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I honestly just retooled and reskinned D&D 4e to run Super Robot Wars for years, of all things, because the at-will/encounter/daily chassis translated really well to the whole paradigm of techniques and finishers (whether they be secret moves or one-shot superweapons) that tend to feature in those games. But I think one trap that some mecha systems do fall into is falling too much in love with the idea of 'war is hell, anyone can die at any time!' which... isn't that core to existing real robot shows, honestly? Gundam gets a lot of rep for it but even something like Votoms coasts on its main character being hyper-skilled that there's not that much ambiguity about his survival until the end because shows with that actual kind of idea, regardless of genre, aren't that rewarding or enjoyable to stay with until the end. It's extremely difficult to maintain a narrative if you sell your audience's emotional engagement too cheaply, too often.
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Mar 9, 2019 08:07
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Nessus posted:Sure, Gundam (especially the original) is basically a big War Story, but it's pretty much translating the toyetic fun aspect of robots into war movie tropes, not making the actual core drama of the series involve who has the most wargritty sociopath PTSD foot-pounds behind his Super Thrust Death Cannon (NOT a LASER or any PSYCHIC CRAP). Our game went from like level 6 to about level 14 which was about the perfect arc for it because Paragon Paths were the perfect time to go "you got a mid-season upgrade!" whether it's the inner goddess in the robot awakening or getting a Custom Ver. Ka (Endless Cucco) or whatever else my players wanted.
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Mar 9, 2019 08:24
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Joe Slowboat posted:I do think this is one place where 'author stance' is really meaningfully different from 'character identification' as a game strategy? I think the main thing is that you really have to be specific because "Gundam" gets used as a shorthand a lot and people have wildly differing opinions and ideas of what it represents; like if I said I wanted to be a Gundam protagonist and my idea is "be in a magical fluffy-winged robot that pirouettes beams everywhere blowing everything up in sight" that's a different expectation and game than tactigrim Robot Vietnam combat
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Mar 9, 2019 23:41
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I've had a couple of friend-adjacent groups be really into AdEva and it already kind of knew it wasn't my cup of tea, but I didn't know the sheer depths to where it went, whew.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:58
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Night10194 posted:Adeptus Evangelion I think that's Demonbane unless you were being tongue-in-cheek
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Mar 11, 2019 22:03
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Night10194 posted:You could also try to evoke the theme of GROWING UP by having angels grow up during battle and turn into second battle forms after starting out larval! "In many ways, Evangelion is a story about a boy who fails to become a man." is a sentence that summons forth the dread power of Deadhorsiel, 69th Angel of Anger at the Protagonist For Failing to Perform Masculinity (and you could make the real argument that in the original show ending, Shinji does, in fact, make the transition from child to adult as part of his ability to accept himself and that it's only the stunted little poo poo of End of Evangelion that fails to grow). Oh, or if you want to get to a really magic realm of Theme, you could have the angel AGE REGRESS characters, mentally, so they act like small children! Also, in such a campaign, the Eigenhart Initiative should be central because they want humankind to grow up and they're all about personal responsibility! Speaking of Super Robot Wars and this though so much of this reminds me of the kind of extremely toxic fans who think Evangelion was fixed forever in some of the SRW titles by having Shinji grow up to become a MAN!! because he got Bright Slapped!! and other shows of toxic hypermasculinity and I wouldn't be surprised if it all stemmed from the same source (/m/ you said?). But yeah "Themes are only for the ambitious GM" is a whole nother level of kettle I can't even grasp
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Mar 11, 2019 22:16
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Night10194 posted:I actually quite like the idea that Shinji would do much better in a genuinely supportive environment. The original show version of him clearly wants to do what's right, just...well, he's a terrified 14 year old kid with depression and a bad home situation. Yeah, in the Alpha games he gets to spend time and empathise around other war-affected kids his age like Camille from Zeta Gundam and even gets to be the one to give some much-needed advice to people who're going through their own initial bad times (like Kira in Gundam Seed).
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Mar 12, 2019 06:03
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Not to give AdEva credit for anything, but a game where all the PCs are Concerned Parents where they go around knocking on various battleships, super robot laboratories and NERV headquarters to give proper information on the physical, emotional and mental wellbeing and healthcare of the kids that go out and ride in robots is a pretty funny idea.
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Mar 12, 2019 20:10
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Night10194 posted:It's legitimately an important lesson. I defend crunchy game design because I think when it's done well it can add a lot to a game by giving you mechanical levers to engage with both as the GM and the player that can end up making the fiction easier to write. But everything you do is taking up your reader's time and memory, so even if you're going crunchy and complex you want to cut out everything you can. You always have to ask 'do I need this subsystem' or 'how often is this going to get used' or 'does this need to work differently than the core mechanic?' As someone who's run games by coding complicated custom mechanics onto base systems in things like Maptools and Roll20 and found out she didn't even really want them about 2 years in favour of just telling narrative stories, I can empathise. Sometimes it doesn't even go as far as your readers and you just realise you yourself don't need what youw rote.
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Mar 13, 2019 22:20
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There's so much to unpack there, but your note on what nerd culture views as dramatic is particularly meaningful.
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Mar 14, 2019 20:52
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The topic of forgiveness is an interesting one to me when writing characters (in say, the context of introducing antagonists in tabletop games) when it gets me to explore the reasons why we are willing or not willing to let go and how we (often subconsciously, shaped by the media we consume) often have double standards on whether we forgive one person or not. And that's not even getting to the space of how rehabilitative or redemptive processes are often just as harming, if not more harmful because of the attitudes that some people have where once you commit a wrong, you just stop being a person to them, period.
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Mar 15, 2019 00:21
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By popular demand posted:I hope this means no more anime talk. Let me tell you about the Kantai Collection tabletop rpg
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Mar 15, 2019 21:10
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Young Freud posted:Please tell me you can make your own ship-woman. I want General Belgrano-chan. It’s been a while but I think you can make oc ships yeah
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Mar 15, 2019 21:21
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Davin Valkri posted:Wouldn't that just be one of those dense wargames that first inspired Gary Gygax (e.g., where the term "armor class" comes from)? Nah iirc it was a jttrpg in the same vein of say Meikyuu Kingdom
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Mar 15, 2019 21:23
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Oh no now the onus is on me Too bad I’m leaving for Japan for two weeks no hooo hoooo hoooo (In all seriousness it’s just a harmless random table heavy game like double cross is. If I can find the doc file with the English translation I might one day do it)
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Mar 15, 2019 21:27
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I know it's from a while back but Night10194's review of Double Cross reminded me of this thread (I've been using the advice! even if I still don't have a game) and while I was in Japan I was glad to be able to find a Table Talk Roleplaying Game section at a K-Books: It was pretty astonishing to see that what I assume are the original rules come in a pretty dense, small manga-size booklet, assumedly black and white; with this in mind the layout from the translated PDFs online honestly make more sense, in how centred everything is when you consider the publication paper size. Also tangentially related, I knew Call of Cthulhu is huge back when I used to follow the Youtube serial TRPGs of various characters making licensed Call of Cthulhu games (my favourite one was Reimu, Youmu from Touhou teaming up with... L from Death Note and Inogashira Goro from Solitary Gourmet of all people), but it wasn't until I saw it that it hit me how huge:  And finally, it was also amusing to see:  I'm the derpy goblin in the banner sleeve
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Mar 18, 2019 11:53
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I'll be the first one to cop having played Exalted and not even KNOWING what the Great Curse is because we didn't bother with it in our short-lived game Though I guess I did enter via the FF7 link because someone said "you can have a buster sword called a daiklave in this and you can slot materia in it too" and I was like "awesome!!" at age 13
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Mar 20, 2019 23:14
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You know, on the topic of 'i got into exalted because someone said i should play this anime game (alien rope burn is right, it wasn't that anime really) because of ff7' I remember being like 'you get limit breaks in this game?? awesome!' But no they're not super cool hyper moves they're like the opposite of that!
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Mar 22, 2019 13:34
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god what IS it with exalted and having so many things that indicate whether or not you'll get pregnant if you gently caress like again with the 15-year old memories even back when i was a teen i knew i was going into uh oh territory when the gm started talking at length about tea that acted as contraceptive pills
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Mar 23, 2019 13:00
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In my limited experience stunting just made the game really narratively weird because the incentive to get bonus dice just made everyone try to overact even when the situation or narrative didn't call for it like sometimes you can just talk to the guy or unlock this lock you don't have to also do triple backflips Also yeah as a fellow veteran of MUSHes it really depends what you want to cover and even with length readability is a prime factor; you can have a single paragraph dense block that's harder to read than a few of interspersed action and dialogue.
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Mar 24, 2019 22:11
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