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Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Archives is broken right now so you're safe there.

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Mitama
Feb 28, 2011

Ettin posted:

I feel like asking questions this time, so let's ask some questions. What are you guys running, reading and planning to run? Or playing if you're not a GM. :buddy:

I think when you asked a similar question back in Janaury, I was about to run a FAE PBP game. Now I'm running a second one in nWoD and recruiting for a third Fate game. Help me I can't stop

(And I should GM post more often.)

Also since then, I've joined a cool local gaming group (I'm still amazed there are tabletop players scattered around this city). We've been playing quite a few games, though mostly street-level nWoD Mage which I've been enjoying so far. We're a few sessions away from reaching what my GM calls the end of the "first season" and for our next game he's considering mashing Tianxia and Mindjammer together for some space wuxia. :buddy:

Mitama fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Jun 3, 2014

SALT CURES HAM
Jan 4, 2011
Running: FAE JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. :getin:

Libertad!
Oct 30, 2013

You can have the last word, but I'll have the last laugh!

Ettin posted:

I feel like asking questions this time, so let's ask some questions. What are you guys running, reading and planning to run? Or playing if you're not a GM. :buddy:

Currently running a Lamentations of the Flame Princess game (minus the gross stuff) over on Min-Max Boards, utilizing the Solo Heroes rules for a 2-person party.

I'm planning on running a Spears of the Dawn game, but first I want to finish reviewing the book, and then searching for interested players.

Fuego Fish
Dec 5, 2004

By tooth and claw!

What's even left?

whydirt
Apr 18, 2001


Gaz Posting Brigade :c00lbert:
AFAIK, the actual rules for LotFP are actually pretty much just standard OD&D retroclone boilerplate with a few house-rules added in. I think there might be a few new spells that are weird/gross/whatever, but the game itself is relatively tame.

Libertad!
Oct 30, 2013

You can have the last word, but I'll have the last laugh!

Fuego Fish posted:

What's even left?

A pretty lethal Basic D&D retroclone with detailed Summoning rules.

whydirt posted:

AFAIK, the actual rules for LotFP are actually pretty much just standard OD&D retroclone boilerplate with a few house-rules added in. I think there might be a few new spells that are weird/gross/whatever, but the game itself is relatively tame.

Right, and I'm using the free version. A lot of the things the RPG's most infamous for is in its supplements.

The prospective players looked over it, Labyrinth Lord, and Swords & Wizardry and decided to go with LotFP.

Libertad! fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Jun 3, 2014

SunAndSpring
Dec 4, 2013
I had a really crazy dream and I'm still wondering if I should make it into a game or not. Essentially, it was about this hotel in this small mountain town that kinda resembles Twin Peaks that borders all realities and universes. Every door in the building can open to a room in a different reality, and there is an infinite number of doors. There are some beings who basically just pass through the hotel on their way to other universes, others who think they can use the hotel as this hub for multiuniversal conquest, and wild cards that you frankly can't tell if they're gonna play nice or start a fight. So, the hotel employees are all secretly really badass defenders of Earth who have to juggle between preventing people in town (who are all a bit weird because of the hotel's influence) from noticing all the crazy poo poo that happens there, fighting invaders who manage to enter the hotel, and catering to the whims of those who are staying in the hotel for a while. One half of me is going, "Ah, it's just Planescape with a bit of Twin Peaks and poo poo in it, it ain't that great, why bother?" and the other half is going, "Write the loving thing up already, you lazy turd!" I'm so lost.

SunAndSpring fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Jun 3, 2014

Nostalgia4ColdWar
May 7, 2007

Good people deserve good things.

Till someone lets the winter in and the dying begins, because Old Dark Places attract Old Dark Things.

SunAndSpring posted:

I had a really crazy dream and I'm still wondering if I should make it into a game or not. Essentially, it was about this hotel in this small mountain town that kinda resembles Twin Peaks that borders all realities and universes. Every door in the building can open to a room in a different reality, and there is an infinite number of doors. There are some beigngs who basically just pass through the hotel on their way to other universes, others who think they can use the hotel as this hub for multiuniversal conquest, and wild cards that you frankly can't tell if they're gonna play nice or start a fight. So, the hotel employees are all secretly really badass defenders of Earth who have to juggle between preventing people in town (who are all a bit weird because of the hotel's influence) from noticing all the crazy poo poo that happens there, fighting invaders who manage to enter the hotel, and catering to the whims of those who are staying in the hotel for a while. One half of me is going, "Ah, it's just Planescape with a bit of Twin Peaks and poo poo in it, it ain't that great, why bother?" and the other half is going, "Write the loving thing up already, you lazy turd!" I'm so lost.

Sounds fun as hell.

Fighting a trans-dimensional demon soul sucker while wearing a bellhop uniform and trying to give directions to the Grand Ballroom to an arrogant Cybermancer who is ignoring everything the demon does as you're trying to load up a angelic vacuum salesman's luggage into the trunk of a car sounds fun as hell.

Hashtag Yoloswag
Mar 24, 2013

...I'm sorry. I can't seem to remember any of the rest.

TurninTrix posted:

I think when you asked a similar question back in Janaury, I was about to run a FAE PBP game. Now I'm running a second one in nWoD and recruiting for a third Fate game. Help me I can't stop

And none of them are Touhou. For shame.

Yalborap
Oct 13, 2012

Kaja Rainbow posted:

Really need to finish working on: magical girl Powered by the Apocalypse game.

I'm super curious about this. What was your solution to the problem of transformation?

As for me:

Running: An Apoc World PbP, set in the X-COM universe after a failed campaign.
Playing: A Star Wars: Edge of the Empire game in real life. We are somehow becoming less competent every session, and it's looking more like Archer in space by the day.
Reading: I've been digging through a lot of *world stuff to get ideas for design when I start work on some of my own projects.

Mitama
Feb 28, 2011

Hashtag Yoloswag posted:

And none of them are Touhou. For shame.

One of these days. :smith:

Kaja Rainbow
Oct 17, 2012

~Adorable horror~

Yalborap posted:

I'm super curious about this. What was your solution to the problem of transformation?

What problem? :)

Seriously, though, the transformation happens, they can do magical things. Things like that don't need game rules. To expand on that further, let's say your magical girl can fly. They can fly, that doesn't need rules. It just happens in the fiction. Where the rules come in is if they try to do something exciting while flying like fighting or facing pressure (my equivalent to acting under fire). Then they roll for those moves as usual.

It's pretty tempting in adaptations of genres with fancy powers to have detailed rules for those fancy powers, but that isn't always necessary. I've seen a fair amount of magical girl media and it typically focuses on the dramatic stuff rather than the minutia of powers. As long as the broad outlines of their capabilities're laid out, that's good enough. Compare and contrast to stuff like the shounen series Hunter X Hunter with its detailed nen system. Plus if I created rules for specific powers then it would only work for stuff that used those specific powers--and the magical girl genre has too broad variety in its heroines' capabilities for that.

In short, there's no difference between triggering the fight move with unpowered punches, magical beams, or superpowered butt punches except what the fiction says you can do with it (i.e. it's hard for regular people to do anything against typical magical villains). Likewise, you can trigger the save move by catching a falling person in a magical net or by grabbing their hand.

I do have rules for a few specific things like a healing power, but that's just because they felt flavorful for specific playbooks.

I'm still fiddling with the specific moves, but that's my basic philosophy. I probably should turn my stuff into a rough draft for review. I'm not sure if it's where I want to be, but it's likely about time to push though and get some eyes on it.

neonchameleon
Nov 14, 2012



ProfessorCirno posted:

The point of a "simulationist" system is that it tries to use the mechanics to create the setting rather then the actual game, which 3.x and its offshoots are entirely guilty of. That's 90's design in a bag - ignore that there's supposed to be an actual game and vaguely hope that players will use the system to do what you want them to do, even if the system doesn't actually end up supporting it all that much (see: WoD).

The thing is that this doesn't make 90s design the birth of the simulationist movement.

The birth of simulationism was in the 80s, when simulationism was combined with sandbox play. That stuff works fairly well. "Here you are. Now go out there and do what you like and play to see what happens."

What you are objecting to is the rise of narrativist play using simulationist mechanics. The problem with the WoD isn't that it was a simulationist game. It's that it's intended to be a narrativist game using simulationist mechanics. Which means the statement is something like "Play to see what happens using your superhumans with fangs, and what will happen will be a story of angst and inhumanity and slowly slipping into darkness." Wait, what?

Simulationism is a means more than an end. Physics sim works for gamist players because it allows you to set up traps, mayhem, and other games. And that's pne reason it ran all over the 80s. Physics sim doing narratitivist ... is a problem. It's the old adage "Measure what you value or you end up valuing what you measure." And what physics sim and narrativist agendas value is almost diametrically opposed.

Ewen Cluney
May 8, 2012

Ask me about
Japanese elfgames!

Kaja Rainbow posted:

What problem? :)

Seriously, though, the transformation happens, they can do magical things. Things like that don't need game rules. To expand on that further, let's say your magical girl can fly. They can fly, that doesn't need rules. It just happens in the fiction. Where the rules come in is if they try to do something exciting while flying like fighting or facing pressure (my equivalent to acting under fire). Then they roll for those moves as usual.
Magical girls tend to follow something like sentai logic as far as transforming goes. Characters have special powers when they're transformers, and don't have those when they're not transformed, but they can transform in the blink of an eye (usually fast enough to be ready to defend against an incoming attack), and stay that way until they take too much damage. It's probably a bit easier to model in a system where it's the baseline for PCs, rather than running into stuff like the nested attributes in BESM or discounted abilities with relatively complicated math like in GURPS and Champions.

Mitama
Feb 28, 2011

I feel that a system like Cortex+ Drama/Smallville RPG would work really great for the genre.

DocBubonic
Mar 11, 2003

Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis

Effectronica posted:


Fate assumes character competence and power within the gameworld, while pure horror assumes that the characters are less than competent and/or fairly impotent when it comes to facing the threat. In other words, Fate assumes, by default, that you can punch Dracula, but in Dracula itself, nobody really has any hope of facing him physically and Dracula is able to evade their first few attempts to destroy him. Simply jacking Dracula's stats up doesn't really help matters either. You could probably hack Fate to do more conventional horror, but it's like using D&D as the basis for a French Resistance game. Impressive if you do it well, but still not as good as building it from the ground up would be.

I think an important part of horror is that the players should feel that their characters are powerless in the face of some looming evil. Feel versus actually are. Having the characters be helpless isn't going to make an interesting game. There needs to be a solution that can be sought that would defeat the evil, so while the the situation is bad there's still hope for success.

The evil shouldn't be fully revealed either. In Dracula, most of the characters don't know what the danger is until near the end of the book. If the characters knew all about Dracula (what he is, where he is, and how to kill him) early on, they probably wouldn't be as scared of him. Instead the characters are witness to the threat's evil deeds.

I don't know Fate that well. I don't know if this is something Fate can do.

(I think a large part of running a horror game is less about the rules and more about what the GM does.)

Effectronica
May 31, 2011
Fallen Rib

DocBubonic posted:

I think an important part of horror is that the players should feel that their characters are powerless in the face of some looming evil. Feel versus actually are. Having the characters be helpless isn't going to make an interesting game. There needs to be a solution that can be sought that would defeat the evil, so while the the situation is bad there's still hope for success.

The evil shouldn't be fully revealed either. In Dracula, most of the characters don't know what the danger is until near the end of the book. If the characters knew all about Dracula (what he is, where he is, and how to kill him) early on, they probably wouldn't be as scared of him. Instead the characters are witness to the threat's evil deeds.

I don't know Fate that well. I don't know if this is something Fate can do.

(I think a large part of running a horror game is less about the rules and more about what the GM does.)

Yeah. This is why jacking stats isn't meaningful- if the game pushes you to believe that you can overcome the threat, then you're just going to be frustrated when you arbitrarily can't do so. And this is something that is really dependent on the setup and GM prep for sure. You probably could do improv horror, but I don't know how effective it would be.

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002

neonchameleon posted:

The thing is that this doesn't make 90s design the birth of the simulationist movement.

The birth of simulationism was in the 80s, when simulationism was combined with sandbox play. That stuff works fairly well. "Here you are. Now go out there and do what you like and play to see what happens."

What you are objecting to is the rise of narrativist play using simulationist mechanics. The problem with the WoD isn't that it was a simulationist game. It's that it's intended to be a narrativist game using simulationist mechanics. Which means the statement is something like "Play to see what happens using your superhumans with fangs, and what will happen will be a story of angst and inhumanity and slowly slipping into darkness." Wait, what?

Simulationism is a means more than an end. Physics sim works for gamist players because it allows you to set up traps, mayhem, and other games. And that's pne reason it ran all over the 80s. Physics sim doing narratitivist ... is a problem. It's the old adage "Measure what you value or you end up valuing what you measure." And what physics sim and narrativist agendas value is almost diametrically opposed.

I might be misreading what you mean by 'physics sim', but I don't think that method is all that good at sandbox sim either, to be honest. In any pen and paper sim game you have to be really drat careful with what you spend your complexity budget on, and in my experience you get way more out of simulating larger world systems than 'physics'-style systems.

Err, that might not be clear. Basically, I think that if you're running a Shadowrun-type game and you want to go heavy on the simulation side of things you're way better off giving rules (or, better yet, guidelines) for things like how much security you can expect at a certain type of corp office, just how badly you have to gently caress a corp over before they take it personally, or how your bad reputation affects how likely you are to be sent on suicide missions by disdainful clients. All of those are systems that can actually lead to interesting consequences to player choices, while a bunch of space dedicated to telling me minor differences between a bunch of different guns doesn't really do too much to help a person run an interesting game.

(A possible exception to this might be Car Wars, where the entire loving game is just one big blob of physics. That's not so great at running sandbox-style play in, though.)

I do think that this is stuff that the hobby was better at early on and that people largely stopped doing in the 90's. It does seem to be making a bit of a comeback, though.

Yalborap
Oct 13, 2012

Ewen Cluney posted:

Magical girls tend to follow something like sentai logic as far as transforming goes. Characters have special powers when they're transformers, and don't have those when they're not transformed, but they can transform in the blink of an eye (usually fast enough to be ready to defend against an incoming attack), and stay that way until they take too much damage. It's probably a bit easier to model in a system where it's the baseline for PCs, rather than running into stuff like the nested attributes in BESM or discounted abilities with relatively complicated math like in GURPS and Champions.

I suppose the chief thing I keep stumbling on for my own hacks is that for something that's as big a deal as the transformation scene, I feel like it should have some amount of rule space, or at least room on the charsheet.

Though a bigger thing is, I suspect, how much focus one wants on the combat versus dramatics versus...Whatever one wants to focus on, really, and how the rules focus on that. Either way, it's an interesting design space that can turn some stuff right on its head.

Kellsterik
Mar 30, 2012
Has anyone found a solid group through the Gamers Seeking Gamers thread? Presumably any responses are over PM or w/e so you can't really see whether the system is working through reading the thread.

Captain Walker
Apr 7, 2009

Mother knows best
Listen to your mother
It's a scary world out there
Literally all my IRL friends are a result of meeting Mimir through that thread. No lie.

Baby Broomer
Feb 19, 2013
Running a Union only Hunter the Vigil game; playing in a Mage the Awakening game set in 1980's France.

This is the first time I've ever ran game with the intentions of ruining the characters lives, and it's really cool. It's also great finding out the only thing I love about Mage more than running it is playing in it.



I've had an idea for a Shonen anime inspired game lately. I really want to go kitchen-sink with it. Like the party could be Ryuko, a Gundam, and early DBZ Goku and it would work just fine. Do I want to be looking at Apoc World, FATE, or Savage Worlds for this? I've never played any of them, but you guys seem to look at those systems for rules-lite insane fun shenanigans games.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

I think the answer is 'none' because that kind of kitchen-sink design is really, really hard to do and even harder to make work, because those are three shows that all run on different themes.

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer

Yalborap posted:

I suppose the chief thing I keep stumbling on for my own hacks is that for something that's as big a deal as the transformation scene, I feel like it should have some amount of rule space, or at least room on the charsheet.

Eh. It's Lynda Carter spinning until she turns into Wonder Woman, or Clark Kent finding a supply closet. Or, more cynically, it's an excuse to burn some episode time with a clip of stock transformation footage or creepy fanservice. It is symbolic of the hammer being brought to bear, but at the same time it almost always occurs outside of time, in a non-interactive space, else monsters and disaster would stomp them flat before they could power up.

It's definitely something that wants a few lines or a paragraph on a character sheet, though. Costuming and special effects always do, in my opinion, even if they don't carry any mechanical effects with them.

Kaja Rainbow
Oct 17, 2012

~Adorable horror~

Yalborap posted:

I suppose the chief thing I keep stumbling on for my own hacks is that for something that's as big a deal as the transformation scene, I feel like it should have some amount of rule space, or at least room on the charsheet.

The thing is, the transformation sequence is pretty much just a prelude to where the rules start kicking in. If you want rule impact, as soon as they transform, they suddenly kick much more rear end in the sense of being able to make all kinds of Moves they couldn't before, like throwing an inferno at an entire group of enemies or tossing big monsters or whatever. Essentially, what the transformation does is greatly expand the scope of what circumstances they can make Moves under.

And all that doesn't require a single bit of game crunch. It's all in the fiction.

EDIT:

Bieeardo posted:

Eh. It's Lynda Carter spinning until she turns into Wonder Woman, or Clark Kent finding a supply closet. Or, more cynically, it's an excuse to burn some episode time with a clip of stock transformation footage or creepy fanservice. It is symbolic of the hammer being brought to bear, but at the same time it almost always occurs outside of time, in a non-interactive space, else monsters and disaster would stomp them flat before they could power up.

It's definitely something that wants a few lines or a paragraph on a character sheet, though. Costuming and special effects always do, in my opinion, even if they don't carry any mechanical effects with them.

Yeah, pretty much this. Though this does bring to my mind that I probably should drop in a mention about that stuff and put in some space for that kind of stuff, yeah.

Kaja Rainbow fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Jun 3, 2014

neonchameleon
Nov 14, 2012



OtspIII posted:

I might be misreading what you mean by 'physics sim', but I don't think that method is all that good at sandbox sim either, to be honest. In any pen and paper sim game you have to be really drat careful with what you spend your complexity budget on, and in my experience you get way more out of simulating larger world systems than 'physics'-style systems.

I was thinking of GURPS to be honest. And I agree that corporations are better things to simulate than the laws of physics, but for game/puzzles solvable by RP characters all you need is a physics sim and a sandbox (which covers the other half of what you want).

Baby Broomer
Feb 19, 2013

Mors Rattus posted:

I think the answer is 'none' because that kind of kitchen-sink design is really, really hard to do and even harder to make work, because those are three shows that all run on different themes.

Good point, guess I should step back and figure out just what about action anime I want to play around with.

Comrade Gorbash
Jul 12, 2011

My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Yalborap posted:

I suppose the chief thing I keep stumbling on for my own hacks is that for something that's as big a deal as the transformation scene, I feel like it should have some amount of rule space, or at least room on the charsheet.

Though a bigger thing is, I suspect, how much focus one wants on the combat versus dramatics versus...Whatever one wants to focus on, really, and how the rules focus on that. Either way, it's an interesting design space that can turn some stuff right on its head.

Bieeardo posted:

Eh. It's Lynda Carter spinning until she turns into Wonder Woman, or Clark Kent finding a supply closet. Or, more cynically, it's an excuse to burn some episode time with a clip of stock transformation footage or creepy fanservice. It is symbolic of the hammer being brought to bear, but at the same time it almost always occurs outside of time, in a non-interactive space, else monsters and disaster would stomp them flat before they could power up.

It's definitely something that wants a few lines or a paragraph on a character sheet, though. Costuming and special effects always do, in my opinion, even if they don't carry any mechanical effects with them.

I'm sort of finding myself falling into the middle on this. I get that lots of time it's just filler, but its pretty common (especially in more recent shows) to shorten the transformation, or even skip the sequence entirely, unless it creates a cool dramatic moment. The first transformation, a transformation after an upgrade, before a big showdown. I wonder if there's a way to get a fun game effect out of a dramatic transformation sequence, something more fiction oriented? Something that can't be used every time, but can give the players a dramatic boost in a key moment.

Provide, say, three uses of major transformation sequences to the players, and when the player chooses to use one they're explicitly raising the narrative stakes for a given scene? Their successes are bigger, but so are their failures. It also can be used to focus the spotlight on a particular character, but because there's an inherent promise that everyone will get a chance to do it, it's less frustrating for the other players.

Tollymain
Jul 9, 2010

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Baby Broomer posted:

I've had an idea for a Shonen anime inspired game lately. I really want to go kitchen-sink with it. Like the party could be Ryuko, a Gundam, and early DBZ Goku and it would work just fine. Do I want to be looking at Apoc World, FATE, or Savage Worlds for this? I've never played any of them, but you guys seem to look at those systems for rules-lite insane fun shenanigans games.

Maaaybe Tenra Bansho Zero? I'm not personally familiar with it but I've heard things.

Rockman Reserve
Oct 2, 2007

"Carbons? Purge? What are you talking about?!"


Currently reading: sorta skimming Double Crossers (which would be a hell of a lot easier if my Kindle didn't somehow eat letters out of random words in the PDF...how does that even happen?!). Non-gaming-wise, I just finished the latest Dresden Files because I like goofy pulpy crap sometimes.

Currently playing: Hahaha

Running: Nothing. But it looks like I might be able to get a Dungeon World game together sometime this century.

Baby Broomer posted:

I've had an idea for a Shonen anime inspired game lately. I really want to go kitchen-sink with it. Like the party could be Ryuko, a Gundam, and early DBZ Goku and it would work just fine. Do I want to be looking at Apoc World, FATE, or Savage Worlds for this? I've never played any of them, but you guys seem to look at those systems for rules-lite insane fun shenanigans games.

Put some fake kanji on some Rifts books and ignore the actual rules in favor of something PbtA.

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth
Is there a Pendragon thread or something because I got the bundle of holding for it and it's just wonderful in every way :allears:

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer

Comrade Gorbash posted:

Provide, say, three uses of major transformation sequences to the players, and when the player chooses to use one they're explicitly raising the narrative stakes for a given scene? Their successes are bigger, but so are their failures. It also can be used to focus the spotlight on a particular character, but because there's an inherent promise that everyone will get a chance to do it, it's less frustrating for the other players.

I like this, and Kaja Rainbow's thoughts on transformation unlocking greater degrees of scale. Reminds me of Power Rangers and similar shows, where things start off on a mundane level, kick up to masks, then giant robots and increasingly unlikely combinations thereof. There was a recently reviewed game in F&F (Trollbabes?) that had a similar theme, but there was explicitly no way to step back down from heroic scale to the mundane.

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth

Comrade Gorbash posted:

Provide, say, three uses of major transformation sequences to the players, and when the player chooses to use one they're explicitly raising the narrative stakes for a given scene? Their successes are bigger, but so are their failures. It also can be used to focus the spotlight on a particular character, but because there's an inherent promise that everyone will get a chance to do it, it's less frustrating for the other players.

When my group ran a hacked up version of Princess the Whatever (Blissful?) this was what we did. You got like two or three power ups to use but when you do poo poo's gonna get real because then it's Magic Girl Time and if you gently caress up someone's gonna get hurt. I can't remember if this was in the proper rules or not because we had to take a chainsaw to that poo poo to make it work as anything but a tragic waifu sim.

DalaranJ
Apr 15, 2008

Yosuke will now die for you.

Bieeardo posted:

There was a recently reviewed game in F&F (Trollbabes?) that had a similar theme, but there was explicitly no way to step back down from heroic scale to the mundane.

Yes, this is a rule in Trollbabe. At the end of any adventure the players can increase the 'scale' of the game if they choose but they are never allowed to reduce the scale.

Taken apart from that game it seems like it would work well in a lot of anime themed roleplaying, since it simulates the spiral of increasing ridiculousness manga/anime writers are often forced into.

Xiahou Dun
Jul 16, 2009

We shall dive down through black abysses... and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.



Ryoshi posted:

Currently reading: sorta skimming Double Crossers (which would be a hell of a lot easier if my Kindle didn't somehow eat letters out of random words in the PDF...how does that even happen?!).

It's probably a Unicode problem : to keep the kerning nice and pretty certain letter combinations are actually special characters in some fonts. Then your device and it cross talk about what's what and it shits the bed.

Happens to me all the time. Usually with symbol and formula heavy journal articles.

Parkreiner
Oct 29, 2011

Baby Broomer posted:


I've had an idea for a Shonen anime inspired game lately. I really want to go kitchen-sink with it. Like the party could be Ryuko, a Gundam, and early DBZ Goku and it would work just fine. Do I want to be looking at Apoc World, FATE, or Savage Worlds for this? I've never played any of them, but you guys seem to look at those systems for rules-lite insane fun shenanigans games.

Yeah, Tenra Bansho Zero is explicitly made for this kind of mash-up (my go-to elevator pitch is "an anime version of Rifts with rules that work"), I can actually mentally eyeball stats for those three offhand. My only slight qualm is that the game works best as either a one-shot or a handful of linked sessions, because characters kind of start off in the system's mechanical sweet spot and can rise in power super quickly. It is super fun as one-shots though!

Parkreiner fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Jun 4, 2014

ProfessorCirno
Feb 17, 2011

The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!

neonchameleon posted:

The thing is that this doesn't make 90s design the birth of the simulationist movement.

The birth of simulationism was in the 80s, when simulationism was combined with sandbox play. That stuff works fairly well. "Here you are. Now go out there and do what you like and play to see what happens."

What you are objecting to is the rise of narrativist play using simulationist mechanics. The problem with the WoD isn't that it was a simulationist game. It's that it's intended to be a narrativist game using simulationist mechanics. Which means the statement is something like "Play to see what happens using your superhumans with fangs, and what will happen will be a story of angst and inhumanity and slowly slipping into darkness." Wait, what?

Simulationism is a means more than an end. Physics sim works for gamist players because it allows you to set up traps, mayhem, and other games. And that's pne reason it ran all over the 80s. Physics sim doing narratitivist ... is a problem. It's the old adage "Measure what you value or you end up valuing what you measure." And what physics sim and narrativist agendas value is almost diametrically opposed.

While I agree that mechanically the whole simulationism thing was from the 80's, I think you're missing a very key difference. As you said, in the 80's, it was used to push the whole sandbox style gameplay. That's because 80's design used simulationism as a mechanical choice; "We want to have this sandbox, so we'll use this mechanical design to emphasize that."

In the 90's, simulationism became a design philosophy in of itself. That's the breaking point. In the 80's, it was "we want to try to 'make' this setting so people will adventure though it." In the 90's, it was just "we want to try to 'make' this setting for it's own sake."

This lead to a lot of differences. 80's design still largely allowed and wanted gamist mechanics - the emphasis was STILL on "adventure," after all. But 90's design didn't want any of that - their goal was to do the whole simulation thing for it's own sake. There WAS no emphasis, because whole 80's design was focused on mechanically pushin, 90's design was focused on abandoning the mechanics entirely. It's why "90's metaplot" is such a thing; the game itself didn't matter. This is the big sin of simulationism; it's a design philosophy desperately searching for an actual game inside. It's why it's so loving rubbish at actually trying to play - because "playing" never entered the mind of the designer. And this is something you still see in Pathfinder. "How does it play?" isn't a question that's ever asked of PF materials. And so very much of Pathfinder material is absolute garbage because of it.

OtspIII
Sep 22, 2002

ProfessorCirno posted:

"How does it play?" isn't a question that's ever asked of PF materials. And so very much of Pathfinder material is absolute garbage because of it.

This is really one of my biggest disappointments with Next--nothing I've seen about it has really communicated what a given session should actually look like. There seems to be this big fear that if they explicitly try to make it a game about, say, dungeon crawling or following semi-scripted plot hooks or whatever that they'll alienate a bunch of potential customers (which isn't entirely wrong), but they seem to be trying to balance for both methods simultaneously despite the fact that they call for very different processes. On top of that, a bunch of the things that D&D has in place to do these bits of balancing are all legacy mechanics that can't really be adjusted too easily (Vancian casting is pretty great for sandboxy dungeon crawls with wandering monster checks but really bad for roaming bands of heroes following strings of plot-hook encounters).

4e did an okay job of this (not a great one, but they communicated a few expectations pretty well/explicitly) with the whole encounter budget/xp budget thing, but Next seems like a mess so far.

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claw game handjob
Mar 27, 2007

pinch pinch scrape pinch
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JESUS TURN IT OFF
WHY ARE YOU STILL SMILING
I have begun debating with myself the idea of running cyberpunk/Shadowrun stuff, but in other systems, as a set of experiments. Probably play-by-post, with my schedule. This was mostly thanks to the idea of running a heist or espionage in Leverage, or trying to mock up a risky delivery under something more cinematic (FATE? gently caress if I know anything about systems these days, period), or...

But mostly because last time I mentioned that I nearly bought the new SR sourcebook in here a bunch of you went "NO DON'T the rules are awful", so I got bored at work and started pondering.

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