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Yeah, that sounds cool. FFXIV has the advantage of doing it from basically day one - you level up as a guy working alongside others, but already marked out as special by Space Crystal Goddess Lady, and then once you end up killing your first deity (around level 20), you've met the world leaders and they've decided you're pretty much the go-to guy for god-related problems.
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Jan 15, 2015 20:25
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Yeah, it's nice. Everyone you run into out questing is either asking you for permission to do something, or grossly incompetent and you gotta' step in and help.
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Jan 15, 2015 20:25
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It's also the approach GW2 takes, where the tutorial gives you a position of importance among your race, then you're actively climbing the ranks to progressively greater responsibilities as the story goes on, first getting kicked upstairs from your race's problems and duties to one of the three major global organizations fighting the Elder Dragons, then when they unite you're one of the founding members of that group. For the last third of the game's story, you're the right hand [wo]man of the Generic Big Leader Guy, making strategic decisions for the Trinity Pact and a recurring theme is that you get handed the most critical assignments that are both risky and important while the Pact's troops are busy with more mundane tasks. A lot of previously important NPCs and side characters turn up as researchers, troopers, and other low-ranking members of the Pact while you give them orders.
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Jan 15, 2015 20:33
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Honestly I really do love the way that Warlords of Draenor does it as long as you stay far far away from Thrall. Khadgar is pretty great because he's at this point he's basically a super powerful time travelling space hobo. He crashes on the Kirin Tor's couch because they literally can't say no to him and then starts making a super powerful ring for you by smashing small suns together like it's no big deal.
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Jan 15, 2015 20:39
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While it ends up making you wonder how the NPCs even put their pants on if you weren't around to help them, it's miles better then being someone's coffee bitch despite technically having the power to call on the gods or sink the entire land because those guys are just bigger and badder then you forever. There's a time and place for all-powerful NPCs (like the Lady of Pain), but players shouldn't feel like they're fancy gofers or extraneous to the plot
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Jan 15, 2015 20:59
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Well, that's one of the reasons why 13th Age works so well; yes there are uber-powerful NPCs running around that could crush you like a bug or fix problems themselves, but they still need the PCs to run errands for them because they're busy doing things like running the Empire or keeping reality from collapsing.
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Jan 15, 2015 21:20
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RIP City of Heroes. I mean, it had a comic-book concept of death, but you were usually doing the important stuff. I can think of a few times when NPCs stepped in to do things, but not a time when what you did didn't matter. I mean, aside from being able to run stuff on infinite loop.
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Jan 15, 2015 21:21
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I guess it's a matter of how much in love the writers are with their self-insertion / wish-fullfillment characters. And now I'm reminded of DC Online, we you're the errant boy for the actual heroes. Then again, having millions of super-powered dudes suddenly running around is actually a plot point, so I guess someone needs to manage this mess. (Not that it makes this any less lame.) Did anyone even test these creation rules? Like, at least once? Or did they just look at the numbers and went "Yeah, I'm sure we can just scale that to level 20" o_O ?
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Jan 15, 2015 23:04
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Doresh posted:I guess it's a matter of how much in love the writers are with their self-insertion / wish-fullfillment characters. The rules in the revised version are much better and do things like put max charisma, wisdom, intelligence, and int at a fraction of the tech score. They also make it so that adding additional functions onto an object is no longer free, to compensate for this they gave all objects a baseline amount of hardness and hit points.
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Jan 15, 2015 23:51
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So out of curiosity what would the DC be for making a really obnoxious canonical device, like the Planetary Re-Origination System that they have in the Halls of Origination?
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Jan 15, 2015 23:58
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In 1st edition? probably Difficulty Class somewhere in the 1000s, but that only increases how much it costs to make, as long as you can fit it inside of your tech limit. The DC to create something is determined by the tech limit. In 2nd edition? Beyond the capacity of the current rules to handle. The most complex devices in 2nd edition are Function Difficulty 100 which include 'Artificial intelligences, devices that can create less complex technological devices, and devices that can hunt down and kill a single specific individual' Which considering it was created by functional gods is a rules limitation I am willing to accept.
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Jan 16, 2015 00:03
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I own this book and never used it or any part of it. Money well spent there. I don't know what I was expecting, but I'm guessing it was along the lines of a much closer re-translation of WoW to the tabletop. While I played it, I honestly enjoyed WoW's PVE. Shadowfang Keep really sold me on the idea, and the many, many nights I spent leading Karazhan raids hit what I like most about tabletop games. I don't think I'd ever go back to WoW. It's different enough to be an alien game to me now. But I can't find much vitriol for the concept of this book.
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Jan 16, 2015 00:13
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Doresh posted:I guess it's a matter of how much in love the writers are with their self-insertion / wish-fullfillment characters. It's not so much that as "we have the whole metaplot hammered out years in advance, we can't risk PCs going off-script and solving things before they should be solved."
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Jan 16, 2015 00:21
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Metaplot and the 90s' embrace of it was weird. All different sorts of methods were tried and none of them really worked super well.
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Jan 16, 2015 00:24
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ZorajitZorajit posted:I own this book and never used it or any part of it. Money well spent there. I don't know what I was expecting, but I'm guessing it was along the lines of a much closer re-translation of WoW to the tabletop. It's important to remember that this book isn't WoW the RPG. That comes later. This book was created before WoW was even in closed beta. What information they had was information given to them by Blizzard The WoW RPG is a closer translation of WoW To the tabletop and I'll get there eventually.
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Jan 16, 2015 00:28
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Mors Rattus posted:Metaplot and the 90s' embrace of it was weird. All different sorts of methods were tried and none of them really worked super well. In the wake of stuff like Dragonlance, the Drizzt novels and Masquerade, there was the idea that you were designing the roleplaying game for the setting, not the setting for the roleplaying game. A setting can sell books, video games, and other crap which non-tabletop players will buy, and is/was the only way to get a decent profit margin for an RPG company. With that, however, came the mistaken belief that people wanted to fight alongside/behind the heroes of the setting, rather than being the heroes themselves. The weird thing is in games for well established properties like Star Wars and Star Trek, you don't get adventures where the Millenium Falcon or the Enterprise shows up to save the day. EDIT: Here's FMguru's more coherent explanation. FMguru posted:Nope, TSR did in 1984 with Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first Dragonlance novel. It flew up the charts, sold a ton of copies (most to non-gamers), led to spinoff merchandise (calendars, atlases, cookbooks) and a zillion sequels and prequels. Oh, and more novels - including Forgotten Realms novels which led to a second moonshot success with Salvatore's Drizzt stories. Seriously, look at a best-seller chart for fiction paperbacks from the late 1980s or early 1990s - half the slots will be filled with novels and collections from TSR. For the longest time, TSR's financials showed them to be a fiction publisher that maintained a legacy sideline in game products. TSR also did great work in licensing their RPG properties into other kinds of products, most notably computer games (of the Gold Box/Baldurs Gate variety).
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Jan 16, 2015 00:59
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Wait a moment, a loving Paranoia novel? Does it end with the reader getting shot with a laser for having read about adventures that are clearly above his security clearance and involve treasonous content?
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Jan 16, 2015 02:48
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PurpleXVI posted:Wait a moment, a loving Paranoia novel? Does it end with the reader getting shot with a laser for having read about adventures that are clearly above his security clearance and involve treasonous content? That sounds like far too good an idea to have actually happened...
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Jan 16, 2015 02:59
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PurpleXVI posted:Wait a moment, a loving Paranoia novel? Does it end with the reader getting shot with a laser for having read about adventures that are clearly above his security clearance and involve treasonous content? It's secretly an omnibus reprinting of "1984" and "Brave New World".
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Jan 16, 2015 03:04
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Isn't that the one where it ends with the Computer's destruction?
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Jan 16, 2015 03:23
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Kurieg posted:This book was created before WoW was even in closed beta. What information they had was information given to them by Blizzard Thinking about all of this now has reminded me that Alliance/Horde Compendium is basically Warcraft 3: The Tabletop: The Expansion Set: The Book. Kurieg posted:The WoW RPG is a closer translation of WoW To the tabletop and I'll get there eventually.
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Jan 16, 2015 04:00
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Robindaybird posted:Isn't that the one where it ends with the Computer's destruction? That was the comic. I never read the novel, but I know there was a second one that was a crossover with Torg.
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Jan 16, 2015 04:07
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AmiYumi posted:For a sense of timeliness, the first edition of the Warcraft RPG was released alongside The Frozen Throne. The RPG was actually my motivation to pick up TFT, despite having a computer that could barely run it, and would literally need to spend 5-10 minutes on each "loading" screen. July 1st, 2003 - The Frozen Throne July 28th, 2003 - Warcraft, The Roleplaying Game October 2nd, 2003 - Manual of Monsters January, 2004 - Alliance and Horde Compendium April, 2004 - Magic and Mayhem July, 2004 - Lands of Conflict October, 2004 - Shadows and Light Nov 24th, 2004 - World of Warcraft July, 2005 - World of Warcraft: the Roleplaying Game Nov, 2005 - More Magic and Mayhem March, 2006- Alliance Players Guide April, 2006 -Lands of Conflict Nov, 2006 - Horde Players Guide Jan 2007 - Burning Crusade Feb, 2007 - Monster Guide May 2008 - Dark Factions The rather large gap between Feb 2007 and May 2008 is because White Wolf was bought out by CCP(You know, the EVE Online guys, it's a long stupid story), and it took 2 years for the writers to explain to them that it's only Gay if the IP's touch and all the principal work for the game had been done since mid 2006. Unfortunately during the timeframe between Nov 2006 and whenever they allowed them make the Dark Factions master they had halted all development work on the WoW:RPG, and Blizzard was slowly souring on the idea since no new money was coming in and their only real rival in the MMO market was holding the rights to part of their Warcraft IP. The fact that Dark Factions was released at all is widely attributed to Luke Johnson refusing to let it die because he had been promising it to people for 2 years. After it was released both parties just let the license drop. That's also why we didn't get any stats for non-broken Draenei and Blood Elves as a character race, even though Dark Factions came out after TBC. quote:I refuse to hate any RPG that lets you take "Race: Bear", spend your first three levels as "Class: Larger Bear", and then dip right into "Prestige Class: Even Larger Bear". Ignoring the fact that its PrC entry requirements literally didn't work, RAW. Oh don't worry, I shall be talking about Even Larger Bear. In great detail. I love that class. Kurieg fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Jan 16, 2015 |
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Jan 16, 2015 05:10
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AmiYumi posted:
I should really get into exactly what Bears can do in Albedo. In the add-on book, there's specifically a modified, 'carbine' version of the .50 anti-material rifle designed by bears. Other people tried to say the bears could not use these as semiautomatic battle rifles, at which point the bears towered over them until they decided you know what, the bears can do what they want.
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Jan 16, 2015 05:26
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Mors Rattus posted:I wouldn't say that - I mean, Devil's Tower still exists, and you're never really meant to beat Stone. You might be interested in Pinnacle's next Kickstarter. New plot point. The point is to try and kill Stone.
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Jan 16, 2015 05:57
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There's an easy hack to make the HSD background make sense: It's an in-character document cut-and-pasted from a Marscorp primary education textbook. This explains both the "everything is great since we removed every possible check on corporate power" propaganda and the lies-to-children simplicity of the explanations for things. Fakeedit: Plus the total whitewashing of the Human Genocide. "Then all the remaining humans just decided that they would all like to move back to Earth, where they were killed by Slenderman. The end."
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Jan 16, 2015 09:01
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Evil Mastermind posted:It's not so much that as "we have the whole metaplot hammered out years in advance, we can't risk PCs going off-script and solving things before they should be solved." And this is why I prefer sandboxes. They can make all the metaplot they want, but that won't stop me from ignoring it. Kavak posted:The weird thing is in games for well established properties like Star Wars and Star Trek, you don't get adventures where the Millenium Falcon or the Enterprise shows up to save the day. I think I can offer at least 2 valid explanations for this: 1. Both licenses have a setting that spans the whole galaxy. Having the Han Solo / Picard show up every time would be a bit weird (even if the movie Enterprise does end up being "the only ship within reach" or however it goes again). 2. Both licenses also have a very large, nerdy fanbase doing all sorts of fanfics and fan movies with whole crews of OCs. It was probably seen financially feasable to cater to them. AmiYumi posted:I refuse to hate any RPG that lets you take "Race: Bear", spend your first three levels as "Class: Larger Bear", and then dip right into "Prestige Class: Even Larger Bear". Ignoring the fact that its PrC entry requirements literally didn't work, RAW. Looks like things really improved with that edition 
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Jan 16, 2015 09:12
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The Lone Badger posted:Fakeedit: Plus the total whitewashing of the Human Genocide. "Then all the remaining humans just decided that they would all like to move back to Earth, where they were killed by Slenderman. The end." I like that bit because it's so transparently just writing out the human loose ends now that they're no longer needed by the author.
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Jan 16, 2015 09:15
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Doresh posted:I think I can offer at least 2 valid explanations for this: On the other hand the WEG Star Wars d6 game was notorious for taking the stance of "you and your shitkicking PC pals are nowhere near as cool as the canon characters from the movies." It took a while for people writing RPGs based on licensed settings that hey, maybe the folks playing these want to be on par with the main characters instead of Third Background Extra From the Left.
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Jan 16, 2015 10:06
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Kai Tave posted:It took a while for people writing RPGs based on licensed settings that hey, maybe the folks playing these want to be on par with the main characters instead of Third Background Extra From the Left. This is pretty much epitomized by this ad campaign: 
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Jan 16, 2015 10:49
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Kai Tave posted:On the other hand the WEG Star Wars d6 game was notorious for taking the stance of "you and your shitkicking PC pals are nowhere near as cool as the canon characters from the movies." It took a while for people writing RPGs based on licensed settings that hey, maybe the folks playing these want to be on par with the main characters instead of Third Background Extra From the Left. Though at least that avoids the other prickly problem of Metaplot: Since they're often trying to 'surprise' you to make you buy more books and tie-ins, Metaplots often are fantastically unsuited to the original pitch of the gameline. Yes, I'm bitching about 7th Sea again, because gently caress 7th Sea for betraying me.
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Jan 16, 2015 11:06
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7th Sea is both a good and bad example in this case, because its metaplot is ridiculous and dumb but even if 7th Sea had zero metaplot whatsoever it would still be a game draped in swashbuckling age-of-sail dress with a setting engineered to prevent any sort of high-seas adventure and exploration whatsoever. 7th Sea is a game unsuited to its own premise right out of the gate, metaplot had nothing to do with it.
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Jan 16, 2015 11:13
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JackMann posted:You might be interested in Pinnacle's next Kickstarter. I actually loved Stone's only "appearance" in Deadlands: Noir. His guns show up at an auction! They go up for sale and are bought! The buyer is mysteriously killed and the guns are missing! The PCs are hired by a third party to investigate and... The guns were fakes, the auctioneer panicked and killed the buyer to avoid his reputation being ruined because he found out -after- the sale and Stone was never really involved at all despite the person who hired you being convinced he was. And nothing actually supernatural happens in the adventure at all.
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Jan 16, 2015 11:14
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Kai Tave posted:On the other hand the WEG Star Wars d6 game was notorious for taking the stance of "you and your shitkicking PC pals are nowhere near as cool as the canon characters from the movies." It took a while for people writing RPGs based on licensed settings that hey, maybe the folks playing these want to be on par with the main characters instead of Third Background Extra From the Left. I'm not so sure it wasn't just them lacking all restraint in flinging numbers around, for no special purpose. They rarely wrote stuff where your PCs actually went up against the heavy hitters. While all the original NPCs and conflicts they did write up were still over-statted, they weren't the clown shoes bullshit of their movie character write ups. When they did have actual canon character conflict, they seemed to assume saner numbers than the ones they printed in the movie/comic sourcebooks. I mean, sure, the upshot is the same, but it doesn't seem like it was because they thought your character was supposed to suck. It was just...because. Which might be worse, I guess.
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Jan 16, 2015 11:34
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I think the secret of WEG was that those hugeass statblocks for characters from the movies and the EU were just to pad out the books.
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Jan 16, 2015 12:00
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WEG Star Wars was basically Traveller with a new engine and coat of paint. The idea of matching Star Wars thematically took them a while. Both of the Star Trek RPGs I've seen had you designing greenish Starfleet officers or the equivalent, but they at least told you upfront that was what you were making and gave you options to make more experienced dudes.
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Jan 16, 2015 12:14
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And at least FASA's RPG featured random rolls for stats, which can never be improved. Having anywhere near as good stats as Kirck and the gang takes a bit of luck.Kai Tave posted:On the other hand the WEG Star Wars d6 game was notorious for taking the stance of "you and your shitkicking PC pals are nowhere near as cool as the canon characters from the movies." It took a while for people writing RPGs based on licensed settings that hey, maybe the folks playing these want to be on par with the main characters instead of Third Background Extra From the Left. Well, at least it forced the players to come up with creative ways to off Vader.
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Jan 16, 2015 13:41
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Kai Tave posted:On the other hand the WEG Star Wars d6 game was notorious for taking the stance of "you and your shitkicking PC pals are nowhere near as cool as the canon characters from the movies." It took a while for people writing RPGs based on licensed settings that hey, maybe the folks playing these want to be on par with the main characters instead of Third Background Extra From the Left. I dunno, I have an extremely old Batman RPG where it is assumed that you will play as Batman. Like the whole book is written with Batman being the gender neutral pronoun. Until you get to the very end of the drat thing, it's easy to assume that it's either a one-player RPG, or that you're supposed to sort of gestalt-control Batman, as if the game was Everyone is edit: Jesus, that's a goddamn good idea though. Everyone is Batman, where every player takes on a Batman style, and wrestles for control of The Bat during each scene. Will he be 60s Adam West Batman? Insane Frank Miller Batman? Does he want Robin around right this minute or is he currently in grim loner mode? theironjef fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Jan 16, 2015 |
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Jan 16, 2015 17:16
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theironjef posted:I dunno, I have an extremely old Batman RPG where it is assumed that you will play as Batman. Like the whole book is written with Batman being the gender neutral pronoun. Until you get to the very end of the drat thing, it's easy to assume that it's either a one-player RPG, or that you're supposed to sort of gestalt-control Batman, as if the game was Everyone is So basically Battle for the Cowl: the RPG?
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Jan 16, 2015 17:25
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Kai Tave posted:On the other hand the WEG Star Wars d6 game was notorious for taking the stance of "you and your shitkicking PC pals are nowhere near as cool as the canon characters from the movies." It took a while for people writing RPGs based on licensed settings that hey, maybe the folks playing these want to be on par with the main characters instead of Third Background Extra From the Left. I think the height of that was WEG's DC Universe game, where the character creation rules made it literally impossible to have a starting character who was as powerful as Robin, let alone Superman or Wonder Woman.
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