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Night10194 posted:Isn't the way you fight the Lady (if you decide to do that because you're a madman) via changing Sigil? Alter the beliefs and general goals and culture of the place and perhaps risk undoing the Cage and you'll really piss her off/maybe defeat her, rather than stabbing her in the face? That's how it operated on just about every level. Each gate-town your plane subverts is a few inches closer to the Spire, nevermind that the Outlands are basically infinite, and the Factions were doing their damnedest to pull the same thing off on a philosophical level whenever they weren't monkeywrenching each other. I got the feeling that's why the Lady murdered the gently caress out of Aoskar, god of portals, too and why she eliminated would-be worshipers of herself with extreme prejudice. The Planescape novels were hot garbage. I read anything I could at that age, and even I realized they were crap squeezed out by a guy with only a cursory knowledge of the setting. The last few chapters of the first almost steamed on the page, they were so bad.
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Jan 2, 2015 22:47
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Kavak posted:So White Wolf didn't invent that? I want to hear more. Well, every other company saw the fountain of money that RPG setting tie-in novels generated for TSR and moved to launch their own lines - so you get shelves clogged with WoD and Warhammer and Torg novels, among others. There's even a Paranoia novel by Ken Ralston! This was, I think, a key part of the push towards 1990s RPG products being less toolboxes and more metaplotted storylines with signature NPCs running around doing all the things your PCs are supposed to be doing. The real story is just how hard it is to make money with RPGs. It's a small market, hard to grow, and once you sell someone (often times only a single person in a playgroup) a set of core books, 90% of them never buy another product (except for maybe a crunch-heavy "Player's Guide" or two). To make money at RPGs, you have to use them as a peg to produce things that are not RPGs (books, boardgames, comics, TV shows, miniatures lines, calendars, action figures, etc.)
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Jan 2, 2015 22:54
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Interesting, and I'm starting to finally grasp the mindset that let people think metaplots were a good idea.
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Jan 2, 2015 23:28
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Kavak posted:Interesting, and I'm starting to finally grasp the mindset that let people think metaplots were a good idea. It's also why we got the whole open source movement following 3.5D&D. Turns out you can't exactly copyright a game system, no matter how hard you try, but you can copyright all the graphics, fiction, and rest of the fluff that comes with it.
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Jan 2, 2015 23:34
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FMguru posted:There's even a Paranoia novel by Ken Ralston! There were actually multiple novels and a 6-issue comic.
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Jan 2, 2015 23:37
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I'm convinced that Dragonlance (and later Forgotten Realms) novels took off because there was this huge unmet demand for D&D-style fiction. Various editions of D&D had recommended reading lists in them, but the novels they sent you to read (by Tolkien, Moorcock, Lieber, de Camp, Vance, Hodgson, Howard, et al) really weren't anything like D&D or feature D&D style characters. Lots of it was out of print, and the stuff you could find was written for the pop culture of several decades ago, which made it hard to approach for a teenager in the 1980s who just wanted to read some stories about wizards and fighters fighting monsters and scoring fat loot. So when that first DL novel appeared, there was a ready audience of nerds who wanted to read fiction set in the kind of fantasy worlds (i.e. D&D-style ones) that they were already familiar with. And so you get the mid-late 1980s boom. The DL/FR novel booms were also, IMHO, responsible for AD&D's ridiculous overproduction of world-settings in the 1990s. They were hoping they could get lightning to strike a third time, so her comes Dark Sun and Planescape and Red Steel and Ravenloft and Al-Qadim and Birthright and Spelljammer and so on until TSR is reduced to crapping out Dragon Dice novels to pay the bills.
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Jan 2, 2015 23:50
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Evil Mastermind posted:There were actually multiple novels and a 6-issue comic. So, if anyone out there was wondering "Is there anything that 1990s West End Games wouldn't publish?", the answer is "No."
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Jan 2, 2015 23:52
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EscortMission posted:Not quite the same thing, but the Rifts novel Palladium released was missing entire chapters. You had to sort of guess at what was going on with this long, rambling fiasco, which to be fair is pretty Rifts in and of itself. I lost my copy of the third book in Palladium's trilogy in one of my many moves, and I'm kinda sad I can't reread the entire horrible mess as it was initially presented.
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Jan 3, 2015 00:33
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FMguru posted:Sigil is the most valuable piece of real estate in the entire multiverse. It's the High Ground from which you can invade any and all other planes - inner, outer, elemental, prime material, whatever. Entire pantheons of gods have spent eternities wracking their brains to try and figure out how to overthrow the Lady and seize control of it, to no effect. None of them have ever come close to succeeding (and I'll bet that not a few of the Dead gods floating in the astral plane got that way because they tried to gently caress with Sigil). She's as far above Thor and Orcus and Asmodeus and Ra as those gods are above level 1 PCs. She's the last person in the entirety of D&D that should have a stat block. Some 3.x product gave her a statblock of something like "The Lady of Pain (LN female humanoid)". This led to 'how do we kill it' discussions creating a Lady of Pain killer that always won initiative and cast an infinite caster level Word of Chaos, or something equally screwy. EscortMission posted:Not quite the same thing, but the Rifts novel Palladium released was missing entire chapters. You had to sort of guess at what was going on with this long, rambling fiasco, which to be fair is pretty Rifts in and of itself. You gotta give detail on this!
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Jan 3, 2015 05:45
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One of the bad things about pre-revised White Wolf is that they would hide metaplot for the various lines in the stories and books for the other gamelines. The one thing I can remember off the top of my head is the Time of Thin Blood, which was a book on how to play Dhampir and High Generation Vampires. But then the last chapter is a giant story about what happened when Ravnos woke up. The reason this is important is because it ends with the mages dropping a spiritually awakened nuke on India, which rends a hole in the umbra and is one of the contributing reasons for the Stargazers to leave the western Concordiat. The only Garou witnesses to this event is a lone pack that happens to wander into the area half a paragraph before the nuke drops, just in time to have their spirits ripped from their bodies and atomized.
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Jan 3, 2015 05:53
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The best part of the Week of Nightmares was a story published several books later, where one Ravnos shows up at another's apartment. They are both on the edge of frenzy and want to diablerize each other, and nearly do. They have no idea why, but they can feel in their blood that something loving big is happening, and that it is very, very bad. It was like the first chapter of Call of Cthulhu- something cosmically massive is happening but you can't even see it, just the psychic waves it's making, and what might be its reflection in them. That's obviously what they were going for, but instead of building things up and moving towards the climax, they start with it and throw a bad DBZ fanfic in to boot.
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Jan 3, 2015 06:10
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Evil Mastermind posted:There were actually multiple novels and a 6-issue comic. What I remember of the 6-issue comic is that it was based loosely off the Arthurian legend and super depressing compared to the content of the covers.
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Jan 3, 2015 06:27
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I'd love to cover more of the TMNT stuff given infinite time. The last review didn't even get into the background / adventure material, which is too bad, because it's the most F&Fey part of the book. Few other games include parodies of Animal Farm, Care Bears, and ninja sparrows named after Russian premiers. I still have many fond memories of running Truckin' Turtles in my youth. That was such a silly little campaign. Halloween Jack posted:I got into Shadowrun through the novels, but I make no apologies for appreciating Nigel D. Findley (RIP). Findley ruled, Shadowplay ruled.
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Jan 3, 2015 06:37
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FMguru posted:TSR I would imagine TSR was all about launching brands and intellectual properties because Lorraine Williams inherited the Buck Rogers IP and it was the source of her personal "fortune". Kurieg posted:Week of Nightmares by committee They'd have stuff like that in the books but it would never have the impact you thought it should have had because other writers would shut it down or ignore it in their books. Notice how it only affected the Ravnos, who no one liked, and the Stargazers, who were broken and didn't fit very well into WtA. India was also a veritable blind spot in Asia because most of the Kindred of the East writers couldn't stop getting all hot and bothered about Yamato-Damashii. Old World of Darkness was always teetering between horror and supernatural X-Men. There's a reason the worst World of Darkness players all jumped ship when the new World of Darkness line launched and it was mostly because it started being more about horror and less about facilitating someone's game of Justice League Dark: Branson.
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Jan 3, 2015 08:10
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Young Freud posted:What I remember of the 6-issue comic is that it was based loosely off the Arthurian legend and super depressing compared to the content of the covers. It also ended with the destruction of Friend Computer because the main character's last clone (he lost a clone every issue) realized he had the genetic memory of one of the Computer's pre-MegaWhoops original programmers or some poo poo, and basically destroyed Alpha Complex. e: Why is that taking up storage space in my brain
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Jan 3, 2015 08:23
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Evil Mastermind posted:It also ended with the destruction of Friend Computer because the main character's last clone (he lost a clone every issue) realized he had the genetic memory of one of the Computer's pre-MegaWhoops original programmers or some poo poo, and basically destroyed Alpha Complex. Yeah, I recall it had to do with the whole Computer crash, even though it did not feature the cryogenically-frozen programmer from "Alice Through The Mirrorshades" who ends up reviving and crashing the whole system.
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Jan 4, 2015 02:14
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JohnnyCanuck posted:I lost my copy of the third book in Palladium's trilogy in one of my many moves, and I'm kinda sad I can't reread the entire horrible mess as it was initially presented. I've never read them, but given the quality of writing in the fiction pieces for The Rifter... Hammer of the Forge is still going, isn't it, for some godforsaken reason? Well, they've got to fill those pages with something when the house ads won't fill the extra space, I suppose... The Rifts comic is surprisingly decent, though, mainly on account of having their best artist doing both the art and writing. The collection comes with game sections and it's bizarre to see what a Rifts book might look like with a much more professional layout (since the artist did the layout himself).
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Jan 4, 2015 07:06
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The storm has a name... - Let's Read TORG Part 2: The Other Basics With the pile of backstory shoved aside for now, let's look at the core mechanics. At first glance, TORG uses a standard stat+skill+d20 system. But the fact of the matter is a little more complex... quote:Because Torg uses a unique system to translate back and forth between the game and the real world, we've created terms to distinguish game numbers from "real" numbers. A value refers to a quantity measured in a way which can be used in the game, such as a Strength of 11. A measure is a measurement from the real world, such as "150 pounds." Measures can sometimes be translated into values, and vice versa, but that is a task for the gamemaster. For instance, the gamemaster has a way to find out whether a Strength value of 11 is enough to lift a measure of 150 pounds. So yeah, this is a game that's going to try and model everything mechanically. Every character has seven attributes: Dexterity, Strength, Toughness, Perception, Mind, Charisma, and Spirit. Torg uses preconstructed templates for character generation, and attributes run the range from 8 to 13, with 10-11 being average. In addition, there are just over 50 skills in the core book (later books would add more, eventually topping out at over 100 skills), ranging from the basics like Lock Picking and Fire Combat to more esoteric things like Space Vehicles and Alteration Magic. Skill ranks are called adds and are added to one specific attribute when rolling. Every skill is assigned a specific attribute. Every character has one skill designated as their tag skill, which starts at 3 adds. This is the character's "signature skill". For example, the Core Earth Intrepid Reporter's tag skill is persuasion, but the Contract Ninja from Nippon Tech has martial arts as his tag skill. (Oh, one thing I like about the game's presentation: stats and skills are always italicised so you know when they're being referred to, and stats are always capitalized.) When a character is created, they automatically get the three adds in their tag skill, and then get an additional 13 adds to put in whatever skills they want. The only limitations are that you can't start with more than three adds in a skill (so you can't bump your tag skill up any further), some skills are unavailable to start with depending on your home cosm, and you have to put at least one add in the reality skill. Reality is the most important skill on your sheet, because it's the skill that allows you to maintain connection to your home reality. Really, it's the fact that you have the reality skill in the first place that makes you a storm knight. When you want to do something in Torg, you roll a d20. This roll is open-ended in a different way than most games; if you roll a natural 10 or 20, you get to roll again and add. If the reroll comes up 10 or 20, you can roll again and add until you don’t roll a 10 or 20. If you don’t have any adds in the skill you’re using, though, you only reroll and add on 10s. So if I’m skilled in fire combat with a 13, and roll a 20, I get to roll again and add. If my second roll is a 10, then I roll and add again. My final roll is a 3, so my total die roll is 20+10+3 = 33. If I wasn’t skilled, I wouldn’t have gotten the reroll on the 20 and that would have been my final roll. Now you'd think you'd just add that number to your attribute or skill, then compare that to a difficulty number. And you'd be almost correct. In Torg, you don't add the roll to your skill; you look it up on the Bonus Chart. And this is where the headaches begin.  The Bonus Chart That chart is on the bottom of the character sheet, because you're going to use it every goddamn time you roll the die. The top row is the result of the die roll, the bottom is the bonus number. See, TORG math works on a logarithmic scale because that was a thing designers did in the 90's. You'll notice that in the 15-20 die roll range, numbers line up one-for-one. But as you get higher die rolls, the bonus increases at a slower rate. Once you roll the die, you look that number up on the Bonus Chart to get the bonus number, and that number is what gets added to your skill. If you meet or beat the difficulty value of the task, you succeed. The difficulty is set by the GM for unopposed tasks and is usually an NPC's skill rank for opposed tests. If you're attacking someone, you also add the bonus number to your weapon's damage rating, but we'll get to that later. Let's say I'm trying to climb something. I have a Strength of 8 and two adds in climb for a total skill rating of 10. I roll the die and get a 17, for a final roll of 27. Looking that up on the bonus chart gives me a bonus number of 9. Adding that to my skill gets me a final action total of 19. Simple! And believe me, that's the easiest the mechanical bits will be around here. Fair warning. Now let's say you roll a 6 (for a -5 to your skill) and are in a situation where you can't afford to fail. That's where possibilities come in. I mentioned last time that in TORG, "Possibilities" are a form of energy. Every living being has at least one Possibility Point, which is what ties them to their reality. A person who's only capable of holding one Possibility Point at a time is called an Ord. Ords can unconsciously spend that one point to generate a change in their life, and that point will eventually be replenished by their cosm, but ultimately they can only hold one Possibility at a time. Storm Knights, on the other hand, can hold more than one Possibility at a time. Not only that, but they can use these Possibilities to bend reality in their favor. This is referred to as being possibility rated, or P-Rated for short. Every character starts with 10 Possibilities, and get more as the game goes on with no upper limit on how many you can have. The main mechanical use of Possibilities is to get rerolls. After rolling the die, you can spend one (and only one) possibility to get a reroll. This reroll is added to the original roll, can still explode, and as a bonus if the first bonus roll is always considered to be at least a 10. Which is nice, that way you don't really waste the roll. Example: Jake Silver is driving a jeep and attempting to lose a Nile Empire patrol. The GM says Jake needs to beat the trooper's driving skill of 12 to get away. He makes a land vehicles roll with his skill of 12, and rolls a 6, which is a -5 on the Bonus Chart for an action total of 7. Jake spends a possibility and rolls again, this time getting a 3. This is treated as a roll of 10, which is added to his first roll of 6 for a total of 16/+3. His final action total is 12 (his skill) + 3 (bonus from the roll) = 15. NPCs can be possibility rated too, and the GM can spend Possibilities for them as well. Players can spend their own possibility points to cancel an NPC's point. On top of that, Possibilities can also be used to counter damage, which I'll discuss in a bit. There's one last use for Possibility Points, and I'm just going to c&p this one because this is the point where things start getting complicated. quote:Reality works differently between one cosm and another (see "The Axioms" later in this chapter), and possibility energy constantly flows to maintain the reality — meaning that equipment, magic, and even skills from your home cosm might not work so well in an alien cosm. So for 15 minutes, you get to use your character's abilities and equipment! What a bargain! Especially since, given the nature of the game, at any given point at least one PC will not be in his home cosm. This restriction also includes what we'd think of as "normal" gear, so if you're the soldier whose tag skill is fire combat and is built around using an assault rifle, and you wind up in Aysle where it doesn't work, then you're going to have to either spend Possibilities or just not be able to use your rifle. I should point out here, too, that you only get Possibilities at the end of an adventure, so they don't refresh quickly. They're also your XP so you need to be careful how you spend them during play. So yes, this is a game where your metagame currency has multiple mutually exclusive uses. If you ever played a mage in Shadowrun, you know how much this can suck. Next up are how to use the social skills, despite the fact that we still haven’t gotten a skill list yet. Charm, persuasion, and intimidate each have several paragraphs of rules on how they work. Charm is used to move people up and down a reaction table, persuasion just gets NPCs to do what you want, and intimidate can actually be used to prevent NPCs from taking actions. You can also do a Test of Wills to get opponents to flee or surrender, taunt them to force them to act in a certain way, or trick them to not act at all. From here we go to the basics of combat. Yes, I know it feels like we're jumping around a lot, but this is the order things are presented in the book. Things just jump all over the place with no rhyme or reason. (And as an aside, this is also a symptom of the game's need to mechanically model everything. Every game concept has a corresponding mechanical bit, and all these game concepts are interconnected. Therefore, all the mechanics are likewise interconnected and depend on each other. That means that there's no real simple mechanical "in" to the system because if I explain the skill system, I need to explain Possibilities. And to explain Possibilities, I need to explain Axioms. It doesn't help that the system explanations tend to jump around from concept to concept a lot. The whole system is one big tangle and sometimes I'm amazed I ever figured it out to begin with.) Anyway, combat. Combat in TORG uses group initiative. You start by determining who goes first (the heroes or villains), then the characters on that side go in reverse-Dexterity order. So if the heroes have initiative, then the character with the highest Dex goes first, then the next highest and so on until everyone on that side has acted, then you do the same for the villains. On your turn, you get one action: attack, defend, maneuver, movement, intimidation, taunt, test of will, or trick. These are mostly pretty self-explanatory; "defend" means doing nothing this round but hunkering down, "maneuver" means getting to a more advantageous position versus "movement" which is getting from point A to point B. It should also be pointed out that you are always assumed to be trying to defend yourself in combat if possible; the difficulty for hitting someone is the skill level of the appropriate defensive skill. So if you're shooting someone, you roll your fire combat against the target's dodge. If you want to actively defend, then you declare it before your opponents go (you can break the initiative order to do this) and roll your defensive skill as normal, but any action result less than 1 is treated as 1. Again, this is set up so you don't completely waste a vital roll, and I like the fact that you can fully defend yourself even if you're going dead last in initiative. And how do you determine initiative? With the Drama Deck, of course! The Drama Deck came with the boxed set, and consisted of 156 cards that looked like this:  A typical card from the Drama Deck I'll explain what all that stuff means later, but for now we're just going to look at the top half. The end of the card with the orange border is the initiative side, and determines who goes first, what advantages/disadvantages they get, and what the approved actions for the round are. The "S" row is for "Standard" scenes, which are normal conflicts. The "D" row is for "Dramatic" scenes, and is used for things like major end-of-act boss fights. The main difference is that the heroes ultimately have the upper hand on two thirds of the S lines, but the villains have it two thirds of the time on the D lines. At the start of a round, the top card of the deck is flipped over and you look at the appropriate line to determine which side goes first, and what advantages or disadvantages they have. On this card, the heroes go first if it's a standard scene, but the villains are "Up", which means that everyone on that side gets one free reroll this round as if they had spent a Possibility. If this was a dramatic scene the heroes would still go first, but they'd suffer from "Fatigue" and automatically take two shock damage at the end of their turns. Each card has a different set-up, with different effects like "Flurry" (everyone on that side gets two actions) or "Stymied" (everyone loses one chance at a reroll). And honestly, I really like this initiative set-up, because the added effects keep everyone on their toes and keeps people guessing about twists in the fight. It's pretty awesome to be losing then see that heroes-first-and-get-Flurry card come up. The side of the card with the grey border is the player's side. In addition to the 10 starting Possibility Points, every character also starts with four cards in their hand. The player's side of the card has effects like giving bonuses to rolls under certain circumstances, free rerolls, or the ability to introduce a subplot. When you're out of combat, you can just play cards as you need them. So if I had that Willpower card there and was making an evidence analysis roll, then I could play the card to get a free +3 to my skill. That's out of combat. In combat it works a little differently. Big shock, right? When you're in combat, you can't just play cards from your hand. To play a card in combat, you need to add it to your pool. Every time you succeed at an action, no matter what that action is, you can put a card from your hand into your pool. During combat, cards can only be played from your card pool. In addition, if you succeed at one of the approved actions listed on the initiative card, you draw a card from the deck and put it in your hand. Regardless of whether or not you succeeded at the approved action, you play a card into your pool. At the end of the fight, all the cards in your pool go back to your hand. Example: At the start of the fight, I have four cards in my hand and none in my pool, and the card up there is in play for the first round (approved actions DEFEND and TRICK). When my turn comes around, I decide I want to attack someone. If I succeed, then I can play a card from my hand into my pool, and I can use that card in my pool whenever it's appropriate. If I had decided to try and trick someone instead and I succeeded, I'd also draw one for my hand, leaving me with four in my hand and one in my pool. Believe it or not, this part of the system isn't that complex in motion. As long as you remember to put a card in your pool when you succeed at a roll, and draw one when you do an approved action, you're pretty much set. There's a few more things you can do with your cards; you can play for the critical moment once per act, where you put as many cards as you want into your pool to be used immediately, you can lose cards by having bad guys perform trick/taunt/tests against you, and you can trade cards between people's pools. So we tangented a bit there, so let's get back to combat and talk about taking damage. There are three kinds of damage you can take in TORG: shock damage, knockout condition, and wounds. Shock damage is recorded as a number, and if you have more shock damage than your Toughness, you're knocked unconscious. Knockout condition is recorded as a "K" or an "O". If you have taken a "K" blow and take another "K" blow, you get two shock damage. If you have the "K" and get an "O" blow, then you're knocked unconscious. (Yes, this means there's two damage types that effectively do the same thing. 90's design.) Wounds are serious damage, and has four ranks: wounded->heavily wounded->mortally wounded->dead. Every time you take a wound you move up one level on that ladder. Mortally wounded character will die without immediate attention, but dead characters are dead on the spot. When you beat someone's defense (armor is a flat add to defense), you need to figure out the damage value. For melee attacks, you add the weapon's damage value to your Strength, whereas guns have fixed damage values. You then add the bonus number from your attack to your damage value and look it up on this table:  You'll notice that there are separate columns for ords and p-rated characters. Torg tries to be pretty "action movie"-y in overall tone, so faceless NPCs aren't anywhere near as hardy as p-rated folks. Think of it as an early version of Feng Shui's named/unnamed split. It should also be pointed out that guns tend to have Damage Values in the high teens-low 20's. Hell, the lowest-damage gun has a base damage of 13, and an AK-47 is a 21. Let's say I'm using a baseball bat (damage rating +3) with a Strength of 10 and no skill, and attacking someone who's Possibility-rated with a defense of 9. My roll is 15, which is +2. 10+2 beats the guy’s defense, so I hit. I now take the damage value of the bat 10+3=13), add the +2, which gives me a damage total of 15. I deal three Wounds, a K and an O, and 5 Shock. The KO means that on top of everything else, the guy's out cold on top of being almost dead. (This is where the whole "glass ninja" thing comes from: when someone has a really high defense, you have to roll a really high number to hit them. However, melee damage isn't determined by how much you hit them by, it's determined by your final action total. So if I'm fighting someone with a dodge skill if 15, odds are I’m going to need a really high bonus number to hit, which means a large bonus to my damage. In other words, if I manage to hit Mr. Dodgy Pants, odds are I'm going to kill him.) As stated previously, you can spend possibilities to reduce incoming damage. It works as follows: quote:A player may spend a Possibility to reduce the damage his character takes from the current blow. Each Possibility may do three of the following: Yes, that's complicated. Unsurprisingly, combat in Torg is pretty deadly. You end up having to spend Possibilities most times you get hit otherwise you’re going to get wreck in a few hits. The idea is that it’s supposed to be like an action movie where people can take tons of damage before dropping, but instead of just making it so you need to take a lot of damage before it matters, they made everything high-damage and put the onus on the player to mitigate it. Anyway, at the end of a scene, all the cards in your pool go back into your hand, and you discard back down to four cards. You can then discard one card if you want, then you fill your hand back up to four cards. Cards carry over between sessions (which is why they're numbered), and there are three special cards that don't count against your hand size:
There are other cards too, of course. Some let you perform actions like escaping from combat for free, others act as free Possibilities. But I'm not going to get into them here because this is getting ridiculous enough as it is. Oh, now we talk about leveling up. You increase your stats and skills by permanently spending Possibilities. Buying adds in a skill costs the rank you're buying up to (so going from +2 to +3 costs 3 Possibilities), buying a new skill costs 2 Possibilities if you can find a teacher, 5 if you're teaching yourself. Increasing a stat works like increasing a skill, but at triple cost (so going from a 10 Dexterity to an 11 would cost 33 Possibilities. That, in a nutshell, is the first three chapters of the book. Chapter 1 is character creation, chapter 2 is everything I described above except the Drama Deck stuff, which is chapter 3. That's only 26 pages. This poo poo is dense. And again, you can see how heavily intertwined all the rules are. Individually, things like the cards and Possibility Points are simple, but when they start interacting with the rest of the system then I have to bounce back and forth and I feel like I'm coming off like a crazy person as I describe this stuff. I don't know how you guys are going to follow all this. Hell, I'm not sure I can follow it, and I not only wrote it, I [i]re[i]wrote it. I did fix some stuff I messed up the first time, but I’m pretty sure I missed some other stuff. Like I said, I like the card mechanics. I like the way initiative is handled with regards to sudden boosts or drawbacks you don't see coming, and for players they act like Aspect-less Fate points, giving the players a little narrative control or a little "oomph" when they need it most. But goddamn if they're not presented terribly. For those of you who are still paying attention, you'll notice how there's kind of the seeds of the Fate system in there; Possibilities are very similar to Fate Points, and the damage mechanics are similar to Fate's if you ignore the K-O bullshit. Yet another reason why I'd love to see a Fate Core version of TORG. But again: we still haven't gotten to the GM's section yet. That's when the rails will be coming off this train. NEXT TIME: GMing this motherfucker.
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Jan 4, 2015 19:53
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How did anyone ever actually play Torg?
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Jan 4, 2015 20:01
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Night10194 posted:How did anyone ever actually play Torg? I actually played it quite a bit as recently as last year. That's not to say we didn't have trouble with the rules, but it is playable. And be aware: I haven't gotten to the real crunchy stuff yet. In Torg, most of the mechanics are GM-facing, in that the GM is supposed to handle all the mechanical and mathematical heavy lifting. If a player attacks, he's not the one who determines how much damage is done, the GM does it. The GM determines all difficulties on the numerous charts he has to convert everything to everything else. Another thing to hold in the back of your mind: this game has no "mook rules". All NPCs are fully stated like PCs are, with full shock/KO/Wound tracks. This will blow your loving mind later on when we get to the full combat rules and the sample adventure.
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Jan 4, 2015 20:11
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The more I see of the rest of the stuff that came out of the same period, the more I forgive Feng Shui's flaws.
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Jan 4, 2015 20:22
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Evil Mastermind posted:I actually played it quite a bit as recently as last year. That's not to say we didn't have trouble with the rules, but it is playable. This has to be a lie. Having to play this sounds like having a job. I can't concieve of a game where you have to look up a table for loving die bonuses, where the GM determines damage, and the very nature of the setting means my character's gun fails to work the majority of the time unless I spend proto-Fate points. I'd have an aneurysm. God speed, Evil Mastermind. You are stronger than I. The Deleter fucked around with this message at 20:34 on Jan 4, 2015 |
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Jan 4, 2015 20:30
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It's typical of a lot of games of the era in that the system has neat things but there's so goddamn much of it. I like the game a lot but running it would require some finessing. The Exalted of its time really.
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Jan 4, 2015 20:37
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The Deleter posted:This has to be a lie. Having to play this sounds like having a job. I can't concieve of a game where you have to look up a table for loving die bonuses, shere the GM determines damage, and the very nature of the setting means my character's gun fails to work the majority of the time unless I spend proto-Fate points. I'd have an aneurysm. Again, as a player I'm not expected to worry about any of the mechanics. The GM is the keeper and handler of all the rules. Hell, even the skill descriptions are in the GM's section of the book. And your gun not working is the least of your problems. In my group, the Core Earth master spy got transformed to a Living Land warrior thanks to a series of bad rolls, the Asyle knight almost transformed by failing a notice roll and my Nile Empire private eye got transformed into a grimdark soldier thanks to being at ground zero of a bridge drop. e: Torg gives no shits about your core character concept. Evil Mastermind fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Jan 4, 2015 |
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Jan 4, 2015 20:39
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Night10194 posted:How did anyone ever actually play Torg? I GMed it a bit back in the day. It's a pretty fun multiverse to play in but the heavy crunch levels (and this was with a group that cut its teeth on AD&D 1E, mind) eventually pushed us away. The Drama Deck was an innovative mechanic for the time but it didn't quite work -- "dramatic" scenes could be pretty drat unforgiving if the PCs hadn't saved up enough Possibilities, and they never seemed to have enough, leading to a lot of frantic GM hand waving to avoid every climactic scene from ending in a TPK.
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Jan 4, 2015 21:56
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Yeah, one of the biggest problems with Torg is that there's no Fate-style "refresh" mechanic. You have what you have, and if you run out tough poo poo. You get some at the end if the adventure but not that many.
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Jan 4, 2015 22:19
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I've played and run Torg many times, and the first couple of combats of a new campaign are really rough. Once everybody figures out the card mechanics and the GM learns how to handle blocks of bad guys it hums along surprisingly quickly. The parts I loath are Possibilities as Experience, Glass Ninja, and Spell Design. Possibilities as XP is a horrible idea because you get players hoarding them so they can improve and getting turned to a thick gooey paste by a Edeinos scout. This is fixable by giving out an XP for every possibility they earn and keeping separate tallies. Glass Ninja isn't really fixable and Spell Design needs cleansing fire. I still actually like the game amazingly. It is 90s as gently caress and glories in it.
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Jan 4, 2015 22:20
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What happens if you take a O hit before a K hit? You just ignore it and take whatever shock or wound damage it's paired with on the table?
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Jan 4, 2015 22:30
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Evil Mastermind posted:I actually played it quite a bit as recently as last year. That's not to say we didn't have trouble with the rules, but it is playable. The last edition, the Revised edition, has rules for converting TORG into either Masterbook or Open D6. In fact, the Kanawa gun and vehicle books have stats in TORG, Cinematic D6 and Open D6. I actually got into Open D6 through that edition. I'm left wondering if that the Ulisses Spiele TORG might not be D6-based than D20 based. Also, I'll say this, Open D6 kinda fixes the Glass Ninja problem since you're rolling to find those values. The Skeep posted:What happens if you take a O hit before a K hit? You just ignore it and take whatever shock or wound damage it's paired with on the table? You mark it down until end of combat. Essentially, it only matters if you get a K result afterwards, at which point you get knocked out. Any combination of K or O will knock you out.
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Jan 4, 2015 22:48
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I never really got into Torg, and this is mostly reminding me why. It's just... too complicated for its own good both in terms of setting and in terms of rules. Having different settings operate by different fundamental rules sounds like it makes sense, but it was a pain in the rear end in Planescape as well. Generally that kind of thing works better when it's low-impact, like "you have +X to hit with melee weapons here because it's a primitive land" or "inventing checks take half the time because it's a pulp setting" and have three or so traits. Having to spend possibilities just to play with your character's actual concept was about as unfun as mechanics get. Better the carrot than the stick with most games, unless you're really trying to emphasize the innate hostility of a strange land (which might be better for a pure horror or post-apocalypse game, for example).
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Jan 4, 2015 23:04
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I never really got into Torg, and this is mostly reminding me why. It's just... too complicated for its own good both in terms of setting and in terms of rules. Having different settings operate by different fundamental rules sounds like it makes sense, but it was a pain in the rear end in Planescape as well. Generally that kind of thing works better when it's low-impact, like "you have +X to hit with melee weapons here because it's a primitive land" or "inventing checks take half the time because it's a pulp setting" and have three or so traits. Having to spend possibilities just to play with your character's actual concept was about as unfun as mechanics get. Better the carrot than the stick with most games, unless you're really trying to emphasize the innate hostility of a strange land (which might be better for a pure horror or post-apocalypse game, for example). Plus, half the fun of dimension hopping is being, say, a Vietnam War soldier stuck on a galleon in the Spanish Main having no idea that swordfighting relies on insults and wordplay as much as footwork, or finding your primitive warrior stuck in a weird hyperfuture where violence is alien and the world has become a hive mind.
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Jan 4, 2015 23:18
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The first time I read Torg's "guns don't work in some realities because reasons", that just made me think "Wait, so basic chemical reactions don't occur in that reality? Wouldn't that mean life evolved on a completely different path, if it even appeared at all?" Shouldn't the gun just cease to exist (since it hasn't been conceived in that reality) rather than not work?
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Jan 4, 2015 23:46
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Payndz posted:The first time I read Torg's "guns don't work in some realities because reasons", that just made me think "Wait, so basic chemical reactions don't occur in that reality? Wouldn't that mean life evolved on a completely different path, if it even appeared at all?" Shouldn't the gun just cease to exist (since it hasn't been conceived in that reality) rather than not work? It does if you give it enough time or possibility energy. A gun might start rusting or become dulled (as if the machining used to make the gun was regressing, which, given the complexity of gun parts, might be enough to start causing feed or firing issues), convert itself into a similar ranged weapon of the era (like an assault rifle into a blunderbuss or crossbow) or just fall straight apart. Most of the time, it might be a user issue in which the user mentally can not conceive of how to use the weapon. Edit: Also, it depends on how far the axioms are from each other. Theoretically, it's possible for areas like research labs or temples to have a higher axioms than the cosm normally allows. As well, they could produce stuff that end up being used in the cosm, but is generally unreliable and prone to failure. Core Earth can produce cyborgs like the Cyberpapacy or Tharkold, but they would not be the same level of capability or reliability. That's why Nippon Tech stuff can work because it's relatively similar to Core Earth, except they might use different materials technology or manufacturing processes that dull or delaminate or transform in such a way they just fail more. The same could be said of Core Earth in the Nile Empire, where you can use AKs and early jet aircraft against the Mauser-wielding and Panzer-driving stormtroopers of Dr. Mobius, but the transformation problem becomes really noticeable in something like the Living Land, where you had tanks and ICBMs converting almost immediately into rocks made of their component materials. Young Freud fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Jan 5, 2015 |
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Jan 4, 2015 23:51
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I've played and run Torg many times, and the first couple of combats of a new campaign are really rough. Once everybody figures out the card mechanics and the GM learns how to handle blocks of bad guys it hums along surprisingly quickly. The parts I loath are Possibilities as Experience, Glass Ninja, and Spell Design. Possibilities as XP is a horrible idea because you get players hoarding them so they can improve and getting turned to a thick gooey paste by a Edeinos scout. This is fixable by giving out an XP for every possibility they earn and keeping separate tallies. Glass Ninja isn't really fixable and Spell Design needs cleansing fire.
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Jan 5, 2015 05:23
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I liked the universal chart because of the many results you can get: fatigue, wounds, knockouts, and putting someone at a disadvantage. But I only ran Masterbook for games like Tales from the Crypt, where combat is rarely more complicated than someone trying to shoot or stab someone.
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Jan 5, 2015 06:16
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Zereth posted:For extra fun, try making Possiblities turn into XP when spent. That is loving genius.
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Jan 5, 2015 06:39
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FMguru posted:Sigil is the most valuable piece of real estate in the entire multiverse. It's the High Ground from which you can invade any and all other planes - inner, outer, elemental, prime material, whatever. Entire pantheons of gods have spent eternities wracking their brains to try and figure out how to overthrow the Lady and seize control of it, to no effect. None of them have ever come close to succeeding (and I'll bet that not a few of the Dead gods floating in the astral plane got that way because they tried to gently caress with Sigil). She's as far above Thor and Orcus and Asmodeus and Ra as those gods are above level 1 PCs. She's the last person in the entirety of D&D that should have a stat block. Yet Sun Wukong still ended up merchandising her outside of Sigil. :p.
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Jan 5, 2015 13:47
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The storm has a name... - Let's Read TORG Part 3: Gamemastery On being a gamemaster posted:If you're just planning on being a player, you don't need to read any more of this book. As long as you've read the Player Section, you know how to figure skill values, how to roll the die and generate a bonus number, how to generate action and effect totals, how to play drama cards into a pool, and what drama cards can do for you. There is a ton of poo poo you need to keep track of as a TORG gamemaster. See, unlike other RPGs, a Torg GM pretty much exclusivly does all the heavy lifting. The players just roll their skill; it's the GM who determines the difficulty numbers. The players don't figure out on their own if they hit and how much damage they do, the GM does. The players technically don't have to worry about the worst of the crunch, that's what the GM is there for. Hell, even the skill list and individual rules for skills are in the GM's section, which the players "don't need to read". And drat, there is a lot of crunch. There's a lot of tables, too, and if you're GMing then you need pretty much all of them, and a lot of the time you need more than one at once. Starting out the Gamemastering section is some generic GMing advice I'm not going to bother reproducing here because it's stuff we've all heard before. The first real chapter of the GMing section is about how to calculate totals and results. The total is the final value generated by a player, which is trying to beat a difficulty, a.k.a. the target number. If the total meets or beats the target number, then you succeed and the amount you succeed by is the result. So if I try to do something that has a difficulty of 14 and I get a total of 19, then I have a result of 5 points. Now, that's all well and good, but what do you do with these result points? That's where the results tables come into play. There are three main result tables, and which one you look at is determined by the type of action you're trying to do. There's a combat result chart, a social interaction result chart, and a general result chart.  Charts, part 1 We've already talked a bit about the combat results table, and the interaction table is used to determine what effect you had on the target of your intimidate/charm/whatever attempt. So let's look at the general results table. Ignore the last three columns for now, just look at the "success" column. For normal skill use, you look the result value up to see the degree of success. What do those values mean? quote:Minimal implies that the character just barely succeeded; you might want to describe how narrowly he avoided failure. Average is average; no extra description is warranted. Good success sometimes merits a more detailed description, particularly if the character faced long odds. A superior success deserves special emphasis. For a spectacular success, pull out all the stops in your description. Your players will love you for it. The next section is about the attribute scale, and I have to let the first two paragraphs speak for themselves. quote:The attribute scale in Torg is an innovative use of attribute numbering, made necessary by the multiple genres in the game. Most game systems either use a consistent scale for their attributes—in other words, each point of an attribute represents a specific amount of real-world measure — or they have no scale at all. The problem with such systems is that while they work fine in a limited setting (fantasy, horror, etc.) they either fall apart when bigger things (like technological weapons) are introduced, or they require huge numbers to represent the top end of the scale. For example, if a dagger does "one die of damage," how many dice do you roll for the main cannon of the Death Star? Anyway, the idea is that any real-world measurement of weight, distance, or time can be converted into a difficulty number. Said difficulty number can then be used for skill checks. So if a player needs to jump between buildings that are 64 feet apart, the GM would check the Value Chart. 64 isn't a value on the chart for distance, so he moves up to the next highest value (100), and that would be the difficulty of the jump; in this case it'd have a difficulty of 10.  Charts, part 2 Except that the chart in in metric, and was designed and mainly distributed in a country that uses imperial measurement! So do we just convert 64 feet into meters? Of course not, because we didn't have Google back then. Instead, we have another chart!  Charts, part 3 To find the actual value of 64 feet, we look up 64 on the Value Chart. 64 doesn't appear on the table, so we go with the next row up (100), which has a Value of 10. Then we look at the Measure Conversion Chart to see what the modifier is for feet. The modifier is -3, which is applied to the target number from the Value Chart for a final difficulty of 7. (And just for the record, that's not all that hard in terms of difficulty. Most starting characters will have at least a 9 in their stats, which means they're going to have to roll above a 5 on a d20 to succeed if they don't have a relevant skill. If they are skilled, they'll probably have to critically fail to actually fail. Also for the record, the current world record for the long jump is just shy of 30 feet, but again they're trying for an action movie feel. Also, since we have to move up to the next highest value when the exact value we want isn't there, that means it's just as difficult to jump 61 feet as it is to jump 100 feet.) Now, I appreciate good guidelines for the GM to set difficulty numbers, but come on...the GM is expected to do this every time he needs a difficulty number. Anyway, there's also the Difficulty Scale for when you want a situational modifier. If the GM decides that a task should be a little harder than normal, you can look up how hard you want to make it on the Difficulty Scale table, and add the appropriate value to the difficulty. For an Easy task, for instance, you reduce the difficulty by 3, but for "2:1 Against" you increase it by 2. Next up is...another chart! The Limit Chart is what's used to determine human (or non-human for some realms) limits so you don't get results like someone rolling well enough to bench-press a tank. The way it works is that it lists the maximum value a character can generate on the Value Chart for a given task/stat. For instance, the Core Earth human limit for running is 10. To find out how fast someone can run in a round, you look up their Dex on the Value Chart. Someone with a 9 Dex can run 60 meters (about 10 car-lengths) a round. But if someone has a Dex of 11, the highest Value they can generate is a 10, which is 100 meters (just shy of a football field) a round. That's a pretty significant speed boost there. A round is 10 seconds, by the way. It's possible to push past these limits by making a difficulty 8 roll and applying the result to the Push Chart. You take the result of that chart and add it to your stat. quote:Example: The Yellow Crab is trying to sprint for his life from a horde of angry, heavily-armed gangsters. Chris declares that the Crab is pushing his speed this round. The Crab generates a Dexterity total of 12. This earns four result points on the push table (total of 12 minus difficulty of 8 = 4), for a value modifier of +1. The Crab's running value for that turn is 11 (Dexterity of 10, +1 value modifier). He sprints 150 meters that round, successfully outdistancing his pursuers. And now, it's time for the "optional" rules about multiple actions: many-on-one, and one-on-many. These are not just combat actions; they're used when a bunch of people are trying to work together on a task (many-on-one), or when someone's trying to affect multiple targets at once (one-on-many). How do they work? Well, they involve charts. I'm sure you're surprised by this.  Charts, part 4 When a group is performing many-on-one, you only roll for one of the characters in the group, and the number of other people performing the action add a modifier to the roll. The result will determine how many of the people in the group succeeded. quote:Four shocktroopers are trying to leap a pit which has a difficulty number of 10. They have jumping at 9. The gamemaster rolls a 14 for a bonus of one, increased to four because of the multi-action bonus modifier. They generate a total of 13 (9 plus 1 plus 3). They have beaten the difficulty number by three, which is enough for two of them, but not quite enough for all four. Two shocktroopers make it across, while two fall screaming into the pit. If you're performing one-on-many, you're trying to use one or more skills for multiple tasks at once, like shooting two foes in one round, or swinging across a chasm while firing a gun. You only roll once, and the result is applied to each skill/task in whatever order the player wants. However, each task you're trying to do gets an increased difficulty modifier. quote:The gamemaster tells Paul to use Quin's Dexterity for the swing, and fire combat for shooting. Swinging across the ravine has a difficulty of 8. The shocktroopers' dodge scores are 9. Paul rolls a bonus of 0; he decides to check the swing first, as he'd prefer not to be hanging over the chasm (or falling in). The modified difficulty of the swing is DN+2, or 10; his Dexterity of 11 is enough to cross the ravine. The first shot difficulty is DN+4, or 13. Quin's fire combat total is 14 and he hits the first shocktrooper. The third action (shooting the second shocktrooper) is DN+6 or 15. Quin misses the third shot. There can be further complications if not everyone involved in a many-on-one doesn't have the same skill, or if getting everyone coordinated is an issue. This is because Torg is intended to be used for big-scale combats; there's an example in the book of 100 bad guys attacking, and some of the modules have combats with 200 or more people. There are no mook rules. At all. Everyone gets full stats. Oh, there's a shortcut... quote:What if 200 gamemaster characters are coordinating their efforts in a mystic ritual? Do you have to roll 200 Perception checks to come up with the correct answer? Well, yes; but if you are willing to live with an approximation, use the following Now, I'm sure you're wondering how the GM is supposed to deal with cross-referencing all these numbers every five minutes across all these tables. Don't worry, the game thought of that. quote:The whole purpose of the chart is to give you something to guess with; pick a number you think is reasonable and go on with the game. Getting the numbers perfect is not the point. If you are off by a point or so, don't worry; being close counts in gamemastering. And that finishes out the basic GMing chapter. We've been told how to use about a dozen or so tables, and we haven't gotten to skills or in-depth combat yet. As I've said: crunchy as gently caress. There's no assumption of eyeballing values here! We are modeling a ficitonal reality here, people. Serious. loving. Business. Again, I love Torg, but goddamn this system... I will leave you with the actual last paragraphs of the chapter, though, because they're pretty good for a laugh. quote:The rules are a framework upon which you and your friends build stories set in the dynamic world of Torg. As with most frameworks, the rules work best when they show the least, and when they can bend under stress. If you need to bend the rules to keep a story flowing with a nice dramatic beat, do so. Keeping to the letter of the rules is almost certainly counterproductive. NEXT TIME: Skills, cards, and human interaction!
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Jan 5, 2015 17:26
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I want to say this looks like it was devised by a serial killer, but we've already seen worse, so the most I can say is at least they gave the confession of "gently caress numbers" even though they wrote like ten tables and tried to model every possible thing. 
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Jan 5, 2015 18:23
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The Deleter posted:I want to say this looks like it was devised by a serial killer, but we've already seen worse, so the most I can say is at least they gave the confession of "gently caress numbers" even though they wrote like ten tables and tried to model every possible thing. I'd say it's more like it was designed by a conspiracy nut; some guy with a wall full of index cards, articles cut out of the newspapers, and labeled strings connecting everything together because everything's connected, man.
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Jan 5, 2015 18:27
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