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Tasoth posted:So Humble Bundle is doing a Dark Conspiracy bundle. Looks like what Shadowrun meets Lovecraft and what C-Tech wishes it were. Anyone got any more info on it? As I recall, it was less Shadowrun and more X-Files with a tiny bit of 90's style cyberpunk. I might be getting it confused with another game but I think a lot of it was based on the Weekly World News type of tabloids. Bat Boys infesting the sewers and such.
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Oct 7, 2014 01:39
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Oh gosh thanks Ettin for changing my thread's tag and title. Real cool move. Real cool discussion on teacups, super awesome. Jeez, amazing. FYI, that was me being sarcastic.
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Oct 7, 2014 01:51
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:Oh gosh thanks Ettin for changing my thread's tag and title. Real cool move. Real cool discussion on teacups, super awesome. Jeez, amazing. Just relax and go w/the flow bro, chill out and have a nice relaxing beverage of some kind.
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Oct 7, 2014 01:55
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*drinks literal quarts of water* i think i'm suffering from heat exhaustion; an ignominious ailment when it's only like 82 out. am i secretly a lost experimental gene-engineered subject intended for arctic survival? (no, but that would be cool)
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Oct 7, 2014 02:02
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Tollymain posted:*drinks literal quarts of water* It also tends to be cool underground, maybe you're a gene-engineered C.H.U.D. hunter?
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Oct 7, 2014 02:05
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that would be cooler, actually; i like dark places. people look at me weird when i say my dream home is a poorly lit nuke bunker
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Oct 7, 2014 02:07
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Bucnasti posted:As I recall, it was less Shadowrun and more X-Files with a tiny bit of 90's style cyberpunk. I might be getting it confused with another game but I think a lot of it was based on the Weekly World News type of tabloids. Bat Boys infesting the sewers and such. Dark Conspiracy was weird one; it was GDW's attempt to do a grim nineties supernatural sort of game, and coming from designers working on Twilight 2000 and Traveller. It was kind of cyberpunk where a supernatural event starts causing all of humanity's fears to start manifesting, but the issue is that their interpretation of "humanity's fears" is "really shlocky horror". So you're up against vampires, werewolves, greys, etc., and other stereotypical monsters. There's a big grim evil Gigeresque force behind it all but tonally it never really worked for me. When the force of pure evil is like "How will I gently caress with humanity? I know- look out I just released a big furry yeti!"... it comes across as an example of how trying to explain something can make it sillier. Also, because it's based off of Twilight 2000, you advance your character by taking "terms", which means the ideal maximization is to be like forty years of age, where you're old enough to dredge up the most skills you can gather but not so old your attributes start falling. So a lot of players end up playing Midlife Crisis Monster Hunters. It also has some pretty grindy combat rules that can sometimes use terms like "square root" and expansive gun lists and generally what happens when a military system is used as a blanket house system for horror. It's an interesting novelty of seeing GDW try to change with the times, and I don't know how much the 2nd edition changed things up, but it struck me as a forced and clumsy effort. It also uses the term "Darktek" with a straight face. Oh, the 90s. 
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Oct 7, 2014 04:50
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Dark Conspiracy was weird one; it was GDW's attempt to do a grim nineties supernatural sort of game, and coming from designers working on Twilight 2000 and Traveller. It was kind of cyberpunk where a supernatural event starts causing all of humanity's fears to start manifesting, but the issue is that their interpretation of "humanity's fears" is "really shlocky horror". So you're up against vampires, werewolves, greys, etc., and other stereotypical monsters. There's a big grim evil Gigeresque force behind it all but tonally it never really worked for me. When the force of pure evil is like "How will I gently caress with humanity? I know- look out I just released a big furry yeti!"... it comes across as an example of how trying to explain something can make it sillier. So they're pretty much the Reckoners from Deadlands? quote:Also, because it's based off of Twilight 2000, you advance your character by taking "terms", which means the ideal maximization is to be like forty years of age, where you're old enough to dredge up the most skills you can gather but not so old your attributes start falling. So a lot of players end up playing Midlife Crisis Monster Hunters. It also has some pretty grindy combat rules that can sometimes use terms like "square root" and expansive gun lists and generally what happens when a military system is used as a blanket house system for horror. It's an interesting novelty of seeing GDW try to change with the times, and I don't know how much the 2nd edition changed things up, but it struck me as a forced and clumsy effort. Does anyone know what inspired this system? It makes sense for military sims but younger gamers don't want to play 50 year old spacers who have been shipping fake palm trees to the Zhodani for 20 years. My theory was that the people at GDW came up with the system after watching Alien, since it's practically working stiffs in space, but it came out in 1979, two years after Traveller. I'm doubtful it's Star Trek. Most of the Enterprise crew were in their 30's, Doohan and DeForest Kelley were in their 40's, and they were on their first 5 year mission. EDIT: Star Wars came out in 1977, the same year, so I doubt it inspired a great deal in the main book. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Oct 7, 2014 |
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Oct 7, 2014 05:36
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Midlife Crisis Monster Hunters I want this to be a reality show on A&E.
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Oct 7, 2014 05:37
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So I'm watching the Clone Wars cartoon, finally, and now I want to run some Star Wars. I'm guessing Edge of the Empire is the least-lovely Star Wars game right now? I looked into WEG D6, and it looks pretty good, if a bit archaic. I had fond memories of Star Wars Saga Edition, but cracked open the book and was struck by a big wall of holyshitfeatsandtalents, so just closed it right back up. I also remember it having terrible, fundamental issues that weren't easily resolvable, like "melee attacks suck rear end," "the force is way overpowered at low levels but if you nerf it the DCs no longer make sense," and "hope you like picking from two different kinds of huge feat chains!" Oh, and "Errata out the rear end, but there's no convenient thing like the 4e Compendium to keep track of all of it." The old d20 WotC version .... ahhahahaha, no. So that pretty much leaves WEG and EotE, I'm thinking? I checked out the EotE thread, but I want a general opinion on it, if anyone has one. I like weird dice, so that's not a problem so long as they work nicely, math-wise.
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Oct 7, 2014 06:20
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EOTE is pretty deece, and the orokos dicebot supports it.
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Oct 7, 2014 06:24
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dwarf74 posted:So I'm watching the Clone Wars cartoon, finally, and now I want to run some Star Wars. I've played EOTE and found it to be a fun system. It's been a while, but I remember the dice mechanic being a nice way to allow for granular success. I remember liking my character and remember having a few thrilling space battles, but I don't really know the rules for the latter.
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Oct 7, 2014 06:27
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WEG's Star Wars has a number of issues and I'd go with EotE since it is younger than some of the posters here. If you want to play a game that's pretty close to capturing SW, EotE. If you want to play space truckers, WEG. If you want to play action space truckers, EotE.
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Oct 7, 2014 06:52
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I'm a big fan of EotE, but it's got two big flaws: Spaceship rules suck. But spaceship rules suck in every Star Wars RPG, so you're not going to find any better either. The Force rules are super janky. So, if you don't have any Jedi, and keep the spaceship combat to a minimum, you're golden.
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Oct 7, 2014 07:05
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I payed EotE once, and my wookie got to rip the arms off a droid and beat it with them.  A++ would Star Wars again.
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Oct 7, 2014 07:14
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Dark Conspiracy was weird one; it was GDW's attempt to do a grim nineties supernatural sort of game, and coming from designers working on Twilight 2000 and Traveller. It was kind of cyberpunk where a supernatural event starts causing all of humanity's fears to start manifesting, but the issue is that their interpretation of "humanity's fears" is "really shlocky horror". Unfortunately, it used their in-house system, descended from Twilight:2000 second edition and used in the Traveller: The New Era game, and that system was a load of crunch-heavy crap (I'd group it in with clunky contemporary systems like Torg and Kult, or maybe a less-elegant version of Shadowrun). The setting had some good elements (the future was essentially Robocop's), with a heavy dose of Deadlands' Reckoners (as it predated DL, it was probably an influence on it) but the whole thing added up to not much as has been pointed out. It's pretty much what you'd expect from a bunch of wargamers trying to build a cyberpunk horror setting. At least there were a lots of stats for guns and explosion templates and grenade scatter diagrams. A strange mix of forward- and backward-looking (it was doing the Grim 90s before the 90s had even really gotten going). It kind of flopped when it was released (blown away by V:tM and couple of years later the Magic/CCG boom) and the fact it keeps getting updated and re-released by different publishers is genuinely baffling to me.
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Oct 7, 2014 07:48
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Does anyone know what inspired this system? It makes sense for military sims but younger gamers don't want to play 50 year old spacers who have been shipping fake palm trees to the Zhodani for 20 years. My theory was that the people at GDW came up with the system after watching Alien, since it's practically working stiffs in space, but it came out in 1979, two years after Traveller. I'm doubtful it's Star Trek. Most of the Enterprise crew were in their 30's, Doohan and DeForest Kelley were in their 40's, and they were on their first 5 year mission. The actual system was descended from En Garde!, their 1975 proto-RPG about playing a gentleman duelist in Musketeer-era France, which is still awesome and worth playing (and in print!) to this day.
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Oct 7, 2014 07:57
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Bucnasti posted:I payed EotE once, and my wookie got to rip the arms off a droid and beat it with them. I'm just surprised SWSE went so quickly from "good enough game" to "haha nope" in my collection.
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Oct 7, 2014 14:35
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FMguru posted:GDW got going in the early 1970s, and was founded by a bunch of guys who had just gotten out of the army, so it made perfect sense that their RPG was about guys who had just gotten out of the army trying to figure out what to do next in their lives with the skills they had learned. At least Traveller gave your chararacters a backstory, compared to D&D having your character materialize in front of a dungeon with 2d6x10 GP worth of equipment and "LVL 1" stamped on their foreheads. The building is now home to my favorite gyro place.
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Oct 7, 2014 14:41
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FMguru posted:A strange mix of forward- and backward-looking (it was doing the Grim 90s before the 90s had even really gotten going). It kind of flopped when it was released (blown away by V:tM and couple of years later the Magic/CCG boom) and the fact it keeps getting updated and re-released by different publishers is genuinely baffling to me. Yeah, it makes more sense to compare Dark Conspiracy to Ravenloft thematically (which came the year before), with the idea of one arch-evil giving rise to all sorts of pulp monsters, just in a near-future setting. But where Ravenloft had at least the push towards a unified gothic theme, Dark Conspiracy literally tries to cover any horror genre under the rainbow (the writer said as much), so one week you might face alien invaders with rayguns, the next week you might face a spooky ghost, the week after that might be an eeevil rock star dark elf. Of course, unlike games like Ravenloft, you have a huge list of guns and explosives, so the means of taking on monsters generally boils down to "shoot them".
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Oct 7, 2014 15:10
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dwarf74 posted:Sold! Well we were young and dumb and it was just well enough put together that it managed to really drive home how much of a clusterfuck 3.5e was in comparison.
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Oct 7, 2014 19:37
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dwarf74 posted:So I'm watching the Clone Wars cartoon, finally, and now I want to run some Star Wars. I've only briefly glanced at FFG's Star Wars games, but honestly these days I honestly can't see running Star Wars in anything heavier than Fate Accelerated. Aspect permissions and a couple of stunts cover 99.9% of what you'd need for aliens or Jedi or whatever. All you might need extra rules for are starships if you want a little mechanical weight for them, but honestly you could model the Millennium Falcon as nothing more than Han having "You've Never Heard of the Millennium Falcon?" or whatever as an Aspect and maybe a stunt like "Fastest Hunk of Junk In the Galaxy: Once per session, you can automatically arrive in or escape a scene if it's at all plausible that you could fly there in your ship.
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Oct 7, 2014 20:28
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I just can't get past "here's your game about playing scoundrels, now here's your--we swear it's different and necessary--game about being rebels."
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Oct 7, 2014 22:19
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PeterWeller posted:I just can't get past "here's your game about playing scoundrels, now here's your--we swear it's different and necessary--game about being rebels." MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Oct 8, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 00:50
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I'm supposed to be running helping run some games for GameCity this month. What are some good, easy to understand one shot RPGs? (I'm assuming an audience with little to no experience)
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Oct 8, 2014 11:10
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WordMercenary posted:I'm supposed to be running helping run some games for GameCity this month. What are some good, easy to understand one shot RPGs? (I'm assuming an audience with little to no experience) I'd go with the usual suspects: Fiasco, Dungeon World, maybe something Fate-y. E: That festival actually looks pretty boss. If only a) I lived in Nottingham and b) had any free time. potatocubed fucked around with this message at 12:27 on Oct 8, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 12:24
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potatocubed posted:I'd go with the usual suspects: Fiasco, Dungeon World, maybe something Fate-y. Speaking of Fiasco, I'm only loosely familiar with it. It seems, from the play reports I've read, to tend to have things go from bad to worse. How much of that is mechanical versus just player choice, and how possible is it to get more of a three act structure out of it? Your Hollywood cliche kind of structure, with the big heroic climax where it all works out for the protagonists. Thanks!
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Oct 8, 2014 12:44
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Yalborap posted:Speaking of Fiasco, I'm only loosely familiar with it. It seems, from the play reports I've read, to tend to have things go from bad to worse. The key mechanic of Fiasco is a central pool of dice, equally split between white and black. After every character's scene, they'll end up with either a good outcome (white dice) or bad outcome (black dice). So just from the start, every scene has a 50/50 chance of going badly, and due to the genre assumptions the bad things are going to be a greater magnitude than the good ones. The second mechanic is the tilt - halfway through the game, you randomly roll for new elements to shake things up. These are all bad or at least disruptive things, like 'something important is on fire' or 'somebody is not so innocent after all'. The players are encouraged to introduce these in the second act. Finally, you have the aftermath - each player rolls the dice they've gained over the course of the game, group them into white and black, and subtract the lowest group from the higher. This then gives them an Aftermath result, with 0 being incredibly awful, 3 being harsh, 8-9 being no worse than you started and only 13+ being a great outcome. Again, this skews things towards failure, tragedy and dark comedy. So, to make the tone more heroic, you'll have to do three things:
In my opinion, though, part of the reason why Fiasco works so well is that by making it ok to have things go wrong for your character (and sort of incentivising this) it frees people up to inflict misery on others, too - important for a GM-less game! If everything is meant to work out OK for the protagonists, I worry that people might balk at introducing the adversity needed to create a good story. In that case maybe Our Last Best Hope would be a better fit?
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Oct 8, 2014 13:41
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MadScientistWorking posted:Well I mean yeah if you are completely making up stuff that you supposedly read its sort of strange but Fantasy Flight is completely honest about the three games almost being exactly the same outside of a few mechanics. Admittedly, its still a bit off putting given that you are still buying the equivalent of a Dungeon Master Guide every time but I haven't actually looked at Age of Rebellion to see how much information changes. The point is it's silly to split it up like the 40K RPGs in the first place. How nice and honest they are about it doesn't matter.
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Oct 8, 2014 14:54
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PeterWeller posted:The point is it's silly to split it up like the 40K RPGs in the first place. How nice and honest they are about it doesn't matter.
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Oct 8, 2014 15:06
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Honestly I think how they split it was pretty true to how people tend to -play- Star Wars. You've got your Traveller with Wookies game, your brave heroes of the alliance game, and your "Holy poo poo, look at all the Jedi" game. All they really need is a creepy space nazi apologist game and they'd be set.
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Oct 8, 2014 15:31
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WordMercenary posted:I'm supposed to be running helping run some games for GameCity this month. What are some good, easy to understand one shot RPGs? (I'm assuming an audience with little to no experience) All Outta Bubblegum quote:This game is copyright 2001, Michael "Epoch" Sullivan and Jeffery Grant. If you want to repost it or whatever, drop me an email.
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Oct 8, 2014 16:14
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unseenlibrarian posted:All they really need is a creepy space nazi apologist game and they'd be set.
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Oct 8, 2014 16:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:All Outta Bubblegum This looks kind of fun.
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Oct 8, 2014 16:37
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FMguru posted:FFG already publishes a whole series of those (Dark Heresy/Only War/Deathwatch/etc.). There are no space jews on 40k, therefore, no space nazis.
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Oct 8, 2014 16:39
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:There are no space jews on 40k, therefore, no space nazis. Im sorry but Tau
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Oct 8, 2014 16:42
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Error 404 posted:Im sorry but Tau The people of Israel do not use chemicals in order to control human thought.
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Oct 8, 2014 16:45
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:The people of Israel do not use chemicals in order to control human thought. That's what they want u to beleive.
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Oct 8, 2014 16:50
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unseenlibrarian posted:All they really need is a creepy space nazi apologist game and they'd be set. If you've seen 501st Legion guys screaming at "civilians" to get out of the way of their photo ops at conventions, you know there's a market segment waiting to buy this. On a lighter note, I currently play in a "WookieeTrav" style game and while we were gearing up we talked mashups like Star Destroyer Enterprise, which we concluded it would just be a Mirror Universe Trek game with better redshirts and occasional laser swords. Also, you *better* join the away team because if you let anything escape micromanagement it's *your* trachea!
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Oct 8, 2014 16:55
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MadScientistWorking posted:Ehhh... Its pretty much like how most if not a lot of RPGs do it though so I'm not entirely sure why this one is causing you to have a fit. How am I having a fit? I just think it's silly and unnecessary.
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Oct 8, 2014 16:58
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