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 Hold on to your asses, rear end-holders! It's 1998, and you're just getting off the school bus. Life in the 7th grade is rough, but every day holds the promise of coming home to screaming and energy blasts on TV. You and your friends bathe in the shoddy animation and almost non-existent plot progression every day, wishing you could be like your heroes Goku and the bald guy who dies all the time. After a trip to the game store, your pal Jimmy has brought you the answer to your wishes!  Jimmy knows not what suffering he brings! Hi, I'll be ruining your day by filling your brain with the knowledge that this game exists! None of you deserve this and I'm sorry. I'll get this out of the way right now: this game doesn't work. The rules fall apart from the word "go." Since this isn't a game with an original setting, and since nearly everything laughable about this game exists in the mechanics, this first post will be glossing over a lot of the setting stuff because it's DBZ and everyone just wants to know how to do backflips and throw fireballs (spoilers: very poorly!). I can certainly go back later to cover what I zoom past, so if anyone wants to know more about something, just let me know. As much as I'm going to make fun of this, I still like the show. This is mostly because I'm easily entertained by bright colors and motion, much like a small child. That's why I have to share this game with you all, because I feel like people need to know how something could possibly not live up to the lofty standards of the Citizen Kane of Anime. Some History Much to the surprise of anyone who doesn't seek out disappointment, R. Talsorian made a tabletop RPG out of Dragon Ball Z in 1999. Written by Mike Pondsmith of Cyberpunk fame, the game was an attempt to cram an already-shoddy cartoon into a simplified version of their Fuzion system. Fuzion was a mix of Cyberpunk's Interlock ruleset and some edition of HERO, and R.Tal used it for a few different games. It wasn't the first anime-based RPG the company had released, but I can hardly imagine that it wasn't their worst. The Fuzion system was Talsorian's attempt at a universal system, and had two levels complexity depending on how much crunch a game called for: Total Fuzion was the default ruleset and was fairly crunchy but too overwhelming, while Instant Fuzion was meant to be very simple and lighter on rules and chargen options. DBZ used Instant Fuzion, since you probably don't need a lot of stats for such a one-note game. The Books The DBZ RPG had three books (the core book and two supplements) that each covered one of the show's major story arcs (sort of). The core rulebook covers the first arc, the Saiyan Saga. The first supplement carries through the Frieza Saga, and the second one covers Garlic Jr. and the Android Saga. It's sort of the weird book since Garlic Jr. was pretty much just filler in a show that already goes nowhere, and the "Android Saga" is really just the first half of a major arc, and furthermore  alright let's just move on. IF YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT THE SETTING, SKIP THIS! Dragon Ball Z, Abridged The book opens with a bunch of background about the show, since they are at least trying to pretend that someone who buys the game might not have actually seen the show. The first ten or so pages is a synopsis of the Saiyan Saga, followed by stats and summaries of the show's main characters that appear during the episodes the book covers. The character write-ups aren't bad, and there's some sidebars that explain puns or references in character names or mannerisms. It's interesting if you're a fan of the show, and if you're not a fan of the show then you probably don't have this little bundle of regret in the first place. After the character write-ups is about 30 pages of information about the rich, detailed setting of the Dragon Ball universe. Like the previous chapter, it's really more of a reference to the game's intended audience. There's a couple spots where it goes into detail for the heck of it, but everything important is made pretty clear in the TV show. I'll go over the basics:
Good gravy, just tell me how to roll dice! After all the setting stuff, the game finally gets around to telling you how the rules work. This is the worst decision the book ever makes, and it never gets better from here. Strap in! As I mentioned before, the DBZ RPG uses the Instant Fuzion rules. Rolls are resolved by Stat + Skill + 3d6. This seems reasonable at first but we're going to find out why this just won't do. Anyway, characters get four Basic Characteristics and three-ish Derived Characteristics. Your basic stats are:
Your derived stats are:
Power Level being randomly determined is pretty weird since it's the only part of chargen that is random. You'll also notice that it's possible to have a Power Up higher than your Power Level. That just means you'll gather all your available energy at once. Good luck with that! Next, you have six skills. Each skill is linked to a basic stat, though some rolls might allow you to use a different stat than you normally would. The skills are:
The rest of the chapter is about combat, but since that's where the bulk of the game's problems start I'm going to hold off until the next post to give it the attention it deserves. Instead, let's jump ahead a little bit and look at how to make a character. I want to be a Super Saiyan 5 and I'm stronger than ten Gokus put together! Chargen starts with a very important question that every player is going to ask: can I be a Saiyan?!? The answer is probably not! In order to make a Saiyan character, you must roll a 2 on 2d6. Rolling a 2 or 3 on 2d6 lets you make a Namekkian, since weird slug dudes are the next best thing to fearsome monkey warriors. Otherwise, you're a standard human. Like I mentioned way back in the setting portion of this post, "human" also includes all the animal people so you can be a wolf-headed guy or whatever. Mechanically, though, you still don't get any special treatment if you didn't Roll To Be Better. After that is a bunch of stuff about having a basic personality and background. It's DBZ, you really don't need a detailed background. Now you finally get to throw some numbers around! The first thing is your basic stats. As above, you have four of them. You get 40 points to distribute however you want. In Fuzion, a stat of 3-4 is average, 7-8 is going to put you in the top 1% of human ability, and going above 10 is clearly superhuman. That being said, basic stats are very rarely used alone, so having a high skill can make up for a low basic stat. That's a good thing, because the Dragon Ball Z RPG never lets you increase your basic stats! Whatever you assign now, that's what you've got forever. Spending XP allows you to raise skills and derived stats, but not basic stats for whatever reason. This is even dumber when you realize that the updated stats in each book for the show's characters increase their basic stats with everything else. After assigning your basic stats and determining your derived stats from them, you get 50 points for your skills. You don't have to put points in every skill, and rolling a skill you don't have just uses your basic stat like any other roll. Finally, you can make up special techniques. Special techniques are hand-to-hand attacks with a goofy name you get to make up, a sweet description of how you want to maul your opponent, and a skill cost. The skill cost can be whatever you want, but when you use your special technique you take a penalty to COM+Fighting+3d6 equal to the cost. The tradeoff is that for every point you reduce your skill, your attack will do one extra die of damage. Basic melee damage is a number of d6s equal to your PHYS+Fighting, so special techniques are a good way to make up for a low PHYS. You can make up as many special techniques as you want, there's no point cost. That's all there is, your character is done! NEXT TIME ON DRAGON BALL Z! In the next post I'll get into the two things DBZ is really about : punching dudes and throwing energy blasts. Here's a teaser, it does neither one well at the start and only gets worse as the game goes on!
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Feb 5, 2014 06:50
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Oh geez I never even thought about that. You'd need an empty basketball court to do it, and I don't want to think about the pulley system you'd have to set up to worry about flight. Luckily, that's all fine because the game's basic rules make it pretty much impossible in the first place due to math!
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Feb 5, 2014 07:06
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jadarx posted:Does the game's version of the afterlife have HELL or the safe for saturday morning HFIL? TV censored DBZ was the best. It's HFIL. Everything in the game is based on the Funimation dub because of some janky license issues. I'll try to dig it up, but there was was some post on RPGnet from the guy who wrote the unreleased Cell Saga book and worked on the Androids book where he said that each book could only use material from the story arc the book covers for game mechanics. Likewise, they could only reference things in past story arcs if it was in a flashback in the Funimation show. I need to track down that post again because he also linked to his name-changed manuscript for the Cell book. He also stated that the game writers for the supplements knew the core rules were dogshit and had to pretend they worked anyway. Thanks, Maximum Mike!
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Feb 5, 2014 19:46
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 LAST TIME ON DRAGON BALL Z! Alright, so last post I went over the character stats and how to make a well-written, compelling character with realistic motivations. Today we're going to learn how to throw a punch. It's harder than it seems! As a quick recap, the Fuzion system's core resolution mechanic is Stat + Skill + Dice vs a target number or opposing roll. DBZ uses 3d6 for dice, so for those who are math-inclined you've got an average roll of 10 and a range of 3-18. This is pretty important! Rolling a natural 3 is an automatic failure, but rolling a natural 18 is NOT an automatic success. That is also pretty important! As a reminder, during chargen you have 40 stat points for four stats and 50 skill points for six skills. Some of you with high power levels might be sensing a strange and evil power on the horizon. I cast Destructo Disk at the darkness. So it's DBZ, you've done the standing around posing and trying to intimidate each other with vague threats of cartoon-friendly violence and blasting your opponent into the Other World. Now it's time for action! FINALLY! Initiative is determined by highest Mental stat, ties are broken by highest Combat stat, and further ties go simultaneously, because that's not a giant clusterfuck or anything. The basic attack roll in DBZ is Attacker's Combat + Fighting (or Weapon) + 3d6, and the defender rolls Combat + Evasion + 3d6. In most cases, the defender has the chance to roll defense against all attacks in a turn and there is no penalty for multiple defenses. Let's take a second to look at some math. The rolling seems pretty simple, but there's a little problem that can crop up just about the second you start the game. As stated above, most any character can roll on a skill check is Stat + Skill + 18, and there's no automatic success. That means that if the difference between two characters Stat + Skill on any given roll is 19 or more, the only way for the character with the higher total to fail is to roll a 3. That wouldn't be so bad if having a skill difference of 19 was a rare thing, but it's pretty common for it to come up while you're making your characters and only gets worse when people start spending XP. Let's say you manage to kick someone in their stupid mouth. I think I said this in the last post, but damage from melee attacks is a number of d6s equal to your base (PHYS + Fighting) for unarmed attacks, or (PHYS + Weapon + (weapon's bonus damage)) for armed attacks. Special techniques add to the base total, not the adjusted skill total. Ranged attacks, including energy powers, do a specific amount of dice related to the method of attack. Roll all those dice somehow and add them up, then subtract the victim's Defense. Any damage left over is subtracted from the victim's Hits. If a character's Hits drop to 0 or below, the character is either knocked out or dead, depending on what the GM thinks makes sense. Combat is divided into Phases of the game-standard, oddly specific 3 seconds. Four Phases make up one Round. Rounds are important because at the end of each Round, everyone gets, uh, hmm, some amount of lost Hits back. See, this is where the game does not work as written. On page 67 you hae the following text: quote:Every 4 Phases is called a Round. At the end of each Round all heroes and bad guys get back any Hits they have lost, up to (2 x their Physical) in lost Hits, if the attacks have not been especially lethal (such as bullets, knives, or lasers). If the heroes or bad guys have lost more Hits than they recover, they are still hurt. They must wait until the end of the next Round to get back more Hits. All fine, except that bit about "lethal attacks" for reason I'll cover later. But then on page 70, under a section called Recovering, you find this: quote:Generally, each Round in which you are resting or being healed, you will get back as many Hits as your Physical Characteristic. Example: Karma has a Physical of 5. He gets back 5 Hits every Round. However, if the GM has determined that the damage you have taken is especially deadly (you were stabbed, shot, etc.), your recovery rate may be in hours or even days instead of Rounds. Which is it? Who the hell knows? I lean towards the PHYS x2 rule because the combat quick sheet on page 97 also says it. As far as I can tell, this has never been errata'd in the books. If it was ever clarified on R. Tal's website, that poo poo's dust in the wind because they dropped any mention of this game a long time ago. The Androids book has a small FAQ but it doesn't say anything either. You have to house rule this right out of the box, because it's going to come up almost immediately. Before we move on, let's go back a second and look at that whole "lethal wounds" business because that seems a little out of place. Before we even look at numbers, let's just think about it in terms of the source material. The show has people throwing around nuclear bombs that they make out of yelling and believing in themselves. Nappa cuts a fighter jet in half with his bare hands as a way of stretching after a long car ride. Piccolo kills the moon to keep Goku's son from going King Kong in the empty countryside. Frieza blows up an entire planet (eventually) as a distraction. Even Yamcha could level a city if he had time and motivation. Is this book really trying to tell me a gun or knife is a serious threat?!? Well, probably not. See, I'm almost certain that is standard Fuzion stuff they just tossed in there. Total Fuzion products have similar explanations, so they may have just copied and pasted to fill space. Then there's the sidebar on page 70 with some example weapon stats. Weapons in DBZ don't really do anything other than add extra damage or range. A sword adds 6 dice of damage to your melee attack, while a rifle would do a straight 10 dice at up to 350 yards. On average, 10 dice will be around 35 damage, which means any starting character with PHYS 7 (which grants 35 Defense) doesn't have to worry a whole lot. PHYS 12 gives 60 Defense, which means even a perfect damage roll from small arms gets ignored entirely. Despite what game text implies, there are no different types of damage. Total Fuzion games have Hits and Stun for non-lethal attacks, but DBZ just mashes it all into one thing. (More specifically, a sidebar notes that if you were to convert DBZ into Total Fuzion, energy attacks would do a shitload of Stun damage, which can still kill someone if you apply enough.) gently caress it, this is DBZ! Only chumps use guns! The few times someone brings a sword to a fistfight, it either breaks or just gets ignored almost immediately anyway, so let's move on. Every Phase, you get one-ish action. For reference, here's the action list:
Most of those are fine, but I took the liberty of rewording them for clarity because this game needs all the help it can get. I marked two of them, however, as being worthy of a little more attention. Let's start with Block. Block is weird because of the complete lack of timing on the action. Nothing tells you when you are supposed to use this action. To go back to Total Fuzion for a second, there's an action called Abort that's missing from DBZ. Abort lets you forfeit your action to make a defensive action (Block or Dodge in this game) if you haven't taken your turn yet. Total Fuzion's Block also makes it so that a blocked opponent must act after you on the next Phase, regardless of turn order. All that neat stuff is missing in DBZ, which means you have to use Block preemptively I guess? The Androids book actually introduces the Abort action into the game but doesn't add the bonus effect for block, which would make it extremely useful. Then we have Grab, which is notable for only being mentioned in the core book in that list above. It isn't mentioned again until the Androids book that came out three years later, which does provide the game-pace-crushing rules for combat hugs that us nerds crave. In general, the rules section of the Androids book makes a noble attempt at damage control, but it was too little too late. I'll cover the Frieza and Android books to show what happens when you pretend a broken game works fine and then throw even more poo poo into it. NEXT TIME ON DRAGON BALL Z! In the next post I'll cover how Energy and Powers factor into this hot mess. It's not DBZ unless there's bright lights and yelling and zwee fighting, so I think it's best that I focus on that in a separate post instead of cramming it into this already-long post. Lynx Winters fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Feb 12, 2014 |
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Feb 6, 2014 05:03
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Sorry for the delay, but I'll have the next DBZ post up tomorrow, when we'll talk about yelling and flexing and fireballs.
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Feb 12, 2014 06:57
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LAST TIME ON DRAGON BALL Z In the last post we learned about beating people up with your hands and feet, which is what happens when the animators had some money to work with. Today's kung fu lesson is about the thing everyone knows DBZ is really about : flying and fireballs! So far, you might have been thinking that some rules are poorly-designed but still maybe a little workable. Today I'm going to send that idea into the Other World. This game will explode in five minutes! In the character stats, I explained that you have a Power Level (determined by dice) and a Power Up stat (PHYS + MEN x10), as well as a Power skill. In the combat basics, you saw the Power Up action. Let's see how all of this works. When a fight starts up, all characters have no energy available to use. To get some ki to work with, you use the Power Up action on your turn. It's never really defined whether or not you can power up before a fight or how long you can hold it after a fight, so I guess the moment someone decides to gather power is when combat time starts. When you use a Power Up action, you get energy points up to your Power Up stat. You keep those energy points until you use them up or get knocked out, and it's sort of implied that you let it go after a fight's over but they never really say. Your Power Level is the maximum amount of energy points you can gather until you have a chance to recover outside of combat. For example, if you have a Power Level of 600 and a Power Up of 200, you could Power Up three times before you hit your maximum unless you pace yourself and don't take the full 200 energy with each action. Also of note, to make the math a little faster you can only gather energy in multiples of 10. Powering Up for 130 energy is fine, but 145 isn't. If your Power Up is higher than the amount of energy left in your Power Level, you just get whatever is left. It is possible to have a Power Up higher than your Power Level, especially at character creation, so Powering Up just gets you all of it at once. Outside of combat you recover used energy at a rate of your Power Up per hour. The GM could also grant ways of recovering used energy faster, like a Senzu Bean to instantly recover your full Power Level. Now that you have some power ready, let's see what you can do it.
Of course, it would be ridiculous if you could just dump as much power as you wanted into any attack, so powers have a skill check to use properly. The difficulty of a Power skill check is (Power Cost / 10). A 400 energy blast has a difficulty of 40, for example. As mentioned above, the special effects on energy blasts increase the difficulty of the Power roll, not the actual energy cost. This is where the game starts to house-rule itself, suggesting that to speed up play you might want to only require the Power roll the first time a a character uses a specific power in a fight, then assume they pass the roll for the rest of combat. While that would speed up play, it also just blows away whatever semblance of balance the Power rolls might have tried to implement. In the case of targeted powers like blasts or some of the powers introduced in later books, after you make the Power roll to control the power, you make another Power roll to hit. Hitting with a massive energy wave is pretty cool, but now it's time to roll damage. This is another spot where the game house-rules itself. Rolling 500d6 is not really as fun as it sounds with real dice but it's a central part of the game so they give you options to speed things up. The first option is the fastest, but also the dumbest: ignore the dice and just apply the points. This ends up loving with the game's already loose math by making fights take longer due to attacks doing less damage and also forcing players to spend more energy to get as much damage as they could by rolling. The second option is more reasonable, and should have just replaced the first option entirely: multiply the number of dice by 3. That's much closer to what an average roll will be, still pretty quick math, and avoids the problems with the first option. The last option is also pretty reasonable while letting people actually roll damage because rolling dice is fun: drop the zeroes, roll however many dice are left and add them up, then add the zeroes back. For example, a 500 dice attack would become 5d6x100 while a 22,000 point attack would become 22d6x1000. You'll still need a buttload of dice but it's way more feasible than rolling 22,000 dice. Nerds of Earth, lend me your power! Goku's Spirit Bomb gets its own sidebar on page 87. The way that they rule it, you get a multiplier to your Power Level and Power Up based on how many people lend you power. A few thousand people gets you a x2 bonus, a small country gets you x10, and if you can get a whole planet to kickstart your attack you get a nice x100,000 multiplier. That's a shitload of power, so naturally nobody but Goku gets to do it unless you convince the GM to let you learn it. NEXT TIME ON DRAGON BALL Z! In the next post I'll be covering what happens when the game manages to survive the first combat: GETTING HUGE! Lynx Winters fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Feb 13, 2014 |
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Feb 13, 2014 03:03
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The Leper Colon V posted:Goddammit, the DBZ game actually sounds like if you tore it all down and rebuilt it from the ground up following very rough guidelines, you'd end up with something really drat fun. Why do I want to do this, F&F thread? I haven't even finished writing up my "all the rules in 10 minutes" CBSU&J:G system. Oh I know, even a few tweaks here and there make a huge difference (no more Reflections, Deflections are ablative, etc) but at the end of the day you're left with two big problems: you'd have to ditch Fuzion entirely, and a DBZ game really wouldn't be that interesting to run or play in the first place. It's a show that basically boils down to two people hitting each other in a big open space. It's the same problem the Street Fighter RPG, Thrash, and the cancelled Capcom World Tournament RPG had in common: the fighting game format usually doesn't make good RPGs. All of the tactically interesting stuff that happens in real-time gets destroyed when you slow it down to a turn-based system. Cover and terrain don't even really work in DBZ for very long past character creation, since blowing up buildings and mountains is pretty easy and both fighters would want to remove that sort of tactical advantage from their opponent. Trust me, man, in my youth I really did try to make this game work. I made rules tweaks, I tried changing the core system to not break, I tried to figure out how to make combat more interesting than two dudes whacking each other until one stops. I'm not saying it can't be done but I am saying there's better uses of your time (such as making a game for the original Dragon Ball instead of Z) (or playing Wulin). This has reminded me, though, can we write about games that never got released if we have the material that was going into it? Because I'd love to write some words about Capcom World Tournament, a cancelled d20 Street Fighter & Friends RPG.
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Feb 13, 2014 18:47
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LAST TIME ON DRAGON BALL Z! It's been a little while, hasn't it? As a refresher, last time I made words about this game I talked about how to just punch a green dude a couple dozen times a turn before anyone gets the chance to throw a fireball! That's good, because it prevents the game from locking up the first time someone actually defends themselves from an energy attack, thanks to the Infinite Death Tennis scenario. Today's post is about what happens if you manage to actually complete a fight without the game imploding: Get Huge or Die Trying! HUGE!!! So I know I've been hammering this point home pretty hard, but clearly nobody actually playtested this game because the math doesn't work. In an earlier post I talked about how the 3d6 roll for skills means that it's possible to make someone that's untouchable or can't possibly miss another starting character by having a skill difference of more than 19. Today we'll turn "possible" into "inevitable," and also look at how R. Talsorian suggests you balance enemies in an environment where balance is a polite suggestion at best. For some reason they decided to cram the Experience section into the middle of the Powers chapter. It first details the ways you can gain XP:
They also suggest that the GM might just give you bonus XP for whatever reason seems appropriate. Oddly, the math on getting XP from fights basically favors keeping your Power Level stat relatively low for maximum XP gain. Since the most useful powers are "going first" and "going more" and both of those are pretty cheap, not spending a lot on raising Power Level is pretty doable. Once you have some XP burning a hole in your weighted clothing, it's time to apply it to your stats. Since this game tries to be pretty easy on the math, XP is spent on your stats on a one-for-one basis. However, you must spend XP in increments of 10. No splitting it up to get 5 points in a skill and 5 points to boost your Defense. You're allowed to spend XP on Power Level, Power Up, your skills, your Defense, or your Hits. I said this in the first post, but at no point are you allowed to raise your four basic stats. Spending energy lets you temporarily boost those stats for a short time, but that's it. You can raise your Fighting and Evasion skills all you want to make up for a low starting Combat score, but a crazy-high starting Mental will let you get the first turn at the start of just about every fight and nobody can really do anything about it. So to put everything together: the core resolution mechanic of the game (stat+skill+3d6) doesn't work well once people have a difference in skill totals higher than 19. There is an auto-fail roll (natural 3) but no auto-success. Character advancement in skills is done in multiples of 10, which means it only takes takes two Evasion skill boosts to destroy any chance the GM had to balance enemies. The moment any one PC has 20 more Evasion than another, any enemy with a real threat of being able to hit that PC will only miss the other PCs on a natural 3, which is roughly a 0.5% chance. How does the book suggest you balance villains when the math is that delicate? Add up all their stats!  Here's a sidebar from page 114:quote:One Man Gang I, uh... hmm. That's all there is in the entire GM chapter of the book. The rest is all just the standard "how to make a game plot" stuff we've seen a million times. That helpful suggestion does nothing to address the problem, and might just end up making a bad guy that never misses and flattens the PC . It also doesn't help that they don't tell you what to make the the villain's skills or defense or anything. The fact is, there is no real good way to do it. Major enemy NPCs will have to have extremely high Defense and Hits to endure more than a couple Phases of a group of PCs going to town, while not having enough offensive capability to vaporize someone with a glance. Buying extra actions with energy means that whoever goes first will probably win, and since that's probably going to be the GM's galaxy-threatening alien supervillain they'll probably just wipe the whole team. At least that means everyone gets to train under King Kai! The second-smartest way to stat out enemy NPCs is decide roughly how many minor and major hits they can take before dying, decide a rough percentage of a player's health to take away on a failed evade, then just fake-roll some dice and tell the players "you need to roll a 12 or better to evade his attack" on his turn. The smartest way to stat out NPCs is to put this book away and just watch the show with your friends. It's not high entertainment, but it's a drat sight smarter than this game ever was. Your wish... is granted. That about does it for the core book of the Dragon Ball Z Anime Adventure Game! Thanks for reading, and I'm sorry. There's still two supplements to cover, but I'm not sure if I want to jump on them right away or if I want to write about Capcom World Tournament, the d20 Street Fighter RPG that almost was. When ever I decide to get around to the Frieza and Androids books, they'll definitely go much faster than the core book. If anyone has any thoughts on the matter, please let me know!
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Feb 22, 2014 07:48
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When I'm not getting bodied by school work, I'll get around to reviewing the d20 Street Fighter game that almost was. It was set to be better than the White Wolf one in a lot of ways, and for a little while I was working on salvaging it into a fully-playable thing until I finally got it through my head that fighting games don't actually make for good RPGs. Still, it had some interesting mechanics for one-on-one fights and the special move system was pretty easy and versatile.
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Mar 5, 2014 19:59
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He might, yeah.
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Apr 17, 2014 04:34
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I read a post somewhere, can't remember if it was here or RPG, that basically explained how Mark MacKinnon, one of the two lead writers for BESM never actually used the combat system. The other one, David Pulver, forced him to sit down and play out a combat with two reasonably-statted characters and it was just a complete slog until one of them actually managed to touch the other resulting in an instant kill. BESM was awful. It's also the game I probably played the most when I was younger, but that's mostly because I had a friend who more or less used as anime-flavored GURPS and refused to learn any other games because he thought he could do the same thing in the Tri-Stat rules. It was a situation made even better by the fact that he didn't really havea good grasp on how it all worked in the first place, which lead to him doing stuff like making up new powers that were just bad versions of the ones that already exist and requiring all the PCs to take it.
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May 9, 2014 17:47
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Just like GURPS. GURPS also has options BESM doesn't to lower an enemy's defenses. They are more or less required when attacks and defenses start getting pretty high unless you want fights to last forever, but not as important in low-power games.
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May 9, 2014 18:30
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In the comments for Cthulhutech I suggested Weapons of the Gods/Legends of the Wulin because it's a better implementation of rolling dice for matching sets, but the Secret Arts and Chi Conditions in WotG were also written by Borgstrom. Go figure, it's a system with really cool ideas that does a poor job of explaining clearly how it all works. They had to put out a free PDF just to explain in simpler terms how the mechanics actually function. Thankfully, they cleaned it up a lot for Wulin (and she didn't write a single word in that book) and it's a good thing they did since that whole subsystem is a lot more central to the game now.
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Jun 18, 2014 22:38
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I remember playing some version of d6 Star Wars a couple times about ten years ago and just found the wild die to be an awful idea. Having three options that the GM can choose from with no rhyme or reason was annoying enough, but our GM wasn't even creative enough to come up with extra complications so it was just Drop Highest every time. A 1/3 chance of your rolls being maybe great or complete garbage just seems really swingy and hard to plan around. Not the most fun we had with a game.
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Jul 17, 2014 08:15
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Bieeardo posted:I threw a classic groggy fit when 4E came out, but while I still think that swathes of the new core could be cut without tears, I eventually pried my head out of my rear end. That stuff though-- that just left me cold. Like, I understand and appreciate the utility of character templates and a Chinese menu where you choose 20 points from Column A and 10 from B, and get a roughly functional character of that archetype without slogging through Evil Stevie's Skills Dumpster. That's hugely helpful, especially for new players. Dungeon Fantasy just seemed to take it to an unfunny extreme for something the designer claimed was '...by turns cheesy, silly, and munchkin.' I've played a bunch of all three of the GURPS "instant games" and they are all pretty good, but each of them could stand to be their own standalone thing, maybe using Lite as a base instead of the two main books. Chargen in GURPS Action for new players was good in the sense that they could pick a template and choose their options, but there was still a good few hours of book-flipping. Monster Hunters is probably their best one, in the sense that the special powers and abilities are laid out in the first book instead of having to reference others. All that said, I've pretty much had enough of GURPS in general. Someone else said that it's pretty good about scalability in terms of how complex you want to get, and I sort of agree, but it really doesn't do a good job of explaining that.
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Jul 25, 2014 20:32
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GURPS Action does a pretty good job of being a more accessible Spycraft, actually. Templates that make action movie roles like SC's classes, a really good chase system, simplified gun combat from regular GURPS so fights go faster, a similar system for calling in favors and services from your spy organization, and you can open up the High-Tech book if you want a giant catalog of stuff.
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Sep 26, 2014 21:19
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theironjef posted:But don't even get me started on math problem games right now. Because I am reading Synnibar. The entire podcast could just be a dramatic reading of the setting background in the first chapter.
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Oct 11, 2014 19:12
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theironjef posted:A reading at dramatic pace took approximately 11 minutes. I am strongly considering adding sound effects and bumpers and just making that the intro. Yeah, now that I think about it, reading it to my friends took about an hour because we couldn't stop laughing at poo poo like "were-storms." When the full moon comes out, he turns into vicious precipitation!
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Oct 12, 2014 01:20
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I have a copy of SenZar: Role Playing For The Next Millennium. It lives on the Shelf of Poor Decisions next to the DBZ books. It is, without a doubt, the most metal-album-cover-inspired fantasy game I've ever seen. I wouldn't say it's crazier than Synnibarr, but while Synnibarr reads like it was made by a bunch of 13-year-olds with too much candy, SenZar reads more like it was made by a bunch of 17-year-olds with too many Spawn comics.
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Nov 13, 2014 04:45
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The only time I ever see any 40K RPG stories is crap from 4chan.
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Nov 24, 2014 06:17
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Unknown Armies is an actually good game where tracking HP is done in secret by the GM and players are given descriptions of how badly they're being beaten. It's also a game that opens the combat rules with a list of ways to avoid getting into a physical fight in the first place. Dropping that sort of thing into a game where you fight monsters and supervillains is completely asinine, but that's the John Wick Way.
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Dec 3, 2014 18:11
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theironjef posted:The L5R edition we read had a great example of that with the Unlucky trait, where your GM was supposed to have you reroll one success a day. If it's an extremely important success, then your GM is going to feel like a dick. If it's a minor unimportant success, then the flaw is pointless. That's bad design. In a GURPS Monster Hunters campaign I used to run, one player took three levels of both Good Destiny and Bad Destiny. Monster Hunters changes the default Destiny (dis)advantage from being your standard "something nebulously good/bad will happen" to something actually useful in that each level grants a plot currency point. Good Destiny points can be used to turn failures into successes, edit details of a scene in your favor, etc. Bad Destiny works the same, except the GM gets those points to use against the character with the disadvantage. Conceptually, it worked for his character since there was a whole Constantine-ish "battle for his soul" thing going on, but it became apparent really quick that every session was just a race to get me to spend all his Bad Destiny for the session so he could actually do something cool. The other big problem was that I hated using those points. I want my players to do cool things, and it's really hard to encourage that when three times a game I have to say no, you hosed up and here's how. In combat, it was the absolute worst because it would just negate an entire turn and waste everyone's time. The campaign ended for a bunch of reasons, but that player and I both agreed that if we picked it back up in a different system we'd have to change that part because good lord it just made everyone sad.
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Dec 4, 2014 18:15
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You'd have to pay me a lot of money to play Maid, but the translator, Ewen Cluney, made a non-creepy game with the same rules and a shitload of random events called Retail Magic and it's pretty much fantasy Clerks and I had a lot of fun running that a couple weeks ago. Also, the whole d6 only is because getting non-d6 dice in Japan is apparently difficult unless you're in a place with a big game shop. It's actually pretty common for Japanese RPGs that aren't a translation of D&D.
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Dec 19, 2014 04:47
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Tapperson TAP Turn Around Punch
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Jan 22, 2015 18:58
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The A-Ko game also has a weird card game thing crammed into it like many other games of the era. I have a copy and it's sitting on the shelf of poor choices next to Cyberpunk v.3 and the Dragon Ball Z RPG.
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Jan 24, 2015 23:12
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It's been a while but I think the way Silhouette works is that you rolls D6s equal to your skill, take the highest result, and add or subtract your attribute (it's a zero-as-average system). Extra 6s in a roll add +1 to the total result. I think the way Heavy Gear explained it was that someone with low skill and high stats could get great rolls inconsistently, while someone with higher skill but closer to average stats would get more consistent results due to having more chances at a higher roll.
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Jan 25, 2015 01:57
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Davin Valkri posted:It feels like it should be a game about officers sending their commands to die and the consequences thereof. The former is actually a thing, sort of, but the latter isn't really explored at all. 3:16 really tries to be more of a quick and easy, play it when someone's absent this week sort of game. Problem is, there's a lot of other games like that with more stuff to do and more varied story potential. 3:16 is more like a series of extremely simple board games where someone can just go "I win!" or "I don't lose!" whenever they want. There's not a lot to think about, and the potential seeds of intra-party conflict that come up later due to conflicting orders are less a source of tension and drama, and more a little gag that makes you go "heh" the first time you see it.
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Feb 5, 2015 19:33
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Gonna talk about Monster Hunter-like RPGs and not talk about a game obviously inspired by MH. Shameful. http://tinyurl.com/LastStandCollection
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Feb 7, 2015 23:17
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Monster Hunters is based on shows like Buffy and Supernatural and is about hunting vampires/werewolves/zombies. It has basically nothing to do with the Capcom game series.
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Feb 8, 2015 05:16
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I'm pretty sure most of the people in that thread would proclaim any dice-based horseshit to be amazing if you slap their favorite lovely nerd power fantasy mascot on it. I've never read an Elric book but it sounds like some teenage wish fulfillment of the highest order. A scrawny, pasty nerd gets kicked out of the cool kids' lunch table for being too whiny, then gets his revenge with a
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Mar 26, 2015 18:22
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Videomancers gets power by watching their favorite TV series when it airs and lose all their accumulated charges by missing the show. That includes reruns, but not recordings, so you can't trap a videomancer by turning on a DVD player. I wouldn't say Netflix makes it irrelevant since watching a recording doesn't count for gaining charges, and streaming a show on the internet is more or less the same as watching a taped recording. However, the way a lot of channels changes their programming methods when DVRs got popular probably hosed with them pretty hard. You were about to go mess with a rival cabal during their ritual under the full moon? Oh too bad your magic buddy can't miss an episode of NCIS because there's a marathon showing at the same time. Never expect reliable help from a videomancer attuned to police procedurals. Basic cable has those guys locked down.
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Mar 26, 2015 21:38
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You lose all your charges when your show gets cancelled, but you're allowed to attune to new shows more or less whenever. You can attune to new shows for free if you catch the world premiere, or spend a significant charge to attune to a show that's been going. Of course, if your show gets cancelled but another station starts playing reruns a few years later, your life just got more complicated. If you're attuned to two or more shows you could potentially build a lot of power quickly, but if the shows get scheduled at the same time you can't gain power from either one because you'll always miss the other.
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Mar 26, 2015 21:47
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Halloween Jack posted:Two screens? You have to be fully-focused on the entire broadcast, including commercials. That means no flipping channels, no getting up to pee, no joking with your buddy about bad writing or delivery, nothing. UA magic stems from obsession and paradox, and is in no way meant to make anyone's lives easier. The cost of great power is irrational and self-destructive behavior. Even the process of being able to be an adept requires you to completely lose your mind and reconstruct your entire worldview around whatever your focus is.
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Mar 26, 2015 21:58
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PJOmega posted:The Rerun part never seemed to make sense in the philosophy of the Videomancer. The whole point is, as someone pointed out upthread, that people who are hundreds if not thousands of miles apart are sharing an experience broadcast from a place that could be thousands of miles away from them both. Reruns still count because you are still performing the act of watching a TV show on a schedule set by someone else at the same time as a lot of other people. You're still symbolically connected to all the other people watching Ross yell "PIVAT!" at the same time. It's just a minor charge because, well, you've seen it before. You could still go to work the next day and talk about the episode with your cubicle neighbor, but it's not as "important" as a new episode. On the other hand, if you popped a Futurama DVD in at the same time as Adult Swim showed an episode, that's not exactly the same thing because you didn't catch that commercial, or that new promo, or see the technical difficulties because an intern at the station messed up.
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Mar 26, 2015 23:40
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I'd think that opening each episode with a variation on "beating a dead horse" would make the tone pretty obvious, but, well, internet people.
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Mar 27, 2015 08:42
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Some people not being able to differentiate "this set of rules was fun to use" and "we had fun around this set of rules" is one of the reasons I don't like trying to talk to most nerds about game design. How much fun you had is both really important and completely irrelevant to how a game works.
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Mar 27, 2015 19:51
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I like how some of the posts in the rpgnet thread imply that a scathing review of a dead game from 25 loving years ago is going to hurt anything. I like to imagine there's some movie producer out there who was about to greenlight an Elric movie franchise but aborted at the last second when a plucky intern busted into the boardroom yelling "wait! Listen to this!"
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Mar 30, 2015 07:28
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Duckman sounds like the kind of game I'd love to play when we're down a person and just want something to kill time, but there's no way it could happen because I've got a player who just gets super sad when any minor bad thing happens to his characters.
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Apr 1, 2015 18:41
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That all sounds close enough to my experience in the US military. As much as I don't want to relive those days, MiliKK sounds like a pretty entertaining thing and I laughed at a lot of things in the review, thinking "yeah that's pretty much true."
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Apr 13, 2015 06:28
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Mors Rattus posted:Scion never talks about how the mundane world reacts to literal demigods. This was a thing I got caught up on when the game first came out. I really couldn't tell if you were supposed to revel in your new powers or try to keep your heritage hidden or what. I also couldn't tell what you were supposed to actually fight because the antagonist chapter was balls.
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May 8, 2015 17:45
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