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The trick with the genres that pbta is best at requires the combination of a wide variety of archetypes with no requirements that anybody is necessarily allied with anyone else.
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Apr 5, 2015 03:40
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gradenko_2000 posted:I think that GURPS having a reputation of being a beast of a system to understand comes from the misunderstood implication that you'll want to or should use many of its rules right off the bat, when in reality it's even an official product to reduce the core of the system down to a single page handout. It certainly took me a careful reading of the Lite rules (and confirmation in the GURPS thread) before I was able to figure out that you can run GURPS in Theater-of-the-Mind if you wanted to. There is also just presentation. GURPS is pretty modular, but it doesn't go to a lot of effort to make itself look that way to fresh eyes.
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Apr 5, 2015 03:42
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Plague of Hats posted:There is also just presentation. GURPS is pretty modular, but it doesn't go to a lot of effort to make itself look that way to fresh eyes. This is true. I bet gurps 4th could go a long way with a reprinting or supplement that explains some of this stuff in better detail without changing the underlying system at all.
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Apr 5, 2015 03:44
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Captain Foo posted:The trick with the genres that pbta is best at requires the combination of a wide variety of archetypes with no requirements that anybody is necessarily allied with anyone else. 
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Apr 5, 2015 03:48
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Lynx Winters posted:GURPS is fine mechanically if you want a detailed and crunchy ruleset, but good lord it's got issues with presentation. For a game as scalable as it is, it does a piss-poor job of actually showing how to raise or lower the complexity for your game. Also, statting NPCs the same as PCs needs to loving go, and even at its simplest you still have to do it a little. I used to be a huge GURPS 3e fan back in the day, but 4e... wasn't as progressive as I hoped even at the time, and boy, is it written for preexisting GURPS fans and nobody else. When I got around to play it, I was pissed off at how they just muddled every genre and power level of trait into a single alphabetical list, and trying to parse it all for the first time to just find the elements I needed was a big headache. And I'm saying that has somebody who used GURPS Vehicles in games unironically. I think GURPS is very important historically but just never kept up with gaming state-of-the-art. There are some things it can do pretty well - low fantasy and historical, chiefly - but it has still has a lot of core issues, mainly stemming from a point system that never has actually functioned properly to a heavy push on simulationism that pervades the system (skills being more expensive depnding on how "hard" they are to learn, all those optional combat rules, etc.) and bogs it down. Even simplified, it tends to be really deadly for a game where making a character can take an hour. It's a fine game line but the core system has always been increasing layers of patchwork that was never really unwoven and rebuilt into something coherent and elegant as time went on.
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Apr 5, 2015 04:05
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Are there any good systems that are really lite where making a character is fast and the game is highly lethal, intentionally? Often, I find games with high lethality have moderate to heavy chargen and games with lite chargen are not lethal.
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Apr 5, 2015 04:12
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3:16, for a certain level of lethal.
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Apr 5, 2015 04:13
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Apr 5, 2015 04:16
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Mr. Maltose posted:3:16, for a certain level of lethal. 3:16 isn't actually particularly lethal; the game is sadly broken pretty badly by the suppression ability.
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Apr 5, 2015 04:21
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Really looking forward to finally seeing a proper treatment of asparagus in RPGs, at least.
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Apr 5, 2015 04:25
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It's really uncool to post GURPS Pokemon and that not be a thing, really uncool.
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Apr 5, 2015 04:36
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Covok posted:Are there any good systems that are really lite where making a character is fast and the game is highly lethal, intentionally? Often, I find games with high lethality have moderate to heavy chargen and games with lite chargen are not lethal. Goblin Quest.
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Apr 5, 2015 04:56
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Tatum Girlparts posted:I think it could have better been phrased as 'disadvantages that will never meaningfully impact your character unless the GM specifically designs a situation for it to come up' instead of the vague 'never matter'. Basically a colorblind character probably will have the issue come up once or twice in some specific GM tailored 'the doors are red and green and only one of these doors leads out and the other leads to a trap' poo poo but if that's the only way the character would have to overcome his disability then he's obviously never going to actually be effected by it in 99% of the rest of the game. Plus it deals with the Time Machine problem too, yea no poo poo Og the caveman can't use a time machine, literally no one can in this world, Og will never have to unless the GM specifically says 'and suddenly there's a time machine buried in the ice! WHAT NOW OG?!' Boom. Another character is there, tells him which door leads out because it's colored green and the other that leads to a trap is colored red. Player revels in his more or less free points from colorblindness. I mean, after reading GURPS and playing GURPS with people, I've seen players create Pun-Pun builds that weren't the 1600-point robot they included in the book. There are ways to manipulate the advantages/disadvantages system such that your advantages paper over your disadvantages and you're still left with more points than you started. Also, I think 3d6 is a horrible way to resolve tests. Honestly, I don't like GURPS because it tries to do everything, but just isn't as great as systems that are designed with intent. If I wanted to play a horror game, I wouldn't play GURPS - I'd play Call of Cthulhu. If I wanted to play a futuristic murder-hobo campaign, I'd play Deathwatch. Finally, if I wanted to play a system where everything hinged on "ask your GM", I'd just play D&D 5e.
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Apr 5, 2015 05:10
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LuiCypher posted:Also, I think 3d6 is a horrible way to resolve tests. I've never played GURPS, but I'm curious why you think this.
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Apr 5, 2015 05:21
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One of the weird effects of something like the 3d6 in GURPS is that though it's a system created with total awareness of the curve, the point costs don't really take it into account per se, trait costs go up as the additions to your chances of success from a trait go down; buying high stats is basically just to counteract penalties (and to cheapen skills), of course, which the system serves up pretty liberally. The math is pretty wonky at times - when you realize you spent 45 points getting to succeed on a 14 or less, and then have to spend another 35 points to get to 16 or less... but what does that 35 points buy? An extra 4% margin of success, because of the curve. That's an oversimplification - things often work out differently in the system - but it's a good demonstration of how strangely it can function at times.
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Apr 5, 2015 09:13
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Covok posted:Are there any good systems that are really lite where making a character is fast and the game is highly lethal, intentionally? Often, I find games with high lethality have moderate to heavy chargen and games with lite chargen are not lethal. As others have mentioned, 3:16 is light and seems lethal (based as it is on Starship Troopers, Aliens etc.), but between all the advantages the PCs have/can get the characters are pretty resilient. Cthulhu Dark is debatably lethal. Your character dies instantly if they try to fight a monster and they have a slow march towards insanity, though they can avoid these by a) running from monsters and getting semi-decent rolls to avoid being captured or trapped and b) destroying evidence of the horror to convince themselves it's not real. Character creation is as simple as choosing personal details and an occupation. Geiger Counter and Danger Mountain are two games based on survival horror and disaster films respectively. Both have very light chargen and the expectation that some (in GC, most) of the characters will die. This is a little different though, because they're designed for one-shots so players don't make new characters when their old ones die. Hollowpoint kinda flirts with this. Characters are mechanically simple - you assign some numbers to some stats and come up with a bunch of traits (1-shot advantages) - and they're fragile - getting hit twice takes them out. However, death is ultimately up to the player. You can hang on with a weakened character or kill them off. There are special rules for what happens when a character dies, depending on what they accomplished beforehand. Paranoia, for a certain value of lethality. Some of the Sundered Land games, where character creation is picking options off lists. I'm working on a Stalker-like game (more based on A Roadside Picnic than the videogames) where the core mechanical part of character generation is "roll 2d6, lowest is how experienced your character is". The game is intended to be fairly lethal at the beginning (unless your characters have great self-preservation instincts, very loyal team members and a bit of luck) and gradually less lethal as the game world moves forwards, because the players get to slowly define how the world works (and knowledge is power).
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Apr 5, 2015 12:38
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gradenko_2000 posted:On a separate note, I'm familiar with Night Witches and World Wide Wrestling: what other notable PbtA games are there, particularly ones that try to tackle completely different genres? Is there a James Bond World? A Call of Duty World? A Star Trek/Wars World? The main notable ones other than those (and of course Apocalypse World itself) are Dungeon World (not great) and the excellent teen horror Monsterhearts. Arguably also Lady Blackbird (which was hacked from a playtest version of Apocalypse World). Huge list here - the ones I'd recommend from it are Gnome's Inverse World (taking Dungeon World and trying to make it good), John Harper's Ghost Lines (steampunkish), Koebel and Latorra's Black Stars Rise (Call of Cthulhu and it is rules light and fast death), and my own Houses and Wands
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Apr 5, 2015 13:39
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Captain Foo posted:The trick with the genres that pbta is best at requires the combination of a wide variety of archetypes with no requirements that anybody is necessarily allied with anyone else. That's only true if you're reskinning Apocalypse World itself, though. The core system of AW (player moves, GM moves/agenda/principles, the Conversation) can go way beyond that. neonchameleon posted:Dungeon World (not great) Is this general opinion now? Why is that? I remember goons being huge fans of DW.
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Apr 5, 2015 15:58
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Cyphoderus posted:Is this general opinion now? Why is that? I remember goons being huge fans of DW. I don't know about anyone else, but I and my group cooled on it pretty quickly after playing it a few times. I also made a big effortpost that nobody read in the last chat thread. It's too D&D for its own good and feels like it's missing some of the stuff that makes AW's gears mesh.
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Apr 5, 2015 16:02
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Cyphoderus posted:Is this general opinion now? Why is that? I remember goons being huge fans of DW. Flavor of the Month syndrome. Gamers are the person Katy Perry was describing in that one song.
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Apr 5, 2015 16:16
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I still love DW, always will.
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Apr 5, 2015 16:22
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Echophonic posted:I don't know about anyone else, but I and my group cooled on it pretty quickly after playing it a few times. I also made a big effortpost that nobody read in the last chat thread. It's too D&D for its own good and feels like it's missing some of the stuff that makes AW's gears mesh. I enjoyed that post, for what it's worth. DW has some structural issues; using the Inverse World playbooks helps a lot but it still gets creaky after a while. It's pretty great for one-shots, especially with people who are used to d20 fantasy but willing to try something new. The problems with it get more pronounced the longer you play, for sure. How fresh and cool it seems also depends on if you've played other PbtA games beforehand. I am just about to wrap up the campaign we've been playing with Inverse World classes - we're probably going on 25-30 sessions at this point, which is much more than DW seems built for. I'm curious if anyone else has done longer PbtA games - it seems like the sweet spot is probably much less than that, especially for AW or Monsterhearts.
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Apr 5, 2015 16:40
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Alien Rope Burn posted:One of the weird effects of something like the 3d6 in GURPS is that though it's a system created with total awareness of the curve, the point costs don't really take it into account per se, trait costs go up as the additions to your chances of success from a trait go down; buying high stats is basically just to counteract penalties (and to cheapen skills), of course, which the system serves up pretty liberally. The math is pretty wonky at times - when you realize you spent 45 points getting to succeed on a 14 or less, and then have to spend another 35 points to get to 16 or less... but what does that 35 points buy? That actually isn't how it works - I think you might have misread something along the line. For one, skill costs don't multiply as they increase: after the first two ranks, which cost 1 and 2 points respectively, they're always a flat "4 more points for the next rank". You're never gonna be in a situation where you have to double down like that on an exorbitant point investment just to get a modest increase. The 3d6 curve is actually very useful because it creates a system weighted towards the middle, one that's balanced around characters having average proficiency rather than that being (as in many other games) a terrible suboptimal weakness compared to maxing out your 'relevant' stats. If you have a skill at 12, something which usually costs 1 - 4 points total, you'll succeed in fair conditions most of the time: you don't need to pump your weaponry skills every chance you get in order to be reasonably capable of killing a monster with a sword. Also, as you mention and perhaps slightly undersell, raising a skill from 14 to 16 does more than increase your odds of success by 4%. It also allows you to suffer through action penalties, like those imposed by shock or when taking a called shot, and still lie right in the sweet spot of the curve. In general though, all these factors combine to create a system where having an exceptionally high skill confers upon you some advantages (like the ability to more easily lop off limbs or hit a target in the dark), but doesn't make you exorbitantly better than a character with a modest investment in that skill. Specialisation has its place and its rewards but isn't the overwhelmingly correct choice: generalism is a viable and efficient option. This is a hard balance to strike with any open point buy based system, and GURPS does it really pretty well, in large part thanks to the way its 3d6 curve interacts with the skill system. Incidentally this is related to the reasons AW's 2d6 curve is so good. Bell curves are overwhelmingly the way to go with game design, I feel.
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Apr 5, 2015 16:48
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I used to like Fate I've since reevaluated it Bad game, play Cortex
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Apr 5, 2015 16:51
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I too am cooling towards Fate. Can you sell me on Cortex?
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Apr 5, 2015 17:02
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I played dungeon world once and it was boring as heck, same with monsterhearts. Pbta sucks!
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Apr 5, 2015 17:12
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From my passive, ex-lurker vantage point, it looked like people were really excited about Dungeon World as a universal adaptation of Apocalypse World and started throwing it at everything. Ironically, this is partially because of the flaws in the system: the moves are unnecessarily generic and it keeps enough of the D&D legacy that it seems easy to translate into other genres. For a while there, every post asking for a system recommendation had at least one person suggesting a DW hack. Sure, it was some flavor-of-the-month bullshit. It was also a learning curve. It takes a new player a bit to understand that Powered by the Apocalypse games thrive on narrowly-defined genres and really shine when you put the effort into basic moves to match those sorts of stories.I think Dungeon World helped us realize that carrying any baggage into a PbtA game beyond the fiction will only hinder your design.
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Apr 5, 2015 17:17
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Lightning Lord posted:Flavor of the Month syndrome. Gamers are the person Katy Perry was describing in that one song. I don't know how them being so gay (and they don't even like boys) is relevant to Dungeon World.
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Apr 5, 2015 17:28
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On the third day, I said gently caress it and just rolled a new character. Happy Easter.
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Apr 5, 2015 17:32
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Android Blues posted:In general though, all these factors combine to create a system where having an exceptionally high skill confers upon you some advantages (like the ability to more easily lop off limbs or hit a target in the dark), but doesn't make you exorbitantly better than a character with a modest investment in that skill. In general, though, increasing skills to the 4 points / level step is generally cost inefficient; the fact that two attributes govern the majority of its massive skill list means you don't want to be worrying too much about cranking a specific skill up too high unless it's really necessary (as with spellcasters, who often rely on the knock-on effects of high skill). And yes, the general intent of the rising costs is to punish specialization, but at the same time it presents issues when trying to adapt the system to certain genres. I'm reminded of GURPS Special Ops, where being a specialist in multiple fields boiled down to being a 200-400 character, in a system where you could have massive powers of the mind that invalidated 90% of that at well under 200 points. Of course, that also came down to modern games charging the same amount as fantasy games did for Strength and Health, despite the fact that those attributes have far less impact in modern games. It definitely has its advantage in that discourages massive exceptionalism (for the sorts of games that works well for, like the aforementioned historical games), but it weights the game towards particular genres and conceits rather than being a cost based on utility, which would serve a generic system better.
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Apr 5, 2015 18:05
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Pope Eggs Benedict posted:I too am cooling towards Fate. Can you sell me on Cortex? Used to like Cortex Turns out it is really bad Play PDQ forever
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Apr 5, 2015 18:21
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:I played dungeon world once and it was boring as heck, same with monsterhearts. Pbta sucks! Just you wait, I'll finish Wrasslehearts someday...
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Apr 5, 2015 18:25
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Alien Rope Burn posted:In general, though, increasing skills to the 4 points / level step is generally cost inefficient; the fact that two attributes govern the majority of its massive skill list means you don't want to be worrying too much about cranking a specific skill up too high unless it's really necessary (as with spellcasters, who often rely on the knock-on effects of high skill). And yes, the general intent of the rising costs is to punish specialization, but at the same time it presents issues when trying to adapt the system to certain genres. I'm reminded of GURPS Special Ops, where being a specialist in multiple fields boiled down to being a 200-400 character, in a system where you could have massive powers of the mind that invalidated 90% of that at well under 200 points. Of course, that also came down to modern games charging the same amount as fantasy games did for Strength and Health, despite the fact that those attributes have far less impact in modern games. Isn't Special Ops a 3rd Edition supplement? We might actually be chatting about different systems here. I respect your opinions though! I wouldn't suggest GURPS as the perfect system - but I think it does many things uniquely well, and was very much ahead of its time on the probability weighting side of things especially. Most games didn't then (and still don't now) consider the way their dice weighting makes playing them feel.
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Apr 5, 2015 18:41
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It's kind of weird to describe a game as "flavor of the month" when people here have been playing it since a little while after I started coming around here.
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Apr 5, 2015 18:43
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:I played dungeon world once and it was boring as heck, same with monsterhearts. Pbta sucks! you're a better troll than this, plutonis
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Apr 5, 2015 18:55
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He really isn't.
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Apr 5, 2015 18:58
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Captain Foo posted:you're a better troll than this, plutonis My april fool is that every post I made this month is absolutely sincere.
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Apr 5, 2015 19:07
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Perhaps rules-light games cause brain damage on people if they are unable to see any criticism of them as trolling and that anyone who argues that rolling 2d6 for everything is too simplistic to make the game fun is a MRA PUA Gamergater Grognard white supremacist scumbag.
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Apr 5, 2015 19:21
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Captain Foo posted:you're a better troll than this, plutonis There's nothing wrong with that opinion.
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Apr 5, 2015 19:24
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neonchameleon posted:The main notable ones other than those (and of course Apocalypse World itself) are Dungeon World (not great) and the excellent teen horror Monsterhearts. Arguably also Lady Blackbird (which was hacked from a playtest version of Apocalypse World). Huge list here - the ones I'd recommend from it are Gnome's Inverse World (taking Dungeon World and trying to make it good), John Harper's Ghost Lines (steampunkish), Koebel and Latorra's Black Stars Rise (Call of Cthulhu and it is rules light and fast death), and my own Houses and Wands So, I like Dungeon World, but ready to move on and try other PbtA stuff. I'm looking for a game that would be good at emulating gritty, weird fantasy, with a high-fatality rate for characters, ala Lamentations of the Flame Princess. I took a brief look at Grim World, but frankly it looks like it's more about anime high-fantasy, only the characters wear a lot of skulls and goth clothing, like an Abyssal Exalted game. Any current PtbA game that can fill the weird-fantasy niche, or should I stick to DW?
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Apr 5, 2015 19:40
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