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Covok posted:I was wondering if it was kosher to advertise stuff like that in relevant threads, but, yeah, I'm totally organizing one for Saturday at 7:00 PM EST. I can't give out any materials till everyone is in the game itself because of the terms of the playtest so it's a very general and easy app to make. For the record, I'm a very easygoing, improvisational GM who likes to let player's be awesome, world build, and have fun, if that helps. If it was pbp I'd gladly app, but sadly being in the UK I can never comit to these roll 20 games. All the same I wish you the best of luck!
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Aug 8, 2015 08:40
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Also it's been mentioned since page one, but it's not in the OP still. Uncharted Worlds. Preview files (from that site).
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Aug 8, 2015 08:45
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It occurred to me recently that no one has made a cyber-punk game in the style of shadow run in this system yet. Which is a shame because as much as I like the shadow run setting, it's mechanics just baffle me. If someone made cyberpunk game I'd probably play the poo poo out of that.
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Aug 8, 2015 09:10
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The Sprawl maybe? Kickstarter page. Which was also mentioned on page 1 apparently, and sounds neat. I can't find preview files or anything for it offhand.
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Aug 8, 2015 09:14
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There are a metric fuckton of them.
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Aug 8, 2015 09:20
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On a related note, with so goddamn many AW hacks and variants out there, what do you guys consider the telltale signs of a poor hack? My own "screening process" consists of checking the Basic Moves and seeing if they agree with the game's atmosphere and are not too many, then looking at playbook concepts and checking whether they spark the imagination and make me want to play as them.
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Aug 8, 2015 13:10
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"I don't care about balance" when coming from the designer. (Looking at you, MotW.) Speaking of which, it seems the consensus is Tremulus is less than great. Can anyone who put some hours into it explain why? I've only read it and didn't notice any obvious flaws.
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Aug 8, 2015 13:18
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Megazver posted:"I don't care about balance" when coming from the designer. (Looking at you, MotW.) Quick highlights: The basic moves don't really fit the feel of a cthulhu mythos setting, they're fairly generic for a *World system. The playbooks are fairly samey and none of them are particularly iconic or stand out in the fiction. The sanity, Lore, and Clue mechanics are all very mechanical and gritty for a *World game, gaining clues doesn't necessarily have anything to do with finding out anything new, and spending clues doesn't benefit you in ways that further the story. So all in all, it's passable and functional but not exceptional. And when we've got a lot of exceptional *World games out there, it just doesn't hold up. That said the Poke Around basic move is really good and I'd highly recommend any other Mythos-based *world attempt take a good look at adapting it. It is the only basic move that's actually unique to Tremulus and it is extremely good for the flavor of the setting. gnome7 fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Aug 8, 2015 |
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Aug 8, 2015 13:59
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Yeah, I was similarly dissatisfied with Tremulus and I couldn't shake the feeling that the entire game was just someone's AW game with a new coat of paint. I did appreciate that trust works in reverse, though; i.e. people use your trust in them for their assist/interfere attempts, and vice versa. I thought that was neat. I wonder if that's what finding a fantasy heartbreaker's like if you're into D&D?
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Aug 8, 2015 15:23
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spectralent posted:Yeah, I was similarly dissatisfied with Tremulus and I couldn't shake the feeling that the entire game was just someone's AW game with a new coat of paint.
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Aug 9, 2015 04:18
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DemonMage posted:Also it's been mentioned since page one, but it's not in the OP still. Sorry about that. It slipped my mind. It's added in now as is the Sprawl. Thanks for pointing that out. Cyphoderus posted:On a related note, with so goddamn many AW hacks and variants out there, what do you guys consider the telltale signs of a poor hack? It's been so long since I made these rules, but:
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Aug 9, 2015 04:47
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Speaking of poor AW hacks, I slapped together an Eclipse Phase hack a few months back. It's not a whole hack, just an overlay that adds a few supplemental moves to the basic AW play. I showed it around a little when I made it, and the opinion I got back was that the fictions of the two games are mildly incompatible. I believe the gist of it was that AW is about scarcity and people's reactions to it, and EP takes place in a post-scarcity world. I don't entirely agree, but I can understand the logic, and admittedly it doesn't work for certain stories within the EP setting. But still, here it is, for whatever good it might do someone to have a move about psychiatric help. I am proud of the "see some seriously hosed-up poo poo" move, though (Even if the 'can't be unseen' meme makes me cringe). --- Harm rules: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B732nw9Uiqy8ZXlLdDhwRjcwMjQ/edit?usp=sharing When you create a character, take a move from another playbook. This is your morph move. Either be logical about what kind of abilities you could get from a morph, or be ready to defend your choice to the MC. When you restore from backup or resleeve, roll+weird. You can also choose a new move from another playbook, replacing the previous morph move. On a 10+, you're dandy. On a 7-9 choose one, on a miss take both: -You go a little crazier. Take -1 forward to your next mental or social action. -The morph doesn't fit. Take -1 forward to your next physical action. Your MC will tell you if there are any other consequences. When you see some seriously hosed-up poo poo, roll+weird. On a 12+, you're mostly okay. On 10-11, pick one from pain in the Harm rules. On 7-9, pick 1 from pain and take -1 ongoing until you can get some kind of help. On a miss, it can't be unseen. The MC will pick two from pain and tell you what else happens. When you take time to fiddle with someone's head without being a Brainer, roll+Hx if it's a PC or roll+Sharp if it's an NPC. On a 10+, choose 2. On a 7-9, choose 1: -You fix something wrong with them -They take +1 forward -You both mark experience -You gain 1 Hx with them -They gain 1 HX with you On a miss, you inflict 1-harm (ap) upon your subject, to no benefit. A Brainer can still do this move, but they have other means of messing with heads.
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Aug 9, 2015 06:49
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Megazver posted:"I don't care about balance" when coming from the designer. (Looking at you, MotW.) This does explain a lot about MotW, which feels like more of a disappointment rather than a truly terrible game. It was a book that helped me grasp onto the concept of a lot of PbtA ideas, but the actual mechanical balance is a giant mess. When did he say this?
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Aug 9, 2015 07:20
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thelazyblank posted:This does explain a lot about MotW, which feels like more of a disappointment rather than a truly terrible game. It was a book that helped me grasp onto the concept of a lot of PbtA ideas, but the actual mechanical balance is a giant mess. When did he say this? I no longer recall, I'm afraid.
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Aug 9, 2015 09:06
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Cyphoderus posted:On a related note, with so goddamn many AW hacks and variants out there, what do you guys consider the telltale signs of a poor hack? MC support. Playbooks and basic moves and poo poo are easy, a /good/ AW hack has a detailed MC section with very carefully chosen moves, principles and threat types. Without a robust MC section it doesn't matter how cute the playbooks are, I'm not gonna have any idea how to make that stuff matter. Monster Hearts and Urban Shadows are the best at this that I've found. Monster Hearts often feels like MCing with one arm tied behind your back because your moves are so tremendously loving limited but it really keeps you on point and doing what you're supposed to.
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Aug 9, 2015 10:41
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Cyphoderus posted:what do you guys consider the telltale signs of a poor hack? When what the developer is really excited about is how he took this mechanic from that game, and combined it with that mechanic from this game, rather than the game itself. Borrowing ideas is fine, AW is a wonderful example of borrowing lots of ideas from different games and ironing them out into a seamless whole. Howver, it has to be secondary to the game experience you're trying to create, and it cannot be all you're doing, you need to bring something to the table. If you're going on about how you designed the game, rather than the game itself, I know it is a bad game. (Tremulus)
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Aug 9, 2015 14:27
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Playing Urban Shadows. Player wants to find Ghosts. Says she wants to hit the streets. I ask her "how she does it, how do they hit the streets?" "With our shoes!"
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Aug 12, 2015 03:35
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The real problem is that none of the Shadowrun hacks are good. Or, more accurately, none of them feel like you're playing Shadowrun. Shadowrun has a certain level of detail, of minutiae, that underlines most of its appeal. Unfortunately, Apoc World is all about jettisoning minutiae to push the plot forward with every move. It's hard to reconcile tiny bits of math that give you tiny advantages in specific situations with broad moves. For example, "'Wared to the Gills" is a reasonable 'move' that a Street Samurai would have on their playbook, but it completely drops away the potential pleasure for digging through a list of gear and perfectly skating the essence line and price just to get yourself actually 'wared to the gills. The minutiae is the appeal. And until an AW hack manages to get it in without it feeling like the Shadowrun gear system just added to the *World system, there won't be a good hack for it.
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Aug 12, 2015 03:47
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QuantumNinja posted:The real problem is that none of the Shadowrun hacks are good. Or, more accurately, none of them feel like you're playing Shadowrun. Shadowrun has a certain level of detail, of minutiae, that underlines most of its appeal. Unfortunately, Apoc World is all about jettisoning minutiae to push the plot forward with every move. It's hard to reconcile tiny bits of math that give you tiny advantages in specific situations with broad moves. For example, "'Wared to the Gills" is a reasonable 'move' that a Street Samurai would have on their playbook, but it completely drops away the potential pleasure for digging through a list of gear and perfectly skating the essence line and price just to get yourself actually 'wared to the gills. The minutiae is the appeal. And until an AW hack manages to get it in without it feeling like the Shadowrun gear system just added to the *World system, there won't be a good hack for it. So then, how much minutiae is enough? Assuming there's a sweet spot between RAW shadowrun and AW... Like, you can look at The Regiment, which is a tactical/modern combat hack that has (relatively) waaay more crunch than the aw we know and love but still has that zip and fiction first mentality. Like if I were doing a cyberpunk/shadowrun hack this is where I'd start. Or would taking a look at the battlebabe's custom weapon rules, expanding them, and integrating them for everyone with some kind of essence/fatigue mechanic be enough?
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Aug 12, 2015 03:59
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Error 404 posted:So then, how much minutiae is enough? Assuming there's a sweet spot between RAW shadowrun and AW... Honestly, Regiment seems like a good step in the right direction. The problem isn't getting the minutiae in it, but about making it feel consistent throughout the system. Simply bolting on a deep gear subsystem makes the small list / light style of the basic moves feel empty. You'll first need to pad those back. The idea, I think, is that a SR game needs upwards of 12+ basic moves / 7+ attributes to sort of reconcile it with the fact that you have 20+ itemization options? I'm not sure, but I know that simply expanding the gear rules isn't enough. The core mechanics need to reflect the minutiae: everything from recon to firefights in Shadowrun have a similar style of minutiae to selecting your cyberware and guns, and it's definitely part of the feel. For example, this table:  The way it works is that every modifier you have gives you a dice pool penalty. If you have two on the same row, they add up to the next row (so two at -3 gives you a -6, two at -6 gives you a -10). If you have two at -3 and one at -6, you're at -10 total. It's insane to stop and look at this table and do the math, but it's also the fundamental charm of Shadowrun: minutiae rules all. I feel like Blades in the Dark captures this sensation pretty well (at least as of v2), but it currently lacks detail in the gear department that needs to get fleshed out. The system is "bigger", and lets you capture those silly details.
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Aug 12, 2015 04:33
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What's the gooncenus on Uncharted Worlds? Is there any preview material out? If you're in my Urban Shadows game, don't read this: This session one of my players told a half truth to the rest of the party about the importance of a heist. He made a normal, routine weapon test out to be something much, much worse to make money off stealing some materials from it. Now, due to a mistake between me and this player, half the party didn't realize he was telling a half truth. We thought they knew that was the case and were just acting in character. They were not. This lead to some confusion and annoyance at the end of the session. This has been resolved, but the player thinks this might be an interesting avenue to explore in the future since some people might not follow him if they know the whole truth, but is rightfully worried it might annoy the rest of the party. To be clear, this time WAS AN ACCIDENT, but he wonders if it would be a good idea for the future. What do you guys think? We're both iffy on the idea since we feel out-of-character misinformation is rude, but we're both curious what other people think.
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Aug 12, 2015 06:04
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QuantumNinja posted:The way it works is that every modifier you have gives you a dice pool penalty. If you have two on the same row, they add up to the next row (so two at -3 gives you a -6, two at -6 gives you a -10). If you have two at -3 and one at -6, you're at -10 total. It's insane to stop and look at this table and do the math, but it's also the fundamental charm of Shadowrun: minutiae rules all. The problem is that most of the minutiae in Shadowrun is functionally an exercise in "can you spot the trap stuff" and "how to stack the most bonuses the most effectively" which leads to the endless cycle of Shadowrun GMs getting frustrated with "munchkins" and "power gamers" despite that sort of thing being exactly what the game tacitly encourages you to do. If you want a game where minutiae rules all but actually has better rules then it seems like GURPS would be a better fit, otherwise if you're going "ugh why do my players keep minmaxing why won't they just stop cramming +1's into everything and jacking their dicepools into the high teens/low 20's by default and just embrace the grimdark cyberdistopia mileau of robot elves shooting orcs in office buildings" then a game full of (badly designed) minutiae isn't really going to help you accomplish that either. I don't think you're going to effectively hybridize *World with Shadowrun in the way you're talking about because *World at its core only tangentially cares about your gear and cares more about what you're doing and how you go about it. An *World game that tried to codify the differences between laser sights and smartgun rigs and reflex sights and this that and the other would collapse under a pile of fiddly bits and pieces. In fact, I agree with you that pretty much every attempt to make a Shadowrun *World hack is bad but from the opposite direction...too many of them try to cram too much fiddly minutiae in there in an attempt to replicate Shadowrun's system when what they should be concerning themselves more with is stripping all the stuff away and focusing on creating a solid set of basic moves and playbooks designed to zero in on whatever the designer deems the quintessential "Shadowrun experience," whether that's gonzo gunfights where people are doing bullet-time dodges and flipping cars with their cyberarms and hacking nearby display terminals to explode like bombs or slick professional freelance criminals with an eye on the bottom line in a job where bullets flying means things are horribly hosed. You probably won't get both aspects at once in a single *World game because the best *World games tend to have an extremely targeted focus instead of being all things to all players, but you probably also won't get a game that satisfies the gear porn and minutiae modifier desire out of *World either. I say this as someone who would dearly love a better designed Shadowrun than the actual Shadowrun, but I think you're better off starting with a crunchy, more gear-centric system first rather than trying to overhaul *World into something it doesn't generally touch on much if at all. (Can I also just say I think it's weird how roleplayers seem to have latched on to huge shopping lists of guns and gear and fiddly poo poo as part of the quintessential cyberpunk experience? I don't remember the parts in Neuromancer or Hardwired where the protagonists spent two hours comparing the relative merits of competing brands of heavy pistols or rattling off laundry lists of their cyber-implants and yet somehow you can't have a cyberpunk RPG unless it has a million pieces of equipment for people to tinker with like they're building a Magic deck.)
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Aug 12, 2015 06:37
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Covok posted:What's the gooncenus on Uncharted Worlds? Is there any preview material out? I don't know if you want this spoilered or whatever but I'm a firm believer that everyone should know everything OOC. Characters hiding info from characters is fine, but players shouldn't hide info from players.
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Aug 12, 2015 07:16
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Kai Tave posted:(Can I also just say I think it's weird how roleplayers seem to have latched on to huge shopping lists of guns and gear and fiddly poo poo as part of the quintessential cyberpunk experience? I don't remember the parts in Neuromancer or Hardwired where the protagonists spent two hours comparing the relative merits of competing brands of heavy pistols or rattling off laundry lists of their cyber-implants and yet somehow you can't have a cyberpunk RPG unless it has a million pieces of equipment for people to tinker with like they're building a Magic deck.) And then there's of course Ghost in the Shell, where the protagonists do spend a page comparing the relative merits of their heavy pistols.  It's a decadent, consumerist genre. 
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Aug 12, 2015 07:51
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There can be fun in a game where players hide information from each other (one of the best moments of my 4e campaign was a player realising she'd been betrayed just as she willing handed her weapon over to another PC and walked into a jail cell), but you need buy-in from all the players if you're going to do it because it's not everybody's kind of fun. Or to put it another way -- you don't need players to know each others' secrets but you do need them to know that other players might be keeping them.
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Aug 12, 2015 08:00
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Siivola posted:That's odd, because it's been something like ten years since I read Gibson's stuff, and basically all I remember is the gear. It wasn't Magic deck level nonsense, of course, but Gibson spent a lot of ink describing how cool this rent-a-cop MRAP is or how far that cyberpunk fixie has been tricked out. I'm pretty sure Neuromancer had a paragraph or three about how cool Case's cyberdeck is, and then there's Molly's eyes, and I think there's a bit in one of the books about the dangers of monofilament wire, too. I should maybe re-read Neuromancer just to see if I can figure out what the gently caress actually happened in that book. Teenage me didn't have a clue so I guess I just focused on the sensible bits. Well I mean, Molly Millions has like three bits of cyberware that get brought up as being important enough to mention. She has a jacked up nervous system, she has retractable finger blades, and then she has what basically amount to mirrorshades implanted over her eyes. I don't think they get brand names or anything and Gibson definitely doesn't go into the realm of technofetishism that someone like Tom Clancey does, a writer who will legitimately spend two pages telling you why this or that particular assault rifle is badass in excruciating detail. Likewise the stolen Russian icebreaker in Burning Chrome is only ever discussed in generalities, not specifics about how many megawhomps it petaflops per second, what you know about it is that it's extremely powerful and extremely hot poo poo and it does exactly you would expect some black market military inforwarfare software to do. Rikki's desire for a new set of cybereyes (with the designer's name on them no less) is certainly present, but Gibson doesn't wax rhapsodic about how they're a set of Zeiss-Ikon Spectra 450's with auto-zoom and enhanced target tracking capability with capacity for 14 distinct upgrades, which you'll find outlined on page 268. The bartender has "a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic." What's that stuff mean? What are those seven functions, what's it do, how much stuff can you cram in there? Doesn't say, and I doubt Gibson put any more thought into it than he did "but what do people in the sprawl eat?" like he got asked that one time by people who wanted to make an official William Gibson Cyberpunk RPG.
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Aug 12, 2015 08:06
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Siivola posted:That's odd, because it's been something like ten years since I read Gibson's stuff, and basically all I remember is the gear. It wasn't Magic deck level nonsense, of course, but Gibson spent a lot of ink describing how cool this rent-a-cop MRAP is or how far that cyberpunk fixie has been tricked out. I'm pretty sure Neuromancer had a paragraph or three about how cool Case's cyberdeck is, and then there's Molly's eyes, and I think there's a bit in one of the books about the dangers of monofilament wire, too. I should maybe re-read Neuromancer just to see if I can figure out what the gently caress actually happened in that book. Teenage me didn't have a clue so I guess I just focused on the sensible bits. Yeah, the sprawl trilogy is all about fetishizing name brand this and that, Case didn't use just any old computer, he used an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 and that gave him an advantage. They encountered a fancy Braun robot in the Villa Straylight, and they drive around in specific brands of cars and motorcycles. Burning Chrome was all about getting someone Zeiss-Ikon eyes. Hardwired and When Gravity Fails both focused on tech as well, but Williams and Effinger just didn't have a flair for name brands the way that Gibson did. Cyberpunk's roots are in early 80's consumerism, that's what made it cyberpunk instead of just near-future sci-fi. That's what made Shadowrun and RT's Cyberpunk games stand out against all the other games that jumped on the cyberpunk bandwagon at the time, they embraced the name branding, you don't just use a heavy pistol, you use an Aries Predator, you don't just drive a mid-sized car, you drove a Eurocar Westwind. I think to get a good cyberpunk *world game you have to approach it from a different direction entirely, start from scratch mechanically with a system that support a multitude of gear options, and then apply *world concepts to your new mechanics.
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Aug 12, 2015 08:31
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Bucnasti posted:Yeah, the sprawl trilogy is all about fetishizing name brand this and that, Case didn't use just any old computer, he used an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 and that gave him an advantage. They encountered a fancy Braun robot in the Villa Straylight, and they drive around in specific brands of cars and motorcycles. Burning Chrome was all about getting someone Zeiss-Ikon eyes. Hardwired and When Gravity Fails both focused on tech as well, but Williams and Effinger just didn't have a flair for name brands the way that Gibson did. Cyberpunk's roots are in early 80's consumerism, that's what made it cyberpunk instead of just near-future sci-fi. That's what made Shadowrun and RT's Cyberpunk games stand out against all the other games that jumped on the cyberpunk bandwagon at the time, they embraced the name branding, you don't just use a heavy pistol, you use an Aries Predator, you don't just drive a mid-sized car, you drove a Eurocar Westwind. Honestly when you break it down like that it sounds like what you really need is just a big list of randomly generated brand names because that basically seems to be the important factor here that people have latched onto, that William Gibson gave things brand names. That's a far cry from the gear porn of cyberpunk RPGs where the assumption is that if character creation isn't an entire minigame of cramming cyberware into your character's body and selecting his personal arsenal from a list of 100 guns and custom ammo types that it's too lightweight. edit; To contribute a bit more, Technoir is a pretty good cyberpunk RPG that manages to not have extensive gear porn or even brand name fetishism while still being laser focused on getting to the heart of the matter which is heavily noir inspired cyberpunk roleplaying. It's got robot arms and robots and everything. There's gear and cyberware and stuff and customizability, but it's more in the realm of the Battlebabe's custom weaponry adding/subtracting tags to things than it is "if I take this scope and this attachment and these custom mods then I can get +6 to hit with my pistol." Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Aug 12, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 08:38
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Kai Tave posted:Honestly when you break it down like that it sounds like what you really need is just a big list of randomly generated brand names because that basically seems to be the important factor here that people have latched onto, that William Gibson gave things brand names. That's a far cry from the gear porn of cyberpunk RPGs where the assumption is that if character creation isn't an entire minigame of cramming cyberware into your character's body and selecting his personal arsenal from a list of 100 guns and custom ammo types that it's too lightweight. Yeah kinda, Cyberpunk is an aesthetic as much as a setting, it's about taking the early 80's to it's extreme conclusion and brand obsession was a new thing at the time. The implication is always that something with a brand name is better than something without. Gibson didn't need to say how much of the rambits Case's computer had, he just had to give it a cool sounding name and have the characters react to that name with reverence to communicate to the reader that this was a bad-rear end piece of hardware (this was actually kinda revolutionary for sci-fi at the time). I don't think you need 100 guns and a separate mini-game to realize a good Cyberpunk game, but I do think you need a fair amount of attention to the tech itself, that's another of the major focuses of the genre, using, exploiting and in some cases internalizing technology. If you ask someone about their Shadowrun character, they're going to tell you in detail about all their cyberware/magic foci/whatever their character uses to do their job and you're not going to be able to reproduce that with a dozen basic moves and 2d6. In the end, I love the Shadowrun setting, but I hate the rules, and I want someone (because I have too much on my plate already) to make a better game so I can play it.
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Aug 12, 2015 09:22
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Bucnasti posted:Yeah kinda, Cyberpunk is an aesthetic as much as a setting, it's about taking the early 80's to it's extreme conclusion and brand obsession was a new thing at the time. The implication is always that something with a brand name is better than something without. Gibson didn't need to say how much of the rambits Case's computer had, he just had to give it a cool sounding name and have the characters react to that name with reverence to communicate to the reader that this was a bad-rear end piece of hardware (this was actually kinda revolutionary for sci-fi at the time). Maybe a potential solution is to take a leaf from Borderlands and have a range of premade manufacturers, each of which applies their own tag to their manufactured equipment? So cheap brands like the Val-U-Ware Ventilator always come with the Unreliable tag, and expensive ones like the Schloss-Mikenburg Eliminator T5 always come with things like Armour-Piercing or Nanotech? That or gate the number of positive tags a piece of gear can have behind how high-end the brand is, so cheap knockoffs have 1 or 2 and top-of-the-line stuff has 5-6. (or simplest solution: branded is an extra tag you can have on gear that means it does something fancy, unique and desirable)
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Aug 12, 2015 09:37
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Bucnasti posted:Yeah kinda, Cyberpunk is an aesthetic as much as a setting, it's about taking the early 80's to it's extreme conclusion and brand obsession was a new thing at the time. The implication is always that something with a brand name is better than something without. Gibson didn't need to say how much of the rambits Case's computer had, he just had to give it a cool sounding name and have the characters react to that name with reverence to communicate to the reader that this was a bad-rear end piece of hardware (this was actually kinda revolutionary for sci-fi at the time). And I certainly don't dispute that, but I think you've hit the nail on the head by pointing out that what Gibson made good use of was implication rather than overt explanation. Something gets a brand name and people react with appropriate awe or whatever (though amusingly enough in Burning Chrome it's not even the fancy Zeiss-Ikon eyes that get any sort of elaboration beyond being expensive and trendy, it's Jack talking about Tiger's Ono-Sendais and how they have depth perception problems, a lovely warranty, and will likely leave him with crippled optic nerves inside six months). That's not a thing you need gear porn to capture, and I think a lot of people in the hobby (including many cyberpunk RPG writers) are missing the forest for the trees when it comes to cyberpunk and how it handles tech. edit; Flavivirus hits it on the head too by pointing out that just having "branded" as a tag would more or less accomplish all it accomplishes in Gibson's writing. It's a nebulous, fetishistic signifier of ineffable qualities, not something that prompts comparison shopping. Bucnasti posted:I don't think you need 100 guns and a separate mini-game to realize a good Cyberpunk game, but I do think you need a fair amount of attention to the tech itself, that's another of the major focuses of the genre, using, exploiting and in some cases internalizing technology. If you ask someone about their Shadowrun character, they're going to tell you in detail about all their cyberware/magic foci/whatever their character uses to do their job and you're not going to be able to reproduce that with a dozen basic moves and 2d6. I do too, but I think starting with *World as a base system is going to be a doomed effort because it's fundamentally not a game designed to give that much of a poo poo about gear porn. The thought of trying to recreate the Shadowrun experience as defined by "poring over chapters of minutiae-laden crunch and spending two hours tuning a character like a car's engine in the latest Forza game" in *World puts me in mind of something like Strands of Fate, or that one Battle Royale *World hack with like 26 basic moves. But also I think it's weird that "exploration of the themes of technology in cyberpunk" has somehow wound up being filtered through the RPG hobby into "let me tell you about my street samurai with his dozen pieces of cyberware and six guns shooting three different types of bullets." The first thing you'd need to do if you wanted to make a Shadowrun *World hack is figure out what sort of Shadowrun you want to hone in on because *World games work best when there's a very clear focus on specific themes and tones and Shadowrun's writers and fanbase both can't decide whether it's a game of explosions and wahoo gunfights and plans involving airdropping a tugboat stuffed with C4 onto someone or a gritty, hardscrabble game of cutthroat corporate espionage using deniable assets as pawns where every bullet could be the one that ends you. They're both enjoyable, but I doubt an *World game could do both and once and still be decent at it. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Aug 12, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 09:41
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Shadowrun being a kitchen sink setting and having 25 years of splatbooks might make it an insurmountable task to work into a *world game without cutting it down to the point that it's no longer recognizable as Shadowrun.
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Aug 12, 2015 10:02
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Bucnasti posted:Shadowrun being a kitchen sink setting and having 25 years of splatbooks might make it an insurmountable task to work into a *world game without cutting it down to the point that it's no longer recognizable as Shadowrun. Probably. I mean Rifts is a hot loving mess of a game and even people with fond memories of making Ultra Neuro Cyber Space Knights with ten million MDC will happily admit that, but I imagine that if someone was trying to make some sort of pared-down Rifts hack that you'd get the same sort of response...that without a thousand OCCs and RCCs and a hojillion suits of power armor and giant robots and laser guns that it's just not Rifts, y'know?
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Aug 12, 2015 10:15
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I suppose you could do it so your gear gave you your stats. That way people could agonise over what equipment to take. But really that's just obuscating the matter rather than solving it.
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Aug 12, 2015 11:05
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I think the tag-based gear in Apolypse World is rather well suited for gear porn. The custom/signature weapons really scratch that itch already and there's only a few options. One could expand that list for a setting where gear is important, and then there are classes like the Savvyhead. I don't know about your groups, but my Driver and Savvyhead teamed up and spent the entire campaign chasing down parts and tricking out a school bus into a rolling death machine. That things had so many moving parts at the end that it was basically a new character. Making a Shadowrun hack is a doomed endeavor, much like making a Twilight 2000 hack would be a doomed endeavor. Better to focus on making a good PbtA cyberpunk game which focuses on the genre conventions and style over substance storytelling rather than the misguided nostalgia for a particular game system. Embrace the PbtA way of doing things (Monsterhearts) instead of forcing another system on top of it. Even when it works, it kind of does not. (Dungeon World).
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Aug 12, 2015 11:47
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When you spend hours upon end optimising your loadout with flashy name-brand gear, roll +cash...
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Aug 12, 2015 12:37
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Covok posted:What's the gooncenus on Uncharted Worlds? Is there any preview material out? There's at least enough that a friend was able to run a session of it for our tabletop gaming group a couple weekends ago. I did like the way characters were combinations of features selected from small groups of options, and weapon design was fun too (I was reprising the role of a character from a FATE game who has Bionic Commando's grappling arm). We didn't have much time, so we really just made characters, landed on a space station, got thrown in jail, talked our way out, and then split up to fix some systems/people/odds. Seemed fine from what we played though.
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Aug 12, 2015 12:53
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Bucnasti posted:In the end, I love the Shadowrun setting, but I hate the rules, and I want someone (because I have too much on my plate already) to make a better game so I can play it. This. So much this. I want a good ruleslight Cyberpunk game. However, I want to thank this conversation for giving me the idea to replace Fine equipment with Brand-Name Equipment in the Cyberpunk Blades in the Dark hack I've been lazily bouncing around in my head for a while.
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Aug 12, 2015 17:08
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Sorry to wheel this topic back so much, but I think the biggest reason people expect gear porn in games is because D&D was (until 4e) a very gear-dependent game. It's pretty much ingrained in people now that you need to have STUFF.
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Aug 12, 2015 17:29
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Evil Mastermind posted:Sorry to wheel this topic back so much, but I think the biggest reason people expect gear porn in games is because D&D was (until 4e) a very gear-dependent game. It's pretty much ingrained in people now that you need to have STUFF. Yeah, and at it's core Shadowrun is just D&D with cyberware, and corporate enclaves replacing proper dungeons.
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Aug 12, 2015 17:52
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