FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

«‹›8 »

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Kurieg posted:

So what's RPG.net's opinion on the forced pregnancy furries and the Nazi Rape Carousel?

Look if you can't handle serious mature adult roleplaying themes then maybe you're in the wrong hobby.

# ¿ May 11, 2016 21:52

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 06:56

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

We talk a lot about nineties RPG design and its pathologies in this thread, and I thought I'd sit down and try to enumerate all the traits that make an RPG a specifically nineties RPG. Here's what I came up with:

- Dice mechanic that tries to be unusual and clever and mostly ends up not working and is hilariously broken
- Badly implemented ads/disads system
- Balance is a joke
- Rules are often very vague or confusing and don�t work and this is excused away (rule zero! make your own decisions! if you�re getting bogged down in the rules you�re missing the point! excuse me it�s ROLE playing not ROLE playing, etc.)
- Lots of talk about narrativism with no mechanical support, or counter-mechanical support (i.e. hyper-detailed combat rules)
- Complicated world setting with tons of factions and subgroups
- Factions relate to each other as bitchy high-school cliques
- Often too many redundant factions
- Little in-setting explanation for cross-faction group cooperation
- Often, little explanation of what your characters are supposed to DO
- Game and setting have dozens of proper noun Words used to describe things, with their definitions hidden away and always much later in the book than the Word was first used. Words are often pretentious and portentous and derived from latin or something fancy like that.
- Books full of padding, both content (in-character narration, unreliable narration, fiction, potted history, documents and journals) and layout (space-eating page borders, big margins, large fonts
- Actively unreadable layouts (busy, grey screens, handwriting fonts)
- Often terrible organization (bad tables of contents, useless or missing indices, etc.)
- Supplement treadmill
- Iconic characters (unkillable, do everything, don�t follow the actual rules, story is about them not the PCs)
- Metaplot threaded through the supplements. Switcheroos, revelations, what is really going on, changes to the settings, secrets that were kept from the GM
- Scenario support is often very lacking (because of the metaplot)
- Obvious fishing for media tie-ins (novels, video games, comics, TV series, whatever)

Have I missed any?

# ¿ May 12, 2016 01:05

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

LatwPIAT posted:

Skill bloat.

I dunno about skill bloat being a 90s RPG thing. Lots of RPGs from the 80s had too-long skill lists - I'm thinking of GURPS, Rolemaster, and BRP. Call of Cthulhu's reputation as a light game system that gets out of the way is belied by its giant character sheet full of nonsense like Operate Heavy Machinery and having Diagnose Disease and Treat Disease and Treat Poison as separate skills. And the 90s-est RPG of them all, Vampire:the Masquerade and its oWoD offspring, smartly had very limited skill lists. Plus, the most important RPG of the 2000s (D&D 3e) was pretty skill-bloaty itself (Rope Use, anyone?).

megane posted:

- Very few, if any, definitively statted-out threats / monsters / whatever. Those that are provided are often just random things included for flavor reasons, instead of having any sort of "power curve."

True. Lots of games were really bad about giving you things to fight (too much like icky old D&D, I guess). Trinity was a great offender for this - one of the big adversaries were the Aberrants, the enemies that your Trinity super troopers were literally created to fight. The core book gives you...exactly one example of an Aberrant to fight, it's abilities are described entirely in terms of the PC's powers (despite deriving their powers from a completely different source than the PCs), and no real rules for customization or special abilities.

wdarkk posted:

Dexterity as a god-stat?

A problem for a lot of 80s games (like GURPS) but you're right, it's often seen in 90s games along with its partner "nobody noticed how abilities that give extra actions completely break the combat system".

AmiYumi posted:

No thought given whatsoever to where starting PCs are supposed to fit into the creator's intricately-defined world, or what they're possibly supposed to do? Can also double as 80s RPG if you add the caveat "what are starting PCs supposed to do that God-NPCs wouldn't have already taken care of".

Covered by "Little in-setting explanation for cross-faction group cooperation" and "Often, little explanation of what your characters are supposed to DO"

Robindaybird posted:

*Tendency to try to reject basic good versus evil paradigms - and overshoot 'moral ambiguity' so far that it ends up with everyone being evil, stupid, or both and a setting that's hopelessly bleak or actively hostile to people trying to change things.

Yep.

quote:

*Lack of editorial control so writers will boost their pet factions (i.e: Wick's Scorpion Clans, oMage traditions vs Technocracy wank, that Revised Children of Gaia book), often causing problems with game balance or setting consistency,

A key part of the supplement treadmill - crank 'em out quickly and don't spend a lot of time editing them or rewriting them to conform to the rest of the game line

quote:

*Attempts to tackle mature topics become tone-deaf and sometimes downright offensive.

Yep.

Halloween Jack posted:

A 1-6 system for measuring character statistics.

Yeah, mostly cargo culting on Vampire (which was itself mostly taken from Shadowrun).

quote:

Moving toward narrative mechanics..coupled with a weird fascination with "realism."

Yep. Lots of talk about narrative techniques but almost no mechanic support for them, plus lots of "realistic" gun porn nonsense, and likely for the reasons you mentioned. The Vampire Player's Guide had details of multiple kinds of light antitank rocket for you to use in your game of subtle undead politics. My favorite example was Kult, which mixed Clive Barker-esque reality headfuckery with dozens of pages of rules for explosive templates and fields of effect for claymore mines.

quote:

Grandiosity.

Eh, bloated elfgame self-importance goes way back.

quote:

The Auteur GM

Oh yeah, the Wickian idea that the GM is telling an elaborate story and your characters are mostly there to play mute witness and occasionally carry a message between important NPCs or maybe fetch them something. And you're right, one of the reasons the 1990s was bad for scenarios was that so many of the published scenarios of the era were just the PCs watching iconic NPCs play out important metaplot events.

theironjef posted:

-Includes an utterly worthless CD-Rom full of pregen DMPCs and word files.
-Fearless about announcing supplement books in the core rulebook.
-Addresses pronoun usage before defensively settling on "he" as the default.
-Half-assed incorporation of religious mythology the author is clearly unfamiliar with.

Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Hostile V posted:

So this real world ethnic group is like, magic, man.

Oh man these views on sex and gender aren't gonna age well.

You know what's cool and edgy? Leather and drugs and drinking. Neither of these will have a downside.

You gotta, like, reject corporates culture and yuppie culture, man. Industry and adulthood are the devil.

Throw some cleavage in there.

Hello local bar, we are 90s RPG and we're cooler and gonna rock harder than D&D! This is our first song, "We're Telling A Story, Not Playing A Game".

All facts, although 1970s RPGs had their share of naked maidens tied to altars and chainmail peekaboo bikinis in their artwork. The 1980s had some pretty retrograde ideas about sexuality and gender, too (random harlot table, "homosexuality" showing up as a mental illness on random charts, that sort of thing).

Alien Rope Burn posted:

- Thematically tenuous quotes to lead chapters, particularly to show your knowledge of '80s glum subculture music, misanthrophic philosophers, or even worse: Yeats.

Supposedly White Wolf switching from using goth band lyrics to old romantic poetry in their chapter headings because someone noticed that reproducing who stanzas of Cure or Sisters Of Mercy songs was a good way to get into expensive trouble with song's rights-holders and ASCAP.

# ¿ May 12, 2016 06:55

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Doresh posted:

I think you're missing "Insistence on using a unique, 'flavourful' dictionary that not only replaces most if not all standard roleplaying terms, but also makes it impossible to understand the setting unless you've skimmed the entire book for the random chunks of dictionary entries. Twice."

It's in there (as " - Game and setting have dozens of proper noun Words used to describe things, with their definitions hidden away and always much later in the book than the Word was first used. Words are often pretentious and portentous and derived from latin or something fancy like that.")

And I'd forgotten that Vampire had three complete sets of vampire terminology to describe all the vampiric things. Oy.

I suppose we should also draw a distinction between games that use elaborate made-up terminology for setting elements (camarilla, kindred, rotschreck), which is understandable if deeply irritating if overdone, and games that come up with their own terms for common RPG terms (it's not a campaign it's a Chronicle, those aren't PCs they're Heroic Personae, that isn't a combat round it's an Action Interval, etc.) which are always infuriating.

Evil Mastermind posted:

One of the original Clanbook: Brujah templates was Vanilla Ice.

Wasn't Rob Liefeld one of the Toreador templates?

# ¿ May 12, 2016 18:53

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Kai Tave posted:

I don't know if it's a 90s game thing specifically but one reason no one uses premade example characters out of an RPG is that without fail they're always built incorrectly. I don't mean "they aren't at peak optimization," I mean they're built using faulty math, older versions of systems before stuff was changed, have abilities that they couldn't legally take due to lacking prerequisites, and are otherwise riddled with mistakes...and they're frequently terrible at their purported areas of expertise as well.

Nah, lots of 80s game did that too, which was infuriating because the #1 way to try and make sense of a complicated and badly-explained chargen system was to try and back-create the sample character. I figure it was one of those things where the chargen rules were tweaked in the final edit but no one bothered to re-do the sample character to match them.

I seem to recall a number of the premade template characters from Shadowrun 1E/2E not being strictly buildable using the rules.

# ¿ May 12, 2016 18:57

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Marvel Super Heroes RPG, TSR 1984

# ¿ May 16, 2016 05:54

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Bieeardo posted:

Wow, I thought that was a compilation of the old Ecology of... articles from Dragon. Glad I was too poor to buy it when it was in print!

Same. I was always baffled by the fact that it was a boxed product, because a collection of largely-fluff discussions about stuff in the Monster Manual seems like the absolute last thing that you'd need to ship in a box. I looked it up, and the box contained...seven 32-page books. That's it. No cards or counters or maps or stand-ups or props, just something that could have as easily been put in a 240-page book.

TSR was a deeply weird company.

# ¿ May 17, 2016 20:26

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Alien Rope Burn posted:

What, and let people see the books before buying them? That might cost you a sale if you let them be discerning!

I'm thinking the reason is some mixture of this and "well, we need to get our money's worth out of our long-term contract with that box printer"

# ¿ May 18, 2016 01:00

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Dungeons and Dragons is a game of fantastic imagination, and by fantastic imagination I mean possessing an entire plane of nothing but ooze and more ooze and monsters made of ooze that is actually the original ur-source of every puddle of slimy wet mud across the entire multiverse. Did I just blow your mind?!?

# ¿ May 18, 2016 21:44

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Halloween Jack posted:

Really, they have many of the faults Ron Edwards identified in fantasy heartbreakers. But as Ron himself said, in the late 70s D&D but fixed! was commercially viable.

When Ryan Dancey was introducing the D20 system/license/idea circa 2000, he mentioned Palladium FRPG a lot. Dancey pointed out that of all the games that tried to compete with D&D in the "pseduo-medieval fantasy adventurers" space, only PFRPG was any kind of ongoing success, and it was literally just some guy's pile of house rules on top of a D&D clone. His point was that fantasy RPGers weren't interested in new and innovative systems, they wanted to play D&D, and we know this because the two best-selling fantasy RPGs year after year were 1) D&D and 2) a D&D clone. Everything else (Rolemaster, RuneQuest, Earthdawn, Chivalry & Sorcery, etc.) ended up as an unsustainable niche product.

# ¿ May 25, 2016 15:22

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Crasical posted:

"Trust me, this is all tied into the overarching metaplot! Which I can't tell you about yet! Just trust me, this will all make sense eventually! It's not just it's own weird little side-game! It's important! Just wait!"

This is so loving nineties I think my wallet just grew a chain.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2016 14:14

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Of course, Moorcock did the Elric series as a reaction against Tolkien, so though some of his criticisms are valid, he may have protested a bit too much. Of course, there's the treatment of women in Moorcock's novels; you can only be so progressive, I suppose. I, for one, quickly had my fill of reading about a character heavily motivated by incest, but that was part of the his anti-Tolkien reaction and not necessarily having the same sort of moralizing Tolkien did. YMMV.

I always read Elric as being the mirror opposite of Conan. Thin, weak, utterly dependent (on drugs or demon magic), tall, pale, unhealthy, a powerful sorcerer, born to massive aristocratic privilege and decadence, bookish - he's basically every character trait of Conan flipped on its head.

And yeah, a lot of "progressive" stuff from the 60s and 70s is really retrograde w/r/t women.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2016 22:23

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

I thought the alt-history in Aces & Eights was so you were free to do your own thing without worrying about being tripped up by "actual" history. And also to create a dynamic (Mexico vs. Union vs. CSA vs. Deseret vs. Natives) that's a little more unstable and interesting than the historical (USA systematically crushes Natives, railroads and suburbs follow in its wake).

And the interesting thing of A&8 is the sheer number of economic minigames embedded in the rulebook. Want to run a saloon, pan for gold, drive a herd of cattle to market, string telegraph wire, or gamble for a living? There are full rules for doing all of things (and much, much more) in the core book. It reminded me fondly of Gangbusters, the TSR game of the Roaring Twenties that had full rules for running protection rackets, selling bathtub gin, paying off cops and judges, and extorting protection money from businesses.

A&8 is certainly not everybody's cup of tea, but I'm glad it exists.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2016 06:42

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Halloween Jack posted:

There are rules for spice and for prescience, but as you can see from the previous chapters they're sketchy and/or bad. The deep ecology elements are in the GM advice, wherein you're encouraged to present the Entourage with social and practical issues that are more complex than they first appear to a budding colonialist.

The thing about this game that's going to disappoint a lot of people is that it depicts the status quo right before the events of Dune. After WotC acquired LUG, the authors were working on a Dune Adventure that would've been on the same scale as The Great Pendragon Campaign and take the PCs through the events of the first novel...but it was scrapped along with the planned D20 version and the entire game line.

Yeah, the Dune RPG was really one of those 1990s games where the core rules were just a bare skeleton that had just enough detail to get a campaign up and running but all the real meat of the setting would be found on the Supplement Treadmill. The game is so clearly set up for you to buy the Bene Gesserit book and the Mentat book and the Spacing Guild book and the Houses Of The Landsraad series of books and the Arrakis box set and on and on, so being cancelled after just the core book really cripples it as a game.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2016 22:44

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

A lot of early RPG players and designers came out of the miniatures/hex-and-counter wargaming hobby of the 1970s. I bought all of my early RPG books and dice at a hobby store called The Command Post, which was mostly full of SPI/Avalon Hill wargames and diorama and modeling supplies, in a town full of military bases and retirees.

Before D&D, Gyagx's big hit game was a fiddly WWII minis ruleset titled "Tanktics". The Traveller company (GDW) got their start with a big, complicated 1941 EastFront game titled "Drang Noch Osten". And so on.

Early RPG culture largely emerged from the milsim hobby, blended with things like the SCA.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2016 16:20

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Alien Rope Burn posted:

To be fair, milwank RPGs have largely been on the outs for the past two decades or so? I mean, the last one I can think of is Spycraft 2.0, and even that's a bit of a stretch.

Also: the rather misbegotten TWILIGHT: 2013 updating of T2K.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2016 20:44

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

gradenko_2000 posted:

Thank you! I tried doing a melee attack in the Hand to Hand Combat System as well. It seems like it's harder in HTH to get to the far-right end of the damage tables, although I suppose that's to be expected/is realistic.

The word filter wins again.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2016 15:49

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

gradenko_2000 posted:

Question for the thread: what was the first edition of GURPS like?

I know some of the big changes going from 3rd to 4th: how costs for basic attributes changes and how defenses were calculated. I never hear about the earlier versions though.

Pretty much the same as 3E. Much smaller skill and advantage and disadvantage lists, no system for magic or psi or superpowers (those books had yet to be written). I think the way guns and shooting worked changed massively between 1E and 2E, but I can't remember the details. Using 1E/2E/3E adventures and supplements interchangably is pretty smooth.

4E is the one that redid a number of core mechanics and is crunch-incompatible with everything that came before.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2016 23:51

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Yeah, I've gotten halfway through it before I just went limp and started emitting steam.

It's also incomplete. The real meat of Glorantha is in the details of its gods and religions, and there's a companion product to the Guide (that should be about the same size) covering that topic which will be along in a year or three.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2016 18:13

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

wiegieman posted:

Why does anyone actually live in the Madlands? Is there something stopping them from leaving?

The same reason Eskimos live near the arctic circle, or Bedouins live in the sahara desert - all the other good land is taken and held by people stronger than them, and they've long adapted to living in that place.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2016 15:18

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

What I remember most about Tomb of Iuchiban was that it came with a large blank grid map and a bunch of punch out tiles to represent the rooms and the semi-random way they were arranged, and that it added nothing to the module and seemed to be there solely to justify the effort and expense of making it a boxed module.

It's not even like TOI is an old-school mapping puzzle like many classic D&D adventures (including Tomb of Horrors) - it's just a series of linked rooms, each one of which has A Clever Trap in the middle and An Exit or two on the other side of the Clever Trap. Plus the whole thing is full of handwavey nonsense about how the shadowlands taint is strong enough to warp space and time so the geometry is unreliable and doesn't always make sense, which is the opposite of the effect created by laying square tiles on a square-gridded map.

Just baffling.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2016 17:57

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Yeah, you had early games like James Bond and Ghostbusters that were definitely meandering towards genre-based mechanics. Call of Cthulhu, too, in its own way.

I'd add Paranoia and Toon to that batch of mid-80s efforts at genre-driven RPGs.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2016 03:25

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Night10194 posted:

In better hands, it could even be the theme. A satire of heroic violence, of the idea that if you're hurting 'bad guys' it's okay to do whatever you want to them.

It's been done.

Not particularly cleverly, but it's been done.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2016 14:28

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

wiegieman posted:

Earthdawn barely gets away with having elves and dwarves by making the elves primitive, regressed tree dwellers (who happen to be from the BLOOD FOREST) and the dwarves the Italian renaissance who are the rulers of the world in the place of the humans who are warmongers.

Glorantha also has interesting variants - Elves are living bipedal plant-creatures who are part of the forest hive-mind, while Dwarves perceive themselves to be cogs of the World Machine working on the Plan to repair the damage from the Great Darkness.

And yeah, I've seen collections of oh-so-liberal Euros suddenly break into Kristallnacht 2 Nacht Harder as soon as someone mentions gypsies/travellers/pikeys.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2016 18:18

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

In additional to poison, Gygax D&D also had this weird obsession with bottles of flaming oil and who was and wasn't allowed to use them.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2016 05:07

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

I thought the D20 license and the advent of supercheap PDF creation and distribution would mean an end to the Fantasy Heartbreaker, but I guess nerds will never, ever, ever stop making "AD&D but with more stuff that is also more realistic and complicated" games.

I'm a little baffled that this thing got enough KS backers to go to production. People were really willing to spend $5300 on some no-name's ideas about rolling dice to hack of limbs and contract dysentery? What a world, what a world.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2016 01:10

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Night10194 posted:

Once again this game is genuinely missing its potential for hilarity.

I have to say, Middenard is a lot more...harmless and silly than hateful. Like, it's dumb, sure, but look, BIRDLORDS can come out of it.

It's so weird. The guy tried to make PEASANT: THE SHITFARMING but just couldn't commit to seeing his grimdark vision through, so we get Exalted wushu powers and the Anachronism knack so you can go full Briscoe County Jr. in your Dung Age Medieval game. It's certainly better and more interesting than what I was expecting, which was pages and pages of rules for rape and child slavery because realism.

Has anyone ever done an everything-is-awful medieval era RPG that actually worked? WFRP and Vampire: the Dark Ages are the only two that come to mind.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2016 14:37

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

I get a real Elder Scrolls vibe from this game. Trying to be Very Serious, but the engine has enough glitches and edge cases that you can make all sorts of ridiculous cartoon weirdness happen just going strictly by the book.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2016 15:54

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Halloween Jack posted:

It's pretty telling that people who've never played RPGs before seem to pick up "storygames" a lot better than they do games that try to model the differences between .40 S&W and .357 SIG. I think there's a good argument to be made that the way most RPGs have been designed for decades, when played from a young age, actually has the potential to miseducate people in how they read stories--always asking the question of how some science-fictional, fantastical phenomena works in terms of a mechanistic virtual reality.

This particular nerd trait actually predates RPGs - I see it in things like the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and the Star Fleet Technical Manual and even the appendices in Lord Of The Rings. That 1978 Poul Anderson essay On Thud And Blunder captures the mindset pretty well. The idea that there's a concrete, consistent, concrete foundation underlying your favorite stories that you can engage with is a really seductive part of fantasy worldbuilding.

The same trait also manifests in one of my least-favorite nerd mindsets - the way that so many nerds can only engage and critique things is by calling out plot holes, things that are "unrealistic", or ways that it contradicts canon or the original work it's being adapted from. Nerds love doing it because it's 1) objectively provable/disprovable and 2) a great way to assert how much smarter you are than the creator. Dear God, the number of people I've heard rant about the Duracell battery analogy and the laws of thermodynamics as their entire takeaway from the first Matrix film...

# ¿ Dec 1, 2016 18:09

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Terrible Opinions posted:

It certainly doesn't ruin a very good film, but the batteries was a really dumb change mandated by executives to the script.

Also I know trap sprung, etc.

It's a valid point worth making, but I was just amazed at how many nerds kept coming back to it to the exclusion of everything else (like discussing the acting, the stunts, the themes, the cinematography, the influences, the art direction, etc etc etc). Like the whole point of the movie was to give them a chance to point out how much smarter they were than the movie. It's seems like such a stunted way to go through life, only engaging art by trying to notice flaws that make you feel better about yourself.

Which also leads to things like TV Tropes, where engagement with art is done entirely by trying to reduce it to a series of pre-constructed tropes. That movie was nothing special, it was just a Five Man Band with a Will They Won't They central dynamic that gets subverted by the Double Betrayal by the Gary Stu.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2016 18:21

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Halloween Jack posted:

That said, it touches on a problem that I also see in CP2020 and a number of other games: PC types that just don't play that well with each other out of the box. Like, a "mechanic" profession makes sense, along with a Media and a Solo, but what are these three characters doing together, at the same place, and the same time? It took a very long time for designers to figure out that just because three characters can be part of the same team on a TV show doesn't mean that they should be together in an Adventuring Party.

This is one of the worst RPG design mistakes, especially when it involves the different kinds of characters using completely different rules systems that don't integrate well (the most famous of these is the computer hacker from cyberpunk games, which gives the phenomenon the name "the Netrunner effect"). Parties full of characters who each have their own specialties are always a problem, even with a good GM who makes the effort to make sure every character gets some time in the spotlight.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2016 23:27

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

unseenlibrarian posted:

I am reminded of Anima: Beyond Fantasy, where every single power system works differently; ki is nothing like psychics is nothing like magic is nothing like summoning with entirely different ways of building and employing powers for each version. I can only imagine if they'd ever done a sourcebook for the secret supertech rulers of reality where you had to deal with hackers.

(Spoilers: the default setting had secret supertech rulers of reality who had an entirely different power system that was never fully described but PCs could buy a merit that let them use hidden supertech if the GM threw it at them.)

It's OK if the kung-fu guy uses a different system than the psionic guy who uses a different system than the magus, as long as they're all standing shoulder-to-shoulder fighting bad guys. I'm talking about when the hacker tries to break in to Arasaka Regional HQ, and he and the GM play out the hacking rules while the rest of the party sits back and checks Facebook on their cellphones for 30-45 minutes, or when the "face" guy does his fast-talking and streetwising and contact wrangling while the rest of the party waits for him to finish. A party of two combat samurais, a face guy, and a hacker are basically playing three separate and almost non-overlapping games, and that's a real problem.

D&D 4E tried to fix this by giving everybody a role to play in combat and the ability to jointly participate in non-combat skill tests, and boy oh boy did that trigger the grognard verisimilitude sensor arrays something fierce.

vvvv: p much

FMguru fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Dec 2, 2016

# ¿ Dec 2, 2016 00:16

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Nessus posted:

Yeah, you see this kind of glib reading with a lot of stuff. I really perceived it with Prometheus, where it was like, instead of engaging with this film, people went "Ha ha, Charlize Theron's character got a really long distance figure wrong and then didn't make the right maneuver while fleeing a rolling object!"

And it was like, Christ, dude (in the collective sense).

It's really just "Ha ha! I caught them out in a plot hole! Look smart I am and how dumb they are!" which is just a tremendously impoverished way to engage the world.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2016 00:58

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Evil Mastermind posted:

The only game I've ever seen that handles the decker/everyone else problem well is, believe it or not, Torg. They establish that time in the GodNet operates at more or less the same speed as the real world, so a hacker moving from one node to another or attacking some ICE is just "an action", then you go and see what everyone else is doing. The explanation was that it was so people could use the GodNet for long periods without having to worry about them going nuts due to the extreme time dilation.

Torg's GodNet also bypasses all the tricky questions about the interaction between cyberspace and realspace because it's literally an alternate dimension with its own rules and if you die in cyberspace you die in real life because that's just how it works. Also you can be attacked by literal demons when you're in the GodNet, or be sucked physically into it and emerge somewhere else, or just about anything else cool you can imagine because it's not an interface to a series of networked servers, it's an actual magical sub-dimension, and your efforts to try and rationalize things about it just don't register.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2016 01:34

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

I think my favorite thing about MIDDENARDE is the way that the guy just keeps infodumping his stupid, irrelevant, and almost certainly false "Did You Know?" factoids about Ye Olde Medieval Times into his game. That's something of an old-time gamer trick, being a font of all kinds of dubious information about history and how weapons really work and how the modern military does things. We've all had That Guy at the table who wouldn't shut up about bullets really kill people by the hydrostatic shock waves they create, haven't we?

# ¿ Dec 7, 2016 16:48

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

PurpleXVI posted:

God, I need to vent my bile over the creator of Middenarde somewhere. So I share my criticism of his adventure modules with him, point out completely unanticipated stuff like the players sailing from Southampton to London. And he says to me that he thought London was landlocked.

"Oh, there's a river that runs through it. I bet you're going to tell me off for not doing enough research now."

Once again proving that the relationship between some nerd creating something "immersive" and "realistic", and that person's actual understanding of how the world works, is perfectly inverse.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2016 20:12

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Doresh posted:

The dick shoe research clearly had priority here.

That, and those beeswax suppositories.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2016 20:14

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Night10194 posted:

Oh, I get that. I'm saying that I'm sick of every goddamn dimension hopping RPG not letting me ride a magical lion while I try to get the flux capacitor into position to shut down a rampaging chrono-bot that is trying to eat the middle ages.

The new Timewatch game (by Pelgrane, using the Gumshoe system) seems to be all about using hi-tech weapons while criss-crossing the timestream battling psychic velociraptors and swarm-minds of radioactive cockroaches. I've just picked up the rulebook and have barely begun skimming it, but I did see a picture of Henry VIII knighting a caveman.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2016 16:34

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Night10194 posted:

The biggest thing to remember is that most fans of an RPG don't actually get to play it very often, and get to DM it even less, so most won't have that much experience with the mechanical flaws of the system they love. If you never actually get to play TORG, then I imagine the fact that the mechanics that make it unplayable are staying in is going to annoy a fan less.

This goes doubly so for 1990s Supplement Treadmill line games, in which the biggest fans don't actually play it much or at all but instead read the sourcebooks and tie-in fiction and have very very strong feelings about setting details and metaplot elements and largely ignore the actual system. Even the overheated edition wars are done is the context of changes to the setting rather than changes to the system.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 23:02

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 06:56

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Night10194 posted:

Are there any legit mechanically solid games from the early-mid nineties that people can think of? I'm curious.

I've heard good things (mechanically) about the Silhouette system that DP9 used for Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles, Tribe 8, and other games.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2016 23:16

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

«‹›8 »