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mllaneza posted:drat right we are. Yeah, I've always wanted to see a sci-fi RPG where Earth was generally considered by aliens to be some kind of poisonous hell-planet. We respirate corrosive oxygen, our piss can eventually melt steel, we poison ourselves for fun, and we domesticated our primary predator before we invented the wheel. So everyone has the impression that we're space orcs.
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Sep 6, 2014 08:17
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Greg Stolze's Out of the Violent Planet sort of does that in the sense that there are various alien races out there and every single one of them has psychic powers, all of them, which means that all forms of conflict are basically decided by psychic strength. One side psionically dominates the other, they win. Or you can telepathically puppet other races to be your slave-soldiers. So everything revolves around psychic powers except some aliens land on Earth one day and learn the hard way that humans have no psychic affinity but this also means that humans aren't very susceptible to psychic powers and that we've invented these crazy things called "guns" that nobody else has ever needed before because hey, psychic powers. Suddenly humans are thrust into the intergalactic scene as a combination of highly sought-after mercenary force and dangerous wildlife.
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Sep 6, 2014 08:39
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Ratoslov posted:Yeah, I've always wanted to see a sci-fi RPG where Earth was generally considered by aliens to be some kind of poisonous hell-planet. We respirate corrosive oxygen, our piss can eventually melt steel, we poison ourselves for fun, and we domesticated our primary predator before we invented the wheel. So everyone has the impression that we're space orcs. I ran a campaign for a few years that was set in a sort of not-very-serious military sci-fi setting. Eventually the PC's ran into a renegade alien who became their BFF. It turned out that all aliens avoid human space on principle because of how terrible our species is, so all the alien encounters had basically been huge dickhead aliens that the council of alien lords had banished for being to assholeish.
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Sep 6, 2014 09:05
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Mors Rattus posted:In theory, but Monsterhearts and 'working together effectively' are not always things that go together. Obviously, but there's definitely a non-antagonist angle to be played there. Take a Chosen and a Queen, and you've got the core of a dysfunctional group of angsty, overly dramatic teenagers who are nevertheless the town's best and only hope against unspeakable horrors - add an Infernal for spice, and a Mortal as someone's family member who's in love with the main villain. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 11:23 on Sep 6, 2014 |
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Sep 6, 2014 11:18
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Ratoslov posted:Yeah, I've always wanted to see a sci-fi RPG where Earth was generally considered by aliens to be some kind of poisonous hell-planet. We respirate corrosive oxygen, our piss can eventually melt steel, we poison ourselves for fun, and we domesticated our primary predator before we invented the wheel. So everyone has the impression that we're space orcs. Not an RPG but there is a series of novels by Alan Dean Foster that follow this premise. A Call to Arms is the first one.
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Sep 6, 2014 12:31
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kaynorr posted:I can't speak to Phoenix Command, but I'm pretty sure both Champions and GURPS tried to become more universal versions of their antecedent genres (supers for Champions, D&D for GURPS) and hit convergent evolution. Phoenix Command was created as a response to the perceived unrealistic RPGs of its era; PCCS (and its predecessors, Sword's Path: Glory and Small Arms Spectrum) were designed in order to avoid the major game-abstractions of D&D and its ilk. PCCS in particular was also 90% tabletop miniature wargame with some vague notes for how you could use it for roleplaying. You have to buy the Advanced Rules supplement just to get rules for handling actions that aren't fighting, for example. SPG, the Aliens RPG, and Living Steel, which are explicitly roleplaying games, have systems for handling non-combat things. As an example of the motivation, from SPG: Why is an arrow to the back more deadly to a young vigorous but inexperienced warrior than an aging veteran? Can a fully armored man make a 90° turn at full speed, and stop on a dime? Is it possible to mix armor? And why doesn't anyone die from concussion days after the fight is over? Patchwork systems were often installed to get around these sorts of problems, whether "Critical Hit" systems or "Strike from Behind" rules. These helped, but there were still inconsistencies. A cut artery that would be immediately fatal to one man might be little more than an inconvenience to another. For some reason "experience" causes one's blood to clot more quickly. Systems with "Hit Points" that remained constant have been introduced with some success and accuracy, but there is still that magic moment of "0 Hit Points" when the character falls over and dies, often bruised to an early and sudden death. PCCS similarly has a blurb inviting you to put a .45 ACP pistol to your character's forehead in your favourite RPG system and pulling the trigger until your character falls unconscious, then waiting some weeks for the wound to heal by itself.
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Sep 6, 2014 13:41
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Ratoslov posted:Yeah, I've always wanted to see a sci-fi RPG where Earth was generally considered by aliens to be some kind of poisonous hell-planet. We respirate corrosive oxygen, our piss can eventually melt steel, we poison ourselves for fun, and we domesticated our primary predator before we invented the wheel. So everyone has the impression that we're space orcs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcPqk-O-fD4
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Sep 6, 2014 14:12
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For an interesting comedic take on Earth and humans as insanely dangerous, look up an Australian RPG called 'Hunter Planet'.
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Sep 6, 2014 15:27
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NGDBSS posted:Anyone have opinions on Tribe 8? One of my roommates acquired the first edition sourcebook at a secondhand shop and the system sounds interesting (if gritty and 90's). That said, I've not delved into the setting (which takes up the first half of the book) so I'm not certain if anything weird came up there. I mention this because both of them are part of a large number of games from the 90s that use a dice pool system with six-siders. In the case of most of these games, I wonder if the writers actually had specific, mechanical design goals they were trying to meet--a certain spread of probabilities, a certain chance of success for Ability Level X vs. Target Y, making skills more important than ability scores or vice versa. I suspect that most of the time, they just wanted a system where the basic die mechanic resolves quickly and was at least slightly different from everyone else on the market. Edit: A few more things I just thought of... DP9 had a very active and loyal fanbase, so when they released the "SilCore" book for their in-house system, I took a look at it. The first thing that caught me off guard was that it actually had plenty of rules for small-unit tactics; you could actually organize the PCs as a fire team and have them moving and firing in unison. And IIRC, the rules were functional and nowhere near as complicated and clunky as, say, Phoenix Command. I had never seen anything like that in a game before. However, the rules for individual combatants were very sparse; any given World of Darkness game had more combat maneuvers for PCs to execute. Tribe 8 actually plugged this gap by having a whole suite of hand-to-hand combat maneuvers. Related to what I was saying above, I'm not sure how well DP9 understood their own system. For example, when leafing through Jovian Chronicles, it said that you could emphasize the importance of eugenically-endowed talent by changing the basic system so that you roll attributes and add skills, rather than the reverse. Well, the basic system already made attributes more important, and that change undoes it. (If you're rolling a roll-and-keep dice pool, you hit diminishing returns after 2 dice, whereas adding a number to the total never hits diminishing returns.) As for the setting of Tribe 8, it always struck me as the kind of metaplotty, apocalyptic, problematic anti-modernism that Werewolf wallowed in. But if I remember right, the evil Z'bri are actually the spirits of the hungry dead whereas the messianic Fatimas are ghosts in the machine. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Sep 6, 2014 |
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Sep 6, 2014 17:02
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The 90s really were the Dice Pool Era. Every game used a dice pool mechanic (I blame Vampire/WoD) and then applied their own little quirk to it so it wouldn't be a verbatim copy of Vampire or Shadowrun.
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Sep 6, 2014 17:07
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I'm not sure anyone really thought about the math, either. Variable dice pools versus variable target numbers made for some really swingy results, and that's before tossing in degrees of success and target numbers that require one or more dice to explode multiple times. FASA simplified things a little for combat in SR2, by standardizing on two successes to 'stage' damage results up or down a level, but it took White Wolf until the New World of Darkness to standardize on a fixed target number.
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Sep 6, 2014 18:43
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Bieeardo posted:I'm not sure anyone really thought about the math, either. Variable dice pools versus variable target numbers made for some really swingy results, and that's before tossing in degrees of success and target numbers that require one or more dice to explode multiple times. FASA simplified things a little for combat in SR2, by standardizing on two successes to 'stage' damage results up or down a level, but it took White Wolf until the New World of Darkness to standardize on a fixed target number.
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Sep 6, 2014 18:45
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I love that if the difficulty hits 10 in Storyteller your chances get worse the more dice you have.
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Sep 6, 2014 18:57
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IIRC, SilCore actually showed their math and understood their probabilities pretty intimately. It's actually my go-to 'fix' for dice pool systems (except for Reign, which also actually showed its math and understood its poo poo), to just throw out whatever the normal thing was and use the bits and pieces of SilCore that make sense. That's not to say that certain line writers didn't understand the system at all, as demonstrated by Jovian Chronicles. Still, they did do the math in the core rules at least, and it's very non-swingy. It's not quite the same as Dune's roll and keep system, because you get a +1 to your result for every additional 6 you roll in SilCore. This keeps high skill values fairly relevant for more than just reducing swinginess.
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Sep 6, 2014 22:44
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Bieeardo posted:I'm not sure anyone really thought about the math, either. Variable dice pools versus variable target numbers made for some really swingy results, and that's before tossing in degrees of success and target numbers that require one or more dice to explode multiple times. FASA simplified things a little for combat in SR2, by standardizing on two successes to 'stage' damage results up or down a level, but it took White Wolf until the New World of Darkness to standardize on a fixed target number. ... Until the Sidereals book showed up.
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Sep 6, 2014 23:04
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I love that if the difficulty hits 10 in Storyteller your chances get worse the more dice you have. The problem with Dramatic failures is that it creates an atmosphere of "If you're not sure that you can succeed, don't even try". Because dramatic failures really are pretty ridiculous.
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Sep 6, 2014 23:26
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Zereth posted:Exalted had a fixed target number, actually. Trinity had it before Exalted. I hacked Trinity so much...
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Sep 6, 2014 23:33
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Kurieg posted:The problem with Dramatic failures is that it creates an atmosphere of "If you're not sure that you can succeed, don't even try". Because dramatic failures really are pretty ridiculous. I was being sarcastic, but yes.
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Sep 6, 2014 23:47
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Cythereal posted:Obviously, but there's definitely a non-antagonist angle to be played there. Take a Chosen and a Queen, and you've got the core of a dysfunctional group of angsty, overly dramatic teenagers who are nevertheless the town's best and only hope against unspeakable horrors - add an Infernal for spice, and a Mortal as someone's family member who's in love with the main villain. The Chosen, the Queen and the Mortal would be a perfect group composition for a game about playing Buffy but with more teenage melodrama: you've got the one person with supernatural powers to save the town from whatever evil besets it, the Queen and the Mortal are both their trusted friends, but the Queen is actually secretly jealous of the Chosen's power (in spite of the fact that the Queen has all the social power) and the Mortal is just caught up in things way over their head. If you have a group of four, a Witch could act as basically Willow from the later seasons (i.e. the geeky friendly person who is at the same time a ticking time bomb should they go mad with power) and any of the overtly monstrous skins could act as an antagonist to the rest of the group.
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Sep 6, 2014 23:52
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Tulpa posted:IIRC, SilCore actually showed their math and understood their probabilities pretty intimately. It's actually my go-to 'fix' for dice pool systems (except for Reign, which also actually showed its math and understood its poo poo), to just throw out whatever the normal thing was and use the bits and pieces of SilCore that make sense.
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Sep 7, 2014 05:52
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Zereth posted:Exalted had a fixed target number, actually. Because Sidereals are huge dicks. 
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Sep 7, 2014 06:08
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Ratoslov posted:Yeah, I've always wanted to see a sci-fi RPG where Earth was generally considered by aliens to be some kind of poisonous hell-planet. We respirate corrosive oxygen, our piss can eventually melt steel, we poison ourselves for fun, and we domesticated our primary predator before we invented the wheel. So everyone has the impression that we're space orcs. Fun fact, Humans have monstrously high endurance compared to pretty much anything else on Earth. So not only are we Space Orcs, we're Space Orcs that will walk you to death.
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Sep 7, 2014 09:36
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Luminous Obscurity posted:Fun fact, Humans have monstrously high endurance compared to pretty much anything else on Earth. So not only are we Space Orcs, we're Space Orcs that will walk you to death. Endurance Predators >> Pack Predators
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Sep 7, 2014 11:25
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Luminous Obscurity posted:Fun fact, Humans have monstrously high endurance compared to pretty much anything else on Earth. So not only are we Space Orcs, we're Space Orcs that will walk you to death. Yeah, not sure where I remember hearing it from exactly, but I'm pretty sure more than a few/most animals would die outright from shock at the total loss of a limb whereas a hopped up enough human can just keep on trucking and potentially survive even without advanced medicine.
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Sep 7, 2014 14:40
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Luminous Obscurity posted:Fun fact, Humans have monstrously high endurance compared to pretty much anything else on Earth. So not only are we Space Orcs, we're Space Orcs that will walk you to death. Indeed. Before we used our impressive brains to invent tools what to kill with, we literally ran other animals to death.
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Sep 7, 2014 16:12
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mllaneza posted:Endurance Predators >> Pack Predators And given our social abilities to allow for cooperation and planning, we're more like Endurance Pack Predators. I'm guessing to a gazelle or a cheetah, a group of human hunters would like Jason Voorhees popping up from behind a tree when they thought they were racing away from him.
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Sep 7, 2014 23:14
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Yeah, Persistance Hunting is also reliant on pack tactics because it narrows the ability of faster animals to alter direction and burst away. We don't stop and we work in groups, and that can be absolutely terrifying if you're on the wrong end of it.
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Sep 7, 2014 23:48
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Mr. Maltose posted:Yeah, Persistance Hunting is also reliant on pack tactics because it narrows the ability of faster animals to alter direction and burst away. We don't stop and we work in groups, and that can be absolutely terrifying if you're on the wrong end of it. Reminds me a bit of Swofford's comment to his fellow Marines in "Jarhead", where he pities the Iraqi Republican Guard, who, up until the Gulf War, had been pretty victorious in conflicts within the region, built up as an elite unit by Saddam, and armed with what they considered the best of equipment, and getting killed and routed by guys who are operating at night, in camouflage, fighting out of visual range or close to it, and have this reputation of being baby-eating monsters. He likens the experience to what it would be like if U.S. Marines would be fighting aliens. It would be as if they suddenly had to fight a bunch of Predators (the alien kind).
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Sep 8, 2014 00:11
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I mentioned the Monsterhearts game to my tabletop gaming group today after the review of it in this thread sparked my interest. We've agreed to take a break on Friday from our Rogue Trader campaign to be melodramatic teenagers rather than interstellar assholes for a change. Already have a Chosen and an Infernal lined up from my players. 
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Sep 8, 2014 03:50
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Cythereal posted:I mentioned the Monsterhearts game to my tabletop gaming group today after the review of it in this thread sparked my interest. We've agreed to take a break on Friday from our Rogue Trader campaign to be melodramatic teenagers rather than interstellar assholes for a change. Already have a Chosen and an Infernal lined up from my players. I'm glad to hear that my review has sparked interest in the game! The Chosen and Infernal are bound to result in some great drama: The Chosen's got the entire "Some big bad wants me dead" angle an the Infernal comes with a big bad straight out of the box! I'd really appreciate it if you could post a report of your game in either this thread or the Apocalypse World thread, as that seems to be where most of the actual Monsterhearts discussion takes place. For my part, I'll try to get another Skin written up today.
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Sep 8, 2014 09:28
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Ratoslov posted:Yeah, I've always wanted to see a sci-fi RPG where Earth was generally considered by aliens to be some kind of poisonous hell-planet. Earth's also the densest planet in the Solar System (5.51 grams/cm3), and our iron core is probably bigger than it should be thanks to the impact that made our moon. Earth is something like 81% more massive than Venus (5.204 grams/cm3), which is of very comparable size. Mars (3.94 grams/cm3) is right out. Mercury (5.427 grams/cm3) comes closest but Mercury's mostly iron. So, in addition to being full of nasty acids, secreting caustic salt and water, and crawling with aggressively infectious bacteria, we're also probably noticeably stronger than another comparable terrestrial species from a comparably sized planet due to Earth's higher gravity. It's us. We're the horrible space monsters (and so is our planet). PoptartsNinja fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 15:59
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Ratpick posted:I'd really appreciate it if you could post a report of your game in either this thread or the Apocalypse World thread, as that seems to be where most of the actual Monsterhearts discussion takes place. Will do. I'm our usual DM/GM/ST/what-have-you, so I'll write up the inevitable shenanigans. Two of my players even work at a local high school, so this should be entertaining.
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Sep 8, 2014 16:40
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PoptartsNinja posted:Earth's also the densest planet in the Solar System (5.51 grams/cm3), and our iron core is probably bigger than it should be thanks to the impact that made our moon. Earth is something like 81% more massive than Venus (5.204 grams/cm3), which is of very comparable size. Mars (3.94 grams/cm3) is right out. Mercury (5.427 grams/cm3) comes closest but Mercury's mostly iron. Fwiw, every planet would be full of relatively horrible monsters since their environmental conditions would be equally as toxic and corrosive to us. Just in different ways. The fact that oxygen is reactive, for example, is what makes it so biologically useful. The same goes with the relative acidity since it help drive reactions.
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Sep 8, 2014 18:42
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inklesspen posted:I've got a first pass result on the writeup archives. This link is not permanent and may go away as work progresses.
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Sep 9, 2014 03:18
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 You know what I'm sick of? Reviewing things anyone has heard of or gives a poo poo about. Here's a review of a LARP we bought for three dollars. It is exactly that good. System Mastery 27 - Nexus: Live Action Roleplaying - Play This Book, Vol. 1
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Sep 9, 2014 08:23
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theironjef posted:
At least with this one, the fact that we didn't do any research is excusable since the internet has no idea what the hell this book is.
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Sep 9, 2014 08:32
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theironjef posted:
Somebody else was stupid enough to buy that? I am not alone!
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Sep 9, 2014 08:46
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I saw "Nexus" and 'things no one has ever heard of' and was all "Oh, hey, a Nexus: the infinite city review!" Then I reread what was after the colon and saw the cover art and was sadly disappointed. And also kinda frightened.
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Sep 9, 2014 10:48
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I want to say that I've seen that title, but I'd have remembered a cover like that. I was also halfway hoping that the mystery game was going to be this particularly terrible vampire LARP book a friend had. It was filled with absurd amounts of math (because you really want to be carrying a clipboard around at game), and all of the powers were coded by a shape and a colour... in a book that was printed in black and white, with the colour correspondences printed exactly once at the front of the book. They had two companion games, Witches and... Demons, maybe. I can't remember. The powers were all thematic as Hell, I'll give them that, but the systems were presented in the most inelegant fashion.
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Sep 9, 2014 12:25
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dwarf74 posted:Going way back here. This is awesome. Thank you for this. It's pretty great! I'll be using it as a means to pass some of my reviews on to my friends this way, due to the lack of a paywall. It's even easier to read than pawing through posts, which is handy. As a caveat- The FATAL & Friends Wiki has not updated since July or so, since DARKSEID DICK PICS (formerly Syrg Sapphire) stopped updating it then. Apparently this is not news to some, but I don't know how many are aware since it was announced in the general TG chat thread and not here. I'm inquiring to make sure I can update Rifts reviews by occamsnailfile and I, but if you've done a review since around that time, bear in mind it is likely not archived on the wiki. If anybody wants to pick up that work from DDP, I'm seeing who to inquire with about getting a wiki account these days. I can't imagine anybody wants that burden, but any work put towards ensuring the indexing continues would be appreciated. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 13:30 on Sep 9, 2014 |
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Sep 9, 2014 13:27
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