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LatwPIAT posted:"she", actually. Also, in basic PCCS you can't get more than 6 actions per impulse, for a running speed of "only" 22 meters per second. That is to say, 80 kmh. Running. At these speeds you can expect to run across a lake and not sink from the sheer force of your feet pushing up from the water. A rather peculiar feature for a game that claims to model extreme realism... I apologized, I assumed that you were male. The 8 CA per impulse I mentioned is something that popped up in an example, so I had thought it was a feasible goal. LatwPIAT posted:This part of the game is actually quite clever. When you fire a gun in real life and in PCCS, your shots will follow a Guassian distribution. It's most likely that your bullets will go straight forward, but it's also fairly likely they'll deviate a little to the either side of "straight forward", and slightly less likely that they'll deviate even more to either side, etc. The probability of hitting your target is the probability that you shot will fall within some distance from of the centre of your aim. The Odds of Hitting Table is basically this Guassian probability distribution made into a table. It actually conforms quite nicely to the probability distribution for hitting of US Army soldiers. Which I know because there are tables of to-hit probabilities at different ranges and skills for US Army soldiers in the US Army Rifle Marksmanship field manual. Which I have studied extensively and compared to PCCS values... I've done this a lot, since those training manuals give you a better idea of the capabilities of modern warfighters, especially if you're trying to replicate that in game. A lot of the qualification tests are designed to be percentage-based so it's easy to find what level of skill that a TRPG character should be. It's why Twilight 2000 kinda dimmed in my eyes because there's no way a character can actually replicate the same hit ratio needed in game. The other thing is that you can easily replicate the same Gaussian curve without complicated math, tables, and such by using opposed dice rolls. The percentages of success scale logarithmically depending the difference in modifiers. For instance, I'm trying to build a game off the OpenD6 system, and if you add a single die between two even die pools, the chance for success is doubled. 4D6 vs. 3D6 has a 75% chance of success, 5D6 vs. 3D6 has something like 88% chance, and 6D6 has an almost 95% chance of success. But you can use single dice or different dice and gets something similar. Evil Mastermind posted:Would it be spoilery of me to point out that Leading Edge Games also put out an RPG based on the "Lawnmower Man" movie, and said game was "fully compatable" with Aliens and Living Steel? That's nothing. LEG licensed a game based off of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Yes, the Francis Ford Coppola movie where I don't think there was any guns and if there were, they're not very effective. hectorgrey posted:I get the feeling that that bit of Phoenix Command would make for an awesome Jagged Alliance type of computer game. Oh, yeah. I created a Phoenix Command framework for MapTools at some point, but largely abandoned it. I took some effort because of the way MapTools reads tables, which forced me to create tables references inside tables to get the cross-referencing down. But yeah, the framework plays almost like a tactical turn-based game. You could chose a shooter, have them select a target within range, and click on them and instantly get results on how they've been wounded, if they made their knockout roll, what their physical damage was and automatically set their state to dead if they failed their Recovery Rolls. I even managed to rig it so that explosives can be spawned on the field, locate objects within range and it's line of sight, and automatically trigger a damage test them. Also, I know when people were poking around inside the Shadowrun Returns engine, there was per-hex incremented range tables per weapon. So, yeah, there's a bit of that Phoenix Command in actual tactical computer RPGs because it has no problem running major calculations quickly. Young Freud fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Apr 1, 2014 |
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Apr 1, 2014 16:52
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Young Freud posted:That's nothing. LEG licensed a game based off of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Yes, the Francis Ford Coppola movie where I don't think there was any guns and if there were, they're not very effective. (As a side note, Eden Studios would release an Army of Darkness RPG a few years later using the Cinematic Unisystem. The idea of it tracked more to the video games and later comics, where people were being pulled back and forth through time to fight the Necronomicon's deadite army.)
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Apr 1, 2014 17:17
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Evil Mastermind posted:That's what it was! I knew they did another pointless movie adaption RPG, but I couldn't find it anywhere. They also did an Army of Darkness game, but it was a minis skirmish game not an RPG. Man oh man, one of our earliest podcast reviews was Cinematic Unisystem junk, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG. It was apparent early on that the book was going to stay in that smarmy tone of calling the reader "Slappy," and promising to fill the pages with "cool show quotes and pictures, honest."
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Apr 1, 2014 17:26
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theironjef posted:Man oh man, one of our earliest podcast reviews was Cinematic Unisystem junk, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG. And Buffy had CJ Carella doing a good deal of the writing, who of course was also the main writer of Pantheons of the Megaverse. Because RPGs are one big ouroboros of fandom, as it turns out.
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Apr 1, 2014 17:37
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theironjef posted:Man oh man, one of our earliest podcast reviews was Cinematic Unisystem junk, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG. It was apparent early on that the book was going to stay in that smarmy tone of calling the reader "Slappy," and promising to fill the pages with "cool show quotes and pictures, honest." I actually liked the BUffy RPG and Cinematic Unisystem, even if it did break at "higher levels". Admittedly, the longest campaign I ever play with it was a game that started out as a "World of Darkness Potpourri" game and got converted to CineUni. The "conversion" by the GM was so badly done that we literally couldn't fail at any task unless we got a critical failure (because CineUni uses bounded math and we blew waaaaaaay past the boundaries). If there's ever an F&F thread offshoot about terrible campaigns we've been in, I could fill up pages with just that campaign. It was by a wide margin the worst campaign I've ever been in.
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Apr 1, 2014 17:45
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Alien Rope Burn posted:And Buffy had CJ Carella doing a good deal of the writing, who of course was also the main writer of Pantheons of the Megaverse. Because RPGs are one big ouroboros of fandom, as it turns out. We talk about that, but I was mostly outing him as the author of Rifts: Underseas and Rifts: South America, since those go off the rails in some extremely crazy ways. To be honest, Underseas might just be my favorite Rifts book, since I love the idea of a single aircraft carrier becoming an insular post-apocalypse society. Of course it's Rifts, so you get that idea and then immediately torpedo it by making the ship a giant ultra-boat that is totally invincible so there's no perceived threats or anything. Just like a floating Chi-Town. Oh, they're lost in the wilderness, a bastion of reactionary society fighting for their very lives, with their impenetrable defenses, impregnable armor, and one million suits of power armor! Fear for them! Still though, PC whales, power armor designed to give sharks legs, and pirates that raid dreams. Best Rifts book? Maybe! I can't speak for the other guy, but as with any game that has one, my problem with Buffy was a lovely merits/flaws system. Bonus character creation if you promise to tell a lot of bad jokes! Same for if you promise not to! Plus a bunch of drawbacks that effectively constitute a game of long-form chicken with your storyteller. "Will this be the week you dump on me for my lovely flaw choices? Will this be the week that you're an rear end in a top hat DM?" type stuff.
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Apr 1, 2014 17:55
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CJ was RIFTS for me, to be honest. Sure, I got in with pictures of SAMAS and UAR-1 Enforcers and stuff, but Siembieda's stuff just got too fussy after a while. Carella's designs were like something out of the old GI-Joe cartoon: toyetic, energetic and just plain ridiculous, with lasers the thickness of your arm and mini missiles firing out of tailpipes, and arrays of silly, themed vehicles with big tires. And then he left Palladium and KS squeezed the Coalition War Campaign out, and I stopped collecting the books.
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Apr 1, 2014 18:14
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From what I hear, Carella was also consistent and prolific enough to allow Palladium to put out product at a steady pace. It all fell apart without him.
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Apr 1, 2014 18:21
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The worst merits/flaws in pretty much any game are the pure-roleplay ones, because they pretty much boil down to "free points". Take "shy" or "cowardly" or whatever, get some extra skill points, and then everyone forgets you have it and you play your character however you want.
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Apr 1, 2014 18:23
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Evil Mastermind posted:The worst merits/flaws in pretty much any game are the pure-roleplay ones, because they pretty much boil down to "free points". Take "shy" or "cowardly" or whatever, get some extra skill points, and then everyone forgets you have it and you play your character however you want.
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Apr 1, 2014 18:29
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FMguru posted:No, the worst are the ones that make the plot all about you and also give you points (hunted, enemy, intermittently possessed, etc.). Or maybe the ones that give you points but make you a burden to the party (I played a campaign with someone who was afraid of the dark and fainted at the sight of blood. A dungeon exploring & fighting campaign. That was some fun). Or the ones that give you points for stuff you were gonna be anyway (bloodthirsty, overconfident, etc.). The worst ones are all of them. Here, have a breakdown. 1. Personality trait: You act like a monkeycheese idiot all the time for the first session, then forget you had this(and keep acting like that because you're playing an RPG). 1 CP 2. Spotlight: You have an archenemy! You have a sidekick! You have a wife! Whatever you've got, it sure is extra characters you get to design and wrench the campaign towards! 3 CP 3. You make the DM be the rear end in a top hat: You're unlucky! The DM can call on you to reroll one successful roll you make per day. If he does this, he's an rear end in a top hat, so make sure to point that out! 5 CP 4. Deformity/Disability: Your choice of sexy scar or pointless bad breath (1 CP), or missing hand/leg sort of thing you'll just metagame around. (5 CP) 5. Obvious choice: Has a surprising reward to penalty ratio. Not surprisingly, everyone in the world seems to have this one (is anyone in this party NOT related to the emperor?)! 10 CP 6. Just a hook: Psychic visions, a delicate wife, a job with a mercenary company, whatever you choose, it's just you spending character points on hooks your DM was gonna have to provide anyway! 2 CP 7. Not Campaign Friendly: What do you mean my 30 foot riding chicken won't fit in the dungeon? Don't make me waste my points, Jerry! See item 3! 5 CP
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Apr 1, 2014 18:48
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It's funny...now that I think about it, I can't come up with any recent RPG that's had a merits/flaws system off the top of my head. (I actually like them, but I think it's because I don't game with people who try to game the system (anymore) v  v )
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Apr 1, 2014 18:53
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FMguru posted:No, the worst are the ones that make the plot all about you and also give you points (hunted, enemy, intermittently possessed, etc.). Or maybe the ones that give you points but make you a burden to the party (I played a campaign with someone who was afraid of the dark and fainted at the sight of blood. A dungeon exploring & fighting campaign. That was some fun). Or the ones that give you points for stuff you were gonna be anyway (bloodthirsty, overconfident, etc.). Trading flaws for points at chargen is generally horrible in every RPG that does it, because it pretty much always comes down to "get points for having to do what I was going to do anyway", "get points for not doing stuff I wasn't going to do anyway", "get points for having a plot hook attached to me", and "nobody picks this flaw because it's too severe". And, occasionally, "get points for screwing over everyone". Unless your GM is merciless (and most GMs aren't, because players get whiny when their characters die to random events), most Flaws that put you at extra risk aren't going to ever harm you. If you take a highly lethal allergy to fish, very few GMs are going to make you occasionally ingest that fish and say "Save vs. death". Besides, most players are adverse to taking flaws that actually penalise them. A much better method is the one invented by Rebecca Borgstrom for Weapon of the Gods (which is also used in the new World of Darkness books), where you pick a flaw at chargen, and every time that flaw becomes relevant during the game, you get extra XP. If you're wheelchair-bound, you don't get any XP when you spend the entire session researching stuff in a library, but you do get extra XP when the bad guys take you out of a fight by tipping your wheelchair over. Edit: theironjef has a much more comprehensive list Young Freud posted:I've done this a lot, since those training manuals give you a better idea of the capabilities of modern warfighters, especially if you're trying to replicate that in game. A lot of the qualification tests are designed to be percentage-based so it's easy to find what level of skill that a TRPG character should be. It's why Twilight 2000 kinda dimmed in my eyes because there's no way a character can actually replicate the same hit ratio needed in game. Most GURPS characters in GURPS Special Ops would pass out from exhaustion if they tried to actually attempt qualifying for Green Beret training, because of how the Hiking rules in GURPS (don't) work. Young Freud posted:The other thing is that you can easily replicate the same Gaussian curve without complicated math, tables, and such by using opposed dice rolls. The percentages of success scale logarithmically depending the difference in modifiers. For instance, I'm trying to build a game off the OpenD6 system, and if you add a single die between two even die pools, the chance for success is doubled. 4D6 vs. 3D6 has a 75% chance of success, 5D6 vs. 3D6 has something like 88% chance, and 6D6 has an almost 95% chance of success. But you can use single dice or different dice and gets something similar. Hmm. Interesting. The only problem with this is that dice-pool-systems where you add the values of the dice are objectively among the slowest dice-roll systems in common use; it simply takes time to add all the numbers up, no matter how small they are or easy the mental arithmetic is. I'll keep it in mind though - it might be a good way to trick lookup-table-adverse players into playing PCCS.  Young Freud posted:That's nothing. LEG licensed a game based off of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Yes, the Francis Ford Coppola movie where I don't think there was any guns and if there were, they're not very effective. Look, sometimes you just want to know exactly how much damage Dracula takes if you fire at him with a helicopter minigun. Young Freud posted:Oh, yeah. I created a Phoenix Command framework for MapTools at some point, but largely abandoned it. I took some effort because of the way MapTools reads tables, which forced me to create tables references inside tables to get the cross-referencing down. But yeah, the framework plays almost like a tactical turn-based game. You could chose a shooter, have them select a target within range, and click on them and instantly get results on how they've been wounded, if they made their knockout roll, what their physical damage was and automatically set their state to dead if they failed their Recovery Rolls. I even managed to rig it so that explosives can be spawned on the field, locate objects within range and it's line of sight, and automatically trigger a damage test them. Very interesting. I keep tinkering with an Excel sheet that does the damage-calculations for me (helped massively by turning the damage tables into a log scale, which means I can reduce the entire Advanced Damage Tables supplement into a single table), but I've considered putting it into some online tabletop thingy for faster and more convenient resolution. The absolute main advantage, as I see it, is that grenade and bullet scatter, as well as autofire, shotguns and grenade shrapnel, can be handled quickly. When you hit someone at close range with a grenade, PCCS just assumes you'll either roll separate hit locations for each of the 260 pieces of shrapnel that hit, or that you'll roll once and have them all go in the same location. And when you hit someone with autofire, the game just assumes they're hit by an average number of bullets - it saves you a few rolls, thankfully, but it's mechanically weird that you'll never get a lucky hit with your three-round burst. The latter problem has a piss-easy solution though, which allowed me to replace the PCCS autofire to-hit table with a more accurate one based on a Poisson-distribution. Which I did because I loves me some hardcore firearms simulation... >_>
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Apr 1, 2014 19:05
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theironjef posted:We talk about that, but I was mostly outing him as the author of Rifts: Underseas and Rifts: South America, since those go off the rails in some extremely crazy ways. South America and South America 2 are my favorites of the early books. They're so unapologetically crazy and actually more mechanically refined at the same time than earlier Rifts books. The only other book I think I enjoyed as much was Madhaven, which I doubt I'll ever get around to. Halloween Jack posted:From what I hear, Carella was also consistent and prolific enough to allow Palladium to put out product at a steady pace. It all fell apart without him. This is absolutely true. When Carella was writing a book, it barely would slip by a month or two at most, and this is with Palladium, which routinely has scheduled books delayed by years, decades, or vanish entirely. Bieeardo posted:And then he left Palladium and KS squeezed the Coalition War Campaign out, and I stopped collecting the books. Coalition War Campaign has an awful lot of bile waiting for it if we get that far. Evil Mastermind posted:The worst merits/flaws in pretty much any game FMguru posted:No, the worst are the ones that make the plot Any flaw / drawback / disadvantage systems are the worst. Having played a lot of Legend of the Five Rings 4e lately, the fact that "pranked once a month by an imp" is the same as "tainted by hell and under a potential death sentence to the entire empire" is just dumb. The only ones that really work to me are narrative ones like Mutants & Masterminds or FATE, where you just grant you narrative currency (instead of character points or XP) when they come up, which self-solves the issue of flaws that never actually inconvenience you (given a good GM, anyway). Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Apr 1, 2014 |
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Apr 1, 2014 19:27
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Alien Rope Burn posted:South America and South America 2 are my favorites of the early books. They're so unapologetically crazy and actually more mechanically refined at the same time than earlier Rifts books. The only other book I think I enjoyed as much was Madhaven, which I doubt I'll ever get around to. The South America books were fantastic. They were also where my group started joking about every corner of the Earth being stuffed with multidimensional empires, who couldn't expand to take over the planet with all of the other ones standing cheek by jowl with them.
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Apr 1, 2014 19:33
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Any flaw / drawback / disadvantage systems are the worst. Having played a lot of Legend of the Five Rings 4e lately, the fact that "pranked once a month by an imp" is the same as "tainted by hell and under a potential death sentence to the entire empire" is just dumb. The only ones that really work to me are narrative ones like Mutants & Masterminds or FATE, where you just grant you narrative currency (instead of character points or XP) when they come up, which self-solves the issue of flaws that never actually inconvenience you (given a good GM, anyway). Don't know if they changed it in future editions, but my favorite thing in L5Rs merit/flaw was that Scorpions got a 1 point reduction in cost for "Dirt on Someone" and the cost for "Dirt on Someone" was 1 per point of Honor. Which meant if you played a Scorpion, it was in your best interest to have dirt on every lower-class person in the Empire/World. I assume the dirt you had was just "you're poor, man." By the same token, it was a 9 point investment (not out of the realm of possibility) for a Scorpion to have some serious, arm-twist grade dirt on the Emperor. Of course the books was pretty heavily set against this, pointing out he'd just have you killed for even having the dirt, which leads me to a category I forgot. 8. Bad Benefits: You have a mentor who's too busy to see you, a kingdom that's constantly getting invaded, or a legend that only draws assassins. Otherwise known as "Just take 4 dots" thanks to this being a key feature to how dumb 1e Exalted was. Bieeardo posted:The South America books were fantastic. They were also where my group started joking about every corner of the Earth being stuffed with multidimensional empires, who couldn't expand to take over the planet with all of the other ones standing cheek by jowl with them. Loved 'em, just quietly removed the Mutant Cat civilization. I get enough drat mutant animals in every other book ever produced by Palladium. Still amazed he didn't try to shoehorn them into Robotech.
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Apr 1, 2014 19:36
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theironjef posted:We talk about that, but I was mostly outing him as the author of Rifts: Underseas and Rifts: South America, since those go off the rails in some extremely crazy ways. To be honest, Underseas might just be my favorite Rifts book, since I love the idea of a single aircraft carrier becoming an insular post-apocalypse society. Of course it's Rifts, so you get that idea and then immediately torpedo it by making the ship a giant ultra-boat that is totally invincible so there's no perceived threats or anything. Just like a floating Chi-Town. Oh, they're lost in the wilderness, a bastion of reactionary society fighting for their very lives, with their impenetrable defenses, impregnable armor, and one million suits of power armor! Fear for them! Still though, PC whales, power armor designed to give sharks legs, and pirates that raid dreams. Best Rifts book? Maybe! I didn't agree with a lot of your opinions from that Buffy review. The main issue is that the players and ref really need to know the game universe. If you don't, a lot of the decisions that were made seem really silly. The merits/flaws work fine if you treat them as '10 Free Bonus Points with an excuse'. If you just gave 10 points to assign to either Qualities or skills I bet you wouldn't have had as much of a problem with them.
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Apr 1, 2014 19:44
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Literally the only system flaws and merits work in is Adeptus Evangelion and that's because being a horrible Dr. Venture level fuckup who's incapable of solving their problems is half the point of the setting.
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Apr 1, 2014 20:09
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I didn't agree with a lot of your opinions from that Buffy review. The main issue is that the players and ref really need to know the game universe. If you don't, a lot of the decisions that were made seem really silly. You're right there. If they hadn't hidden them behind a wall of "promise to tell a bunch of bad jokes" stuff I would have loved it to just have an extra ten points. Overall, I think we both came out more or less liking that book, despite a few 90s-y misgivings (the art, the relentless inclusion of template PCs, the merits/flaws) and of course we didn't like the tone. I'm not a Buffyverse expert (I've been watching it and I'm up to season 4) but the other guy has seen 'em all and knows the material. The book doesn't really reflect the tone of the show, it has a sort of ... trying too hard flair. We were big fans of the simplified enemy creation system and the clever model to create a game where playing Xander wouldn't be extremely terrible.
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Apr 1, 2014 20:24
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Any flaw / drawback / disadvantage systems are the worst. Having played a lot of Legend of the Five Rings 4e lately, the fact that "pranked once a month by an imp" is the same as "tainted by hell and under a potential death sentence to the entire empire" is just dumb. The only ones that really work to me are narrative ones like Mutants & Masterminds or FATE, where you just grant you narrative currency (instead of character points or XP) when they come up, which self-solves the issue of flaws that never actually inconvenience you (given a good GM, anyway). I like the idea conceptually, but getting a flat amount of bonus points at chargen is the worst way to implement it.
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Apr 1, 2014 20:25
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LatwPIAT posted:A much better method is the one invented by Rebecca Borgstrom for Weapon of the Gods (which is also used in the new World of Darkness books), where you pick a flaw at chargen, and every time that flaw becomes relevant during the game, you get extra XP. If you're wheelchair-bound, you don't get any XP when you spend the entire session researching stuff in a library, but you do get extra XP when the bad guys take you out of a fight by tipping your wheelchair over. I'd have to see which came first, but this sounds very awfully like how FATE handles disadvantages. LatwPIAT posted:Hmm. Interesting. The only problem with this is that dice-pool-systems where you add the values of the dice are objectively among the slowest dice-roll systems in common use; it simply takes time to add all the numbers up, no matter how small they are or easy the mental arithmetic is. I'll keep it in mind though - it might be a good way to trick lookup-table-adverse players into playing PCCS. It's not just dice-pools. Underground used opposed 2d10 rolls and it's almost bone simple in it's math.  However, it used Value/Measures, so you would need to translate between a real-world measurement to find it's value. TORG is probably a cleaner example, since it used Values based off metric measurements instead of Imperial units like in Underground, which allows anyone to quickly remember a value without having to look at a chart, since it used a logarithm where every 5th Value would be x10 in Measures, so Value 10 is actually 100 m/kgs/anything in a real world count, or 20 is 10,000 and 30 is a million. TORG kinda blew it with how you actually rolled to get Values, since you would roll a d20, consult a chart, then add or subtract that cross-referenced number from your skill Also, you can use a single d20 instead, but the curve becomes a pyramid and changes take longer. A cool thing about using OpenD6 is that small changes are big starting off. To put it in marksmanship numbers, a character with +1D in firearms would be equivalent of a Marksman-qualified shooter, but +2D in firearms makes them equivalent to a special forces commando or a military sniper and +3D is like Olympic-class shooters.
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Apr 1, 2014 20:31
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Yeah Underground used the DC Heroes(Mayfair) rules which they expanded on in Blood of Heroes. Logs were the only way to keep Green Arrow and Superman on the same tables.
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Apr 1, 2014 20:43
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theironjef posted:Don't know if they changed it in future editions, but my favorite thing in L5Rs merit/flaw was that Scorpions got a 1 point reduction in cost for "Dirt on Someone" and the cost for "Dirt on Someone" was 1 per point of Honor. Which meant if you played a Scorpion, it was in your best interest to have dirt on every lower-class person in the Empire/World. I assume the dirt you had was just "you're poor, man." Assuming you're talking about Blackmail, 4e is 1 pt per point of Status. Scorpion get 1 pt discount. So for free, you can know why that Ronin is hiding(hint: he's a ronin).
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Apr 1, 2014 20:49
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theironjef posted:Don't know if they changed it in future editions, but my favorite thing in L5Rs merit/flaw was that Scorpions got a 1 point reduction in cost for "Dirt on Someone" and the cost for "Dirt on Someone" was 1 per point of Honor. Which meant if you played a Scorpion, it was in your best interest to have dirt on every lower-class person in the Empire/World. I noted this in my Way of the Scorpion review, since some of the Scorpion courtier techniques let you do ridiculous poo poo with Blackmail and disadvantages, and it gets even worse when they're involved. theironjef posted:Bad Benefits: You have a mentor who's too busy to see you, a kingdom that's constantly getting invaded, or a legend that only draws assassins. Otherwise known as "Just take 4 dots" thanks to this being a key feature to how dumb 1e Exalted was. I'm reminded of L5R's Chosen by the Oracles, which usually did offer a solid benefit that you paid for, but then you have the side effect of "oh, the dragons select you as an Oracle, your character ascends and becomes an NPC, congratulations!" Which, of course, is contrary to the CCG narrative where you have some Oracles like Isawa Kaede or theironjef posted:Loved 'em, just quietly removed the Mutant Cat civilization. I get enough drat mutant animals in every other book ever produced by Palladium. Still amazed he didn't try to shoehorn them into Robotech. I didn't mind so much because it's so over the top as to pass into farce. Werecats! Mutant flying cats! Psychic mutant cats who are on fire! And you haven't read Robotech II: The Sentinels, I suppose. 
Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Apr 1, 2014 |
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Apr 1, 2014 20:50
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theironjef posted:You're right there. If they hadn't hidden them behind a wall of "promise to tell a bunch of bad jokes" stuff I would have loved it to just have an extra ten points. Overall, I think we both came out more or less liking that book, despite a few 90s-y misgivings (the art, the relentless inclusion of template PCs, the merits/flaws) and of course we didn't like the tone. I'm not a Buffyverse expert (I've been watching it and I'm up to season 4) but the other guy has seen 'em all and knows the material. The book doesn't really reflect the tone of the show, it has a sort of ... trying too hard flair. We were big fans of the simplified enemy creation system and the clever model to create a game where playing Xander wouldn't be extremely terrible. Young Freud posted:I'd have to see which came first, but this sounds very awfully like how FATE handles disadvantages. quote:However, it used Value/Measures, so you would need to translate between a real-world measurement to find it's value. TORG is probably a cleaner example, since it used Values based off metric measurements instead of Imperial units like in Underground, which allows anyone to quickly remember a value without having to look at a chart, since it used a logarithm where every 5th Value would be x10 in Measures, so Value 10 is actually 100 m/kgs/anything in a real world count, or 20 is 10,000 and 30 is a million. TORG kinda blew it with how you actually rolled to get Values, since you would roll a d20, consult a chart, then add or subtract that cross-referenced number from your skill
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Apr 1, 2014 20:54
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Evil Mastermind posted:To be fair, you wouldn't think it was "trying to hard" if you'd ever read any of the West End later-day RPGs like Paranoia 5th or Men in Black. Those are games that try to hard. Gonna take that one as a challenge. Men in Black, going on the to-do list! Also drat, we hadn't figured out to do the intro and junk by episode 3. That just sounds weird to me now. Also my own voice, still totally making me shudder. theironjef fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Apr 1, 2014 |
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Apr 1, 2014 20:57
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jef, I'm still trying to figure out why you guys actually like any of the Palladium games. Some variation on Stockholm Syndrome maybe?
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Apr 1, 2014 21:05
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:jef, I'm still trying to figure out why you guys actually like any of the Palladium games. Some variation on Stockholm Syndrome maybe? Straight up that. I didn't come to this nerdlife through D&D like a normal child ought to do. I was playing Dahmer (we're all 13 for a year) the Titan Cyberknight. There's a lot of rose-colored nostalgia for Palladium for us. What have we reviewed so far, I think just Heroes Unlimited? I figure we'll probably save Rifts (a game we both love the concept of so much that we have like 300 pages of homebrew D10 conversion stuff for it) for a milestone episode or something.
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Apr 1, 2014 21:10
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Like I said. I have an insane collection of RPGs (I've scanned a lot of them as well) and would love to guest commentate.
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Apr 1, 2014 21:14
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Like I said. I have an insane collection of RPGs (I've scanned a lot of them as well) and would love to guest commentate. We're working on that. I just finished moving and recently the other fella got a job in the same town as me (finally) so he'll be moving as well, so we're gearing up to expand the field a little on all the dust settles. More guest hosts and more topics.
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Apr 1, 2014 21:18
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:jef, I'm still trying to figure out why you guys actually like any of the Palladium games. Some variation on Stockholm Syndrome maybe? For me it's basically the same reason Roger Corman films are great.
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Apr 1, 2014 21:22
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Yeah, I was aware of red-box D&D, AD&D, and Traveller at the time, but the first RPG I bought was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness. Palladium Books were cheap, complete, and often done-in-one, so they were aimed at a kid's price range, with supplements only running $7. They also didn't require maps or boxed components, so they were easily lugged around inside a backpack. You could also combine them (badly) which was a big part of their appeal. By the time Rifts came out I had essentially been imprinted to embrace it. I was hosed.
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Apr 1, 2014 21:23
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theironjef posted:Straight up that. I didn't come to this nerdlife through D&D like a normal child ought to do. Loved the South America books too, they showed a lot of imagination. Dimension hopping psychic Mutant Capybaras for life. Edit: Picture a bunch of teenagers arguing over which sort of RPG game they want to play. The GM says, "gently caress it, let's play all of those at once," and then a Rifts game happens. BerkerkLurk fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Apr 1, 2014 |
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Apr 1, 2014 21:35
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theironjef posted:Gonna take that one as a challenge. Men in Black, going on the to-do list! Yes, moreso than Crash Course Manual. At least that book tried to take things in an interesting new direction. Whether it did it well is a whole different discussion, but at least it didn't ignore everything that made the setting fun in the first place.
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Apr 1, 2014 21:44
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I remember nothing about Masterbook save for trying to read it several times and not quite getting it, and developing a visceral distaste for the system that remains with me to this day.
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Apr 1, 2014 21:58
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Was Paranoia 5th Masterbook? MiB was D6; I own a copy. Masterbook has some peculiar merits, but I wouldn't use it for Paranoia.
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Apr 1, 2014 22:07
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Halloween Jack posted:Was Paranoia 5th Masterbook? MiB was D6; I own a copy. Masterbook has some peculiar merits, but I wouldn't use it for Paranoia. No, I'm just getting confused and being dumb because they were released soon after Masterbook was given the axe. Carry on.
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Apr 1, 2014 22:10
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I was a TMNT fan, so I bought the RPG rulebook when I saw it in the (now closed) local gameshop. I never actually played it--I didn't really play RPGs in-person due to my deafness (and the few times I tried with my dad interpreting, it sucked because I missed out on too much). But I had too much fun generating assorted mutant animals. Of course, in retrospective the system had a lot of issues. But I probably would create a TMNT character over a D&D one those days, largely because the 'roll up a background' stuff at least made it more interesting. I'd rather play the considerably better RPGs that implement that kind of character generation, though.
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Apr 1, 2014 22:35
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Carella was also responsible for Nightspawn, which rates pretty high on the 'things Palladium did that weren't complete poo poo' list for me. It was a somewhat blatant ripoff of a blending of 80s horror flicks to make a setting, but I think it did a much better job of the whole 'your character is a supernatural monster' thing than WoD in that there was nothing glamorous or noble about being a thing with a doll face, screaming mouths for eyes, and spider legs. poo poo was just plain creepy and hosed-up, and the world was so screwed that a party of cenobites was actually fairly believable as the good guys compared to the other things out there.
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Apr 1, 2014 23:21
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Valatar posted:Carella was also responsible for Nightspawn, which rates pretty high on the 'things Palladium did that weren't complete poo poo' list for me. It was a somewhat blatant ripoff of a blending of 80s horror flicks to make a setting, but I think it did a much better job of the whole 'your character is a supernatural monster' thing than WoD in that there was nothing glamorous or noble about being a thing with a doll face, screaming mouths for eyes, and spider legs. poo poo was just plain creepy and hosed-up, and the world was so screwed that a party of cenobites was actually fairly believable as the good guys compared to the other things out there. Oh man I was flipping through my copy of that the other day and it was so hilarious how much I had built up the art in my head. There's a Brom piece on the cover, so that's wonderful, but some of the stuff inside... wow. One thing about that book that always intrigued me were the little light-powered aliens that shot beams. They're introduced in a short section near the back, they don't really seem to fit the gothic dark theme, and I have always wondered... what are the odds they're a late addition to the book by the Simbieda? He did always seem to have a need to add a paladin-y obvious good guy in each book (Azverkan, Cosmo-Knight, etc.).
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Apr 1, 2014 23:44
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