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Humbug Scoolbus posted:The idea of TORG using a version of Cinematic Unisystem (Those aren't Drama Points! Those are Possibilities!) excites me. Torg is the greatest game with the worst mechanics ever made. I wouldn't use Cinematic Unisystem, though. I've had the misfortune of being in a high-powered campaign in that and it breaks ridiculously easily after a certain point.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:31
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Pardon me if someone else already mentioned it, but the rights to TORG are owned by a company with plans to develop it. After Eric Gibson imploded and sold off all his WEG-related rights, Torg was picked up by Ulisses Spiele (a German company that specializes in wargames but also owns the rights to The Dark Eye). They were the ones who got all the old Torg books up on DriveThru, and they planned to release new Torg stuff this year. (That said, I'm doubtful that anything they release will be developed with a drastically different system, although TORG needs it badly.)
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Apr 9, 2015 21:32
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I still need to review All Flesh Must Be Eaten some time, but it's really my only experience with Unisystem and at the level that game takes place with (especially as Norms) if you cut some of the dumber skill bloat (like every individual class of gun or melee weapon being a separate skill) it works quite solidly.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:34
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Halloween Jack posted:Pardon me if someone else already mentioned it, but the rights to TORG are owned by a company with plans to develop it. After Eric Gibson imploded and sold off all his WEG-related rights, Torg was picked up by Ulisses Spiele (a German company that specializes in wargames but also owns the rights to The Dark Eye). They were the ones who got all the old Torg books up on DriveThru, and they planned to release new Torg stuff this year. No, that's been brought up. The problem is that they've been sitting on the license for like 5+ years and haven't said what, if anything, they're doing with it. And yeah, I'm sure they're not going to update the system because God loving forbid we upset the old fans even if that means just re-releasing the exact same thing that came out 20 years ago.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:35
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Also I hope you're all happy because now I'm going through and looking at my old Torg->Fate Core notes.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:37
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I feel like if you're going to keep Axioms for not-Torg you might want to mess with them. I'd at the very least suggest a Life Axiom, which governs how crazy biology can get. At low levels you have sterile places like city-world or whatever, at high levels you have Godzilla/The Zerg/Kryptonians.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:43
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I'm happy because now I'm going to read Fate and Dungeon World (which let's face it I should have done like in January of last year) and decide which one I'll build my Malleable Realities game in.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:44
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theironjef posted:I'm happy because now I'm going to read Fate and Dungeon World (which let's face it I should have done like in January of last year) and decide which one I'll build my Malleable Realities game in. Fate is the better choice in my mind, but I could see a PBTA TORG game doing some interesting things. You could have a playbook for each cosm and one consequence of getting disconnected/transformed could be "take a move from the playbook of the cosm your currently in" to represent getting transformed. Have a way to get rid of the move or just make it temporary.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:47
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Evil Mastermind posted:No, that's been brought up. The problem is that they've been sitting on the license for like 5+ years and haven't said what, if anything, they're doing with it.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:51
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Yeah, I feel Fate's the way to go. Torg has a wide spread of character types, and while I love PbtA I don't think you could make playbooks that worked for that kind of thing. Especially if you want to get into reality mixing and such.
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Apr 9, 2015 21:51
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wdarkk posted:I feel like if you're going to keep Axioms for not-Torg you might want to mess with them. I'd at the very least suggest a Life Axiom, which governs how crazy biology can get. At low levels you have sterile places like city-world or whatever, at high levels you have Godzilla/The Zerg/Kryptonians. Uh, if you're talking about Genius with regards to axioms, there's no real difference between organic and non-organic wonders. Making life is the preserve of Automata, which can make robots or living creatures as you prefer. Making godzilla/zerg/kryptonians is entirely doable with Automata. With anything else, you're free to say you're making a wonder with genetically engineered plants or are chopping up stray dogs for parts to make your wonder. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Apr 9, 2015 |
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Apr 9, 2015 22:04
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Evil Mastermind posted:Torg is the greatest game with the worst mechanics ever made. I think Torg was created about twenty years too early. In the late 2000s/early 2010s on the other end of the FATE and PBTA storygame boom and the metaplot busts of things like oWoD Torg might have actually delivered on its promise. Torg not only comes from an extremely metaplot-y place but also an incredibly simulationist-y one. It really is born from the worst of both 80s and 90s. When I made a crack about how Torg wants you to remember it's not your world to play with I meant no hyperbole, so much time and effort was put into axioms and world laws and the metaphysics of the setting they forgot to make their cool premise cool. I'm absolutely on board with gutting Torg and starting again. Torg as written is trash. Meanwhile playing a version of Torg where you can be a knight in shining armor who turns into a Monster Hunter character, or a cyborg who turns into a half golem? That would be a hell of a ride.
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Apr 9, 2015 23:05
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Fung Shui might also be a decent fit for TORG, if you want a more action-y atmosphere. You'd need more substantial transformation-y mechanics though. Don't use Dungeonworld; it's way to restrictive by nature for something like TORG.
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Apr 10, 2015 00:44
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Cythereal posted:Uh, if you're talking about Genius with regards to axioms, there's no real difference between organic and non-organic wonders. Making life is the preserve of Automata, which can make robots or living creatures as you prefer. Making godzilla/zerg/kryptonians is entirely doable with Automata. With anything else, you're free to say you're making a wonder with genetically engineered plants or are chopping up stray dogs for parts to make your wonder. 
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Apr 10, 2015 01:07
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Zereth posted:They're clearly talking about Torg? They said "not-Torg" and mentioned axioms, which made me think they were talking about Genius. Torg never interested me so I haven't been paying any attention to that discussion.
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Apr 10, 2015 01:29
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Cythereal posted:They said "not-Torg" and mentioned axioms, which made me think they were talking about Genius. Torg never interested me so I haven't been paying any attention to that discussion. They're talking about making a torg-alike in a different system. Axioms are also a Torg thing.
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Apr 10, 2015 01:32
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Cythereal posted:Torg never interested me so I haven't been paying any attention to that discussion. You're dead to me.
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Apr 10, 2015 02:29
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Evil Mastermind posted:You're dead to me. I tried following it a bit at first, but lost interest like I did in the Rifts stuff.  It just doesn't interest me as a setting.
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Apr 10, 2015 02:36
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Cythereal posted:I tried following it a bit at first, but lost interest like I did in the Rifts stuff. Nah, I get that. Torg is one of the densest settings ever made. There's a ludicrous amount of information and crunch in every book.
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Apr 10, 2015 02:47
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Torg interests me mostly in the fact that it's a complete and total dead end, game design and writing wise. Failures are interesting, hence this thread, sometimes.
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Apr 10, 2015 02:51
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Late to the dinosaur talk, but I'm a bit upset that no one has brought up the slam dunkinest, trash talkinest hero from the Hollow Earth. Yeah, that's right, a sapient T-Rex with multiple battlerigs powered by a game controller his tiny arms can use.
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Apr 10, 2015 02:51
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I know we haven't gotten to discussion of it in Torg, but I thought that the worst thing was that you could never really explore the home cosm of a realm. While stuff like Cyberpapacy's home cosm was a little lame being stuck in largely in the 1600s, I would love more interaction with stuff like Asyle, with it's hosed up geography, and especially Tharkold, since RAW Tharkold seemed to be a one-way trip from anyone from Tharkold into LA but that whole home cosm was such a bizarre post-apocalyptic wasteland. A remake or reimagining nowadays would have to have Tharkold drop into Russia, just because it seems like it would fit tremendously with stuff like STALKER or Metro 2033.
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Apr 10, 2015 03:58
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The problem I'm seeing with the Genius catalysts is it seems like they overlap quite a bit. I mean, doesn't EVERY mad scientist want to get back at those fools at the university who scoffed at their plans to build a race of atomic monsters that shoot laser beams from their eyesockets?
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Apr 10, 2015 04:00
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Maxwell Lord posted:The problem I'm seeing with the Genius catalysts is it seems like they overlap quite a bit. I mean, doesn't EVERY mad scientist want to get back at those fools at the university who scoffed at their plans to build a race of atomic monsters that shoot laser beams from their eyesockets? Not every mad scientist even has a high school diploma. The catalyst is the emotional impulse that drove your mind to the brink of madness and opened you to Inspiration - though some people feel Inspiration first and then start to go mad. The way Genius writes it, those sorts of plans tend to come only after you fully crack and become Inspired, though certainly any Genius who already has tenure might start to feel that way. The salient mental state for a catalyzing Genius is an intense emotional drive to do something, whether that's anger, vision, loss, resentment/paranoia, or curiosity, combined with a mind flexible enough to start putting together a plan to do it. It's when things suddenly start making total sense to you that you previously would have called insane, and everyone around you still does, that catalysis begins. How exactly an incipient Genius responds to that, if they're even aware of what's happening at all, is up to the player.
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Apr 10, 2015 04:12
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Nippon Tech makes me think of a conceit from the later Kindred of the East where numerous cities are being taken over by a demon mainly because his particular hell happens to be composed of farcical levels of urban blight, so most people just credit it to Things Getting Worse.
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Apr 10, 2015 05:17
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I'm sure that if you wanted an actual game about being a mad scientist your best bet would be to take Doors and rejigger them into an Invention system before adding Visitors, various Angels, startup cultists of various stripes, and hollow, envious financiers. But it would be nothing like oMage, so... Big Hubris fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Apr 10, 2015 |
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Apr 10, 2015 05:28
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God drat you people. I've spent the better part of the day with theironjef hashing out how to make a workable system out of TORG that eventually turned into Sliders meets Marvel's Exiles meets Quantum Leap that is basically nothing like the source material anymore outside of "there are other dimensions" and "they have governing laws to their reality".
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Apr 10, 2015 06:46
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Grnegsnspm posted:God drat you people. I've spent the better part of the day with theironjef hashing out how to make a workable system out of TORG that eventually turned into Sliders meets Marvel's Exiles meets Quantum Leap that is basically nothing like the source material anymore outside of "there are other dimensions" and "they have governing laws to their reality". Let's face it, this is probably the best way to approach making a not!Torg.
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Apr 10, 2015 07:02
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Grnegsnspm posted:God drat you people. I've spent the better part of the day with theironjef hashing out how to make a workable system out of TORG that eventually turned into Sliders meets Marvel's Exiles meets Quantum Leap that is basically nothing like the source material anymore outside of "there are other dimensions" and "they have governing laws to their reality". You've made entirely the right choices.
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Apr 10, 2015 07:03
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Grnegsnspm posted:God drat you people. I've spent the better part of the day with theironjef hashing out how to make a workable system out of TORG that eventually turned into Sliders meets Marvel's Exiles meets Quantum Leap that is basically nothing like the source material anymore outside of "there are other dimensions" and "they have governing laws to their reality". Man Golden Age of Aviation Universe is so good. Sky Emperor Richtofen all calling the shots from his mighty Zeppelin Throne. I can't wait to get this thing on paper.
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Apr 10, 2015 07:30
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Man, you reminded me of that movie that popped up on Netflix a few weeks ago that was blatantly not a movie at all, but a TV series pilot for a Sliders-like show that I thought would be really fun to watch. But alas...
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Apr 10, 2015 12:10
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My only apprehension about redoing Torg is that I think a lot of people would just want it to be total over-the-top monkey cheese. The problem with kitchen sink settings is that ultimately, they're totally unnecessary. Just decide what universal system you're going to use and make poo poo up.
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Apr 10, 2015 14:28
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:Man, you reminded me of that movie that popped up on Netflix a few weeks ago that was blatantly not a movie at all, but a TV series pilot for a Sliders-like show that I thought would be really fun to watch. But alas... You're talking about Parallels, which oddly Grnegsnspm wrote a review of for our website. Well, not oddly, he's obsessed with dimension hopping as a media concept. What was odd is that he seemed to be the only person anywhere that bothered reviewing it, so it was the most viewed page on our site for like two weeks. All of our google keywords for a while were stuff like "Netflix dimensions movie" and "Parallels is it a pilot?"
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Apr 10, 2015 15:12
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Oh yeah, that's what it was called. As a movie, it was terrible, but it would've made an excellent pilot if there was an actual TV show attached to it. I mean, that's clearly what it was supposed to be. The pacing is nonsensically bad for a movie. Man, I'd watch the hell out of that.
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Apr 10, 2015 15:25
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Getting rid of something similar to the Cyberpapacy in a Torg-a-like would be a pretty big misstep, not just because the Cyber Pope is a stupid cool idea but because it shows how influence on the infringing realities is not just possible but frightening in that possibility. Just because you introduce new ideas to that reality doesn't mean you've made things any better.
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Apr 10, 2015 15:26
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Grnegsnspm posted:God drat you people. I've spent the better part of the day with theironjef hashing out how to make a workable system out of TORG that eventually turned into Sliders meets Marvel's Exiles meets Quantum Leap that is basically nothing like the source material anymore outside of "there are other dimensions" and "they have governing laws to their reality". The rundown has made me realize that the TORG i played in high school was this, as the GM had apparently torn the game apart and rebuilt it on his own to be fun. Stormknights were immune to cosm changes, the darkness devices where just powerful artifacts and not sentient, and the high lords just fell into the "absolute power corrupts" thing. We also took down stele like mad and no one died, they just shifted back. A grand time was had by all. I now know why he never let ANYONE read the core books, and helped us with everything. We were playing a different game entirely with a similar plot. I don’t remember any of the terrible card mechanics, and am pretty sure we were just using a lot of reskinned d&d 2.0 mechanics, now that i think about it. TyrsHTML fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Apr 10, 2015 |
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Apr 10, 2015 15:51
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Mr. Maltose posted:Getting rid of something similar to the Cyberpapacy in a Torg-a-like would be a pretty big misstep, not just because the Cyber Pope is a stupid cool idea but because it shows how influence on the infringing realities is not just possible but frightening in that possibility. Just because you introduce new ideas to that reality doesn't mean you've made things any better.
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Apr 10, 2015 16:05
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Halloween Jack posted:The Cyberpapacy is also something that's not stupidly complicated or silly in concept, but has a lot more flavour than if the Torg creators were just like "Well there's a high fantasy world, a cyberpunk world, a steampunk world, and a Prehistoric world." I don't know how well they executed Tharkold, but the "Terminator meets Hellraiser" sounds really cool, actually. Well yeah, the whole awesome thing about a dimension hopping game is that the hopping started long before the players figured it out. I think the best way to create new ones is in three parts. Pick a genre, pick a twist, pick a bad guy (who probably generates an additional twist). So say for example... 1. World - Dinosaur World - Humans never evolved, the KT event never happened. Classic. 2. Twist - Iron Age technology - sword and spear, chariots, battle engines all that good stuff. What a twist, are dinosaurs doing this? 3. Bad Guy - Alexander the Great - He wept, for he had no more worlds to conquer, and thus did reality provide him one. Result: Tôi Kratistôi - The world where Macedonians have been cultivating, hunting, domesticating, and selectively breeding dinosaurs for 2500 years. Since only Alexander and an army went through to this world, they didn't bring along the former world's momentum of technological development and are fairly backwards tech-wise. Whether Alexander is still alive would depend on if I wanted to make this games dimensional lord equivalents immortal or not, but I can already slap together some hacky genre fiction (they're now greco-animistic religiously and worship a Zeus that's embodied as a T-Rex with gnashing jaws that create the storms, Bucephalus is now a triceratops, etc.) and start writing adventures.
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Apr 10, 2015 16:22
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Halloween Jack posted:The Cyberpapacy is also something that's not stupidly complicated or silly in concept, but has a lot more flavour than if the Torg creators were just like "Well there's a high fantasy world, a cyberpunk world, a steampunk world, and a Prehistoric world." I don't know how well they executed Tharkold, but the "Terminator meets Hellraiser" sounds really cool, actually. Tharkold is actually pretty well done, but has so amazing poo poo that I can't wait to talk about because it's gonna make the whole thread uncomfortable. It's  squared.
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Apr 10, 2015 16:42
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theironjef posted:Well yeah, the whole awesome thing about a dimension hopping game is that the hopping started long before the players figured it out. I think the best way to create new ones is in three parts. Pick a genre, pick a twist, pick a bad guy (who probably generates an additional twist). So say for example... You could probably set up a set of tables during char gen so everyone can participate in the bizarre cosm building
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