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MJ12 posted:I think just like GURPS is neither particularly Generic or Universal, most universal systems (ORE, M&M, etc) actually have pretty strong biases as to what type of game you're going to play. This is pretty accurate. Sometimes they are kind of bad at doing what they want to do, too  I haven't looked much into the 6th Edition, but I have played me some HERO System 5th. HERO is super cool for being a "make a super hero and then play as it" engine. However, I've found that it's nearly impossible to balance combat unless you use it for a lower level of power, like D&D-style fantasy. With actual superheroes, you're better off in HERO, as the GM, running it like FATE. Just define NPCs as a collection of their most important powers, skills, and stats, and then fill in the blanks as an encounter goes on. "Your character just punched him in the face for HOW much damage?" *scribbles furiously* It's the only way to avoid a weird arms race with the one guy in the group who inevitably min-maxed a character for combat supremacy without resorting to GM faux pas like Mind Control powers. The best solution I ever found for that guy was to distract him with a similarly beastly opponent, while the rest of the party mopped up minions. Usually also they would handle the detective work. Either way, it was always a struggle to balance a fight unless I fudged the NPC character sheets for dramatic effect. The reason boils down to the costs of things in the point buy. Damage and damage reduction both are relatively inexpensive things to acquire. There's no reason why every character shouldn't have at least one method of attack that does the GM's campaign cap for damage, even if it's under limited circumstances. Accuracy and evasion, however, are quite expensive. For the same cost of raising your overall accuracy/evasion by 1, by purchasing 3 levels of Dexterity, you could instead increase an attack by 1d6 AND give yourself 2 points of lethal defense. In a low-points build, like most fantasy or other "elite normal" characters, this means you have to choose between accuracy and damage, evasion and durability. Plus you have to account for Skills. However, it goes out the window when you have 3 times that many points to work with. A player willing to sacrifice versatility for fighting ability can only be stopped by GM audit, which is kind of a big "gently caress you". It's not hard, with 3-400 points, to make a guy who is nearly impossible to hit without area attacks, almost never misses, does huge damage, absorbs huge damage, but knows how to neither make nor eat breakfast. This guy can be fun if the rest of the party is on board- they take care of the background work and basically weaponize this guy when the villain appears, like the hulk. If they aren't on board, though... well, all that Dexterity that Combat Guy bought maximize his probabilities also gave him a bunch of extra actions per time, so he dominates the entire combat round both in and out of game, creating a weird cycle of boredom revenge. Combat Guy is bored during all non-combat scenes because he can only solve problems by punching them through 5 buildings. Everybody else is bored during combat scenes because Combat Guy has punched all of their problems away before they have gotten to do anything cool. TL;DR: Point-based generic systems are only fun if either nobody min-maxes or everybody min-maxes, with the small exception of people who are willing to weaponize the min-maxer.
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Sep 30, 2013 17:11
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Majuju posted:Has anyone done a good send-up of D20 Modern core? It's not on the wiki, and it deserves one! Not to mention the other associated settings, etc. Hrrrrrrg. I have the core books, but I don't wanna  I'll... I'll really think about it.
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Oct 4, 2013 20:44
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Majuju posted:Fear not, friends. I shall shoulder this terrible burden. I shall become the very embodiment of Moondog Greenberg, Tough Hero. Godspeed, Moondog. 
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Oct 4, 2013 21:03
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Davin Valkri posted:Did Rifts ever have aspirations to being a miniatures wargame like Warhammer? Or did somebody just feel the need to detail a bunch of vehicles with "Not for players!" stamped on them? It's meant to be toyetic, I think? RIFTs I'm pretty sure is Palladium's sperglord fantasy world of "anime GI Joes, but like for real". I'm sure that in some parallel reality, where roleplaying is more popular than television, there would be an extensive, decades-spanning line of action figures. EDIT: In a more ideal world, it would be Kevin Long et al trying to sieze the part of the player's brain that goes, "oh neat!" when it sees Optimus Prime. I think that the reality is closer to that part of the brain having been permanently seized in Kevin Long, and we are just peering into it. deadly_pudding fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Oct 11, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 18:25
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AccidentalHipster posted:If you're going to steal (and let's face it, RIFTS is roughly 84% theft), you might as well steal from the awesomedorable. Mirror match pissing contests are fun  Oh god, was I being that guy when I just kept foiling the combat monster guy by pulling him away from the group with a similarly monstrous NPC during battles?  I have yet to drown a PC for any reason, at least. Although I have had whole encounters in D&D3.5 where the Ranger can't quite manage to climb a tree...
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Oct 11, 2013 20:27
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PleasingFungus posted:The best RIFTS campaign? That... that RIFTS TRUCKIN post somehow made me want to play RIFTS. I want to play RIFTS trucks 
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Oct 11, 2013 20:37
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Midjack posted:Looking at that thing why does it have a satellite dish if all the satellites are inaccessible to earth? Maybe it's a badly-drawn radar dish? 
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Oct 11, 2013 20:44
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Bieeardo posted:Wraith was an interesting story bible, but I was never convinced that it was a particularly playable game. Things like the Shadow guides and even the little physical effects that taking up specific Arcanoi inflicted on a character were interesting literary ideas, but the latter were easy to forget about and the players I knew... well, you were more likely to have the Wraith ignore their Shadow (and the Shadow player get annoyed at being ineffective) or have a Wraith/Shadow pair continually disrupt the game. I've used a lot of its ideas as a pretty good jumping-off point for running Ghost games in other systems. The "spirit world" as a hosed up zone of reality that doesn't quite properly sync up to the physical world is pretty compelling on its own as a place to have adventures in, especially once you start populating it with plutocratic assholes who want to make you suffer for eternity in the form of money and/or furniture. Shadow mechanic can take a hike, though. Edit: I wanna elaborate on this, because it was a pretty cool campaign  It's pretty system-neutral; I used HERO, but you can use anything really that's generic enough for PCs to be ghosts, with ghosty powers, and not have it be dumb like a D&D ghost. Ignore all the stuff in Wraith about character creation, especially fetters and junk. GM provides some fetters by fiat as part of the narrative, because nobody in the afterlife gives a poo poo who you were, and you probably don't remember. PCs all blip into existence around one dead body. It's the body of one of the PCs- the others all have fetters to items left around the body. A weapon, a shovel, and abandoned vehicle, and so on. Nobody knows what happened. Everybody is disoriented. This is Ghost Trick the RPG. After they solved the mystery and brought the culprit to justice using GHOST SCIENCE, it became Ghost Private Eye adventures, which was pretty great. They would zero in on some mortal experiencing supernatural trubs and then help them out. It was good from GM standpoint because you had situations that were neatly self-contained: here is a weird problem. Solve it. Try not to make it weirder. Or, make it weirder if that would be funny. deadly_pudding fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Oct 15, 2013 |
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Oct 15, 2013 19:30
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AccidentalHipster posted:Once again, Kev demonstrates how full of poo poo his "play what you want" claims are. And speaking of RPGs written by people who are full of poo poo, I've been looking back at my EH review and I've realized that there are 2 Kev is full of poo poo, but it seems like one of those things that kind of boils down to the GM. D&D has PC stats for evil humanoids and monsters, too, but it's up to the DM to make the civilized world super racist toward them. In D&D's defense, though, I guess it's big selling point isn't "PLAY ANYTHING, DO EVERYTHING," which is kind of the case with RIFTs. "The party consists of a magical hobo, a man who has been permanently grafted into a Glitterboy, and a gargoyle! It's zany! FYI gargoyle player, this entire campaign will consist of you escaping lynch mobs because the setting is NGR."
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Oct 16, 2013 16:26
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I missed in Character Creation. The Warlock Taint Gift gives you a Warlock Point which do not exist in EH (I think they might be trying to say Dark Magic Point) and Step 3 does nothing except give you a Fumble which doesn't exist in EH either. Should I bring these up in my next part or just edit them in to Character Creation?
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Syrg Sapphire posted:If you haven't watched any of the AHS miniseries, get ye to Netflix. They're some of the best TV running. Have they gotten the second one yet? Either way, the first one was super good. My girlfriend and I fuckin marathonned that thing and we were both super sad when we ran out. Also it's good brainfuel if you want to run a Wraith-type game that is "Beetlejuice Without Beetlejuice".
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Oct 21, 2013 14:03
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Majuju posted:d20 Modern Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook - Part 2 I can't tell you how pumped I am about the MONEY update. This game flew so close to the sun with approximating modern finances, but close examination of the system instantly melts its "makes any drat sense" wings.
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Oct 25, 2013 13:42
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FMguru posted:Yeah, setting the swashbuckling age of sail game in a world where everyone lived on a single giant continent and there was no reason for anyone to develop anything more advanced than bronze age coasthugging triremes was the first warning sign. There were a couple of foreign lands on the far side of the continent that it made sense to visit by ship, but the setting made sure that you could never reach them by surrounding them with a giant impenetrable wall of fire that there was no way to cross unless you were one of the demigod setting NPCs whose power the PCs could never hope to approach even if they got and spent all the XPs in the world.  That's pretty rough. Wick, what are you doing with your life? I was in high school when I homebrewed an age of sail setting. It was a ring continent around a gigantic inland sea. IT WAS EASY, SO EASY. ONE CONVENIENT CONTINENT, STILL A MASSIVE AREA OF OPEN WATER TO TRAVERSE.
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Oct 25, 2013 18:17
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Majuju posted:WEALTH Essentially, the best thing about Wealth is how it scales in terms of gaining equipment. Wealth of 31, putting you into the Ultra-Rich category? You don't even have to bother rolling to acquire just about anything. Buuut, your DC 15 rule means that a pricey item will still ding a point off of your Wealth Bonus the same as a less obscenely wealthy person. Want to outfit a private army with top of the line assault rifles and armor? You can probably get about 6 guys equipped before you start having to cook the books a little. If you somehow succeed on every purchase check, you've equipped about 15 mercenaries and completely bankrupted yourself. That's before you've been able to pay any of them for their actual services. But, I guess now you have a sweet pile of guns and kevlar  If your DM lets you somehow keep your Occupation by completely shrugging off the effects that your newfound homelessness should have on your stress levels, access to proper hygiene, shelter, and so on, at least you will probably bounce back into moderate wealth or upper-middle-classness next time you level up. If you're lucky, one of the other PCs let you and your giant pile of state-of-the art guns crash at their place.
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Oct 28, 2013 15:21
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FMguru posted:Erin Darkflame Montgomery is pretty much the exact sort of name I'd have given my pretend girlfriend when I was 14. Darkflame Montgomery is especially notorious, since she's one of the Factols that got actual stats in the box set. It's like David Cook was just screaming at the reader, "This is my perfect Mary-Sue! Look at all her neat abilities! Oh, she's so sensual, but mysterious! And filled with the energy of youth! She's all statted out! You could, I don't know, use her as a DMPC in every campaign so that she can shine through in all of your Planescape Adventures!" 
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Dec 30, 2013 18:47
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