The Alexandrian Review of Candela Obscura: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiKQN6T2UNI
SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/indestructoboy?sub_confirmation=1
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Bio
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Taron “Indestructoboy” Pounds is a game designer, graphic designer, music educator, Twitch streamer, and YouTuber. He has earned an ENnie nomination for his work on Home-Field Advantage, and is an adamantium best-seller on the Dungeon Masters Guild.
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Credits
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Graphic Design & Editing: Taron “Indestructoboy” Pounds
Channel Artwork: Jeremy Luther
Channel Theme Song: “Dungeons of Canada” by Michael McGinley
Dungeon Map Background: Dyson Logos
#dnd #ttrpg #dungeonsanddragons
source
My Review in written format over on Flutes Loot: https://www.flutesloot.com/candela-obscura-review-by-a-game-designer/
a weakness for femboys?
Seems they wrote an "RPG" that is intended for use by a group that is streaming for entertainment. Like Critical Role.
What an articulate breakdown! Subscribed for sure.
So, you are more likely to succeed than fail in anything you try to do?
I enjoyed most of your video but the mini-rant at 19:00 is silly. I don't mind if you're a leftie, but portraying right wingers as non-empathetic while also proudly standing on the side of mass murder of unborn babies is pretty outrageous. I too wish I could lie to myself to this extent and declare myself a good person in spite of that.
Yeah dagger heart seems to get more sceptical now. Like the way CR do thing in the "show" is definitely different from an actual personal "session"
Coming to this discussion a tad bit late, but I feel the criticism is fair. It's unfortunate that rules are missing out of the first print. I wonder if that has anything to do with the book only having a single proofreader? I picked up the book because my group like to try horror themed games around October; I thought a short-form campaign horror themed system would be perfect for that, so I bought the book. Unfortunately the first warning sign I had on the game was from watching the second season of C.O., when Spenser Starke set up a player versus player conflict, and then had to create rules on the spot because there weren't any in the system.
Missing rules like that is very concerning to me, as I was really looking forward to Daggerheart; now I'm left wondering what state it will be in when it gets released.
The problem isn't that the book lacks bigotry… So far that it sets itself up to include that element and then goes out of its way to not only lecture the player about it, but to handwave it away. "OHH no! a massive influx of refuges of different cultures! This will certainly cause some conflict"… Game: "Nope, everyone gets along and everyone is even MORE prosperous than before"… Me: "I am noticing that none of the refuges' cultures are in the game"… Game: "Actually depicting other cultures is offensive so we left it out"… Me: "Also if there is no racism why are the cops so corrupt?"… Game: "What are you saying something?".
.
You don't need to be "Born with Empathy" (I hate when people say that for "Why they are progressive" if ONLY because it once again is a "Us against them" saying, might as well have someone who is Right Wing say they were "Born with a brain") to see that there seems to be a problem with the game and how it wants to tell a story.
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Like… I watch kids shows where there is no racism, sexism, or any of the sort… But they don't draw attention to it or lecture the kids for the racism that doesn't exist.
you don't need to be a right wing nutjob to find it easy to critic an oversanitized over progressive slop. you can be a centralist, you know… like a normal person
Critical role definitely has a problem with being "preachy" in a somewhat hypocritical way that I think is worth talking about, like how the cast often excuses pretty heinous actions their characters take as "we're the good guys" or "that guy was an asshole, he deserved it" (or how uncommitted they are to making sure they address the nonbinary characters by the proper pronouns). You make excellent points about the gameplay and the weirdness of explicitly excluding RPing insanity while encouraging RPing physical disability, but getting hung up on the fact that the book is patronizing I think hurts your argument, especially in the written portions where your reading voice loses some of the heart from your freeform speaking and comes across more bitter. I think you go a bit too hard into the "don't lecture me" argument in a way that lands tonally a little too close to right wing-y complaints.
I hope my fellow critters didn't debase themselves attacking you! They can be real shitheads about that. Sorry!
Great review. Its basically a game designed by woke agenda pushing SJWs . Unfortunately you can see its insidious infection creeping and all corners of the TTRPG community as a whole. Characters {or real people} dont need pronoun labels or sexual orientation to define there place in a game. RPG are supposed to be about creativity and fun escapism without word policing or pushing socio-political agendas. Though it could make a for great psychological backstory for an unhinged Kool-aid haired androgenous nemesis for a campaign.😆
This sounds like an absolutely terrible revamp of shadow run
Will we ever reach a point where people can stop qualifying Lovecraft? Is there anyone in this space that doesn't already know he was a racist?
I really like CR‘s videos of candela obscura, because seeing it in action is very exciting. But working through it yourself is a whole different story. We can only hope that the book evolves over time, because it does seem messy, as you said, the things it does other systems to better, and the part about how NOT to play… I like how another commentator put it: This is an issue for the table, not the ruleset. Representation is important, and roleplaying insanity can be done very respectfully, and even would be weird to not be a part of a world messed up like this – hell, our world already drives people insane, and we don‘t have cosmic horrors running around. It‘s honestly shocking to me. Like, I‘m a teacher, and one of the first things i learned at uni was „Put rulesets into positive wording, because you can praise people for following the „do“s, while you can only punish for breaking the „don‘t“s. It would have been so easy to just write a note that with roleplaying any kind of disability, queerness, ethnicity, whatever it may be – to listen to the struggles of people actually affected by those and be respectful to them and the people at your gaming table. Easily done.
"Better as a campaign setting rather than its own system." There are so many cases of this! But the combat, hah. This codifies exactly what people accuse CR of doing. Being a GM controlled plot that the players are dragged through. Aka NOT A GAME.
I'm also not surprised the layout is bad. 5e's layout is atrocious, and it pads out info like that, they're used to it.
On the note on H.P lovecraft's views. Did everyone just forget that the man mellowed out? Are people just not allowed to be edgy youngsters anymore? The lack of forgiveness, lack of charity, and the constant beating on him while using his legacy is just as reprehensible as the edgy racism he had.
I really liked your analysis, would love you to check out Never Going Home its a favorite of mine with alot of cool ideas but feel the explanation is in a bit of a rough state of how the mechanics work.
Yeah honestly, pretty good review.
This game sounds like garbage.
I actually believe they wanted to release a good game, however they rushed it and they wanted to jump on the train of the OGL with an unfinished product, sometimes when you have producers or investors that require you to release things like this, even if you have a good Idea it turns out plain bad, I believe taliesin had an Idea and hired a lot of people, but then a lot of other people just start "suggesting" things to be "woke friendly" or "avoid criticism" and it looks like it's all patched, like if you read the rules without those paragraphs that tell you what to avoid, it makes sense, like that part specifically seems that it was placed later on, it even reads differently, I believe someone had placed someone on top of the production line that said, "take this off, take that off, put this in and you are good to go"
As some other comment said here, they are growing thin on micromanaging all of their projects that they probably don't want to hire other people because they believe their product should be theirs only, but Ironically they ended up being influenced in a very poor way, the show is actually decent but it seems like they always want to make some things that are simply not there, and I can even see frustration on itself, but Matt is a hell of a good DM and compensates, but it simply doesn't click that well as game mechanics.
I am willing to try it myself, I believe that you can add some things to it that can make it a good game, a simple game is always welcome to newbies and if you have experience with other games it might carry it, I will support their project in hopes that a second edition comes out revised, better, because it has a lot of potential, but you don't live of potential only.
I am a full heart critter by the way, and I do believe they did wrong with this, but I will try this on… besides I'm from another country, where you don't find people to play roleplaying games except D&D most of the time, playing another game might be imposible still.
Having a distaste for the alt-left moralistic cult that creates such preachiness in this text calling itself a ttrpg doesn't make you alt-right, my dude. It makes you sane.
It also lacks much of any bestiary and doesn't really explain why. It does imply that the GM has creative freedom, but there's no guidance. There are some example cases, with creatures, and a few pages of description of creature types, but i guess this goes hand in hand with the lack of a death mechanic. I also agree completely about the preachy condescending tone of certain things and the issue with the Quickstart guide. We're adults and nerds, and if you're seeking out a horror themed game, you know that mental and physical disabilities are a possibility that's part of the horror genre.
I like Critical Role, but I have never rolled my eyes harder than when they announced this game. Maybe mostly because it's not a game for me at all. The horror genre in general is something I could not care less about. But gosh, that name is so pretensious. I wish they would have named it anything else in all honesty.
I appreciate you and other creators going in dephts and talking about it, despite knowing how gungho the fans can be.
This is an example of a game where political correctness becomes the stumbling block to good game design. And this is sad. This could have been so good.
I am baffled at how terrible this game is. This really made me believe that just because you love TTRPGs and play them lots doesn't mean you can make them. From the lack of rules to a game world that, literally, makes no sense if you even take a pause it makes me FAR less interested in their fantasy TTRPG. They clearly want to make sure their world is influenced by, what they believe to be, "real world issues" but without any real consequences on the players. The injustices of the world are at odds with the utopian world they want to craft. Why? Because they knew if their world had anything resembling police then their fanbase, and probably even people working on the game, would say, "So, they are ALL corrupt and ALL antagonistic to the players, right?"
They've also crafted a system that ensures characters don't die…they just become NPCs. Pretty convenient when much of their money is made on their, now, celebrity cast/employees never having potentially beloved characters die off but come back in perpetuity! That and the amount of people I see on places such as Reddit seem to enjoy "storytelling" over "playing a game". After going through the game and even playing some it just felt like we should have just been playing Fiasco the whole time.
its super dumb to assume that rightwing people who have the same perception as you are just bigots. This preachy crap is bad wherever it happens and has nothing to do with right or left.
So does Critical Role (secretly) endorses Critical Race where certain people are inherently born bigots and it's someone else's role (wink wink nudge nudge) to educate them? 😅
What you said at 19 minutes just made me subscribe to you. Like, it actually physically MADE me. Amazing.
Not even a big cr fan and this review pissed me off. This isnt a review, this is a big whine 😀
CR might have been ethical towards FitD and Vaesen but it sure wasn't towards their fans. Hey, here's our super new, never seen before, proprietary product! What do you mean you own and play it already? It's NEW!
I just finished watching CO Tide & Bones and thought of maybe getting it. But seeing the character creation layout makes my head hurt. 😅 Getting into a new RPG is hard enough, but all that page flipping is definitely. Anyway, really good and fair review. 👌🏾
what is the rpg youre referencing in this video? The subtitles keep writing it as Bason for some reason and surprise surprise that doesnt give any results lol
Love knowing that they got preachy about not gamifying mental disabilities but then they list anxiety as an example. Like social anxiety just doesn't even exist and can't be crippling.