played a TTRPG before, but you know what? I'm going to roll up a character too. A female Anakim. brb, learning new jargon.

edited 17th Sep '09 1:37:11 AM by Made of Meat

My God, William, what have you done?!?!

edited 17th Sep '09 1:37:54 AM by Zudak

This is the way the world ends.