Alien Rope Burn posted:

The more I go back and read old World of Darkness the more I think of Everlasting.

It's like all the 90s supernatural games start to congeal into one indistinguishable, loathsome mass.

Halloween Jack posted:

Rockopolis posted:

The pair of quotes requested before

GimpInBlack posted:

Too busy playing the same basic concept but better in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.


Ugh, this. I pretty much rage quit when the description of Athena started with the phrase "honey-haired and voluptuous."


"Shockingly insulting" covers a lot of Scion's execution, honestly. Some great basic concepts, but drat some of the choices they made.

Evil Mastermind posted:

I think it's more of a mis-remembering of what old gaming was actually like. People get so focused on things like the S-series they start to think that was the default play-style.

Evil Mastermind posted:

The worst merits/flaws in pretty much any game are the pure-roleplay ones, because they pretty much boil down to "free points". Take "shy" or "cowardly" or whatever, get some extra skill points, and then everyone forgets you have it and you play your character however you want.

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

Six Guns and Sorcery goes over North America extremely thoroughly for Castle Falkenstein. There are some wonderful bits including who Norton's right hand man is.

theironjef posted:

Has anyone ever seen the D20 Prime Directive? Or the GURPS one? My partner hated that game like ... nothing I've seen before, and I really want to know if the other variants are as bad.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Central Casting's author, on the other hand, came out as a transsexual, and presumably her thoughts on the matter have changed.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

That subtitle seems suspiciously superfluous. "Just in case you missed the title, this is what the game is about."

Halloween Jack posted:

Yeah, if anything, I'd assume the opposite--they liked furries, no one had done a furry pirates game yet, engage!

Kurieg posted:

It wasn't a 3rd party book.

Behold the Onager, the anthropomorphic donkey that no one wanted.


It also had rules for loving bizarre stuff like having a centipede grafted to your head and being half gelatinous cube.

hectorgrey posted:

To be fair, that's probably the fault of the setting - Star Wars has a very black and white morality (particularly as regards the force).

Edit: To be fair, the Return of the Jedi stats for Luke Skywalker actually gives him a dark side point - for the use of a dark side power, if memory serves.

Bieeardo posted:

Personally, I think it's bullshit. As much as I'm not a fan of Campbell, Luke and the others follow a clear Hero's Journey arc, and for my money the focus is on the fantasy heroics. Sure, Mos Eisley is a shithole, but then you've got places like Cloud City... which, okay, wasn't a whole lot nicer when you got past the shiny surface. The focus was still on adventure, and sticking a thumb in the eye of evil, not praying that you don't flub your docking roll, and getting hassled by Hutt legbreakers while your hold's being loaded with tibanna. Not that there isn't room for that style of play, but it's pretty weird when the rules as written seem to sidestep the tone of the source material.

Maxwell Lord posted:

Most of the modules for Star Wars were built around Rebel missions rather than playing Traveller in the SW universe, though- you were by default heroes fighting the Empire. The simplicity of the core mechanics relative to most of what was out at the time, plus the 1e GM advice, marked it as fairly cinematic.

It has the start at Level 1 problem, and a lot of unnecessary cruft, but I see it as the precursor to more properly cinematic games that came later.

theironjef posted:

Having also reviewed Ghostbusters for the podcast, I totally believe this, because it was completely stripped down and a reasonably good attempt to produce something fun and cinematic. Very impressive for 1986. Somewhere between '88 and '96 every RPG designer became obsessed with ultra-grit realism and big charts that randomized every little thing.

unseenlibrarian posted:

I can forgive the Ghostbusters RPG for a multitude of sins for basically being the game that invented Plot/Brownie/Drama/Hero etc etc points as a -thing-.

Evil Mastermind posted:

I think I talked about this a thread or two ago when we were discussing Paranoia 5th Edition, but when it got right down to it WEG's writers didn't see the difference between dark comedy, intelligent comedy, or slapstick. Everything got dumped into that category eventually.

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

WEG also had one of the best modern conflict board wargames in AirCav and a bunch of good historical board wargames. I wasn't really a fan of the D6 system, but I did like TORG.

Kai Tave posted:

I did actually get my pre-order money refunded after a while, though I have no idea how many other people did, and Eric Gibson had the typical RPGnet angry game designer flounce when people wouldn't stop being mean to him over his complete and utter clusterfuck. Bill Coffin did actually wind up releasing Septimus in digital format for free if you want to check it out. The punchline is that it's mostly kind of forgettable.

Eric Gibson posted:

I'm done trying to explain myself to people who don't want an explaination but just wish to turn words around and read into what I write.

If there is anyone here that still has a valid interest in WEG, or their refunds or exchanges, I'm happy to answer any question you have. Other than that, I'm gone.

Dana, you are an enormous loving rear end in a top hat.

Moderators, please feel free to make my suspension permanent. I've absolutely no desire to frequent or associate with a forum that suffers the posting of total cock-suckers like him.

Jgants, even though you are on Dana's "side" in this matter, please do not assume that I share the same feelings about you. The reason is, my history with Dana goes FAR back and this was just too much.

My business is my business Dana. You don't know it and I'm don't trying to explain how things now work, or have worked in the past because all you want to do is be a total prick.

For people who with be angered my my reduced transparency and approachability, please thank Dana Jorgensen.

Dana, you don't know me in the least. Long ago your made the errant decision that I was cut from the same cloth as Ken Whitman and you are very wrong. Go ahead and think yourself noble as some sort of crusader. You are not. You and an angery, stupid man who makes prejudical conclusions about people and then obsessively follows everything they say looking for the slightest inconsistency (usually a result of simply talking about two different things) and reads that was dishonesty.

I'm not dishonest. I am many things. I'm often irresponsible. I certainly dream bigger than my means, and I'm quick to go public with things before I've done 100% of the homework. I'm a passionate lover of gaming -- or was at one time -- that leads be to make business decisions not fully motivated by profit. I'm emotional, and fallable. I am a human being.

I'm am not now nor will I ever be a scammer or a crook. I'm not anywhere close to Ken Whitman.

I am also -- out of here. I wash my hands of Dana Jorgensen. I was my wash hands of RPG.net and the hordes cat-piss men gamer masses that don't realize that most game publishers do what we do because the love (or loved) this community, but still you manage to treat us like crap.

I am going to refund or give exchanges to everyone as they desire and that may yet be that last thing I do in this industry.

Open D6? Maybe, maybe not. I must ask myself, why bother? Just to give people fuel for the sense on entitlement?

As this hobby industry shinks from it's great past, it is sad to see that, rather than doing what it takes to beathe life back into it, we snarl like ravenous beasts fighting for scraps. The hobby will die because it must die. I've is a social hobby designed for people with all the social grace of a reptile. A fat, disgusting reptile with just enough education so that put on an air for sophistication, but they really just justifies the world's labels of gamers as hopeless, vile dorks that need to be put down like lame dogs.

Give yourself a pat on the back, oh great crusader of the unwashed masses. You have defeated me. You've unjustly labeled me a criminal and attacked me for years, and I've not more heart to fight back. If we should square off again, it will certainly not be on the internet.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Ultimately, GURPS isn't really that universal, it basically works around most human-level genres, but once you get into the high-scale supernatural or superhuman realms - and don't even get me started on Vehicles - the math rapidly unravels. But if you want to run a low fantasy game, espionage, investigative, or anything else relatively "realistic", it functions rather well. But something like GURPS IOU nicely highlighted how not to use GURPS.

Asimo posted:

Compare that to the classic example of 90's GURPS where they expected you to do gritty fantasy, modern horror, super heroes, and far-future sci-fi with characters that were theoretically point balanced between. It's not like there's been some hard transition point, but it's still a pretty clear long term trend.

theironjef posted:

Also goddamn I would love to see an attempt to explain Immortal. It's unreadable, one of those games where the rules are battered in a thick coating of goofy names and metaphoric titles and then deep-fried in a vat of oily fluff text, such that you can never tell if you're reading a game rule or a poem at any given moment.

Kavak posted:

I'm kind of surprised Palladium is still in business despite Siembieda's insanity eccentricity.

theironjef posted:

California is a vast empty wasteland.

Robindaybird posted:

honestly, California agriculture is hosed when the aquifer is drained dry.

Evil Mastermind posted:

Yeah, it's very 90's design

theironjef posted:

It's borne out correctly with the stuff from the 80s we've talked about on the podcast. Prime Directive, Car Wars, D6 Star Wars, and Skyrealms of Jorune are some of our episodes where we really get into how rulesy they are, and they're all 80s games. I think the one big exception would be the comically light Ghostbusters RPG.

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

You really need to take a look at one of the FGU games from the early 80s (Just not Chivalry and Sorcery unless you need a sleeping pill). Villains and Vigilantes, Daredevils, Aftermath, PsiWorld, Flashing Blades, or Space Opera would be my recommendations.

Bieeardo posted:

I'm not sure anyone really thought about the math, either. Variable dice pools versus variable target numbers made for some really swingy results, and that's before tossing in degrees of success and target numbers that require one or more dice to explode multiple times. FASA simplified things a little for combat in SR2, by standardizing on two successes to 'stage' damage results up or down a level, but it took White Wolf until the New World of Darkness to standardize on a fixed target number.

Night10194 posted:

The funniest part is, because they have to keep them out of Well Known Major Historical Tragedies like WWII, they always come off as not actually controlling much of human affairs, really.

ZeeToo posted:

Another promising angle to take would be setting the Ark down and then arguing that a 4x3x3 box rounds up to basically being a 5x5x5 piece of cover, and that if an attack misses you by less than the bonus from cover (+4 AC), then it struck the cover. So you hunker down behind it, then wait for the other guy to hit it with a stray arrow and summon two angels that make solars look underpowered.

Kai Tave posted:

Also Reckoning had metaplot. If you want strings-free monster hunting then what you want is Hunter: the Vigil from the nWoD.

Reckoning also suffered from having a pretty serious mismatch between what the art promised and what the game was actually like. The art, especially the pieces they previewed running up to the game, was full of stuff like badass dudes casually slinging double barrel shotguns over their shoulder and Buffy-esque vampire slayers, but the actual game itself is about un-badass people being imbued with very minor supernatural gimmicks and then being thrust into a world they're completely ill-equipped to deal with and may not even be sure they aren't just having a schizophrenic breakdown when the literal voices in their heads start telling them to kill the guy next door.

Night10194 posted:

Also, if I remember, the crazy Messengers giving you the powers were loving Exalted.

Ratpick posted:

I love the fact that he first admonishes someone for writing a review of his RPG Orkworld without having even played it and then goes on a rant saying "Well D&D 3e is really bad and dumb, I couldn't even get around to playing it because just reading it made me mad."

Bieeardo posted:

I remember thinking Orkworld was an interesting concept