Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
neonchameleon
Nov 14, 2012



thelazyblank posted:

Okay, so I'm currently playing in a Leverage PbP game and am thinking I may want to run one myself soon for my weekly Fate group. The problem is, heist games seem to devolve into giant boring planning sessions and these cause me some level of frustration. I don't want people to think like they have to plan everything all the time which seems hard to do except in an aggressive "stop it!" manner. Are there more subtle things I can do? Can any of these transfer to the player side?

Get a copy of the Leverage rules. Seriously. It's designed for running heists on very low planning. And with allowing you to spend the plot points to establish flashback scenes when things do go wrong. And the villain construction in the Leverage RPG is genius.

And if your Fate group questions the Leverage rules tell them that MWP basically subcontracted Evil Hat to write them. Seriously.

Project L Conceptual Design Leads:
Cam Banks and Rob Donoghue

LEVERAGE RPG Design and Development:
Cam Banks, Rob Donoghue, Fred Hicks, Ryan Macklin, Clark Valentine

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

The Lore Bear
Jan 21, 2014

I don't know what to put here. Guys? GUYS?!
Alright, I've gotten that far, although re-reading with more of a game-running perspective may help. I like the rules, but I'm worried I'll have a hard time getting past the basics with the group.

I was more worried about once the game is in session. Is a lot of keeping things fast and flowing just player and GM buy-in, or are there some tricks out there that might help out? Should I be too concerned about the exact mechanics or is it better to just roll with things in terms of dice and dice pools?

The Lore Bear
Jan 21, 2014

I don't know what to put here. Guys? GUYS?!
Update! After getting the hardcopy of the Hacker's Guide, I thought about what settings would be fun for Cortex Plus. I decided I'd run something with the Shadowrun setting, but without the Shadowrun rules. Since I'm currently in a Fate heist game with some of the others, however, I decided against running it as straight shadowrunners. This gave me a number of action ideas (Lone Star, Internal Troubleshooting Squad for some corp, new gang in town, DocWagon), I also came up with a potentially more ridiculous game that could still be a lot of fun: Running a game of Corp executives, all working for the same corp, trying to navigate through the Shadowrun world using Drama instead of Action. As I think more and more about it, I'm coming up with some unique issues.

Mainly, that people don't tend to die in either of those games. Not that I want to make a bloody mess, but I want there to be some chance of character loss because it seems to fit in-setting. I was thinking of dragging the Trauma system over as well, but I'm not sure how it would work with Action or Drama. Especially Action, since there's no real stress tracks over on that side. Would I have to make major changes, or are those systems flexible enough that it'd be a minor change in terms of exchanges and getting Taken Out?

Some secondary ones are how I should deal with magic, cyberware, bioware and the need for money. Should I limit it in some way to only certain sections of the character, or just let people go hog-wild? Since Cortex generally avoids money, is there some abstractions to use that would make sense to handle money and items without having to actually track money and items?

Gau
Nov 18, 2003

I don't think you understand, Gau.
The Firefly RPG is apparently over half off for Tabletop Day or something. I'm tossing around the idea of picking it up, can anyone tell me if it's worth it beyond OH MY GOD I LOVE THIS ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD SHOW THAT RAN FOR THIRTEEN EPISODES AND A MOVIE? The description promises a lot.

inklesspen
Oct 17, 2007

Here I am coming, with the good news of me, and you hate it. You can think only of the bell and how much I have it, and you are never the goose. I will run around with my bell as much as I want and you will make despair.
Buglord
I'm quite interested in finding which Cortex+ variant it uses. The free Tabletop Day bundle includes the quickstart, but the servers are too overloaded to download it.

The Lore Bear
Jan 21, 2014

I don't know what to put here. Guys? GUYS?!
I got the PDF for free for preordering, and here's what I can tell so far:

It uses a combination of all three Cortex Pluses to make the game. The basic Attributes are like the Affiliation dice from MHR, and are very broad (Physical, Mental, Social). The distinctions have a combination of the Action/Heroic's d8 or d4+PP, but have triggers like Drama's distinctions. The skills are kinda like the old Serenity list, but brought down in number and skill specialties just adds another die to the pool. Signature Assets from Action have also been brought over. Ships are basically characters with slightly different generation, but also get distinctions and signature assets.

There's also at least one new thing, the Big drat Hero dice, which can be saved up from certain situations at a certain die type to use later. Spend 1pp to both roll the die and add it to the total, and it can be used after the initial roll. Probably the only truly unique thing about this Cortex Plus game. Which is fine, because it mixes up a lot of the parts of the other Cortex Plus games that I like.

neonchameleon
Nov 14, 2012



Gau posted:

The Firefly RPG is apparently over half off for Tabletop Day or something. I'm tossing around the idea of picking it up, can anyone tell me if it's worth it beyond OH MY GOD I LOVE THIS ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD SHOW THAT RAN FOR THIRTEEN EPISODES AND A MOVIE? The description promises a lot.

That's not half off. That's a Drivethru RPG special - the $49.99 is the price of the printed book.

And having run a short campaign of it, it's like Smallville - an excellent game, and one you should probably break away from the default setting unless you happen to really like Firefly. My description of it on RPG.net was that "Firefly is about a semi-competent team that fails entertainingly along the way to success and works through their challenges while being fish out of water." And it's the best game I have ever played at creating a sense of madcap insanity from failures and partial successes. Think Police Academy or Farscape for the sort of game it does really well, and much better than any other system I've ever tried.

And ships in play aren't characters so much as character overlays. When a PC acts using a ship as a ship you replace the PC's physical/mental/social with the ship's hull/engines/systems and use the PC's skill.

Lichtenstein
May 31, 2012

It'll make sense, eventually.
I'm thinking of hacking/reskinning the Leverage into something more Metal Gear Solid. Any tips on how to properly do little gimmicky boss battle sections under Cortex Action rules?

The Lore Bear
Jan 21, 2014

I don't know what to put here. Guys? GUYS?!
The easiest way I could see is something involving the gang-up rules being used in weird ways. Have each "member" of the mob be one of the gimmick-y targets/unlocks/etc, and as the hero dispatches them, remove them from the dice pool. Alternatively, make the boss have different character sheets for each phase.

I've been working on a way to move stress over to Action conceptually, which would help as well. I'm trying (and failing) to do more than staple Heroic stress onto the side of Action.

Lurks With Wolves
Jan 14, 2013

At least I don't dance with them, right?
Another thing to remember is that most MGS-style boss fights can't be brought straight in from a video game to a tabletop. Take the Vulcan Raven fight for example. You're running around a warehouse fighting a giant guy with a giant machine gun. You can't face him one on one because he'll shoot you full of holes, so you have to hide behind cargo containers and plant mines and shoot him in the back with remote control rockets. Eventually he starts knocking containers around and altering the playing field and it's a conceptually cool fight. You literally can't do that fight in Cortex+ the way the game does it. The mechanical focus on movement just isn't there.

But what does Cortex+ have? Distinctions, dice tricks and plot points. If you're converting the Vulcan Raven fight to Cortex+, you can do anything you want with those three things. You can a Stealth Die that Raven's trying to eliminate, and if it reaches zero you automatically take damage because you're in his line of sight and he's spewing too many bullets to dodge them all. You can suddenly have to deal with a Hurled Cargo Container d8. You can... have more interesting mechanical gimmicks than what I can think up.

What I'm saying is, no matter what system you're making a gimmick boss in, you need to look at all the mechanical hooks you have and you need to twist them as hard as you can. If you know what tools you have at your disposal, you can do almost anything.

(In retrospect, figuring out what tools you have is probably what you wanted help with in the first place and this post about the theory behind making gimmick-focused fights isn't that helpful, but I already wrote it so let's hope someone thinks it's useful.)

The Lore Bear
Jan 21, 2014

I don't know what to put here. Guys? GUYS?!
Alright, so, if any of my players are secret goons, STOP READING HERE.



I'm running an online Roll20 game of Firefly in the Verse proper, and I've got some questions/wan to talk some ideas through to make sure that I have some idea of what's going on. I've never run a full session of any Cortex Plus game, but I've both played and ran short-lived Cortex Plus games, and am even in a current great Marvel game. The mechanics aren't what I'm the most worried about right now, as much as I'm not sure how much I should plan out ahead of time. I've read most of the relevant sections of the book, but I always feel like I might be missing something important.

The book suggests that I should put them in a middle of a job, which sounds like a good idea on paper but in practice, I can't think of anything that basically breaks down to "this job was supposed to be easy, but things are more complicated than they seem" without feeling like it'll mess with the players in a serious way and/or will lead to them doing "nuh-uh, I wanna do something else". Should I worry about this? Should I ask them what job they'd be doing?

How balanced are the NPCs in the example adventure from the PDF? What about the suggestions from the GMC section? I know that Cortex Plus isn't as concerned with high levels of balance, and Firefly especially has a lot of dice-based nonsense that will happen no matter how much I balance things, but I want to have some idea as to the power level of the gMCs I throw at them.

Finally, I'm looking at the example adventure for conceptual help, even if the reasons and etc are more focused on the party. Still, a basic There Are rear end in a top hat Criminals Who Are Terrible, Make Them Go Away Or Whatever story seems relative easy and fun to set up and run. What are the good parts of the example adventure? What are the bad parts?

Blasphemeral
Jul 26, 2012

Three mongrel men in exchange for a party member? I found that one in the Faustian Bargain Bin.
For a while now, I've been rolling around an idea in my head to make a tactical-hack for Cortex+. I have some ideas for meshing grid-based combat with the Cortex+ dice pool mechanic, and I was wondering: has anything of this nature has been done before?

I'd love to know about any other hacks or home-brews that have attempted this, and what issues/successes they've had.

Bigup DJ
Nov 8, 2012
Alright so I'm really interested in Cortex+ but I want to learn more about it before I buy any books. Why hasn't Cortex+ been a runaway popular success like Fate or *World? What does it have to offer over those systems?

Blasphemeral
Jul 26, 2012

Three mongrel men in exchange for a party member? I found that one in the Faustian Bargain Bin.

Bigup DJ posted:

Alright so I'm really interested in Cortex+ but I want to learn more about it before I buy any books. Why hasn't Cortex+ been a runaway popular success like Fate or *World? What does it have to offer over those systems?

FATE is built on the Fudge chassis which, while giving it a good bell-curve in die rolls, gives it almost zero numerical flex room for any die tricks, number advancement, or special powers.

Dungeon World uses 2d6, so its numerical spread is much better, and it's built to be a simple game that's easy to pick up, but has the downside of only supporting "classes" that have playbooks. While playbooks are amazing both thematically and from a pick-up and play perspective, they don't allow for someone to sit down and make whatever character they want to play. They've gotta pick from an existing archetype or reflavor existing mechanics.

Cortex+ uses a meaty dice-pool system, which functions unlike most die-pools you've seen. Instead of just "more dice is always better," and boundless improvement, you're enticed to build "just the right" pool for the job. It gives a lot of flex room for building interesting power sets and is so hackable they have a whole book on how to hack it; including a bunch of example hacks from the development community. The Hacker's Guide was kickstarted, in fact.

The numbers are much more forgiving, too. So much so that, in most games, they don't even give you a point-buy character building system of any kind (which kind of bugs me, personally). They can get away with giving you a bunch of guidelines instead and then letting you spitball it and it still generally plays fair.

As for why it hasn't taken off, it actually has. It's just, apparently, not that big in your circles (or on here, for that matter.) It's the system that the Smallville RPG, the Leverage RPG and the Marvel heroic RPG are based on. Smallville and Leverage won awards, if I'm not misremembering, and The Marvel Heroic did quite well in sales, in fact, and was ramping up a quite nice product line until MARVEL called in their honestly unrealistic sales expectations and forced MW to repeal all unsold material for it. I really wish they'd put out more products for it Cortex+, honestly. That might be why it's not a huge success.

Basically, I like to think of it as the better bits of FATE's character generation combined with a meatier rolling system that puts the same kind of dramatic power in the players' hands.

Blasphemeral fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Jul 23, 2014

inklesspen
Oct 17, 2007

Here I am coming, with the good news of me, and you hate it. You can think only of the bell and how much I have it, and you are never the goose. I will run around with my bell as much as I want and you will make despair.
Buglord

Bigup DJ posted:

Alright so I'm really interested in Cortex+ but I want to learn more about it before I buy any books. Why hasn't Cortex+ been a runaway popular success like Fate or *World? What does it have to offer over those systems?

I agree with pretty much everything Blasphemeral said, but part of the reason Fate and *World took off is that their licensing is much more forgiving. Fate is Creative Commons and OGL dual-licensed, so you can do anything you want with it under the terms of one of those licenses. Apocalypse World doesn't have an explicit license, but the number of games suggests Vincent Baker is pretty open with that; Dungeon World is explicitly Creative Commons licensed.

What this means is, as long as you give credit, you can take any amount of text you need from these games to make your own game.

Cortex+ has a dual fanwork and pro license, neither of which lets you reuse any text from any of their books (including the Cortex Plus Hacker's Guide) or their trademarks, both of which let MWP change the terms on you at any time or revoke your license at any time, and the pro license requires you to advertise for them, sell your book through DTRPG, and prevents you from suing them for any reason.

Basically, their licenses (a) don't give you any right you don't already have simply from copyright law and (b) impose additional restrictions on you. Unless I have a game concept that ties explicitly into one of MWP's licensed titles or really needs Cortex+'s system, I can't see why I'd base a new property on MWP's work.

neonchameleon
Nov 14, 2012



Bigup DJ posted:

Alright so I'm really interested in Cortex+ but I want to learn more about it before I buy any books. Why hasn't Cortex+ been a runaway popular success like Fate or *World? What does it have to offer over those systems?

The parts already mentioned are true (it isn't doing badly despite a bad fan license). What's being missed is the business side of MWP - which isn't the worst publisher in the industry (and won't be as long as Palladium is around), but is pretty terrible. They've a reputation for treating their freelancers badly, and they've got serious issues with publishers and printing to the point that they have failed to publish books and I don't know a single publishing deadline they've kept. (There might have been a few round MHRP). I don't know what they are doing or not doing with their publisher but they need to change it.

As for what it offers, Cortex+ Action (Leverage, Firefly) is Fate's stepbrother - as in Cam Banks subcontracted almost all of Evil Hat and it shows. Cortex+ is swingier than Fate (so is ... just about everything else) and Firefly is perfect for something like Police Academy with a team of misfits with weird skills that are going to roll half catastropically forward. Marvel Heroic is pretty much the system for play that ends up looking like a comic book and if you want to run heists you want to own Leverage at the very least. If you like rolling lots of dice and like mechanics that really match the fiction they emulate, Cortex+ is great.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Blasphemeral
Jul 26, 2012

Three mongrel men in exchange for a party member? I found that one in the Faustian Bargain Bin.
I finally got my copy of the new Firefly RPG from MW. I'm gonna try and run it for a couple-week one-shot starting next Tuesday. I'm wondering: does anyone know of any resources online I could check-out to get into the right mind-set? Maybe a blog or something with GM advice or session summaries?

I've checked out Rick Neal's place, but his group just started their Firefly run and he doesn't have much posted on it, yet.

  • Locked thread