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If you're writing soft science fiction with crazy supernatural stuff you should ideally be as far away from a reasonable future as possible. Maoris took over new zealand and the Aoteroan empire controls the southern hemisphere. Taiwan takes over mainland China. Who cares, the future doesn't exist and it's going to suck anyway, have some fun with it.
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Aug 28, 2017 00:49
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Comrade Koba posted:I'm still baffled every time someone living in the present day manages to write yet another game that is all about NeoCyberJapan dominating the TechnoFuture. You'd have to pretend really hard that the past 30 years never happened. And the thing is, they don't need it for the premise! Like, Ghost in the Shell? It's made in Japan, so it's going to be predisposed to a little dick waggling about the hometown, but it's also a narrative that needs Japan to be a major player to set up the spy versus spy bullshit. (It also sets things up better with "Japan invented this one badass tech everyone needs" and "Japan was the biggest world power with the sense to stay home during WWIII and WWIV.") Here, the game proper gets going only after Japan's cut off from the rest of the world (rather less efficiently than ideal for the premise, but still). A Japan that's in its modern position, or even notably declined from it, can still work great for that, because it's all internal (or infernal) affairs. Global geopolitics are irrelevant. I'm curious how the game messes up from here. I mean, there's a ton of obvious interesting hooks from the elevator pitch, but from the sound and how it's handling things already, it's going to miss all of them.
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Aug 28, 2017 01:29
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Right, all that's really needed for the premise is China's Dead Man's Hand misfiring and nukes miraculously being destroyed. The US turning Japan upside down trying to find a technology that doesn't exist to appease an increasingly crazy China is a great complication and hook.
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Aug 28, 2017 02:17
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Comrade Koba posted:I'm still baffled every time someone living in the present day manages to write yet another game that is all about NeoCyberJapan dominating the TechnoFuture. You'd have to pretend really hard that the past 30 years never happened. It's more exciting than "Silicon Valley dominating the technofuture"
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Aug 28, 2017 04:33
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JcDent posted:It's more exciting than "Silicon Valley dominating the technofuture" Well, at least with those settings you don't get a whole lot of  about how they rose to dominance because they combined capitalism with ~Ancient European Philosophy~ and ~Western Martial Spirit~.Also, there'd be no need for a 20-page glossary to explain all the foreign terms game designers love to insert in random places.
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Aug 28, 2017 06:08
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Comrade Koba posted:Well, at least with those settings you don't get a whole lot of I dunno. I'm just not sure we needed the 50 page history of Hooli. And even that's not as bad as the way the book keeps spending time on Ed Chambers's history. I get it. He has lots of sex and a tragic past. Can we focus on what the PLAYERS are supposed to do?
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Aug 28, 2017 06:32
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Comrade Koba posted:Well, at least with those settings you don't get a whole lot of Have you heard of Protestant work ethic?
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Aug 28, 2017 06:54
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 Mechanics, Character Creations, Skills Alright, first we’re starting with mechanics. There are only three pages of mechanics. Your average check is: (Stat)d6+Skill or Specialization vs. Target Number. The dice are rolled, you add them together, you add on the relevant bonus and you compare it against a TN. There are two gimmicks to rolling dice. The first is the classic exploding sixes where they keep exploding with new sixes and you add all of the results together. The other gimmick is the fact that you don't get any points added to a roll if it's a 4 due to the Japanese cultural superstition that four is unlucky. It's a pronunciation thing; 4 can be pronounced as Shi which is the Japanese word for death. Just explaining that for people who don't know that little tidbit. Anyway a 4 adds absolutely nothing to the roll, which is just very "tee hee do you get it, this takes place in Japan". There's also the optional rule where a majority of rolled fours is some kind of SUPERFAIL which...meh, whatever. Not a good rule but I've seen worse.  If you have to do a flat attribute check, you roll the dice pool and then instead of adding a skill, double the attribute's rating and add that. Unskilled checks don't add double the attribute. Opposed checks are just roll pools, add numbers, compare totals and then there's just a paragraph that says "hey so compare your total with the TN and then try to figure out how bad you succeeded or failed based on the difference between the TN and the total". Like there's just. Not much to say about the system? It takes up two pages worth of text. It's standard, it's competent, it's functional but it's not particularly fancy or notable. This is going to be pretty much what I'll say about the entire system. Let's do chargen first before we do the rest. CHARACTER CREATION Okay, we have to break this down step by step because there are some Problems with some of these steps.  The characteristics break down into 4 Physical (Dexterity, Strength, Reflexes, Stamina) and Mental (Intelligence, Perception, Charisma, Willpower). Because you're meant to be Normal People, 3 is the max you can take in a characteristic/stat/attribute to begin with.   If you think 8 characteristics are too many (they are) and that your character is kinda hindered by being too normal (they are), I agree with you. Then you use your characteristics to calculate derived stats.
Age is one point where things get very stupid and dumb.  Alright, we'll talk about Kaiso later. First is age. Normally when I see a nod to age being somewhat important in a game, this means one of two things. 1: age truly is just nothing but a number, be whatever you want. 2: there is an advantage and disadvantage to age. Being older gives you perks at the cost of something like weakened physical abilities, being younger makes you more fit but dumber, something along that line. Or maybe being too young is a hindrance inasmuch as you're not taken seriously but still youthful. Kuro does not do this. The older you are, the more skills you know. That's it. The game assumes you're going to want to play someone 21-35. If you wish to be older, you need GM permission. That's it. It's just flat better to be any character over the age of 50. This isn't even a minmaxing thing or an exploit, this is just...rules as written. This is not the most baffling choice the game makes. Skill Areas and Specializations are the only really interesting system I like from this game? A Skill Area is just a parent skill for a group beneath a category (Combat, Academic, General, Technical, Engineering). "Firearms" is a Skill Area. You can't have a Skill Area score higher than 6 at creation, this is just a general competency across multiple Areas. Also interesting is that some Skill Areas can't be accessed without a minimum 3 points sunk into another Skill Area (Skill Area: Medicine requires some knowledge of Skill Area: Natural Sciences, for example). Specializations are a more specific prowess within skill areas: Firearms is a Skill Area, Shotguns are a Skill Specialization. Specializations can't rise above 11 during chargen. Sinking points into Specializations raises the skill above the rating of the Area. This system breaks down...hard in a bad way. It's hard to explain. During chargen, Area and Specialization are bought on a 1:1 basis. 4 points in Firearms is Firearms 4, 4 points in Handguns is Handguns 4+Firearms. After chargen, things get silly. Raising an Area costs double the new rating in XP while Specializations just cost the new rating in XP. However. Like a rising flood lifting boats, all Specializations within the Area will raise with the price of the new Area. Raising Firearms beyond 4 means that Handgun is now 5, the specialization points don't stack. The points are just pissed away. It's more economically viable with this system to invest in Areas above Specializations.  Social Rank is the system I hate the most. To point back up at the Age system, there is absolutely no mechanical weight to this choice at all. There are no sacrifices that must be made to be part of the upper 10% or whatever percent you wish to choose. You can just say "yeah I'm Kaiso 5, I have a shitload of money". The book attempts to say "you want to have a mixed social group so that way you have members investigating where CEOs shouldn't" but, like. Again, no mechanical weight at all. It's baffling to me that a game that's ostensibly cyberpunk will just let characters be rich with no mechanical weight in the slightest. And you want a high Kaiso for... Equipment. Which has four big problems. Four huge mechanical problems intertwined. The first is that you get everything that makes sense for your character idea for free. Be a cop? Get a gun. Want to be a quadruple amputee? You now have 4 prosthetic limbs. The second is that you can just sacrifice ranks of your Kaiso to be in debt to represent things that your character has that give them the ability to do extra things. Want strength-enhanced cybernetic limbs? Well now you're paying off your debt and your income is lower to account for these payments. Alternately you can just owe illicit favors to be people and be socially in debt with no loss to your Kaiso. The third is that 900,000 yen a month sure sounds like it buys a lot but it sure as hell doesn't. The wealth disparity between what a Genocrat could afford and what your Kaiso 5 character could afford is immense. Problems 1 and 2 means that this money will never be used to buy anything. The fourth is that the equipment chapter lacks...pretty much everything you'd expect in a standard cyberpunk game. Those enhanced limbs don't exist. You want cyberblades implanted in your arms? They don't exist. You want a gun-holster built into your leg? Doesn't exist. State of the art hacking computer? Doesn't exist. You're at the mercy of your GM fluffing things or having to come up with the equivalents of what you want for your character. And because you don't pay for them, you get them for free. So on paper you could make yourself a 65 year old CEO of a company who ran into massive debt/made a lot of illicit deals to turn himself into a shiny and chrome street samurai except no you can't for three heavily conflicting reasons based on the other 3 problems: you get all of that for free because it's core to your character idea except it would be completely out of your character's league to ever obtain it due to the Genocrats except it doesn't exist mechanically to begin with. Attempting to approach anything beyond the scope of Problem 1 (which is less a problem and more a good general design choice for wanting to abstract player equipment) results in the other three problems colliding with none of them taking immediate precedence. Something Is Wrong, An Error Has Occurred but it's not clear which. Then come up with the character's name and history and motivations. SKILLS Here are all of the skills. All of the skills.  I'm only going to explain two things to this: Contacts and Gimmiku (not appearing on this skill list). This entire section has 11 pages explaining skills and everything, so gently caress going in depth. Contacts counts as a Skill Area for the purposes of Knowing People. The ones beneath it are Skill Specializations. You can be lacking Contacts in the area in which you operate, that just reflects not being good enough friends with your coworkers. Gimmiku are a good idea on paper that do not work in execution. Raising a Specialization to a set level means that you basically gain 1 proc you can attach to it, something optional that triggers when you use that Specialization.  These procs are:
Anyway here are premade characters. I will not be making characters for this system, I just can't be bothered to. I did combine the art with the statblocks. That's as much as I could bear.        NEXT TIME: Combat, maybe equipment. Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Aug 28, 2017 |
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Aug 28, 2017 08:47
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Not sure why you're highlighting 'defence' - doesn't it make sense they'd use British English, being French?
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Aug 28, 2017 09:31
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Cubicle 7's British too, that's probably them.
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Aug 28, 2017 09:54
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I'll admit I'm a tiny bit disappointed we're not getting characters. I kind of wanted to see a party with thinly veiled versions of Mokoto Kusanagi and Yuji Yata, but considering how weak the cyberware and sock puppet possessed by an alien intelligence rules seem to be, I can't even imagine blaming you.
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Aug 28, 2017 10:06
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chiasaur11 posted:I'll admit I'm a tiny bit disappointed we're not getting characters. I kind of wanted to see a party with thinly veiled versions of Mokoto Kusanagi and Yuji Yata, but considering how weak the cyberware and sock puppet possessed by an alien intelligence rules seem to be, I can't even imagine blaming you.
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Aug 28, 2017 10:14
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I guess cyberkimonos are a thing now.
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Aug 28, 2017 10:40
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By the way, was there ever a Cold War zombie apocalypse setting? Seems you have one for every historical period...
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Aug 28, 2017 11:54
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"We're going to make 4 a super fail because it's an unlucky and avoided number in Japan!" "Uh, ok. What's the difficulty multiplier for dice rolls?" "4."
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Aug 28, 2017 12:09
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Jesus christ Gackt stop hijacking my games
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Aug 28, 2017 12:45
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It should also be noted that gimikku is Japanese to the same extent that the word sushi is English - it's a loanword. Specifically, it's the loanword for 'gimmick'.
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Aug 28, 2017 12:52
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Japanese love stealing/loaning words. Probably because they figure that if they steal enough of them, it will fix the mistake of stealing the God drat kanji from the Chinese. Kaaaanji 
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Aug 28, 2017 13:11
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JcDent posted:Japanese love stealing/loaning words. That theft is the only reason I could easily travel in japan because for some inexplicable reason tourist traps and restaurant menus were mostly kanji. Had I needed to do anything invented after like 1800 though id have been proper screwed.
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Aug 28, 2017 13:21
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Yes, my point is more that the translators of Kuro were against using the actual word 'gimmick' for some reason and it's the most weeb thing.
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Aug 28, 2017 13:28
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Mors Rattus posted:Yes, my point is more that the translators of Kuro were against using the actual word 'gimmick' for some reason and it's the most weeb thing.
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Aug 28, 2017 13:57
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They made a cyberpunk book with no cyber limbs stated in the main book, they are the worst weebs.
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Aug 28, 2017 14:28
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It bears repeating: this was not written in Japan. This was written by a French company setting a game in Japan that was then translated into English. It's Gimmiku because someone in France thought it would be cool to use that Japanese word.
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Aug 28, 2017 14:49
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Hostile V posted:It bears repeating: this was not written in Japan. This was written by a French company setting a game in Japan that was then translated into English. It's Gimmiku because someone in France thought it would be cool to use that Japanese word. That would also make it more evidence that the translation here is a bit lazy. The translator looked at the skill list and translated all the French on it, and left the Japanese... and didn't bother to consider that the "Japanese" skill name is actually English. e: Or decided to keep the Japanese for "cool" factor which is just as silly. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Aug 28, 2017 |
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Aug 28, 2017 15:38
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Lemme hear about that Seduction skill! Also, given "Gimmiku," does this game have a skill for planning?
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Aug 28, 2017 15:44
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Sigh. Okay, first, why does every game set in the future have to have a resurgent Japanese monarchy? The background of Kuro actually had a promising start, until i realized that this is all just a setup for a cyberpunk game set in a nation-sized supernatural Zone. It's a|state baka kawaii nani desu ^_^ Should I take it for granted that the Big Secret behind the missing nuke is never explained in the corebook, even in the GM section? Hostile V posted:Now, it's absolutely near future but it's missing the -punk element and it's also shooting for the Japanese horror atmosphere which is tricky, at best, to get across properly to a Western audience and is also not necessarily good to be played at the table. Like, there's a lot of investigative elements to J-Horror; Noroi is all about documentarians picking apart what happened to this old village and what's going on, Ringu and One Missed Call and Ju-On have people investigating the curses plaguing them and seeing if finding out the truth will save them and the people close to them. There's also a heavy psychological horror element and aspects of unreliable narrator and being able to figure out if what you're witnessing are hallucinations or real. The former is not conveyed significantly well in a mechanical sense and the latter really requires a good GM, players who are willing to go that route and a good atmosphere to be willing to interact with it. In The Ring, and for that matter Nightmare on Elm Street and Blair Witch, the ghosts and supernatural happenings exist as explanations for an unexplainable event. Since roleplaying is an imitative medium, writer/designers almost always just imitate the virtual reality of whatever novel/movie/whatever inspired them, losing the actual story in the process.
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Aug 28, 2017 16:00
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theironjef posted:Lemme hear about that Seduction skill! Also, given "Gimmiku," does this game have a skill for planning? Alternately whatever they choose to do will be the wrong choice and the GM is encouraged to twist the knife and make every choice agony, so sayeth the GM advice chapter. chiasaur11 posted:I'll admit I'm a tiny bit disappointed we're not getting characters. I kind of wanted to see a party with thinly veiled versions of Mokoto Kusanagi and Yuji Yata, but considering how weak the cyberware and sock puppet possessed by an alien intelligence rules seem to be, I can't even imagine blaming you. Halloween Jack posted:Should I take it for granted that the Big Secret behind the missing nuke is never explained in the corebook, even in the GM section? Vox Valentine fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Aug 28, 2017 |
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Aug 28, 2017 16:02
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So a secret society brings them together in Kuro? Because reading Unhallowed Metropolis, I have a hard time imagining why people from such different backgrounds would meet and work together (unless they all wake up in the same room clad in black spandex and there's a morning radio programme playing). You're a crew of lowlifes in shadowrun, you're a band of specialists going on an adventure in DnD, and you're definitely brought together in a very strict sense in the non-fantasy Ham RPGs. Modern games don't seem to have a similar way to do it. That's why if I ever make Unhallowed Cold War, everyone's gonna be a part of the military 
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Aug 28, 2017 16:32
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JcDent posted:So a secret society brings them together in Kuro? The official module is...insane. It's a whole plans in plans thing that the characters are never meant to get a bigger picture for because if they do, it's the most contrived nonsense and it still feels like contrived nonsense even if you never find out the bigger story. It starts with going to the bank. It ends with the Hive in the first Resident Evil movie.
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Aug 28, 2017 16:36
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JcDent posted:By the way, was there ever a Cold War zombie apocalypse setting? Seems you have one for every historical period... Isn't that Hot War? I mean there's other horrific stuff in Hot War, but the Soviets using not-zombies cultivated from Axis technology is one of them.
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Aug 28, 2017 16:36
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Can someone post a spoilered breakdown of what happened to the nuke in Kuro because I've skimmed through the main book before and I was wondering what was up with that?
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Aug 28, 2017 17:02
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Oh poo poo! I forgot I promised (read: threatened) to send to the System Mastery dudes my collection of StarWars New Jedi Order novels!
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Aug 28, 2017 17:12
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My guess: eaten by ghosts.
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Aug 28, 2017 17:21
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JcDent posted:So a secret society brings them together in Kuro? Because reading Unhallowed Metropolis, I have a hard time imagining why people from such different backgrounds would meet and work together (unless they all wake up in the same room clad in black spandex and there's a morning radio programme playing). One big problem with UM is that there's no shortage of adventure seeds, but not a lot of campaign seeds. Your PC group isn't compelled to stay together long-term by anything built into the setting; it's up to the GM to contrive that. What aggravates this problem is that while pretty much everything involves fighting monsters, the monsters themselves don't really work together or have a hierarchy. You can hunt a Dracula, hunt a Wolf-Man, hunt a Frankenstein, or fight a horde of mindless zombies. The other big problem is that there's nothing you can do that isn't just polishing the brass on the Titanic, so to speak.
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Aug 28, 2017 17:39
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UM does the thing that most not-actually-punk things do, which is not deliberately building itself to lead towards players building their own guillotines.
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Aug 28, 2017 17:44
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Can someone post a spoilered breakdown of what happened to the nuke in Kuro because I've skimmed through the main book before and I was wondering what was up with that? Masakado made it go away
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Aug 28, 2017 17:55
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Can someone post a spoilered breakdown of what happened to the nuke in Kuro because I've skimmed through the main book before and I was wondering what was up with that?
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Aug 28, 2017 17:59
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Belatedly, listening to that just makes me want to shout at game writers, "No, seriously, have some idea what characters do in your game, and have some idea why they'd do it!" I really, really like Degensis outside of its mechanics and some parts of its lore, but this is a huge problem it has. "Why are all these violent chucklefucks traveling together" is a question thats often pretty hard to answer.
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Aug 28, 2017 18:21
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You managed to find the mechanics in Degenesis? It really is a game best suited by having like 3 of your players play the same class with one person being something else whose skillset is required by the job they're doing as far as I can tell though.
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Aug 28, 2017 18:25
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| # ? Dec 11, 2024 03:07 |
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Well, I'm happy that we'll have nerds willing to comment on the rules if/when I get to them. I'm not an expert on rules in any game.
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Aug 28, 2017 18:36
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