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JDCorley posted:A bunch of RPG people on my Google+ feed teased Guardians of the Galaxy as "this is a RPG group which is comedically tormenting its DM, who is trying to run a serious space adventure" and my mind just boggled. To run a funny game, the DM should almost always be serious, since the world should be grounded before the comedy starts to lift off. That exact post is how I convinced a non rpg friend to let me run a game for them. That friend is now hooked. 
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Jun 9, 2015 17:14
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I love to watch Ghostbusters through that lens, and Alien3 reminds me of way too many lovely games where people forget the NPC they're debating killing is right there. Ghostbusters even has the new guy who really isn't into gaming at first, but wants to hang with his buddies regardless.
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Jun 9, 2015 17:16
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2e Paranoia art is so, so good. I love the bootlicker picture. You know the one.
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Jun 9, 2015 17:21
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 I love the IntSec guy there. He's seen this exact thing happen so many times.
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Jun 9, 2015 17:27
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:2e Paranoia art is so, so good. I love the bootlicker picture. You know the one.  "Traitor gets a significant bonus to his Bluff roll"
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Jun 9, 2015 17:33
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Holloway's art did such a great job bringing the feel of the game across. Especially with the faces and small details.
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Jun 9, 2015 17:39
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Someday I will be drunk enough to buy all the 2ed books and novels off of eBay.
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Jun 9, 2015 17:59
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Don't bother with the novels.
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Jun 9, 2015 18:00
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God. I played 2nd edition Paranoia maybe, like, twice? Never even complete adventures. But I had most of the books and supplements and I read them and re-read them for years and years as a teenager. As another example of Paranoia's mechanics supporting the comedy: the characters are Troubleshooters. Their job is to root out commie mutant traitors. However, every character, during creation, is given: a Mutant power, and membership in a secret society (one of which is the communists). So your character's a commie mutant traitor, right off the bat. And of course, all the players know that all the other characters must also be commie mutant traitors. But you can't just terminate someone without justification, so first you gotta find some evidence (no matter how flimsy) that the other guys are commie mutant traitors, and then you can terminate them, which ought to please The Computer and earn you some kudos. Which of course, they're all going to try to do to you. Meanwhile, nominally there's an actual mission going on. Like, the GM has some sort of task for the squad of Troubleshooters to try to do. It is probably lethally dangerous, stupid, impossible, or even treasonous on its face, but disobeying the orders to go do the mission is treason, so, welp. Paranoia's character stats also served the comedy. OK, so you do have Dexterity, Agility and Endurance. But you also have Chutzpah, Moxie, and Mechanical Aptitude. For combat, you may have a Macho Bonus. And Chutzpah (the best ability score category ever) gives you bonuses to skills like Bootlicking, Con, Fast Talking, Spurious Logic, and Oratory! OK. The skill tree is a bit unweildy. There's fifty skills, including three different skills dedicated to robot maintenance, fourteen different weapon skills (split between Agility and Dexterity), and Data Analysis is distinct from Data Search. But that's actually part of the comedy, too. Your character probably has a bunch of basically worthless skills. He or she is poorly suited to the job, but is required to attempt it anyway. Your character probably has skills that are essentially traitorous just to use, like the aforementioned Data Analysis (computer skills? at Your security clearance?), or Forgery, or Bribery. You can play that completely straight, if you want, but you know how players are... if you have spent skill points on a skill, you look for chances to use it, right? The second page of your character sheet has the secret stuff on it. Your secret society membership, your mutant power. And three skills that are blatantly traitorous just to have: Communist Propaganda, Computer Programming, and Old Reckoning Cultures! Fun! Paranoia 2nd edition is basically near-perfect mechanics to support and encourage the game's flavor and desired atmosphere. I even love how combat works. There's no hit points to track, no detailed hit locations charts. If you get injured, you just have a continuum of status effects: Stunned, Wounded, Incapacitated, Killed, and Vaporized. That's it. Yes, you have to look up damage numbers on a table, roll dice, and check the table for the damage ranges and which statuses they work out as, but this isn't too unwieldy and so basically combat goes quickly and tends to be either pathetically useless (your lovely red laser is bad against red reflec armor, which everyone has) or rapidly lethal (your Plasma Generator has two possible damage states: on a 1, you get a Kill, and on a 2-20, you get a Vaporize).
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Jun 9, 2015 18:15
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The thing I also love about Paranoia 2e is that they basically say "if your players are typical roleplayers (MMJS note: this was in the 80s so by definition this means super-serious dungeon crawlers) they're going to go crazy and blast the poo poo out of each other and act like gibbering apes once this hits the table. This is ok, for a while. Let them do this, then try to get them to take this whole thing semi-seriously because it's funnier when they do." Edit: Paranoia also has the best player handouts which are dumb gags/jokes in-and-of themselves.
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Jun 9, 2015 18:20
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Leperflesh posted:But that's actually part of the comedy, too. Your character probably has a bunch of basically worthless skills. He or she is poorly suited to the job, but is required to attempt it anyway. Your character probably has skills that are essentially traitorous just to use, like the aforementioned Data Analysis (computer skills? at Your security clearance?), or Forgery, or Bribery. You can play that completely straight, if you want, but you know how players are... if you have spent skill points on a skill, you look for chances to use it, right? That's a factor that's gotten downplayed and forgotten over the years; the idea that most Troubleshooters are just random shlubs who got promoted from Infrared for turning someone in for treason, and are then given heavy weaponry and a licence to kill (assuming they've filled out the proper forms).
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Jun 9, 2015 18:21
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This was from a way's back, but thanks to whoever mentioned the "Wizards Presents" documents as a window into the design decisions that went into 4th Edition. I almost want to make an F&F of it now to really get at the idea that it was an iteration and evolution of 3rd Edition, and not its own radical change.
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Jun 9, 2015 21:35
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gradenko_2000 posted:This was from a way's back, but thanks to whoever mentioned the "Wizards Presents" documents as a window into the design decisions that went into 4th Edition. I almost want to make an F&F of it now to really get at the idea that it was an iteration and evolution of 3rd Edition, and not its own radical change. I'd be interested in reading that.
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Jun 9, 2015 22:19
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Going back to MiB and Ghostbusters. Yes the movies are comedies, but the stakes are lethally high in both and the protagonists are actually really competent. That's the thing that the games missed. The PCs shouldn't be schlubs.
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Jun 9, 2015 22:20
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Going back to MiB and Ghostbusters. Yes the movies are comedies, but the stakes are lethally high in both and the protagonists are actually really competent. That's the thing that the games missed. The PCs shouldn't be schlubs.
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Jun 9, 2015 22:25
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gradenko_2000 posted:This was from a way's back, but thanks to whoever mentioned the "Wizards Presents" documents as a window into the design decisions that went into 4th Edition. I almost want to make an F&F of it now to really get at the idea that it was an iteration and evolution of 3rd Edition, and not its own radical change. I'd love to see this, too. In my last 3.x game I played with some of the late-model classes like the Knight, which very definitely had a rudimentary threat/tanking mechanism.
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Jun 9, 2015 22:41
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Toph Bei Fong posted:
On that same topic, it's worth checking out Technoir for another game that has pitch-perfect mechanical enforcement of theme.
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Jun 9, 2015 23:13
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reasons why TOR is one of the best RPGs ever designed
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Evil Mastermind posted:Don't bother with the novels. I have very very fond memories of the novels. I'm sure they are trash but I want to read them again just the same.
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Jun 9, 2015 23:17
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:The thing I also love about Paranoia 2e is that they basically say "if your players are typical roleplayers (MMJS note: this was in the 80s so by definition this means super-serious dungeon crawlers) they're going to go crazy and blast the poo poo out of each other and act like gibbering apes once this hits the table. This is ok, for a while. Let them do this, then try to get them to take this whole thing semi-seriously because it's funnier when they do." I want to run Paranoia and I own the XP edition but I can never get through the rules - something about it just bores me. I have played 2e and I loved it, partially because it was a quicker read. I wish I could get my hands on a copy of 2E again. Too bad they're rare and expensive.
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Jun 9, 2015 23:17
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Going back to MiB and Ghostbusters. Yes the movies are comedies, but the stakes are lethally high in both and the protagonists are actually really competent. That's the thing that the games missed. The PCs shouldn't be schlubs.
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Jun 10, 2015 03:44
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The default assumption of the Ghostbusters RPG is that the players are a just-opened franchise that hasn't gotten any real training at all. They got the packs, traps, a PKE meter or two, a containment grid, and a training video. Now go fight that demon.
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Jun 10, 2015 03:56
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Evil Mastermind posted:The default assumption of the Ghostbusters RPG is that the players are a just-opened franchise that hasn't gotten any real training at all. They got the packs, traps, a PKE meter or two, a containment grid, and a training video. Now go fight that demon. So it's paranoia without the FRIEND COMPUTER LOL TRAITOR stuff? I can get behind that.
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Jun 10, 2015 07:04
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paradoxGentleman posted:How does one simulate themes in an RPG? I immagine genere conventions are easier to simulate once you have located them. Well, another way to explain is that a lot of nerds tend to see things in a nuts 'n bolts fashion, particularly in RPGs, and try and explain things with reason and physics, when narratives are often fairly unhinged from this notions. Take the nerdly notion that if Hulk can lift 100 tons, any punch from him should have, say, 100 tons of force over whatever amount of square inches a fist has and therefore any time he punches, he should be making shockwaves that injure or kill city blocks of people, and therefore, comics are badly written. Of course, a writer (who I enjoy, mind) later came along and said "well, Bruce Banner's subconscious genius tracks physics to the point he can keep the Hulk from doing too much damage". But both those kind of things miss the essential point that Hulk stories were basically intended for kids and a story where Hulk is a literal walking atomic bomb (instead of a metaphorical one) stops being a superhero story and quickly becomes a horror story. Hulk doesn't destroy cities because the kind of stories he works in call for his strength level to fluctuate for the needs of a story. He's strong enough to punch giant robots around, but when he punches a wall, he'll just punch through the wall and not necessarily bring a building down. If he guest-stars in another Fantastic Four, he might get chumped by The Thing, because The Thing is a star in that book and Hulk isn't. We may have been given very precise numbers for the Hulk's strength at times, most authors could give a poo poo and just settle for "he is the strongest one there is, and if he isn't, that's a super-big deal". And yet most superhero RPGs are focused on defining exactly how much a character like the Hulk can lift and under what circumstances he can do it to the ton, but as you can see above, numbers rarely matter in comics. Comic universes often develop pecking orders (Ms. Marvel isn't as strong as The Thing, and The Thing isn't as strong as the Hulk, etc.) but beyond that most systems don't need to actually define that beyond broad notions. Spider-Man can lift a car or so and that's about all you need to know about him, but there's an iconic issue where he gets a building dropped on him and he needs to be able to lift that because it's cool and dramatic, even if most RPG rules would tell us he'd be squashed as flat as a... well... spider. Something like Fate, though, might allow Spider-Man to key off several of his aspects like With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility and Does Everything a Spider Can and throw enough narrative currency / fate points to shrug that building off his shoulders, which would actually allow you to simulate those old Silver Age stories in a way, say, Champions can't. This has gotten way nerdy to explain, but basically a lot of nerds see stories as a bunch of "moving gears" when in reality they're much more fluid and malleable. But most older systems are strictly "moving gears" systems, and as a result they lack a lot of the flexibility fiction authors have for better or worse. Sometimes this can work well to simulate a given genre accidentally, but it's often by accident rather than intent. Recon from 1981 is pretty solid at representing the gritty, miserable situations of the Vietnam War, but that's a situation where fiction and a reality simulation mesh well. Also, how did we get this far in bringing up old systems with genre emulation without mentioning Call of Cthulhu? Yeah, it's clunky, but it very much made a deliberate attempt to simulate Lovecraftian horror, and was shockingly decent at it given it was released - once again - in 1981. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Jun 10, 2015 |
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Jun 10, 2015 07:38
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here is a good post on genre emulation and the new WoD Beast: The Primordial whateverAttorney at Funk posted:other kinds of monster stories are evocative of concrete human fears e.g. violent and taboo sexuality, uncontrollable destructive emotion, not understanding the world (or worse, understanding and hating it). beast, rather than be evocative of those fears, is evocative of those stories. it's a second-order narrative that mistakes genre savvy for an understanding of theme and pattern recognition for storytelling. beast the primordial is what you'd get if you tried to reconstruct the empire strikes back from its constituent wookieepedia entries
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Jun 10, 2015 07:43
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WEG also did The Price Of Freedom, which at the time (the mid-80s; Peak Reagan) White Dwarf slammed for being appalling jingoistic right-wing gun porn. But reading it today, from the sample character descriptions alone it's clearly a very deadpan piss-take of exactly that Red Dawn, Invasion USA fearful paranoia that THE COMMIES will come and take away all your stuff.
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Jun 10, 2015 08:24
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Payndz posted:WEG also did The Price Of Freedom, which at the time (the mid-80s; Peak Reagan) White Dwarf slammed for being appalling jingoistic right-wing gun porn. But reading it today, from the sample character descriptions alone it's clearly a very deadpan piss-take of exactly that Red Dawn, Invasion USA fearful paranoia that THE COMMIES will come and take away all your stuff.
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Jun 10, 2015 08:35
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Thank you for the answers.
paradoxGentleman fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Jun 10, 2015 |
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Jun 10, 2015 08:53
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Alien Rope Burn posted:This has gotten way nerdy to explain, but basically a lot of nerds see stories as a bunch of "moving gears"  But seriously this was a pretty good summary of the issue, and I should have phrased it better in my reply. quote:Also, how did we get this far in bringing up old systems with genre emulation without mentioning Call of Cthulhu? Yeah, it's clunky, but it very much made a deliberate attempt to simulate Lovecraftian horror, and was shockingly decent at it given it was released - once again - in 1981.
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Jun 10, 2015 09:42
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RE: Nerds and media There's a reason the MST3k theme song had the lyric, "If you're wondering how he eats and breathes And other science facts, Just repeat to yourself "It's just a show, I should really just relax.""
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Jun 10, 2015 09:50
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And just so it's clear, there's nothing wrong with a "could Goku beat up Superman? Let's roll dice to see!" sort of game or campaign. The problems come in when the rules are built to support that, but people try to use them in a game that's supposed to feel like a story.
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Jun 10, 2015 10:03
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paradoxGentleman posted:Thank you for the answers. A good, classic example of how game and tone/themes can fail to mesh is the famous Dragon Magazine article that presented a D&D writeup for RE Howard's Conan. Conan is often cited as an inspirational work for D&D, so you would expect that there'd be no problem building Conan in the D&D gaming system and showing players how they could recreate this famous, iconic character, right? Well no, actually. Because D&D is actually pretty bad at emulating protagonists like Conan who, in the stories, is more than a one-note "Fighter level Whatever" within its mechanical framework. The end result is that the Conan writeup was some mish-mash of like three classes bodged together, plus psionic powers stapled in there awkwardly in order to help give Conan's prowess and capabilities within Howard's stories some sort of mechanical backing the only way they knew how. And of course no D&D GM was going to look at that and go "sure Bob, you can totally do this at next Sunday's game," so it wound up being nothing more than a goofy thought experiment than any sort of serious "here's how our game allows you to emulate these things it's supposed to be drawing from," because frankly the game couldn't handle it without some serious contortions.
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Jun 10, 2015 10:06
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At this point I feel like I should ask: what system would you use to stat Conan? I feel like either FATE or GURPS could pull it off, but that feels like cheating because those are generic, all-purpose systems that are designed to cover a lot of ground.
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Jun 10, 2015 10:24
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Asimo posted:I admit, I It's very much just a few steps away from D&D by modern standards, but the Sanity system - though it's ham-handed and arbitrary by modern standards - is a perfect example of an early and fairly effective attempt at genre emulation for its time. And yeah, "moving gears" sorts of RPGs aren't necessarily wrong or inferior per se, but you get specific results out of them and just being cognizant of what their strengths and weaknesses are is important. Without it that kind of self-awareness, you get bizarre products like GURPS Discworld or Slayers d20.
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Jun 10, 2015 10:25
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paradoxGentleman posted:At this point I feel like I should ask: what system would you use to stat Conan? You have two options: 1) generic systems designed to cover a lot of ground, which will let you stat up someone who was never designed as an RPG character but was designed as a literary protagonist whose abilities don't fit within the narrow mould of existing RPG protagonists. 2) systems specifically designed to let you stat up Conan and emulate sword and sorcery. D&D literally fails at statting up Conan because it is neither a generic system that can accommodate him nor a specifically designed system that can accommodate him. D&D doesn't have mechanics that can support the kind of hyper-competent characters or fiction of the Conan stories.
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Jun 10, 2015 10:36
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paradoxGentleman posted:At this point I feel like I should ask: what system would you use to stat Conan? There's a retroclone by writer/designer Kevin Crawford called Scarlet Heroes that I think could do a reasonable job of it despite being based on OD&D rules, and it accomplishes this with some very clever rules and approaches to things. For a start, Scarlet Heroes is explicitly intended to be a game for one GM and one player, so instead of a party it's meant to be played by one person running a singularly powerful character. Conan led armies and had bold companions, but the Conan stories were very much centered around the adventures and exploits of a single character and not a party of 4-6 adventurers. In terms of mechanics, Scarlet Heroes characters eschew rigid lists of proficiencies for broad capabilities more in line with 13th Age's backgrounds which give players the ability to easily make characters with a wide breadth of skills and experiences to draw on, which is also in line with Conan who was everything from a tower-climbing thief to a pirate to a mercenary to a king, he was very much not just a D&D Fighter who can maybe jump and climb and pound the dents out of his armor and that's it. The scale of combat is adjusted as well even while preserving the basic d20/D&D combat resolution system where when you deal your damage you aren't dealing it in hitpoints, you're dealing it in hit dice of enemies killed. So if your damage for a combat exchange comes out to be 3 then you slay 3HD worth of monsters outright, either one 3HD monster or three 1HD monsters or you take 3HD off of something tougher, your choice. Combat in Conan stories is rarely a long, drawn-out affair, and Conan can dispatch a half dozen men in the span of a paragraph. Fundamentally combat in Scarlet Heroes isn't vastly different in terms of "roll a d20 against TN, then roll damage" than many other retroclones, but by a simple and elegant change of contexts it provides a very different sort of experience. There are other things too...characters have a "fate point-ish" sort of ability that allows them to suffer "narrow escapes" from otherwise deadly traps and circumstances at the cost of some vitality, everybody gets a Fray Die in combat which is basically a source of extra damage that can be spread around, the game itself isn't very concerned with tracking individual copper pieces and prying off door hinges for resale, etc. I would say it definitely does a better job of emulating the Conan of Howard's stories as well as the sorts of stories Howard was writing than many editions of D&D can do without significant tinkering.
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Jun 10, 2015 10:44
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Scarlet Heroes sounds very interesting, and it fills nicely the niche of "I'd like to play some elfgames tonight but I only one of my friend is available".
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Jun 10, 2015 11:04
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paradoxGentleman posted:Scarlet Heroes sounds very interesting, and it fills nicely the niche of "I'd like to play some elfgames tonight but I only one of my friend is available". The author also wrote a combination retroclone and "how to design and format your own RPG" style guide called Exemplars and Eidolons that takes a lot of the Scarlet Heroes hacks and makes a full-fledged traditional adventuring party RPG out of them which is also pretty cool. Someone recently did an F&F review of it.
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Jun 10, 2015 11:07
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Sandy Petersen gave a very frank interview about the changes at Chaosium, with a lot more information about why this is all happening than we normally get in these situations.
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Jun 10, 2015 14:51
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paradoxGentleman posted:At this point I feel like I should ask: what system would you use to stat Conan? Are we talking about an exact emulation of Conan, or a Conan-esque character? Because Conan is someone with a lot of skills that would make him a pretty expensive character to make in a generic system, and difficult to do in a more narrowly-focused system (apart from one that was solely for playing Conan), but making a character like Conan without being an exact match is a much easier task, and even easier if we assume that characters will develop to the point of being as capable of Conan instead of starting out at his level. This is more apparent if we look at the anti-Conan, Elric of Melnibone, who was a Magic-User/Illusionist/Fighter/Cleric/Druid/Assassin in the 1980 Deities and Demigods, but making a character who does what Elric does is much easier- you could do it with some limited houseruling in D&D 4e, mostly to add Stormbringer.
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Jun 10, 2015 14:52
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paradoxGentleman posted:At this point I feel like I should ask: what system would you use to stat Conan? Iron Heroes (Not completely kidding)
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Jun 10, 2015 16:03
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