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Evil Mastermind posted:WoD must have the widest gap between "stated playstyle" and "actual playstyle" ever.
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Jun 2, 2014 16:59
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New World of Darkness is exactly the same. Like, they wanted to emphasize that being a vampire is miserable misery, so they wrote sourcebooks with all their usual in-character bullshit about being a miserably miserable not-even-a-real-person doing miserable things to other miserable people to make them even more miserable. Then they slooowly slide across books with names like World of Darkness: Armory: Reloaded.
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Jun 2, 2014 17:03
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Are there many games that are actually good about marrying their rules to their theme? A lot of the big name PbtA games seem quite good at that (Monsterhearts, whoop whoop!), and the FATE derivatives seem good at it too.
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Jun 2, 2014 17:06
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FMguru posted:Kult was another one. It's supposed to be a game of Clive Barker-esque horror, full of Gnosticism and seeing-the-world-behind-the-world and successive mental breakdowns, but the rules (at least in 1E) had a detailed combat system that wouldn't have been out of place in Twilight:2000 and weapons lists with pages of machine guns and explosives. Because when the walls of reality are warping around you and chittering monsters from before creation are sweeping through a Brazilian slum, the most important detail is whether you're firing an FN-FAL 50.41 or a Barrett M240LW. That's a very 90's RPG design thing, really. Long lists of specific guns that only really differ by one point of damage.
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Jun 2, 2014 17:11
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Playing: D&D Next, Finished GURPS, Dungeon World, Double Cross Running: Dungeon World, Potentially Eclipse Phase Reading: Eclipse Phase Stallion Cabana posted:Is it normal as a GM or whatever to feel really excited about the finale and stuff even though you know it's awhile off because you think your players are going to really enjoy it? Ettin posted:Fate is bad at horror unless you're rolling with a pulpy kind of horror or something that can deal with Fate's player empowerment. If you're not, you probably want another system.
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Jun 2, 2014 17:18
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The new X Chronicle books (which are essentially nWoD revised) have largely been better at getting back to intended play style. Vampire focuses on you being a horrible monster who maintains a fragile grasp on humanity via personal connections that you are prone to hurting, Demon is a spy thriller.
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Jun 2, 2014 17:39
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Evil Mastermind posted:That's a very 90's RPG design thing, really. Long lists of specific guns that only really differ by one point of damage.
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Jun 2, 2014 17:43
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Halloween Jack posted:New World of Darkness is exactly the same. Like, they wanted to emphasize that being a vampire is miserable misery, so they wrote sourcebooks with all their usual in-character bullshit about being a miserably miserable not-even-a-real-person doing miserable things to other miserable people to make them even more miserable. Nah, nWoD focused a lot on dials that you could turn for Vampire Matrix or Mage the game of identity disintegration. Reloaded, for example, is one third options to tweak the combat rules to fit more cinematic or gritty/horrific play, one third horrific artifacts, and another third an examination of fighting styles. nWoD was both - so it can do actual horror just fine.
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Jun 2, 2014 18:29
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Davin Valkri posted:Are there many games that are actually good about marrying their rules to their theme? A lot of the big name PbtA games seem quite good at that (Monsterhearts, whoop whoop!), and the FATE derivatives seem good at it too. You mean like Fear Itself with its Stability mechanic for the effects of horror and other bad situations? There's also Unknown Armies and its multiple tracks for insanity, which come in handy considering a lot of the characters in that setting are crazy.
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Jun 2, 2014 19:05
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Covok posted:
Delta Green, as mentioned. It's the old creaking Chaosium Call of Cthulhu rules and some of the books can be hard to find, but it makes for some loving great toilet reading/inspiration. I have a couple and I still take them out to steal cool ideas from or just kind of get in the mood. I know there's a dark space-faring RPG (I think using Gumshoe, maybe?) with explicit Lovecraftian elements, but I can't remember the name of it. Someone was doing an F&F write up for it, but then the semester exploded and I got 1,000 posts behind and... Whelp. If someone doesn't remember what I'm talking about and post by when I get home tonight, I'll look through the table of contents and find it. There's The Laundry RPG, but I haven't even read the rules. I just read the novels it's based on, but those kick some serious rear end. Computer scientists fight Cthulhu and Nazis with some great humor to boot? Sign me the gently caress up. Running : Dungeon World and Torchbearer. (Seriously, Torchbearer owns, guys. I'd start a thread but 1) I suck at actually keeping threads rolling and 2) I'm not exactly an authority on the rules, so I'd feel weird putting myself forward.) Trying to get my group to try Monsterhearts Playing :  I don't get to play that much. My buddy may be running Deadlands at the end of the month, so I guess that's a thing?Reading : I just got this great collection of short stories for my birthday : New Cthulhu : The Recent Weird, which is much, much better than you'd think. It's not pandering bullshit, and is instead mostly more in the vein of Lovecraft or riffing off of him tongue in cheek than just Cthul-2 Fast 2 Furious like a lot of that poo poo can be. Definitely worth a read. It's got some pretty great authors (Elizabeth Bear, China Mieville, Charles Stross and Neil god drat Gaiman, among others) and I've been eating through it over the last couple of days like a starving man with a bucket of fried chicken.
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Jun 2, 2014 19:14
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Davin Valkri posted:Are there many games that are actually good about marrying their rules to their theme? A lot of the big name PbtA games seem quite good at that (Monsterhearts, whoop whoop!), and the FATE derivatives seem good at it too.
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Jun 2, 2014 19:18
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Evil Mastermind posted:That's a very 90's RPG design thing, really. Long lists of specific guns that only really differ by one point of damage.
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Jun 2, 2014 19:18
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Xiahou Dun posted:I know there's a dark space-faring RPG (I think using Gumshoe, maybe?) with explicit Lovecraftian elements, but I can't remember the name of it. Someone was doing an F&F write up for it, but then the semester exploded and I got 1,000 posts behind and... Whelp. If someone doesn't remember what I'm talking about and post by when I get home tonight, I'll look through the table of contents and find it.
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Jun 2, 2014 19:19
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Meanwhile you have GRUNT just sort of hanging out with its generic Rifle/Pistol/Machine Gun rules for a military squad based RPG because it's not like the details of the M16 v AK-47 debate matter when you're face down in the mud and the green hell is buzzing.
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Jun 2, 2014 19:20
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FMguru posted:Pendragon is rather brilliantly designed to simulate chivalrous knights from the Morte d'Arthur. The rules system backs up the theme in large ways (Personality Traits, Passions, the Glory system) and small (the way swords are just better than anything else in combat). Pretty impressive for a system that's been largely unchanged since debuting in 1985. Speaking of which, Pendragon is the new Bundle of Holding.
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Jun 2, 2014 19:21
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dwarf74 posted:The most recent example I can think of is the random detailed gun porn just stuck into Call of Cthulhu d20, with a conversion chart for caliber to dice size in case they left off your favorite shooty thing. Oh, and detailed history of popular guns, like you need to know details of various Colts or the FN FAL for Cthulhu. FMguru fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Jun 2, 2014 |
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Jun 2, 2014 19:22
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FMguru posted:It helps if you think of it a wry joke - in C&C (both BRP and D20), it really doesn't matter what caliber of firearm you're carrying because the bad guys are either immune to gunfire (mi-go, fire vampires, colours out of space, lloigor, etc) or are so enormous that they shrug it off (Cthulhu just emerged from his tomb - bet your glad you brought the .44 Ruger instead of the 9mm, huh?). Yeah, everyone knows you hit Cthulhu with a tugboat.
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Jun 2, 2014 19:26
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Meanwhile, Feng Shui handwaves mistakes in its gun porn chart with "Oh, the Colt 1911's .45 caliber instead of 9mm in the real world? Those pesky superficial shifts in the timestream, what kidders, huh?"
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Jun 2, 2014 19:29
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To be fair, Feng Shui's gun porn section is primarily about drooling over gun silhouettes.
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Jun 2, 2014 19:30
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SunAndSpring posted:Playing: D&D 4e, some Vampire, and Numenera. Dread is probably the best single system for playing a horror movie or horror short story. The complete game is $3 right now, and the basic rules and scenarios are available for free. Play it. Mors Rattus posted:To be fair, Feng Shui's gun porn section is primarily about drooling over gun silhouettes. And of course, the ugly Buro guns are just slightly worse mechanically than the better-looking modern guns.
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Jun 2, 2014 19:32
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Mors Rattus posted:To be fair, Feng Shui's gun porn section is primarily about drooling over gun silhouettes. You mean its gun porn selection is about picking the thing with the coolest name. "Hmm, do I want the Desert Eagle, the Anaconda or the Hellhammer?"
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Jun 2, 2014 19:34
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Effectronica posted:Dread is probably the best single system for playing a horror movie or horror short story. The complete game is $3 right now, and the basic rules and scenarios are available for free. Play it. Right up until you hit the Hellharrower, which only a Big Bruiser from 2056 or a cyborg with his robot limbs turned on can even use. But then, it's called the Hellharrower, and cool name can cover a multitude of sins.
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Jun 2, 2014 19:36
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Evil Mastermind posted:Speaking of which, Pendragon is the new Bundle of Holding. And the BTA includes The Great Pendragon Campaign, which is one of the best RPG supplements, like, ever.
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Jun 2, 2014 19:38
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unseenlibrarian posted:Meanwhile, Feng Shui handwaves mistakes in its gun porn chart with "Oh, the Colt 1911's .45 caliber instead of 9mm in the real world? Those pesky superficial shifts in the timestream, what kidders, huh?" I remember the first time I read that back in the 90's. It was mind-blowing that an RPG was basically saying "a pistol's a pistol" and made the gun's appearance the important part.
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Jun 2, 2014 19:41
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Anyone have a link to that initial post secretly drumming up support for Pathfinder? I recall it came out mere months after the 4E announcement and was big on poisoning the well in order to (in hindsight) support Paizo's own line. (Unfortunately my link to it was disappeared along with the second grogs.txt thread for Horrible Rules Violations at the end.)
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Jun 2, 2014 19:59
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Mr. Maltose posted:Tim Powers is basically the Writer In Residence for Apoc World, Unknown Armies, and 7th Sea. Dude's ridiculously good. True. Anyways, since the ApocWorld thread is buried and moribund, I thought I'd throw this playbook I made after rereading Dinner at Deviant's Palace up here. It's fairly rough and in my opinion somewhat overly specific in emulation, but here it is anyways: the Redeemer, Mk. 1. MadScientistWorking posted:I've never really been able to figure out what genres of horror Fate won't work with. I know I can get it to work with certain genres quite easily but I don't know much about the genre itself to know where it breaks down. Fate assumes character competence and power within the gameworld, while pure horror assumes that the characters are less than competent and/or fairly impotent when it comes to facing the threat. In other words, Fate assumes, by default, that you can punch Dracula, but in Dracula itself, nobody really has any hope of facing him physically and Dracula is able to evade their first few attempts to destroy him. Simply jacking Dracula's stats up doesn't really help matters either. You could probably hack Fate to do more conventional horror, but it's like using D&D as the basis for a French Resistance game. Impressive if you do it well, but still not as good as building it from the ground up would be.
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Jun 2, 2014 20:09
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Effectronica posted:True. Anyways, since the ApocWorld thread is buried and moribund Stupid Dungeon World thread stealing all the glory. 
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Jun 2, 2014 20:15
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NachtSieger posted:Also I'm planning to run a Double Cross game set in the Disgaea universe, replacing Encroachment with "ability to tolerate your Overlord," where the PCs all obviousl work for some kind of Overlord. But I have no idea what to rename it into so it's not long and unwieldy. I approve of this entirely. May I suggest Sufferance?
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Jun 2, 2014 21:01
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Effectronica posted:Fate assumes character competence and power within the gameworld, while pure horror assumes that the characters are less than competent and/or fairly impotent when it comes to facing the threat. In other words, Fate assumes, by default, that you can punch Dracula, but in Dracula itself, nobody really has any hope of facing him physically and Dracula is able to evade their first few attempts to destroy him. Simply jacking Dracula's stats up doesn't really help matters either. You could probably hack Fate to do more conventional horror, but it's like using D&D as the basis for a French Resistance game. Impressive if you do it well, but still not as good as building it from the ground up would be.
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Jun 2, 2014 21:39
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It seems like the best way to run horror in FATE would be to make it so that, while in theory you could punch Dracula in the face, in practice Dracula is always two steps ahead of you- by the time you find out he's somewhere, he's already slaughtered every normal in the building and is in the process of flying out the window.
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Jun 2, 2014 22:23
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90's design was basically the birth of the "simulationist" movement; you can still see it in a few d20 games (like the big one, Pathfinder) or Shadowrun. It's also pretty much the worst design philosophy for actually mechanically supporting any sort of intended playstyle, as the entire purpose is to pointedly ignore things like "playstyle" while making the mechanics.
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Jun 3, 2014 00:08
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Thinking of Pathfinder as simulationist makes my head hurt. It's not simulationist so much as so far up its own rear end it literally believes its own uvula is the sun.
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Jun 3, 2014 00:21
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What's grating about Pathfinder, in regards to most of the campaigns I've been exposed to, is that a lot of players believe it's a simulation. Players in one group I've since stopped playing with were constantly making appeals to me in regards to realism, which is a really difficult expectation to design around when Pathfinder is the goddamn system. My favorite thing about 4th Edition powers was how they somehow magically removed that expectation.
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Jun 3, 2014 00:35
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Well, time to get back to work, I guess. Had good sales last month, so hopefully putting out more stuff will keep doing that. Hell, after walking away from RPG work so long ago, I figured it would be harder then this to get back into working again, but it wasn't. So... yay! It was weird to see that DriveThruRPG and RPGNow are both linked now. Still gotta finish getting the paperwork together and putting out on the Paizo store and the d20 Pathfinder SRD store. Good luck for me, I found an old backup that contains a ton of stuff that didn't get released when I got into that argument with ENPublishing, most of it just needs slimmed up, done up for Pathfinder instead of 3.X, and artwork, layout, and covers, which means I've got a LOT of stuff ready to go once I get around to it. Hell, with any luck I'll have about a dozen neat little things up on RPG now for sale. Oh, and who wrote this: http://www.rpgnow.com/product/129865/MurderHobos and who did the cover, because holy poo poo is that genius. Gotta love the expression on the elf's face. He's so loving being a murderhobo.
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Jun 3, 2014 00:43
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ProfessorCirno posted:90's design was basically the birth of the "simulationist" movement; you can still see it in a few d20 games (like the big one, Pathfinder) or Shadowrun. It's also pretty much the worst design philosophy for actually mechanically supporting any sort of intended playstyle, as the entire purpose is to pointedly ignore things like "playstyle" while making the mechanics.
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Jun 3, 2014 00:46
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Arivia posted:Thinking of Pathfinder as simulationist makes my head hurt. It's not simulationist so much as so far up its own rear end it literally believes its own uvula is the sun. The point of a "simulationist" system is that it tries to use the mechanics to create the setting rather then the actual game, which 3.x and its offshoots are entirely guilty of. That's 90's design in a bag - ignore that there's supposed to be an actual game and vaguely hope that players will use the system to do what you want them to do, even if the system doesn't actually end up supporting it all that much (see: WoD). It's why I think AD&D -> 3e fans are the weirdest, because AD&D and Gygax were entirely opposed to this. Gygax was not shy about giving poo poo to people who thought D&D was meant to simulate anything, and hated 3e. That people now try to staple his name to everything 3e is some kind of amazing.
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Jun 3, 2014 00:47
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Arivia posted:Thinking of Pathfinder as simulationist makes my head hurt. It's not simulationist so much as so far up its own rear end it literally believes its own uvula is the sun. grogs.txt is full of this ridiculous nonsense from ENWorld, such as hilarious logic that moves from "The rules of the game should represent physics insofar as is possible," to "The rules of the game and all the abstractions we accept, like hit points and armor class, literally are observable physics of the game world."
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Jun 3, 2014 00:54
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Kaja Rainbow posted:Really need to finish working on: magical girl Powered by the Apocalypse game.  .grassy gnoll posted:Disgaea: Saturday Afternoon of Darkness. Baron Snow posted:I approve of this entirely. May I suggest Sufferance?
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Jun 3, 2014 00:57
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Playing? Nothing, nothing at all. My home group skips most sessions due to RL issues from someone or other. Hard to get a game going these days. Seems like we play once a month now. Running? Oh yeah. I have that crazy two-team Next pbp game going. At one point I ran a fight with both teams, 10 PCs, all at once. That was fun just to run and something I don't see much in a pbp. It's been a challenge to stay on top of things and keep two games moving as they both explore the same dungeon in different directions. The last pbp I ran here was a serious nWod mortals game, which we actually managed to finish. I'm also getting ready for Gencon. I've got two 4-hour games of Dungeon World submitted as official events this year. Last year I ran a few games of it unofficially for goon groups. But there are only 4 total DW games for the whole 4-day con, so I wanted to see DW out there more. Running an official event has me nervous for some reason.
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Jun 3, 2014 02:37
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i'm very slowly running a monsterhearts pbp, also running battlecon pbp matches pretty much constantly. i was playing in a storium game but recent events have soured the site for me. i'm in a weird fate/pdq hybrid game but that's also moving really slow due to life stuff on the gm's end. i totally sympathize with their situation  i'm trying to get into a FATE (atomic robo edition) game about one piece pirates. that should be fun if i get in: i made a sick (and by sick i mean dorky as gently caress) pirate flag for if i end up captain  also i'm waiting on Hremsfeld to finish up our pbp checkers game before it goes to archives 
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Jun 3, 2014 02:51
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