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Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

Evil Mastermind posted:

My personal favorite example of a licenced RPG completely missing the point mechanically was the Ghostbusters RPG, where the example of how to make skill checks was "let's say you wanted to eat a telephone".

Of course, that had just as much to do with WEG not understanding what makes things funny, which killed a few of their game lines.

Actually that example owns, but only if you realize WEG was secretly adapting the Real Ghostbusters animated series.

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Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
Oh man I forgot Pendragon is that old. Talk about a game of genre emulation.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

Halloween Jack posted:

Well, I definitely have to listen to this one now. Immortal is my current gold standard for "It's very intriguing and makes sense once you puzzle it out, which is not to say it's not totally bugfuck crazy."

Continuum was also an F&F super review back in the first thread, if you want to read while you listen.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

Davin Valkri posted:

Is there an official Fallout New Vegas RPG? That's the tone I'd go for for a post-post apocalypse. Unless I were going full Ghibli or something.

Yeah, Chuubo's already exists for that.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
You sure you're not looking at a section about mystik hobos? Because those are some hobo names right there.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
Sometimes acting like an actual adult when everything is dialed to Highschool Drama backfires in real life. Occasionally it backfires catastrophically. I'm sure we've all seen that happen at least once.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
That Atomic Highway art just makes me sad we'll never have a Zoofights rpg system.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
We can be brothers in suffering on that one.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

Luminous Obscurity posted:

Fun fact, Humans have monstrously high endurance compared to pretty much anything else on Earth. So not only are we Space Orcs, we're Space Orcs that will walk you to death.

Indeed. Before we used our impressive brains to invent tools what to kill with, we literally ran other animals to death.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
Yeah, Persistance Hunting is also reliant on pack tactics because it narrows the ability of faster animals to alter direction and burst away. We don't stop and we work in groups, and that can be absolutely terrifying if you're on the wrong end of it.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
The Creature is more like a Creature from the Blue Lagoon.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
The true archetype of the Battlebabe is Zardoz, actually.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
The best part of The Iron Dream is all the mail the author received talking about how it was a great sci-fi yarn but the pointless alt-history about hitler really dragged the story down.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
It was perfectly serviceable except for Marche's unending desire to recripple his younger brother.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
Literally every person except for Marche's brother had really petty reasons for being in mythical fantasy land and moving beyond escapism to face reality is a common narrative in that sort of fiction. The problem being his brother, unlike everyone else, can't grow out of being wheelchair bound.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
Why are there other options when we could be talking about The Cyber Papacy? It's the one really really unique Torg setting and so we should hit it as quickly as posible

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
Pretty sure one of the class/build/archetype things in THE CYBERPAPACY is "You are a Grandpa who wakes up and is suddenly chromed up like a robocop" and why would you want to delay that wonder any longer.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

Evil Mastermind posted:

That is legit my favorite template in the entire game because you're not just a Grandpa, you're a Grandpa who actually fought in the original French Resistance during WWII and now you've got your faculties back, cyberware, and an itchin' need to show these young whippersnappers how you really run a resistance movement.

Well yeah, gotta leave you something to talk about.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
Create-A-Spell really should be the finale of the worldbooks, because there is nothing more TORG than that system.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

theironjef posted:

I dunno, I have an extremely old Batman RPG where it is assumed that you will play as Batman. Like the whole book is written with Batman being the gender neutral pronoun. Until you get to the very end of the drat thing, it's easy to assume that it's either a one-player RPG, or that you're supposed to sort of gestalt-control Batman, as if the game was Everyone is JohnBatman.

edit: Jesus, that's a goddamn good idea though. Everyone is Batman, where every player takes on a Batman style, and wrestles for control of The Bat during each scene. Will he be 60s Adam West Batman? Insane Frank Miller Batman? Does he want Robin around right this minute or is he currently in grim loner mode?

The Planetary/Batman crossover was very good, yes.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

8one6 posted:

Mazes and Monsters (which we covered in our Forced Filmography series)* is weird because it feels like the director was almost on the pro-RPGs side because it almost goes out of its way to show it was anything but the invention of LARPing that drove Tom Hanks crazy.

gently caress, while I'm plugging stuff, we figured out how to turn Mazes & Monsters into a couple of decent convention one shots in our most recent episode.

*This is our director commentary style series we created as an excuse to make one of the hosts have to watch lovely movies.

The actual book Mazes and Monsters was similar in that all the major characters had other issues that tangentially related to them getting together for friday night gaming, and the actual blaming of the game was shown as hysteric in and of itself. The film cut a lot of stuff because it's rather dull compared to Tom Hanks flipping out in New York.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
Polaris is great, The Mountain Witch is great, that 3:16 review is not in that august company hot drat.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

Pinball posted:

I'm 99 percent sure someone has already reviewed this (I remember the whole 'you are a snow elf and everything sucks poo poo' aesthetic); it might be on the archive.

It was a really bad review that missed the entire point of the game, so it's not the best introduction.

Polaris owns, though, so it'd probably be bad grist for the bad games podcast.

EDIT: more games should tell you why you shouldn't play them, honestly. Trad Games work best when they have focus, and it's not a bad thing not to like what a game focuses on.

Mr. Maltose fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Mar 4, 2015

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

theironjef posted:

Eh, it's too easy to get smug like that. All "This game is for people with brains. If you're a dimwitted normal, you should avoid this game."

I mean, yes, if you were bad at basic human interaction that could happen. Saying "This game doesn't have a clear and concise win state, if you don't like that try another game more your speed. Your characters are mythic and deal with mythic poo poo, if you want something more street level you'll want a more suitable system" isn't smug, unless the idea of a game not catering to any and everyone is smug. Stating this poo poo outright is something more games should do and be able to do, both to explain expectations to players and to prevent the dreadful 'universal system' heartbreakers that are endemic in the hobby and this thread.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
That's a pretty disingenuous summation of Polaris, duder.

There is 'one story' in Polaris in as much as there is one story in Pendragon, for example.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

She certainly did do that. Her mismanagement is how Wizards ended up buying TSR.

If you listen to a group of "industry insiders" who are basically walking avatars of grog. TSR was hosed regardless.

EDIT: She was the single downfall of TSR, whose previous owners used company funds to provide family members with sports cars.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
Most people severely undersell how bad pre-Williams TSR was, because she was the one who sold to Wizard and ~ruined everything~ (The fact that she's a woman totally has nothing to do with it either, I'm sure). The fact that TSR could even be sold to Wizard instead of dying like any of the other dozens of game companies that died in the late 80s and early 90s have to do with a lot of her policies like focusing on brand diversification to extend D&D as a product instead of a true untarnished gaming system. That's another reason she gets a lot of pointless heat, working with the product like a business commodity instead of the one true gift Gary gave unto us.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
I'm just saying that the idea that Lorraine Williams "mismanaged" TSR is mostly the unfortunate skewing of history that this hobby is loving rife with.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

NutritiousSnack posted:

It honestly isn't and this idea that it does wraps into weird rear end nerd self loathing and self masturbatory "I'm better than the strawman neckbeard Other I fear I am".

At the risk of outing myself as the true hater of women here, deep in my heart of hearts, I'm referring less to conspiracy from external sources as much as how former TSR employees framed Williams in discussion of the company, where poo poo like an actual 'fake nerd girl' test have been discussed in all but name (specifically regarding the license she brought into TSR!) It's not just jumping at shadows to show how big and great an ally I am or however I'm supposedly loathing about dicegames or whatever.

I also feel justified when I mention the D&D set's distorted hobby nostalgia having it's own distinct tone if only because the hobby is dominated by it, unlike baseball where for every Cubs fan there is an equal and opposite Cardinals fan with their own line of bullshit, rife with acronyms and World Series stats.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

GimpInBlack posted:

Yeah. Taking a page from the Telltale video game (and the books themselves), you could probably do some kind of troupe play to minimize the "sitting on your hands while Jaime Lannister kills dudes" problem: have everybody create a member of a noble house, then spend the first session contriving to scatter them to the four winds and explain that these are the "main" characters of the story, but everyone will be creating a supporting cast member in the same vein. So, like, you send the family's eldest daughter to King's Landing to play politics and have the rest of the group play spies, ladies-in-waiting, etc. who can engage with the Intrigue system as well, send the heir off to fight a war and give everybody else lieutenants and banner knights, etc. Or just have everybody create one "fighty" character, one "intrigue-y" character, and one, I dunno, "wildcard" or whatever, then you can just pull whoever you need for a given scene.


Too bad there's little to no support for that kind of game in the book. Of course, having four Jaime Lannisters to go off and kill dudes really doesn't help the "it's hilariously easy to break the system over your knee by specializing" problem, but still....

Ars Magica would be a great system for ASIF, yeah.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

Zereth posted:

No no we should save the worst for last.

That's why there's no votes for Aysle. If we don't cap off with Evil Mastermind trying to make a spell we're just robbing the climax. Nippontech because I'm in a particularly vicious mood about stupid poo poo involving Japan from the late 80s and 90s.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
I do like, with all the comparisons to Mage, that Genius takes the reverse tack even if it doesn't do much with it: Mage is the progression to an actual higher truth, and mortal minds may one day see what you see and do what you do. Genius states directly that you are not finding a better or new way of looking at the real world, you're permanently askew from how things should and actually do work so deal with it.

Pity about ever other thing about it being trash.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
The timeline is obviously included in the Trash section.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

Night10194 posted:

The basic idea in Genius feels like it could be salvaged for a hell of a tragedy: The idea of being useless, the horror of being the universal Ideas Guy because the comics' editor will never let Reed Richards cure cancer, as an effective sort of hopelessness. A game about having immense power that is completely useless (because it can never be shared with others or used to actually change much) in a group of secret societies who in no way actually manage to influence the world would be interesting as a storytelling device.

You're a comic book Genius and it means nothing. Overcoming your condition and working like a sane person is your only hope to change the world. Keep the idea that they desperately see how the world 'ought' to be and force them to reconcile giving up their power to work with others to try to change the world, to sacrifice the dream of the Great Man who discovers everything, and you'd have an interesting campaign about intellectual coming of age that you can only run once.

Genius ripping Promethean more than Mage would be pretty great, yeah.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
I've been going through a lot of late 80's education trade journals and similar for a Methods of Teaching class and reading the observations linking Japanese education to a 'more harmonious and productive society' is just cringe inducing to go through. At least Nippontech shows the situation as undesirable at best.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

Xelkelvos posted:

Well there's Princess: the Hopeful or something that's probably the only other fansplat that I know of that's had more than a week's worth of development. It's also gone through at least one tone shift during its existence and development since an entirely new bucket of source material came out while it was being worked on.

Leviathan is another, and honestly better than Genius by a large margin. It's not great, but certainly more solid.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
I think Genius would want to short out any idea of "Use my super duper technology to create marketable goods and services" by saying that it would be a good and sensible idea to do so, two adjectives that don't really apply to men and women so unstable they exist in unique paradigms of physical laws. It's not a very good excuse, but Genius leans pretty hard on characters being too mad science for basic logical things already that one more on the pile isn't too onerous.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
The Living Land would hate it, cementing firmly its place as The Worst Cosm.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
Getting rid of something similar to the Cyberpapacy in a Torg-a-like would be a pretty big misstep, not just because the Cyber Pope is a stupid cool idea but because it shows how influence on the infringing realities is not just possible but frightening in that possibility. Just because you introduce new ideas to that reality doesn't mean you've made things any better.

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Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

RandallODim posted:

So what in Genius is stopping me from taking In Pill Form and Normal Looking (so people don't gently caress with it more than they would pills) and revolutionizing the pill industry with all sorts of crazy poo poo?

You would need to make a poo poo ton of pills, and I bet FDA examination counts as poking and prodding.

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