|
Leraika posted:also the Horus Rangers, if we're gonna crib from lancer some more. RA is Zordon. Horus Rangers, directed by David Cronenberg
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2024 21:10
|
|
|
|
| # ? Sep 18, 2024 22:41 |
|
|
 Sparkle Stars Part 2: I'm just an ordinary middle school student, until, one day... Okay, now we're ready to start playing! We need character sheets and writing implements for every player, a single program sheet to track the campaign, and a deck or two of playing cards (jacks, queens and kings numerically count as 11-13, with aces being 1 or 14). This is accompanied by little chibi magical girl doodles that will give helpful little sidebars, and... huh, they look kinda familiar...  I am not the deepest expert on the mahou shoujo genre, but I recognize that's Cure Blossom with a duck on her ribbon and Cure Marine with a pudding on her ribbon. A lot of the character art is very obviously somewhat chibified Heartcatch Precure fanart. Which makes sense, I gather it's one of the better regarded Precure seasons and from a graphic design standpoint it has an artstyle that lends itself to small instruction manual doodles like this. But yeah, this game is not shy about its media influences, down to the example scenario snippets and the sorts of plot beats the mechanics emulate. I would believe you if you told me this was the Official Precure Tie-in RPG. But anyway, the first thing we do is create a character. This is something that, if you wanted, you could just write out all the fluff and backstory yourself, but the game assumes that a lot of this is gonna be randomized based on drawing cards from the deck. The player is dealt a hand of four cards by the GM (in this game referred to as the GP, or Game Producer), which they can use to sub out unwanted draws, so it's not totally left to chance. There are also elements of shared worldbuilding in this first setup phase, and in those cases all the players draw a card and decide amongst themselves which of the options everyone most vibes with. To demonstrate this, I will be making TWO characters, randomly generated, A-Chan and B-Chan. First we decide the Star Base, which sounds like the orbiting space station we all hang out in, but is more accurately the shared hobby or job or school activity or whatever that is the primary social bond of all these weirdos. A-Chan got "same school sports team," but I'm gonna go with B-Chan's draw of "family," so these are probably siblings which isn't something you see super-often in these kinds of shows, so that'll be neat. Next we draw for our civilian identity, which is functionally our age bracket. An ace-10 draw sets you as the bog-standard 6th grader, which is what A-Chan gets, while B-Chan drew a face card, which sends her to another table that has decided she is a 4th or 5th grader, just a little younger than us (it would have been possible to get some out-there results here, like an infant or a celebrity or an old person or a literal space alien). So yeah, A-Chan is the bossy domineering big sister and B-Chan is the snot-nosed troublemaker little sister, so far so good. Now it's time to get to the more magical side of Magical Girls. We have to decide on a shared Sparkle Type, the motif that our magical girl team is all gonna be themed around. B-chan drew "flowers," but she's been getting the lion's share of weird choices, so we'll concede to A-Chan's pick of "mythical creatures." Another set of cards picks out our color, with associated theming based on our Sparkle Type. A-Chan is The Yellow heroine who soars like lightning, Sparkle Thunderbird! B-Chan, in constrast, is The Green spirit who frolics in forests, Sparkle Dryad! These superhero names should be accompanied by Symbols, some small easy-to-draw individual logos you can put on all your branded merchandise. Now, a Magical Girl is only as good as their villains, everyone loves a good Dark Kingdom or what have you. This is also decided via card draws to decide their name and broad evil goals. Drawing a Queen tells me their evil goal is to fill the world with... landmarks of some sort, huh. A seven of clubs tells me they are the (evil totalitarian government-sounding word) of (scary thing related to their goal). A bit of creative massaging of the prompts gives us the Labyrinth Bureau, where seated in their maze-like futuristic technodrome fortress, Minister Minos seeks to ensnare the world and all its fantastical elements in maze-prisons! The fiend! Okay, so that's a lot of the fluff sorted out, now we can move on to the stats, the actual mechanical crunch now that we have some mental image of what kind of people our characters are. There are four of them, and at character creation you get 10 points to distribute, with at least one in every stat. You have:
It is handily demonstrated in this little comic here, with more Legally Distinct Tsubomi, Erika and Itsuki  For this example, I'm gonna give A-Chan 3 Heart, 4 Body, 1 Bonds and 2 Charm. She has convictions she believes in and cool-headed athleticism, but is a bit of a loner and not big on the whole little kid "magic" thing. In contrast, B-Chan will have 2 Heart, 1 Body, 4 Bonds and 3 Charm. She's gregarious and makes friends easily, and has lots of toyetic items and magic tricks up her sleeve, but is relatively frail and not super hot-blooded about heroism. It's a very warrior/wizard dynamic. Next we have a bit more character background and personality details, under the banner of the (Blank) of your Heart. Exactly what it is, the "flower" or "book" or "song" or whatever depends on the theme of the show, but it's some symbolic core thingy that everyone in the world has deep in their heart that makes them who they are on a fundamental level. To normal people it's invisible and imperceptible, but this is what the Bad Guys seek to steal or destroy in people, and what you as a Sparkle Star must protect. Also the bit of the character sheet you write it in looks exactly like that big crystal thing the Desert Apostles use to suck out people's Heart Flower and make monsters of the week in Heartcatch. In the character sheet, this has a specific name and an important personal symbolic meaning, and if you can't come up with one, this is yet another thing with a random table. A-Chan's Beast of the Heart is Garuda, which the cards say represents "finding happiness together." B-Chan's Beast of the Heart is Erato, who the cards have decided represents "Sympathy." Really these act as sort of prompts for character arcs they might undergo as the game goes on, with A-Chan maybe opening up a bit more to people and B-Chan maybe becoming less of a prankish brat. Next to this is a box for setting notes and bits of useful info on your character. This will get filled in more as the game progresses and you flesh out your character, and can give guidance on how you act during play. It's here suggested that each player should now take turns coming up with one thing about another player’s character, to give some fun weird texture they might not have otherwise. The character's player can reject suggestions they REALLY don't like, so you wanna workshop stuff a bit. A-Chan has suggested that Sparkle Dryad is terrified of bugs, and B-Chan has made it canon that Sparkle Thunderbird gets flustered and loses her cool composure around cute boys. Yes this has mechanical implications, but we'll get to that later. Now all that's left is to decide which of our player characters is the First Sparkle, aka the lead character of this fictional cartoon show. It isn't called "Sailor Scouts," after all, it's "Sailor Moon," there's gotta be a central star that gets the most screentime. Though honestly this is mostly fluff and doesn't have much in the way of actual mechanical effect, it's just for show. It's even suggested that you make the youngest or most inexperienced player the Lead Sparkle, because in these kinds of shows the leader is usually the kinda clumsy relatable girlfailure who is in over her head and must grow into their role. Hell, you can make a different player Lead Sparkle every game session if you wanna make it a rotating ensemble cast. One last touch is giving each player three Sparkle Hearts, which are sorta consumable brownie point thingies that'll come up later. And with that we're done with character creation! Look out Labyrinth Bureau, nothing can cage the hope and passion of the sisterly duo of Sparkle Thunderbird and Sparkle Dryad, the Mythical Monster Sparkle Stars! Next Part: Girls are icky and lame! I get to pilot a giant robot!? Asterite34 fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Aug 5, 2024 |
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2024 21:13
|
|
|
drat I'm loving this game. I might steal 'make up something minor about another pc' for my games in general, because it's cute
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2024 21:47
|
|
|
Asterite34 posted:I would believe you if you told me this was the Official Precure Tie-in RPG. Not official but yeah. The original form of this was specifically a Heartcatch PreCure fan RPG called Hato*Puri (the shortened form of Heartcatch PreCure in Japanese) and they did a pun with the title by making the main girls Pigeon (Hato) and Flan (Purin). Hato & Puri. Very clever. The Rangers stuff didn't come in until the supplement, but we decided to smoosh it all together into a single volume since the bonus stuff from the supplement really completes the game, in my opinion.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2024 21:48
|
|
|
Getsuya posted:Not official but yeah. An entirely sensible decision, because Super Sentai and Pretty Cure share so much DNA in terms of structure and tropes that any ruleset that could simulate one can already do a decent job simulating the other with the barest token reskinning.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2024 21:52
|
|
|
They're all toei properties and treated as basically sibling IPs targeting different demographics. Hell the very first precure makes a reference to the famous final snowfield fight scene of Kamen Rider Kuuga (another toei franchise, one that traditionally skews a little older than super sentai but not terribly so). Precure, being anime and thus made by turbonerd artists, is a little more glib at giving shoutouts to the toei toku shows than the other way around.
|
|
#
?
Aug 5, 2024 22:00
|
|
|
Asterite34 posted:
I was nodding along with this thinking "This can make Gundam can't it? At the very least Gundam Wing because it's basically magical girls already." And then you said there robot rules.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2024 01:03
|
|
|
G-Gundam is more magical girls than Gundam Wing was. I'm saying this as a positive thing for G-Gundam. Doumon even has a loving henshin call and a transformation sequence.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2024 04:44
|
|
|
G Gundam is the most Sentai/Magical Girl out of the Gundams,
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2024 07:02
|
|
|
Asterite34 posted:Star Rules is where things get weird. The above rules are more oriented around genre emulation and immersion in the conventions of the show. The Star Rules are the extra-difficulty advanced rules that break kayfabe and acknowledge the reality of actually making a TV show, where now you have to contend with out-of-universe creative pressures you have to work around. We'll get to those in their own time, but suffice it to say they give a very different experience, where what used to be a sort of guided improv exercise suddenly turns into loving Pandemic. Kurieg posted:Doumon even has a loving henshin call and a transformation sequence. Traveller posted:Humbly asking for Cure Monarch, fighting evil in the name of love, justice, and entirely too many SSC-30 High Penetration Missile System warheads for full battlefield coverage Leraika posted:also the Horus Rangers, if we're gonna crib from lancer some more. RA is Zordon. Mecha_Face fucked around with this message at 12:11 on Aug 6, 2024 |
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2024 11:51
|
|
|
Mecha_Face posted:Excuse me?! Oh boy. I'm really looking forward to this now. I tried Glitter Hearts, but something about it just made it roll off of me. I loved the ideas behind it, and how easy it was to homebrew, but I dunno. It just didn't do it for me. But having to deal with Executive Meddling in a TTRPG? This sounds right up my alley. Oh man, you're in for a treat  quote:I do have issues with systems that try to leave anything about characters up to random chance, ESPECIALLY important fluff like "what is my character/team themed as", but I assume there's wording in the book that says "Yea you can just decide this stuff"?" My understanding is that all this stuff CAN just be written in at the player's discretion without consulting the cards, but the random tables are there for people who aren't that familiar with RPGs to just auto-generate a character for a one-shot or something. Or just as a creative writing exercise to work around.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2024 13:13
|
|
|
Asterite34 posted:
Honstly Sparkle star looks to be so flexible as a systems to run both magical girls and mecha theb I won't be surprised if somebody would attempt to run a game of WtA as an alternative to W5. Ghost Armor 1337 fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Aug 6, 2024 |
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2024 14:05
|
|
|
Yes! As long as you run it as though you're producing a WtA TV show that has a monster/incident-of-the-week episode structure. I don't want to spoil mechanics before they're reviewed so I'll hold off for now but I have a good list of how to refluff it to be just about any kind of show you want (with a fitting episode structure). The whole 'show' thing is a load-bearing element, but as long as you're okay with that you can use this system for all sorts of stuff.
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2024 14:13
|
|
|
Mecha_Face posted:
that was me lmao
|
|
#
?
Aug 6, 2024 18:18
|
|
|
Sparkle Stars Part 3: Alpha, Rita's escaped! Recruit a team of teenagers with attitude! As has been mentioned previously, most modern Magical Girl teams of the "transform into superheroes and fight goofy monsters" mold are something of a sibling genre to the venerable tokusatsu shows, with Precure being full of Super Sentai and Kamen Rider references especially (which makes sense, Toei owns all that stuff after all). So it was perhaps inevitable that the original publication of Sparkle Stars would eventually get a supplement to more fully emulate the transforming hero genre that's already a natural fit for the ruleset, and in turn it was natural for Silver Vine Publishing to bundle all that into the english release as one book. So today we'll be looking at the character creation and unique rules for being a Power Ranger, the Spark Rules. Let's see what character C-Chan can generate from the cards! The first major difference is in determining our character's Origins. Tokusatsu heroes tend to have slightly more in-depth backstories than magical girls, and a bit more up-front lore about how we got a super-suit that lets us fight monsters. Interestingly this involves drawing TWO cards, representing the source of our power (a wizard, an unethical megacorp, dinosaurs in the Hollow Earth, etc) and our particular relationship to it (they trained us, they gave us a magic potion, we're descended from them, we were good at a videogame they put out as a recruiting tool Last Starfighter style, etc). This is a thing that everyone in the Sentai Team would do and then decide which they liked best, but for simplicity I'll just go with C-Chan going alone. In this case, they got Space Police (3 of Diamonds) and A remnant of a modern academy dedicated to your Power Source that was destroyed by the enemy organization (Jack of Clubs). poo poo, looks like someone blew up the Land of Light and our guy here is the last Ultra Fighter left. Or, for Western comic fans, he's Kyle Rayner. Another group decision is the Spark Type, where we pick our group theme. Again, we pick TWO cards, because these sorts of shows love mashing two concepts together to create awesome word salad titles. In this case we have "elements/nature" and... "pirates/cowboys" of all things. Huh. Well our fictional tv show needs a title, so we're gonna go with Spark Stars: Eco-Space Marshalls. Our specific guy also needs a color, and drawing a 10 gives us a choice of "Gray/Colorless/Rainbow." I don't think we've really worked our way up to Rainbow yet, so our transforming elemental space-cowboy will be Marshall Gray. There is a table here for figuring out our civilian identity, which is a bit looser than the Magical Girl table (transforming henshin heroes tend to have a wider age range than Magical Girls, after all), but in this case it seems we're pretty much a middle-schooler like the standard. As with the Sparkle Rules, the Spark Rules have instructions for figuring out your series' evil villain organization. The villains' goals are usually a bit more prosaic and less high-concept than the magical girl villains, but it is a little more intricate. For example, they have two lists of evil end-goals and the means by which they intend to get them. Our villains who destroyed the space police academy intend to become the very best there is (Queen) by conducting bizarre experiments (8), so I guess we're dealing with some transhumanist conspiracy. There's also a fun thing with naming the evil organization, in that there's one chart with just sorta general evil organization terminology like "Empire" or "Society" or "Gang" or whatever, and another chart that is just random scary words, and you draw one card for the first list and THREE cards for the second and just mash them all up. Marshall Gray has to contend against the machinations and monsters of the Proud Outsider Devil Force. Oh God, it's alien transhumanist Boogaloo Boys. Thankfully, we have a fortified position from which to strike, because the rules give us a Secret Base. A random table tells us that behind the innocent front of a humble pawn shop we're always hanging around, there is "a door that connects to a different world/dimension where your Power Source is/are." So I guess we have a warp gate back to the ruins of the Space Police Academy. And naturally, you can't have a base of operations without a Zordon, so we can select a Commander, some NPC that acts to give us our marching orders and generally act as mission control/support. Drawing an 8 gives us a "Robot/Computer/Residual Memory", so I guess the space academy's AI is still functional and helping us as best it can now that we're the last Eco-Space Marshall. After this the character creation proceeds pretty much like the Sparkle Rules. Even a little simpler, because we don't really bother with the (Blank) of the Heart symbolism. Our villains aren't concerned with such metaphysical tinkering with people's souls, they're more into materialistic murder and mayhem, and for our heart we just write "JUSTICE." Stats work identically to the Sparkle Stars, ten points to spread around. C-Chan has decided to give Marshall Gray 2 Heart, 3 Body, 2 Bonds and 3 Charm. They're mediocre at giving big speeches and forging bonds with others (probably traumatized from that whole massacre thing) but by god do they have good PhysEd at Space Police Academy, and also an elemental six-shooter for the real tough space-hombres. You then give yourself three Brave Hearts (which are mechanically identical to Sparkle Hearts, but just renamed to not turn off the male demographic) and bam, you now have a henshin hero! But wait a minute, you may ask; where's my fuckin' Giant Robot? Well, here's the thing. Explaining the giant robot requires explaining the actual mechanics of the game a bit in a way that jumps the gun a little. Like I said, this bit of the rules was originally a later supplement that was bundled into this english release. And in this case you can kinda tell these rules were written assuming you'd already read rules that are later in this book, but published earlier. It's slightly awkward. So I'm going to give a very abbreviated rundown of the gameplay a bit, and then the robot will make sense. So a round of play in Sparkle Stars (or "scene") is basically a trick-taking card game, where everyone has a hand and plays a card and adds the relevant stat depending on a suit played and narrates out what that corresponds to in terms of in-universe actions, and the highest number wins and takes the trick. There's a lot more to it, but that's the quick broad idea. The GP has their own hand of cards and their own stats, and kinda sets the scene and difficulty. Now at any point in this, you can pay one Brave Heart to just declare "I get in my giant robot." And the game encourages you to go nuts kitting out your robot with all the missiles and laser eyes and beam-swords and jump-jets you can think of, and to feel free to keep adding more as the game goes on because gently caress it, these things always reveal hitherto-unknown abilities at convenient times.  See? Japanese Spider-Man here knows what's up. What does this do mechanically, like in terms of crunch? Basically... nothing. Your stats aren't really changed, you don't reshuffle your hand or anything, gameplay continues more or less as normal, it's just now your stats represent using energy shields or rocket-punches or syncing up with your dead mom's ghost in the machine or shooting a beam or whatever (was it mentioned that this was based on an earlier Evangelion game?) In terms of flavor and in-universe description, there are things you can do now that you really couldn't have done before, and now there's human-scale interactions you can't feasibly do inside a giant robot, but it's all set-dressing. But as Power Ranger aficionados will know, the individual Zords always kinda sucked. The big ticket item is the Megazord. After a certain point in the session, when the GP plays a face card to start off a scene, they can declare that a Giant Monster has shown up. At this point, the GP's stats all shoot up by +5, so essentially every card they play has an extra 5 tacked on to whatever the card says, in addition to their regular stats. This is a kinda "oh poo poo" situation, because that can most likely stomp the players unless they get very lucky with their hands, this is mid-season escalation of stakes here. And at this point, everyone can just pay their Brave Hearts, get in their individual giant robots, and combine into a super-robot. What good is a super-robot? Well, super-robots have Combination Attacks. A player lays down their card, and the next person in play can throw down a card (ideally of the same suit) that, instead of being counted as its own action, adds its value to the previous card. And that can keep going for every player just contributing to this gently caress-off unstoppable Shining Finger Sword. Now, Marshall Gray here is the only tokusatsu Spark Star in the game, I didn't make another character, so he can't really benefit from these combining robot rules, can he? Well that's one of the strengths of this game: a la carte rules. All these special boys-only-no-girls-allowed rules can all be back-ported into the OG Sparkle rules and it all just works. You can in fact have the cast of Tokyo Mew Mew fight Shocker and it all has the same mechanical framework, since most of these random tables are just for fluff anyway. It's not like big combination attacks are unknown in the Magical Girl genre, that poo poo happens all the time, it's a matter of flavortext whether it involves a gattai mecha or just some other generic Super Mode or whatever. Or maybe A-Chan, B-Chan and C-Chan can all play together in the same game and they can all have giant robots. Make it a Magic Knight Rayearth RPG!  See, Dark Precure here is getting into the spirit of things! Next Part: Deep-diving into actually playing this game, and trusting in the Heart of the Cards Asterite34 fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Aug 7, 2024 |
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2024 03:34
|
|
|
It is important to declare to people you are THE EMISSARY OF HELL as you summon your spiderman bot.
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2024 04:34
|
|
|
I can’t believe his majesty ripped off calling the city “the city”, which spirit of 77 did. They even went so far as to make the Mexican city you go to “La Cuidad.”
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2024 06:31
|
|
|
 His Majesty the Worm Appendix A: Sorcery I really don't understand the distinction between chapters and appendices, here. Whatever. There are four "Far Realms" in HMTW, and they each come with ten spells. The Far Realms flavors are zombies, Cthulhu, Faeries, and angels. You know all the spells of the realms for which you have talents.  HMTW posted:The Wastes To cast a spell, you need to have the appropriate Talent from the Path of Wands. You can take multiple Talents and have multiple schools of magic. Nothing is stopping you from being an ur-Caster. To cast a spell, you must have its component. Each spell has a unique component, it takes up a slot in your gear, it is not consumed in casting. You can have the components for 20+ spells if you want - but the rules for "What are you holding" still apply - getting the component from your pack is a Cups action. Getting components (reminder) is from the Prepare Components city action - so when spellcasters return to the City, they have to choose between getting new components and getting new gear. (But components aren't consumed - if you don't lose them in the Underworld and you don't want to change out your spell selection, you're good.) To cast a spell, hold the component in your hand and spend 1 Point of Resolve. (The other primary use of Resolve is to gain favor on an action.) Some spells have bonus effects for more Resolve. (As a reminder, for each pact you have, you can charge 1 Component during Camp, and get Resolve-free casts of the spell.) There are some small rules - you have to be able to see what you're targeting, etc. If the relevant talent is in training, you have to spend 1 XP. We get rules for Concentration, naturally. Iron is the anti-magic. You can't wear iron or have too much of it on your person. Creatures cloaked in iron are immune to direct magical effects (so you can't hit an enemy wearing plate, but you can cause the roof to drop on their head - you can't hit them with a fireball but you can ignite everything around them). We get a section called Magical Effects that explains that spells are somewhat minimalist - the GM should be permissive in their use and allow players to be creative. Then we come to Maleficence. This is the "bad wizards" table - screw up, and you're going to have a very bad time. Things that trigger Maleficence:
Triggering Maleficence means drawing a card from the Minor Arcana and comparing it to the magic school's appropriate table. Here are excerpts from the Wastes and Weald:  Then we get the spells. Here are two from the Wastes.  HMTW posted:Brainfever And that's Appendix A. Next time, Alchemy!
|
|
#
?
Aug 7, 2024 20:41
|
|
|
Sorry for off topic but His Majesty The Worm is back in stock.
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2024 00:50
|
|
|
CitizenKeen posted:Sorry for off topic but His Majesty The Worm is back in stock. Only a couple hours until my paycheck!
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2024 00:55
|
|
|
Sparkle Stars Part 4: Okay, who opened up the Clow Book and got goddamn cards everywhere again!? Okay, now that we have our characters all set up, we can actually start playing this game in earnest after we briefly touched on it last post. First things first, take out the Jokers, we're gonna need those later. It is at this point the GP can broadly decide what sort of story we're telling this session, that corresponds to a single episode of a tv show. As you can imagine, there's random "draw a card" charts for this if you're short on ideas, or the GP can just wing it. It's a bunch of prompts ranging from "the local community center is gonna be shut down!" or "a love triangle with a Character of the Week" or "a superficially unpleasant person shows up with a weird hobby, are they as bad as they seem?" or "an enemy Commander is using a cunning and cowardly scheme to beat you," stuff like that. But this sort of plotting is less important than the Clear Condition. Before play proper starts, the GP pulls a card from the deck. Take special note of the suit, and the number. If a game session is like an episode of a tv show, this is like an editorial mandate from the director to the writer's room. This card is the Clear Condition, in that in this session you should be aiming to have THIS many scenes hit THIS particular sort of story note.  As I mentioned before, the main gameplay of this RPG is essentially a trick-taking card game, with every trick being a scene. For example, if the GP drew a 5 of Hearts, then the players should try to collectively take at least five tricks with a Heart-suited high card, representing that this episode had this many big memorable dramatic emotional moments. If the players don't manage this, the episode is considered a failure, and that has... consequences. As an aside, it's a little surreal seeing a super-weeb magical girl RPG reminding me of 500 or Oh Hell or other similar card games that Midwesterners of my grandparents' generation would get together and play when they wanted to kill an afternoon and also a bottle of sloe gin. But anyway, here the GP deals everyone (including themselves) four cards, and takes the remaining deck and splits it into two roughly equal piles. These represent the A Part and B Part of the half-hour episode, with a commercial break in-between. Every round, the GP lays down a card (while drawing a fresh card from the A pile), the Scene Card, which is accompanied by some narration setting the scene corresponding to the suit. The Players go around and can do one of the following:
The scene goes round and round, with the Players putting down cards and adding the value of the stat of the corresponding suit. This total value is the Performance Score, and the Player with the highest Performance Score takes the scene (ties between Player and GP goes to the Player. Player/Player ties go to whoever acted first). This doesn't necessarily mean that the Player totally effortlessly succeeded at whatever they were trying to do, but more represents that that character got the most screentime and was the most entertaining memorable part of the scene. The GP has stats and a Performance Score too for that initial Scene Card, and if they take the scene, it means that the main characters got upstaged by a villain or a side character or something, and that's not a great sign! This continues with players drawing cards from the A Pile until it runs out. At which point, we have an actual Commercial Break scene. The GP throws down a card, and the Players can choose to Act, but only with Diamond cards. This represents your character actually showing up in the commercial to hock some colorful plastic junk. Once this concludes and someone gets a nice bonus scene, everyone starts drawing from the B Pile of cards and play resumes. It is likely around this point in play that we are going to see those Joker cards we set aside earlier come back into play. Of the two Jokers in your average deck of cards, the GP keeps one, and the Players hold onto another. Who specifically holds onto it is decided amongst the players, ideally the "main character" of the episode. At any point (but probably in the back half of the episode for dramatic pacing), the GP can throw down their Joker as a Producer Scene. This is a scene where the main characters aren't the focus, like Queen Beryl chewing out the Dark Generals or something, and usually presages the villains making their big move and starting their attack. The Players can't Act here, they just each draw a card. They can, at this point, also trade cards freely from each others' hands to try and sure up their positions for the coming big confrontation. At any point after this Producer Scene, a Player can play THEIR Joker. This is a suitless wild card that automatically takes the scene and represents them doing their ~*Transformation Sequence*~. At this point, everyone can transform and begin the big climactic fight scene! There's no special "combat rules" or whatever, it follows the same format as the slice-of-life scenes, because this is a genre all about mundane middle school girl stuff taking on huge grandiose importance while conflicts against magic supervillains are sometimes met with blase or slapsticky anticlimax.  Once the B Pile is exhausted and there's no more cards to draw, the episode is over. Ideally people should pay attention to how many cards are left to the episode can hopefully wrap up in a neat little package, but if it doesn't then that's fine, everyone loves a nice "to be continued" cliffhangar. Next Part: speaking of "to be continued" cliffhangars, the thrilling conclusion of basic gameplay concepts, including long-form campaign progression!
|
|
#
?
Aug 8, 2024 02:00
|
|
|
Asterite34 posted:Okay, now that we have our characters all set up, we can actually start playing this game in earnest after we briefly touched on it last post. First things first, take out the Jokers, we're gonna need those later. It is at this point the GP can broadly decide what sort of story we're telling this session, that corresponds to a single episode of a tv show. As you can imagine, there's random "draw a card" charts for this if you're short on ideas, or the GP can just wing it. It's a bunch of prompts ranging from "the local community center is gonna be shut down!" or "a love triangle with a Character of the Week" or "a superficially unpleasant person shows up with a weird hobby, are they as bad as they seem?" or "an enemy Commander is using a cunning and cowardly scheme to beat you," stuff like that. But this sort of plotting is less important than the Clear Condition. Do the numbers go all the way up? Like if the GP flips a king is everybody just hosed because they've got to win 13 tricks? Is the GP also trying to get the series canceled, in terms of their strategy in playing out cards?
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2024 00:07
|
|
|
Glazius posted:Do the numbers go all the way up? Like if the GP flips a king is everybody just hosed because they've got to win 13 tricks? The numbers do, in fact, go all the way up, and you can be randomly given a wildly unreasonable demand from the production staff. The book actually says, and this is a direct quote, "Even if you draw a really tough Clear Condition, don’t give up! Face your trials with courage and hope!" As for the GP's strategy, they aren't actively encouraged to try and screw you over, but their ability to do so even if they wanted to is somewhat limited. They're beholden to the hand they're dealt as much as anyone, and have to keep playing cards until the draw piles are empty and they have no cards left in their hand, so they can't really hold anything back good OR bad. They're more a fair arbitrator who sets the scene and tries to string together a coherent narrative out of the chaos. They want everything to succeed, but you know, it's show biz, things happen.
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2024 00:35
|
|
|
Getsuya posted:Yes! Honestly this reminds me of a thread on RPG.net where violent or mature Trpg's setting are adapted into 80's cartoon, similarly to how violent action moves also got cartoon spinoffs (Rambo, Conan the barbarian, RoboCop, Toxic Avenger) And there's even a post that's basically pitch for a WtA show: quote:I think I hate myself a little for this one.
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2024 01:30
|
|
|
Sparkle Stars Part 5: Moon Prism Power, Level Up! Last part we looked at the flow of a game session. If this were a one-shot, we'd pretty much be done. But this game does support longer campaigns, or "seasons." A 13-episode campaign is recommended for people just dipping their toes into committed RPG campaigns. In these cases, we have some post-episode cleanup to do. Firstly, you level up your characters. Remember the scenes your characters took during the game? You wanna keep track of those, especially the suits. Because for every two tricks you take of a suit, you add a permanent +1 to that stat. For example, if you took five tricks (2 Hearts, 2 Clubs and a Diamond), your character would get a +1 to your Heart Stat, a +1 to your Bonds, and your Charm would remain unchanged, though you should make a mark next to that stat since these carry over between sessions, so getting another Diamond next time would contribute to getting more stat points. Now this system has some... implications. Firstly there's the obvious one, that you're more likely to TAKE tricks using a suit you already have a high stat in, so you will get better faster at things you are already good at. I guess you can think of this as your character solidifying as the story goes on, their initial muddier characterization settling into a more defined niche. Secondly, scenes are a finite resource that goes to whoever plays the high card, so not only can characters get uneven amounts of stat increases, everyone is to a degree in direct competition for them. All the characters are, in a sense, fighting for screentime. This also has the issue that in a sense, having more Players actually makes the game harder, in that if everyone is trying to one-up each other scrabbling to win a hand, everyone will chew through cards faster and there's fewer hands overall to go around. There's only so many minutes in an episode after all, everyone vying for attention can gently caress up the pacing like those bits in Bleach where the action constantly cuts between the bloated cast of side characters all having their own fight. Ideally, even though there is an element of competition, Players should still treat this as a coop game and on occasion be willing to take a step back and be a side character so someone else can have the spotlight. You want everyone to have a chance to shine, for a couple reasons. For one, the GP also has stats, and as the season goes on, the stakes of the story get higher and their stats increase. They don't get points from taking scenes, they just have an even stat distribution that goes up each episode. So for episode 1 they have a +1 to everything, episode 2 has a +2, and by episode 3 they have a higher overall stat total than a fresh-out-of-character-gen Sparkle Star could ever have naturally. It's the equivalent of them taking eight scenes every episode, and that's a lot. The only weakness is that the stats are all uniform, so a minmaxed character can beat them in their area of expertise even with a worse overall stat total. As the campaign goes on, the actual number on the cards get less and less important relative to the character stats, since as far as I know there isn't really a CAP on how high stats can go. The ideal way to play is for characters to specialize and be willing to give the spotlight to whoever is most well-suited to beating the Clear Condition of the episode, while still giving other characters good moments when appropriate just to keep everyone sorta up to speed. In essence, the characters start getting more defined in relation to each other and work as a team! Speaking of the Clear Condition, after everyone levels up, we should check to see if we met the requirements. Here we are introduced to the Unhappiness Gauge! This is sort of an abstracted idea of how happy everyone (such as the small children being entertained by this colorful nonsense) is with the show. It goes from zero to double the planned number of sessions in the campaign (so up to 26 for a 13-episode season).  As you can see here, the Unhappiness can go up astonishingly fast if you both play poorly and are very unlucky, and only slowly creeps down with effort. If you draw a King for the Clear Condition, get no relevant scenes, and then draw another King at this stage, you can literally go from zero to 26 in one episode. And if the Unhappiness Gauge hits the top, the whole campaign is a failure and your show is cancelled. So even if you have a really high unreasonable Clear Condition, it's important to try and still get as many relevant scenes as you can just to staunch the bleeding a bit, and hope you get some easier ones later to hopefully repair the damage with excess scenes. That's pretty much it for the mechanical book-keeping, but there's one more thing: in between sessions, you add more fun setting details to other Players' character sheets, helping fleshing out the history and quirks and feel of characters. This sort of addition to other Players' characters is a bit limited, but there is no such limit to your OWN character sheet. Write a goddamn novel about your own Magical Girl, all their backstory and hobbies and hopes and dreams and extended cast of NPCs that relate to them somehow. It's been a whole lot of crunch the last update or two, so it's good to remember that this is still a game big on creativity and telling fun stories! Next Part: miscellaneous variant rules, solo play and Sparkle Stars: The MOVIE!?!
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2024 01:53
|
|
|
"We either get our poo poo together or we get got like Game of Thrones" is certainly a game pitch.
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2024 02:23
|
|
|
This sounds like a strong contender for new omni-system
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2024 03:35
|
|
|
Asterite34 posted:As you can see here, the Unhappiness can go up astonishingly fast if you both play poorly and are very unlucky, and only slowly creeps down with effort. I believe the creators expressly stated that they wanted the players to always be aware that they are one step away from cancellation, which will encourage them to work really hard on cooperating to meet the quota while still focusing on their own growth. I think it's a very good effective ticking clock to keep this from feeling too much like an easy storytelling game. You do have to invest at least some focus in the mechanics and stat balance. Nessus posted:This sounds like a strong contender for new omni-system It's very focused mechanics-wise, so it'd be hard to use it for anything that doesn't engage with the concept of creating a show, but story-wise yeah you could run just about any kind of story you want with only some minor tweaks to the fluff. Here's some ideas I've had about stuff it'd be well suited for: Superhero Cartoons (GM plays the Joker when either the supervillain attacks or the meteor is heading for the town or volcano is exploding etc/Players throw down the Joker to dive into a nearby phone booth and change) Professional Wrestling (the pre-Joker is the pre-match drama, then the GM throws the Joker down for the villains' entrance, Players throw down for their folks entering the ring and then the rest of the episode is the fight. Instead of magic/items, Diamond is used for signature moves.) Carebears/helpful fuzzy friends (GM's Joker is whatever bad thing is happening to a kid, the Players throw down the Joker for the Carebears or whoever to finally reveal themselves to the kid of the week and use their rainbow magic to help) Police Procedural (This is a bit more tricky but I'd say the GM Joker would be a massive twist in the case and the Players's Joker would be the big breakthrough a-ha moment where the detectives crack the thing wide open. Diamond could be for CSI bullshit.) Magical Thief (GM Joker is for the handsome detective showing up at the scene of the theft and the Players throw their Joker down to transform and use their magic to give them the slip) Reality Competition (GM Joker could be for the council to vote someone off after the competition and the Players Joker is for some kind of dramatic reveal? This one's fuzzy though I like the idea of Diamond being used for cunning/betrayal type poo poo folks love in these shows) Mecha Anime (GM Joker is the big monster showing up and Players Joker is them getting into their big mech to fight it. This is basically already in there thanks to the Spark Rules, you'd just have to house rule a bit to make the robot a more core element of each episode.) The possibilities really are endless. As long as you've got that Part A/Part B structure plus two turning points (one of the GM Joker, one of the Player Joker) you've got something that will slot into this system very smoothly. It's also a fairly fast-paced game for playing on a forum since everyone is just playing their card and taking their action. Nothing else to calculate out until the end of each session. And yes I do hope to see a few PbP threads of this popping up after the game comes out. Maybe I'll run one!
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2024 03:51
|
|
|
i.e: Mecha, it'd work less for Gundam-type dramas, but the Super Robot stuff like Mazinger/Getter Robo? it definitely has legs. I imagine you can do some Heist games in the style of Lupin III, or even if you somehow got people who are tabletop gamers and massive racing nerds a Speed Racer-style (or just ridiculous Sports Anime) antics
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2024 08:45
|
|
|
The only thing I'd change about that Werewolf show is swapping out Ethan for an actual Native character. Joke about how his name rhymes with Steals-the-Past here.
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2024 14:30
|
|
|
Robindaybird posted:i.e: Mecha, it'd work less for Gundam-type dramas, but the Super Robot stuff like Mazinger/Getter Robo? it definitely has legs. G Gundam would totally work! The other ones not so much though yeah.
|
|
#
?
Aug 9, 2024 14:36
|
|
|
Sparkle Stars The Movie Part 6: A Grand Adventure in a Thrilling Game World! Here we have a little bit of a miscellaneus grab-bag of optional rules to simulate specific sorts of genre conventions of the Magical Girl genre, as well as alternate modes of play. Firstly, this game supports GM-less play. Since a lot of the GP's mechanical powers comes from them playing the cards they draw, you can somewhat simulate the flow by just flipping the top card of the draw pile and deciding that's the Scene Card, then either players take turns narrating and setting the scene based on the card that was drawn, or the whole group brainstorms it collaboratively. The GP Joker is shuffled randomly into the deck, so the villains can make their move at basically any time, so it can make for a bit more unpredictable play. This is recommended for a group of veterans who can all think on their feet and already have a feel for the game's vibe. This can also apply to entirely Solo Play, turning the game into a sort of journaling RPG. As above, you just flip the top card of the draw pile to simulate the GP, and try and meet the Clear Condition (which if you feel like going easy on yourself, you can just set to 7). To simulate having a party of companions, you can create a helper hand, a dummy hand of four cards that you can play one to three cards to simulate your companions helping you. Or, you can eschew the helper hand and try your luck as a Lone Star, either a solo Magical Girl taking on the world on their own, OR a character from a campaign that's doing one of those spotlight episodes where they have to deal with a crisis without backup. These can in fact be integrated back into the main campaign and have this chalked up as a little side adventure. Wanna play as a Cute Mascot Character, like Luna or Kero or Wanna introduce a new player midway through a campaign, with all the hype and pomp of a mid-season Precure? Sure! New players who come in partway through a campaign have eight + (twice the episode number) stat points, as opposed to the ten of an Episode 1 starter character. During their premiere episode, all the Scenes they take are counted twice. This counts for gaining stats, satisfying the Clear Condition and Unhappiness Gauge. New characters showing off their transformation sequence can be very good for ratings! Sadly though you aren't allowed to exploit this by just having a new character show up every episode. Wanna do a big extravaganza that's gonna maybe give a huge boost to your ratings if it succeeds or possibly totally ruin your show's reputation if it flops? Well then maybe it's time to do a Movie! This is somewhat similar to a normal session, but instead of a single deck of cards split in half, you use multiple whole decks, one for approximately each half-hour of runtime (so three decks for a 90-minute feature length film). You draw a Clear Condition card from EACH deck, meaning you could have to reach goals cumulatively much higher than in a normal game, and likely in multiple suits. No mid-episode commercial break here, instead you have one per player at the beginning of the session, representing the trailers. One advantage your players have in a Movie is getting the collective audience to cheer you on. At any point, everyone can pay a Sparkle Heart and pick a card someone played that round. Draw a card, and if it matches the suit, add its value on top of it (if it's a different suit, add half its value rounded up). You can overcome any obstacle with the power of little kids in the theater waving around their glowstick wands. Now, a key part of the tv show tie-in movie is that it's largely disconnected from the main story. There are, in fact, random tables for determining what made-up faraway country this takes place in, what contrived reason you have to be there, and what dubiously-canonical villain you're facing accompanied by a mysterious ally that will never be mentioned again but will probably get a lot of fanfic written about them. This is basically a set of charts to artificially generate that HeartCatch movie where they go to Paris and help a werewolf kid deal with his dapper dickhead dragon dad. Next Part: Sparkle Star, the Abridged Series
|
|
#
?
Aug 12, 2024 04:13
|
|
|
Asterite34 posted:
This game is so loving sick dude!!!
|
|
#
?
Aug 12, 2024 05:49
|
|
|
Sparkle Stars Part 7: Card Games on Motorcycles This update covers the Digest Campaign Rules, which basically condenses entire sessions of a game into individual hands, allowing players to have the feel of a long-form season but still skipping forward to the good bits if so desired. In that spirit, this will also be a heavily abbreviated post.
There, you did an entire episode of a childrens' action-adventure anime in about twenty seconds. It should be noted that this can be integrated into standard campaigns, with stretches of episodes rapidly done in Digest format and then back to the standard rules. This is for groups who desperately wish to avoid filler arcs or who want that "in-media res" sort of feel, jumping to what feels like a climactic late-season episode while still maintaining some context.  Next Part: Okay, we've had our fun and games, children. Now the kiddie gloves come off Asterite34 fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Aug 13, 2024 |
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2024 03:14
|
|
|
Spears Of The Tisangani for Pulp Hero, from the the Dime Hero Adventures line. Author: Steven S. Long quote:When they learn that the lost half of an antique map has been discovered, Our Heroes must journey into the heart of darkest Africa in search of the long-lost city of Tisangani! But they’d best beware, for one of their enemies seeks to thwart their efforts to find the fabled city. And if they do reach it, they’ll find themselves plunged into a political battle between the king and his warlord, with the fate of all of Africa perhaps hanging in the balance... Scholars estimate that 100 billion people have ever lived, and I’ve read more pulp modules than they have. So trust me when I say this is the laziest published module in the entire genre. There is one handout (a map) and all the text flows in the right order. The 2007 draft I read ended most paragraphs without punctuation, although paragraphs over one sentence had interior punctuation. What makes this module lazy is how little imagination was offered. It has some of the standard tropes, which are used better elsewhere. An old professor invites you over and tells you to go to Africa, searching for the other half of his map that would prove him right. You’re ambushed by people from that nation who try and kill him with a blow dart. (One of the best adventures of my multi-pulp campaign started with a beloved NPC being put into a coma by a blow dart, so it’s a workable cliché.) But there's one thread of this adventure that makes it remarkable among the 60+ I’ve read: its complete disinterest in Africa beyond the stereotypes. The African Warriors of the fictional secret nation have warpaint, shields and spears. Their nation, ethnicity and language are all the same word (Tisangani). And if somehow players can speak their language, the ambushing warriors “clam up” if captured. The module isn’t really interested in them having personalities. After the ambush, the players head to Stanleyville in the Belgian Congo, Where they get the other half of the map without issue and attacked by “street Arabs” with daggers. This module was written three years before Obama was elected. More than 20 years after Temple of Doom Showed Indiana Jones’s favorite companion, Short Round. But we get paragraphs like this: quote:The PCs quickly attract a crowd after they enter Tisangani. Most of the natives stare at them with frank curiosity; a few of the bolder ones might touch them to see if the white color of their skin “rubs off.” Maybe a clever inversion, but we visit a nation of people and only three of them have names. As for dramatis personae: we have the feeble but noble king, the evil warlord, the foreigner who has been sending people against the heroes, and the only competent person, the princess. One might assume that at least the westerner would have some fleshing out, but he’s so one-dimensional I don’t know if he casts a shadow. Here is his only dialogue of the adventure: quote:Looking in the hole in the door is their old adversary — “Colonel” Bruce Forsythe! “Looks like I’ve finally got you where I want you,” he gloats fiendishly The denouement is equally unexciting. You can describe the player’s trek home, or they could do another jungle adventure. The effect that discovering a lost civilization has on the professor who assigned the quest isn’t mentioned. Again, this is a common module archetype: your friend the Explorer wants to visit an “undiscovered” civilization, but it’s secretly taken over by Nazis. You have to deal with their weird ways, and also there are dinosaurs. But even in the 80s, these modules had wrinkles. Jealous witch doctors who cut the guide rope. Hallucination dust and strange blades that make people think they’ve been attacked by transforming panthers. Coded ciphers, drunk and selfish riverboat pilots who meet prospective customers with a gun drawn. Lousy little river towns with dirt floor bars, and rocking chairs looking upon the deep jungle. This module was worth remarking upon because of how little it seemed interested in doing anything new.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2024 16:34
|
|
Ahh, well, I’m sure writing standards of the 1890’s weren’t—quote:2007 draft quote:written three years before Obama was elected fuckin cripes
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2024 16:46
|
|
|
Regalingualius posted:Ahh, well, I’m sure writing standards of the 1890’s weren’t— The original was in 2005, but I was able to find a 2007 version for a buck and a half. What’s worth interrogating, perhaps elsewhere is how often “you go to Chinatown, and it’s Kooky!” was used as a plotline in the 80s, 90s and 2000s without any real subversion. I think it died out because the writers who grew up in the late 80s and 90s didn’t have a yellow peril reference point.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2024 18:02
|
|
|
 His Majesty the Worm Appendix B: Alchemy Alchemy is a second form of magic, other than sorcery. Accessible only by way of the Path of Cups Talent Alchemy, this subsystem lets you turn parts into potions. To be an alchemist, you need an alchemy kit (two spots in your pack) and hermetic bottles. Each hermetic bottle takes up one spot in your pack, and can be turned into an alchemical substance. All you need to do is get some reagents. A reagent is a body part. After you murder something - monstrous creatures only - you can spend a Watch to harvest reagents (one per monster). You write down your reagent, Hermetic bottle: Eyes of slaamander. As a Camp Action, you can Brew Alchemy. You convert as many hermetically sealed reagents into alchemical substances: potions, oils, or bombs. Theoretically reagent can become a bomb, oil, or potion - your pick. Write it down such as Hermetic bottle: Salamander bomb. Potions are beneficial or transformational when drunk. Bombs are thrown and spews its contents in a magical way. Oils are like bombs but a little more controlled - they can be poured or slathered onto things and change the environment. A monster's reagents might only be bombs or oils but not potions, or potions and oils but not bombs, or just oils - the GM should be clear to the players what they're getting. And what are they getting? It's all narrative: if you've got spider fangs as a reagent, you could turn those into a potion (granting wall-climbing) or a bomb (poison bomb) or an oil (stick two things together with webbiness). We get some GM advice for alchemy, like "Steal the creature's powers", "Disregard balance, embrace creativity", and so forth. Every monster stat block comes with alchemy suggestions. There's a page noting that discovering what monsters do is a per-campaign bit of fun - new monsters or variant reagents is part of the experience. And we get this gem: HMTW posted:Can a player read this chapter and get a sense of the alchemical substances derived from the creatures in Appendix C? Of course. They can read a book. We're not cops. Finally, we get a sampling of alchemical substances for each monster in Appendix C (NEXT TIME). As an example: HMTW posted:JINN NEXT TIME - The Bestiary
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2024 18:26
|
|
|
Sparkle Stars Part 8: The Terrible Curse of Minky Momo So far, we've all been enjoying the experience of being part of a childrens' action-adventure show, all the colorful nonsense and friendship and courage and such. And it's been fun. But that's only been half the rules, in the same way as what we see onscreen is only half the story. We as adults are aware of a terrible truth that we overlooked as children: these shows are a capitalist enterprise created solely to sell plastic garbage, and as such are the product of ruthless artistic compromise. All the colors and laughter and cuteness conceal a corporate greed as cold and sharp and cynical as a razor blade hidden in an apple. That's right, we're gonna start covering the Star Rules, where the real Sparkle Stars begins. The Star Rules are the hard-mode rules for advanced players, and its whole conceit is to get meta about poo poo. This isn't about being characters in a Magical Girl show, it's about being in the writer's room of a Magical Girl show. The mechanics aren't just about following the storytelling structure and tropes that organically come up in a fiction genre, this is about writing around the logistical constraints that come from making a television show. But don't despair, constraints can foster creativity! And you're gonna be fostering a LOT of creativity here by sheer necessity. First off, you need money to actually animate all this stuff and build all these miniature cities the monster of the week destroys or whatever. That money comes from Sponsors. Your show has a main sponsor, a toy company who is using this show as a longform commercial for a bunch of dolls and secret base playsets and plastic wands and tiaras and stuff with your faces on it. In addition, each character has a sub-sponsor, a smaller company that can't afford to license the likeness of the whole cast, so they just picked your character to get first dibs for merchandise. The actual nature of the sub-sponsor is determined by a random table, but the specifics are up to you. It could be a publisher who wants to put out a spinoff manga about you, or a record label trying to juice your VA's music career, to a snack company putting your face on squid crackers, to a big pharma company shilling diet pills, it could be goddamn anything. This re-contextualizes a few things. You remember the Charm stat your character has, that relates to you doing magical supernatural things like whipping out your magical transformation item and hanging out with your mascot fairy and stuff? Yeah, now that relates to you doing stuff relevant to your show's sponsors. This is the stat you reference when you go hang out at the Barnes&Noble to research an enemy, or sing a song from your new album to entrance the monster, or regain your strength by eating delicious, delicious squid crackers. Getting a Clear Condition of a diamond suit means this episode's gonna be big on corporate synergy. Now this isn't all just flavor to make your game feel a little more like an episode of 30 Rock. Your Sponsors can make Sponsor Requests, which is some clueless corporate ghoul who has never watched you show before forcing some element to be incorporated into the episode. And these can be totally random based on drawing a card and referencing a list of prompts. Possible corporate demands include:
Now, these don't happen all the time, thank God. So what sort of things prompt sponsor intervention? A drop in your Ratings. Remember the Unhappiness Gauge? Yeah, we're dropping the euphemism, it's just the Ratings Gauge now. It behaves a bit like the old paradigm, but instead of worrying about Unhappiness rising too high, you worry about your Ratings dropping too low. The formula works like this:  Now as you can see, this is a bit more punitive than the old system. It can drop precipitously if you miss the Clear Condition, and it can STILL drop even if you meet it! It's not enough anymore to just meet the bare minimum expectations, now you have to contend with the fickle attention spans of the viewing public and avoiding getting boring. Getting your Ratings higher actually has some quite nice perks. Higher Ratings brackets actually give bonuses to your characters' stats across the board, as you get more budget and can get more ambitious with your production values. But dropping into a lower bracket triggers a Sponsor Request to try and clumsily right a sinking ship. And if it drops all the way to zero, you suffer the tragic fate of Minky Momo, with your main character being run over by a truck full of unsold merchandise and your show being unceremoniously cancelled.  Still, as bad as Sponsors are, they aren't all bad. There are times when the Players will be the ones to initiate a Sponsor Request, willingly offering to engage in the dog-and-pony show of asinine commercialization of your show. Because you will get something in exchange for debasing yourself to your corporate overlords, because sometimes they're the lesser evil... Next Part: Weaponizing online shipping flame wars Asterite34 fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Aug 13, 2024 |
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2024 19:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? Sep 18, 2024 22:41 |
|
|
You can be forced to do the Chowder episode where the VAs run a car wash? This game is incredible.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2024 22:48
|
|
