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Winson_Paine posted:Top Secret SI, the best thing TSR ever did. 
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Jul 10, 2014 16:05
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The best part was that the Rocky and Bullwinkle game came with hand puppets to help get into character.
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Jul 10, 2014 16:08
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Winson_Paine posted:Warren Spector wrote Top Secret SI, the best thing TSR ever did. You are sadly forgetting his magnum opus, the Rocky and Bullwinkle RPG.
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Jul 10, 2014 16:09
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unseenlibrarian posted:The best part was that the Rocky and Bullwinkle game came with hand puppets to help get into character.
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Jul 10, 2014 16:09
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Warren Spector posted:Man, you do go back a ways! That was in the days before videotape. We had to go to the Museum of Broadcasting in New York to see Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons because they hadn’t even been released on VHS. So we watched hours and hours of Rocky and Bullwinkle until our eyes bled and our brains turned to mush. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but we went to a little place in New York called Pete’s Tavern, and looked at each other and said “We’re doomed. There’s no way to turn this into a game. Let’s have a gin and tonic!” So after the first gin and tonic we said “Spinners!” and after the second “Masks!” which later became hand puppets, and so on. That’s how we came up with the Rocky and Bullwinkle game. I need to get this game someday.
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Jul 10, 2014 16:10
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unseenlibrarian posted:Zeb Cook who did a lot of post Gygax AD&D 1E worked on City of Villains a bit, as did Shane Hensley from Pinnacle, IIRC. Zeb Cook, Lawrence Schick, Bill Slavicsek, and Ed Stark are all writers on Elder Scrolls Online. That's a lot of TSR/WotC lead design talent there... also Ian Lemke and Zach Bush, from the White Wolf segment of the hobby, while I'm at it. Tabletop designers who want to make a living wind up in computer games.
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Jul 10, 2014 16:19
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This is from a few pages back, but does anyone have a good example of a third-party Dungeon World adventure? I'm sure I could write one, but I'm not certain what's useful to include and what isn't.
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Jul 10, 2014 17:15
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potatocubed posted:This is from a few pages back, but does anyone have a good example of a third-party Dungeon World adventure? I'm sure I could write one, but I'm not certain what's useful to include and what isn't. http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse.php?manufacturers_id=4483 All of that guy's DW adventures are great. DW1 Lair of the Unknown is the best one, IMO. The trick to making a good DW adventure is to know how to adapt your adventure to DW's principles - if you read through LotU, you'll see what I mean.
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Jul 10, 2014 17:26
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potatocubed posted:This is from a few pages back, but does anyone have a good example of a third-party Dungeon World adventure? I'm sure I could write one, but I'm not certain what's useful to include and what isn't. This is also of interest to me. Edit; Thanks, Lem. Error 404 fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Jul 10, 2014 |
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Jul 10, 2014 17:28
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Evil Mastermind posted:I think that's more a problem with how "modern horror" is handled in general nowadays. It's hard for a game to really have that feeling of fear if everyone's got shotguns and magic and flamethrowers. You don't get that sense of helplessness or decline that (to me) makes for good horror. The PCs having shotguns and flamethrowers just gives the illusion of being in control. What happens when shotguns and flamethrowers don't work on what they're facing? Finding out that their "security blanket" is gone should be a horrific realization. This is especially true when this realization comes after facing the "monster" for the first time. GURPS Horror and Fear Itself books both talk about how to run horror in a modern setting, and I think they have a lot of good ideas on how to make a good modern horror game.
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Jul 10, 2014 18:44
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DocBubonic posted:The PCs having shotguns and flamethrowers just gives the illusion of being in control. What happens when shotguns and flamethrowers don't work on what they're facing? The players get mad at the GM for negating their character choices.
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Jul 10, 2014 18:52
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I don't really see Monster of the Weeks genre as horror at all. Like, it's got a lot of things leading it to be a solid Buffy/Supernatural style game, and I don't really think those shows are horror, outside of a few episodes. It's probably something more along the lines of Urban Fantasy, with some horror trappings. And that could be a great genre for a PbtA game to emulate. I read Monster of the Week and can get a Buffy game out of it. It's main problem is that it has a lot of other stuff that pushes it to maybe be The X-Files, or Fringe, or even some Dresden Files, and then it becomes too many genres to emulate entirely. It also borrows from Apocalypse World's base moves too much, which leads it to feel even more generic on top of its lack of focus. With that said, I like parts of Monster of the Week. It's got some great adventure design guidelines, and good advice for running a more episodic game. If they designed better base moves and tightened up the genre, it really could be a great PbtA game.
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Jul 10, 2014 18:56
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Paolomania posted:The players get mad at the GM for negating their character choices.
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Jul 10, 2014 19:00
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unseenlibrarian posted:The best part was that the Rocky and Bullwinkle game came with hand puppets to help get into character. The hand puppets were just printed plastic bags, though, in the edition I played. So there was strong incentive to take them off ASAP. A shame, really.
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Jul 10, 2014 19:04
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That article I mentioned writing is up now, if you're curious. I didn't feel like I was a primo authority on the consultants, but I tried to give examples of their toxic behaviors.
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Jul 10, 2014 19:18
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Where did this idealized idea of a longterm RPG campaign taking place from beginning to end, first level (or its equivalent) to last, with a stable and relatively unchanging group of nonantagonistic people come from? I have never experienced this and yet I see the expectation of this kind of play in a lot of games. I've been thinking a lot lately about oneshot- or a handful of sessions-based design.
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Jul 10, 2014 20:16
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Paolomania posted:The players get mad at the GM for negating their character choices. I assume the players know coming into this that they're playing a horror game. For a horror game to be successful I believe the game needs to illicit some emotional response from the players. In order to do this, the players need to let the GM do things like "negate their character choices" and trust that GM isn't just out to screw the characters over with no chance of victory. Yeah, there's a way of defeating the monsters, but it just happens that shotguns and flamethrowers aren't the way to go.
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Jul 10, 2014 20:17
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Tollymain posted:Where did this idealized idea of a longterm RPG campaign taking place from beginning to end, first level (or its equivalent) to last, with a stable and relatively unchanging group of nonantagonistic people come from? It's been the majority of my RPG experience from 1992 to now.
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Jul 10, 2014 20:22
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I think it's a combination of an ethos of "you always start at level one" and groups deciding it would be silly to do the free form mixing trucking your character around that really oldschool groups did. So they adopt campaigns with clear beginnings, but still only want to start at level 1, but also want to see later levels, so the only way to get there is to play through, and that takes a while with the default leveling/XP rate, so they sort of naturally end up with this epic campaign.
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Jul 10, 2014 20:22
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fatherdog posted:It's been the majority of my RPG experience from 1992 to now. 2002 to now for me. Or we tried to do it that way, at least.
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Jul 10, 2014 20:25
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A story without at least the expectation of a beginning, middle, and end, is a bad story.
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Jul 10, 2014 20:26
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That doesn't preclude shorter games.
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Jul 10, 2014 20:33
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Error 404 posted:A story without at least the expectation of a beginning, middle, and end, is a bad story. You can tell a complete story in 4 hours, though. You don't need a year to do so. I think there are merits to both ways, really. I imagine that certain RPGs go for the full-bore campaign because, quite frankly, it means that people will be playing their game for a while, potentially buying other products in the line, and getting themselves invested in the setting. RPGs are work, too. You have to work at them to really get it. I've been doing one-shots for quite a few systems and most of the time, we end with a sense of, "That was fun, but did we really understand it?" I feel like a lot of games have a baked-in learning curve, and sometimes that takes more than one session to understand.
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Jul 10, 2014 20:35
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Yeah, I was being too vague, but essentially my point was that you should aim for stories, no matter the length. Also, long running campaigns are often served better by being several smaller stories in a series, rather than one long over arching narrative.
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Jul 10, 2014 20:38
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I think some of it comes out of players getting attached to their characters and wanting to see how the same character reacts to multiple different situations and a long career, too. At least, that's been my experience with my players. They like watching their protagonists develop and deal with a long series of different problems and situations, more like a long serial than a single big novel.
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Jul 10, 2014 20:45
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Tollymain posted:Where did this idealized idea of a longterm RPG campaign taking place from beginning to end, first level (or its equivalent) to last, with a stable and relatively unchanging group of nonantagonistic people come from? You're joking, right? AD&D and its excruciatingly slow level system has been with us since the beginning. Games since have followed the same drip-drap advancement system without a lot of consideration because that's the method that was established, right down to the mentality that you have to "earn" powerful characters and that later games are "like videogames" because you can shoot fire more than twice a day without a nappy-nap. Even most games during the 90s had you gaining a frankly glacial amount of XP - how many Legend of the Five Rings games ever saw rank 4, much less rank 8? I've been running short sets of adventures for my group, and it's a very different feel. Part of this is my group wanting to try the various different Japanese games that've hopped the pond, and one is just me wanting to relax and run some predesigned adventures without having to sit down and plan out my games for awhile. It's very different in that it doesn't really promote the same kind of investment in the game, but at the same time it also engages with novelty and that fresh game feeling every month. Of course, the conspiracy theorist in me says part of the success of D&D is that slow reward system, since that encourages people to play the game for a long time, think about it a lot, and most importantly, pick up that new game book to freshen up your three-year campaign. I think game companies haven't quite worked out how to market much more "single serving" sorts of games.
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Jul 10, 2014 20:47
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Of course, the conspiracy theorist in me says part of the success of D&D is that slow reward system, since that encourages people to play the game for a long time, think about it a lot, and most importantly, pick up that new game book to freshen up your three-year campaign. I think game companies haven't quite worked out how to market much more "single serving" sorts of games. I don't think that back when this system was taking place, there would have been such a marketing plan in place. Also isn't there adventures designed for a single night? I want to say that adventures designed for conventions were like that.
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Jul 10, 2014 21:02
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DocBubonic posted:I don't think that back when this system was taking place, there would have been such a marketing plan in place. That's why it's a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories aren't ever true! But it may be part of the secret sauce that keeps D&D going.
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Jul 10, 2014 21:03
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Anything from a one-shot to a years-long campaign can be potentially really awesome in their own ways. It's just that long campaigns have been the overwhelming default for a long time, so that in most games doing a one-shot means kind of fighting the system on some fronts, or at least hugely under-utilizing what's in the book. It seems like there's a definite need for more games that support faster, shorter-term play. Personally I really like D&D4e for example, but I haven't been able to play it at all the past couple years because regularly getting people together for 6-8 hour sessions just hasn't been possible. At my work they started an after-hours tabletop gaming club, and D&D is pretty much out for the same reason.
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Jul 10, 2014 21:31
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I finally gave in and ordered a copy of Faith and Flame: the Provencal Tribunal rather than wait a year or so for the PDF. Curse you, Atlas Games! Curse youuuuuuuuu!
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Jul 10, 2014 21:35
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Saguaro PI posted:Also, I know the thread has moved on from this, but PbtA isn't even close to the new D20 glut, because even the bad stuff like tremulus is the result of a sincere labour of love and not cynical bullshit shat out in the space of an afternoon. Speaking of PbtA horror, has anybody tried Black Stars Rise?
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Jul 10, 2014 22:10
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Winson_Paine posted:Warren Spector wrote Top Secret SI, the best thing TSR ever did. Also Spelljammer and Toon.
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Jul 10, 2014 22:32
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Rulebook Heavily posted:Also Spelljammer and Toon. Well sure, but he did Toon for SJG.
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Jul 10, 2014 22:42
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What is the most Bush era RPG, my friends were talking about this and we all agreed that Command and Conquer: Generals was the most Bush era video game but couldn't figure out an equivalent RPG
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Jul 10, 2014 22:48
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homerlaw posted:What is the most Bush era RPG, my friends were talking about this and we all agreed that Command and Conquer: Generals was the most Bush era video game but couldn't figure out an equivalent RPG http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/57471/afghanistan-d20
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Jul 10, 2014 22:52
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homerlaw posted:What is the most Bush era RPG, my friends were talking about this and we all agreed that Command and Conquer: Generals was the most Bush era video game but couldn't figure out an equivalent RPG http://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/57471/afghanistan-d20 ^ Haha, beaten by literal seconds.
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Jul 10, 2014 22:52
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homerlaw posted:What is the most Bush era RPG, my friends were talking about this and we all agreed that Command and Conquer: Generals was the most Bush era video game but couldn't figure out an equivalent RPG D&D 4e, the game of tactical skirmishes which when played by the rules of the Bush era stretch into endless slogs that wear down resources and sap the will to fight while protesters who don't understand the reasons for it endlessly grouse.
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Jul 10, 2014 22:57
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Winson_Paine posted:D&D 4e, the game of tactical skirmishes which when played by the rules of the Bush era stretch into endless slogs that wear down resources and sap the will to fight while protesters who don't understand the reasons for it endlessly grouse. Fffffffffffffffffffffffff
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Jul 10, 2014 23:02
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Winson_Paine posted:endlessly grouse.  Endless? drat, I could feed a lot people with that.
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Jul 10, 2014 23:05
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Disappointed that y'all didn't mention the most glorious of the ttrpg-to-crpg career paths, that of Mister Chris Avellone.Sionak posted:Edit: the other thing is that the experience of play in RPGs is more subjective than video games, too. You can come to a video game with a negative impression and be won over by pretty graphics or solid mechanics. Given the amount of buy-in to learn an RPG and the need for good-faith participation to see how things click, I think poisoned preconceptions can do even more damage.
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Jul 10, 2014 23:19
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