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Tasoth posted:I have to agree that a Culture based RPG would be difficult. For one, most of the characters/SC agents don't operate at their full potential in the open. Whenever their talets break out (Zakalwe, Horza), it's a last minute deal in which death is certain. Or they're cloistered like the girl with superior predictive abilities than a Mind. And then there is the question of how you mechanically support the special abilities of the characters. Culture always seemed to be a natural fit for something like GURPS, which does a (reasonably) good job of handling interactions between vastly different tech levels - something that comes up more often than not in the life of an SC agent. Plus, trying to figure out the point value of something in GURPS also gets across the staggering scale and gap between your average guy living a carefree life on an orbital and even a basic drone or SC agent, let alone something like a Mind. Culture scales....weirdly.
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May 23, 2014 16:21
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hectorgrey posted:One thing I do like about GURPS is how the level of crunch is entirely up to the GM. Probably the most accurate appraisal of the system that I've heard is that it isn't really so much a system as a box of lego bricks for you to build a system out of. They've tried to change that in the last few years with the Dungeon Fantasy and Monster Hunter lines, which are roughly analogous to buying a LEGO kit that you can make into an X-Wing or a Camaro or what-have-you. It's a valiant effort, but doesn't really play to GURPS' strengths which are largely in insanely flexible character creation. Infinite Worlds or Transhuman Space did far better jobs of that, but just didn't sell enough.
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Jul 25, 2014 16:46
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Evil Mastermind posted:Man I thought that was about the Capcom Monster Hunter games and I got all excited. You could probably do Capcom Monster Hunter without too much effort, because close-range melee/ranged combat with lowtech weapons is one of those things that GURPS does really well. The only real jarring part is that like most tabletop RPGs the numbers don't get really big, so you can't slowly whittle down the health of a giant bag of hitpoints. It would be about avoid attacks and making a lot of low-chance hits until someone gets lucky. Another of GURPS virtues is that a single hit can have a lot of knock on effects such as shock, knockdown, limb crippling, etc. - so the nature of the fight slowly changes as you make significant hits.
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Jul 25, 2014 17:16
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Yes it is simple, but that is fine by me I like simple, and I especially appreciate that simplicity for the air combat. Its meant to be a fast-paced cinematic system afterall. No reason to get fancy or complex. This feels like they've gone too far in the other direction - so generic as to be pointless. There are potentially any number of factors unique to air combat (and not just air combat, but death-defying barnstorming dogfighting) that would make for wonderful improvements to an otherwise unremarkable system. That would help to compensate for that fact that it's bad enough keeping track of participants on a flat bit of earth, now you're moving around in 3D space and that kind of thing is extremely hard to describe narratively. I guess what I'm saying is that it's a shame there wasn't the same effort put forth mechanically as there clearly was with the setting. If that's not the case, then by god man show us more!
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Aug 18, 2014 23:27
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Bieeardo posted:Eh, it's clearly a storygame: you can't actually die unless you explicitly accept the risk, and you have the option of taking crit-fails in return for additional bennies, as well as extra bonuses for describing your (otherwise) death-defying stunts. Crimson Skies 2.0 is obviously not the intention. You can be a mechanically interesting storygame, and the Lay It On The Line stuff is actually a great example of that. The fiddly bits just become about the emotional narrative of the dogfight versus how many Gs you're pulling and turning radii and whatnot. Bonuses for describing your stunts is the kind of thing that felt great 10-15 years ago when we were doing it in Feng Shui and Exalted, but my experience of actually playing those games has led me to conclude that it tends to mostly just reward good descriptions that people were going to make anyway, but the game would have unfolded pretty much the exact same way without them. kaynorr fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Aug 18, 2014 |
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Aug 18, 2014 23:43
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Impermanent posted:It is the overall fandom's inhibitions and unwillingness to move away from power fantasies that prevents gaming from being as artistically expressive as it could be. I don't think you're accusing anyone of badwrongfun, but it always bugs me when people get dismissive of most games as being nothing more than power fantasies, and how games could be so much more if people would just be More Mature. I tend to see it not so much as glorifying power but agency - the ability to make meaningful choices as a PC and have them reflected back by the gameworld. Why play an RPG that emphasizes futility and powerlessness? It's what makes horror have such a niche appeal - horror only works well when your options narrow, when the chances of survival are more remote by the moment and you dig into someone's primal fight-or-flight-ohgod-please-flight response. Not liking that isn't a sign of immaturity or narrow-mindedness, it just means that's not something you feel the need to seek out in your recreation. Hearing that Monsterhearts is intended to drive towards a conclusion where everyone is a well-adjusted adult is fantastic. Way, way, way too much of this genre is focused about the spiral down into the dark, without chance of escape.
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Aug 20, 2014 23:42
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Prison Warden posted:Buffy is one of the primary inspirations for the game apparently, and that show had a big bad guy every year, multiple plot things interacting with the characters, tons of jokes, maybe three times where Buffy had to fight evil robot us's AND an episode where everyone turned into what they dressed as for Halloween. It's the difference between watching the show, writing the show, and being Buffy. RPGs ask you to put yourself in the character's shoes, and the "default" mode for such things is that you want your PC to succeed and achieve his/her personal goals. The more invested you are, the more individual and structural setbacks sting. Horror RPGs require you to maintain a delicate balance between investment in the character and distance so that your character's almost inevitable ruin doesn't make you go, "welp that's it I'm going to play Halo". It's not for everyone, and requires a significantly greater degree of finesse and agreement at the table between players and GMs.
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Aug 22, 2014 16:44
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Ratpick posted:That's an important part of playing Monsterhearts: not playing your character as a rational agent, but using them as a vehicle for getting some juicy drama out of the situation at hand. I would contend that this is one of the major reasons that Monsterhearts IS a horror game, because there is such a profound tension between acting in-character and getting the juicy drama. The strength of the game is that the mechanics support there - there is a reason to be the obsessive stalker, the shadowy sexpot, the raging jock. But that reason is the metalevel of a story about angst, confusion, and the painful process of becoming mature. "I'm doing this thing but I don't know why I'm doing it, or even worse I know why I'm doing it and I HATE THAT." is particularly difficult in the context of a role-playing game where you are in the driver's seat, much more so than a passive medium like TV. It's a great game, but I think there are reasons why a lot of people (including some in this thread) will have some unease about actually playing it, precisely because of that tension. Color me extremely disappointed, though, by the suggestions that the Growing Up stuff isn't as mechanically solid as what came before.
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Aug 22, 2014 18:22
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hectorgrey posted:Honestly, the main reason I'm not particularly interested in Monster Hearts is the same reason I'm not particularly interested in Apocalypse World - I dislike the concept of sex as a mechanical device. That's not to say that I'm all about the murder-hoboing (though when it comes to that, I prefer believable mechanics to genre emulating mechanics); I'm more than happy to play games about people with friends, families, poo poo to do and other very good reasons not to go wandering the countryside looking for monsters to kill; I just prefer those things to be decisions made by the GM and the players rather than something enforced by the system. If you don't like having interpersonal dynamics made mechanical, than it's pretty safe to say that Monsterhearts and possibly many PbtA games are not for you. It's a pretty core part of the premise, similar to "the roll of a d20 can simulate whether or not I chop that orc's arm off". That's the essence of making something mechanical, and I strongly suspect is a huge limiting factor of why we don't see more people working in this design space. There is a very large chunk of all potential and practicing roleplayers who are completely turned off by the notion that the dice or rules can dictate an emotional or mental response that isn't outright mind control.
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Aug 22, 2014 21:16
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Mors Rattus posted:I have literally no idea what this has to do with Monsterhearts at all, a game in which medieval combat does not feature. I suspect it was a response to when I said "It's a pretty core part of the premise, similar to "the roll of a d20 can simulate whether or not I chop that orc's arm off". If you can't accept that a die roll can determine whether or not caused your character to get aroused (for example), much as a die roll could determine whether or not you punched that guy square in the jaw, then this whole design space pretty much is a lost cause for you.
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Aug 22, 2014 22:31
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Halloween Jack posted:Oh sure, but I mean, why did those games get made? I can't speak to Phoenix Command, but I'm pretty sure both Champions and GURPS tried to become more universal versions of their antecedent genres (supers for Champions, D&D for GURPS) and hit convergent evolution. And as it turned out, between the two of them there really wasn't any meaningful space for a third universal game engine so a lot of other players withered and died there. And then 20ish years later you get Powered By The Apocalypse, which is arguably very close to a universal game engine for narrative instead of simulationist play.
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Sep 5, 2014 22:04
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Evil Mastermind posted:So here's what you have to do to take back territory from the High Lords: I realize that TORG is terrible on many, many possible levels - but given TORG's elevator pitch as warring realities, I kind of like that they've provided a default campaign frame with enough detail that you can fill in the blanks and go. GM invents the relevant eternity shard and stelae, then the rest can essentially be a player-driven romp. The execution, of course, is beyond bad - but if anything in the entire goddamn book is worth this level of detail, it's how to actually fight a possibility war.
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Jan 9, 2015 22:05
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TORG may not have a Space Pope, but it does have a Chrome Pope, and that's good enough for me. Forward the Cyberpapacy!
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Jan 13, 2015 18:18
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Rangpur posted:All this talk of adapting video game systems makes me wonder if anyone's ever done a hack for Monster Hunter. D&D4e would be near perfect for it out of the box--combat already revolves around tactical positioning, and there's an entire class of enemies designed to be a challenge for a full party by themselves. All it really needs is a system for called shots and location damage. Though you'd want to restrict it to Martial characters or it becomes a Dragon's Dogma hack instead. I've been of the opinion that GURPS would be a great system for Monster Hunter, because of the crunchy combat and fairly detailed hit location and wounding rules. Called shots, disabling a giant spider one leg at a time, that kind of thing.
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Feb 8, 2015 04:15
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Hipster Occultist posted:Honestly, Polaris seems like it would make a better book than a game. I want more choice in my games than just "well you're inevitably going to fall, but you get to choose how dramatically you fall and where you land." If memory serves, Polaris came out in the general timespan as stuff like The Mountain Witch and Dogs In The Vineyard, the first wave of stuff that was explicitly influenced by much of the early Forge theory. Which is to say, you've got a lot of designers who are thinking about things in a much more structured and systematic way and trying out their chops in the new paradigm. It helps to think of them not as games so much as workshop exercises in game design. They're the pen & paper equivalent of video games like The Last Of Us, with extremely focused intent (and in some cases superb execution) but little-to-no replayability.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:05
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PurpleXVI posted:Nothing about Forge-produced games deserves to be judged or considered by any standards but the ones we use for every other RPG. The only thing that sets them apart is that they were produced by one insular group and their preferences, but they released them to the world at large, so they get to be judged by the world at large. Oh they should absolutely be judged by the same standards as the world at large. The issue things like Polaris raise is how important is replayability and flexibility to a game? If I go into (either by buying it or just sitting down to play it) it knowing exactly what is on the tin, I don't think there is any inherent flaw in the game being a one-and-done affair. That said, it's been a good decade since these kinds of things first hit the scene, and what's far more interesting is the degree to which these workshop designs have fed back (and not fed back) into games that reach for a broader audience. IMHO, by and large I haven't seen it - maybe with the exception of the God-Machine nWoD stuff which tries to create a marriage between the narrative and the mechanical with the Conditions & Beats mechanics. Examples to the contrary would be great, but I'm not aware of anything that takes the design insights of, say, the world's greatest "samurai climbing a mountain to kill a witch and betray each other" and applies it to anything broader that witch-murder-based-mountaineering.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:54
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hyphz posted:Sure, it's about the context - the whole idea of a group of people taking a fetish of theirs and designing a kids' game around it, even if they hid it in the process. (I'm told Totally Spies had the same thing going on.) Even outside of the fetish concept there's some disturbing stuff in there, because of all the "transform classmate into a snake and then put him in a jar" stuff. I get that there is a certain amount of magical empowerment going on, and from one perspective that's totally valid because it's a game about kids with powers, and kids are little shits. In part because that's just what you look like at that level of emotional development, and on top of that because you're mostly interacting with other little shits all the time who are inflicting their own emotional abuse onto you. It's adolesence. Give the average kid the ability to turn someone into a toad, and I'm pretty confident that he'll go around settling scores by turning his enemies into amphibians (and only releasing them into the wild IF THEY'RE LUCKY). It's unsettling because it frames settling real world-grade problems (bullies, mean girls, etc.) with magical overpowered solutions. It's like someone watched Buffy but didn't quite grasp how the metaphor of high-school-as-Hell works. Buffy gives a witty retort to Cordelia when she's being mean, and then chops a demon's head off (even if the demon is a metaphorical representation of, say, being bitchy and exclusionary), not vice versa. It would take a deft hand to create a world where you give kids real, reality-altering magic (beyond the kind of playing pranks spells that the kids at, say, Hogwarts tend to use) and it doesn't become a moral quagmire real fast. A defter hand than writes Witch Girl Adventures, to say the least.
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Mar 17, 2015 21:32
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I've never understood why BRP, despite using entirely reasonable percentiles for skills, insists on having stats in the 1-20 range. I don't want to have to calculate the x3 and x5 of 13 all the time, damnit! Every time I point this out to my dyed-in-the-wool CoC/BRP most-perfect-game friend, I just get a shrug and a, "That's how Sandy did it." But aside from that, it's a pretty fantastic generic system, and intuitive in a way that GURPS and Hero just aren't.
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Apr 1, 2015 22:10
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theironjef posted:Moore's law is from the mid-60s so they definitely had it. RPGs just have this awesome rich history of putting in computers that are underwhelming practically by the date of publishing. Personally, I think it should be a tradition now and RPG writers should be putting in DVD-RWs that hold TWICE as much as today's or USB connectors that, get this, can be stuck in upside down just fine(!) forever. I suspect that more than a few cyberpunk authors take solace in the fact that William Gibson knew gently caress-all about technology and basically cribbed terms that he had overheard or gleaned from friends. Missing the point that unless you can write prose like Gibson, maybe you want to do a bit more research and grounding for your mirrorshades future.
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Apr 7, 2015 17:48
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oriongates posted:But that's exactly what produced the settings biggest boogeyman: The Freak. Thankfully, s/he's not interested in Ascending...to the relief of everyone. IIRC, The Freak and the current Mystic Hermaphrodite are aware of each other (that's one of the perks of being a godwalker, I think) and both sides are cool with the existing arrangement. The Freak gets to run amok here on the physical plane and the MH doesn't have to be watching hisherits back for a dagger. Yet another reason why The Freak is the most dangerous person on Earth, they don't have a divine being constantly trying to mess with their poo poo unlike most godwalkers.
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Jul 2, 2015 23:11
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Strange Matter posted:I just realized the common thread we've seen so far in Postmodern Magick. It's full of stuff that would be really interesting and compelling for player characters to encounter, but not to actually play as. That's pretty much UA adepts in general, though. It can be difficult to keep a group dynamic going if multiple members of the group have various antisocial (self-inflicted) mental illnesses. But if they didn't, the case could be made that they aren't paying a high enough price for their magic. I don't think it's happenstance that in the fairly long (20+ month) UA campaign I was once in, members of our cabal generally drifted from adepts to avatars as the challenge level ratcheted up.
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Sep 14, 2015 18:02
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oriongates posted:There can be a lot of weird loopholes, although most of the ones not covered by the Law of Transaction can be slapped down by the GM with the law of Obedience (for instance, the plutomancy "hack" of a plutomancer and a few friends trading money back and forth every day). I can't remember if this was in Postmodern Magick or not, but I know that a in-universe version of the Laws of Obedience was at least kicked around with the notion that if you kept charging the exact same way time over time (the example that I remember was a dipsomancer drinking exclusively from Nixon's favorite coffee cup) then you started getting a degree of mystic bleed where things other than just the raw power you wanted started to seep into your soul. The dipso would start becoming paranoid, short-tempered, and generally more Nixonian, and a plutomancer's little microfinancing circle will start to pass along memories, personality traits, or maybe even physical features as they stop being part of the overall economy and become part of a closed network centered on the plutomancer. One of the "nice" things about UA is that while it's generally bad form for the GM to be adversarial, the entire loving universe is kind of adversarial so clever players/characters should expect their One Weird Trick to be answered in kind.
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Sep 28, 2015 17:22
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