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How are Ashen Stars and Dragon Age?
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Jan 9, 2015 02:31
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| # ? Jun 6, 2024 15:33 |
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I played a couple games of Ashen Stars last year and it's pretty interesting. Gameplay is the same as Esoterrorists, Night's Black Agents, Mutant City Blues, Trail of Cthulhu, and so on so you're pretty much paying for the setting. Those other Gumshoe games mostly adhere pretty closely to a specific tone/genre/whatever but Ashen Stars incorporates a bunch of different sci-fi stuff (space opera, cyberpunk, space western type things) into its setting, which works well if you want to run a specific type of game. I kinda like the concept of viroware (it's like Shadowrun's bioware but the alterations are done entirely through infecting a host with custom-designed viruses) and feel like it should be in more stuff.
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Jan 9, 2015 02:53
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Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 12:19 on Jan 9, 2015 |
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Jan 9, 2015 10:41
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Lemon Curdistan posted:Dragon Age is a bad d20 game that isn't even fully out yet (they're releasing a core book for each slice of levels, the first two books cover 1-5 and 6-10) despite the first book getting released four and a half years ago, and should be avoided. Mechanically, it's exactly everything you'd expect from the rash of lovely d20 games released in the early 00s. Plus, until the second book's release ~6 months ago you couldn't even be a Grey Warden. This is all cobblers. It doesn't use a d20 (3d6 all the way) or any of the d20 inherited bullshit like AC or BAB. Set 2 has been out for four years, and that's the one that allows Gray Wardens. Set 3 was delayed until June last year, but it's now a complete line.
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Jan 9, 2015 10:55
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DigitalRaven posted:This is all cobblers. It doesn't use a d20 (3d6 all the way) or any of the d20 inherited bullshit like AC or BAB. Set 2 has been out for four years, and that's the one that allows Gray Wardens. Set 3 was delayed until June last year, but it's now a complete line. Huh, alright. I'm not sure what game I was thinking of, then. There was definitely a terrible d20 Dragon Age game kicking around back when Green Ronin released their first set. e; might have gotten it completely mixed up with the d20 Game of Thrones RPG that exists, since Green Ronin publish the non-d20 version. 
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Jan 9, 2015 |
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Jan 9, 2015 12:19
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The latest BoH is Torg, the epitome of 90's RPG design. It's everything except the Asyle and Living Land sourcebooks.
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Jan 9, 2015 16:12
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d20 Game of Thrones was terrible and published by White Wolf. The Green Ronin Song of Ice and Fire game is non-d20 and pretty dang good, though the most fun part is randomly generating minor houses using their huge charts.
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Jan 9, 2015 16:30
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Game of Thrones D20 was mostly Guardians of Order, much like BESM 3, so while WW published it a lot of their poo poo comes back to McKinnon, surprising nobody.
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Jan 9, 2015 16:45
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PresidentBeard posted:d20 Game of Thrones was terrible and published by White Wolf. The Green Ronin Song of Ice and Fire game is non-d20 and pretty dang good, though the most fun part is randomly generating minor houses using their huge charts. Oh, man, I recall trying to play it. A d20 game where you didn't ever get hit points for leveling and magical healing was non-existant... so of course they went with the logical conclusion and upped the damage on swords. 
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Jan 10, 2015 06:24
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The new BoH is books about the history of the hobby. Beating the average gets you all four "Designers & Dragons" books plus a few others on top of that.
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Jan 16, 2015 00:42
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Humble Store is currently having a pretty good sale on Games Workshop computer games. I've heard mixed reviews of some of this stuff, but I enjoyed both Space Marine and Dawn of War.
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Jan 17, 2015 05:51
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Evil Mastermind posted:The new BoH is books about the history of the hobby. Beating the average gets you all four "Designers & Dragons" books plus a few others on top of that. I'd really recommend the Designers & Dragons books, that's a bargain for the number of companies covered. Learn a thing or two!
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Jan 25, 2015 21:31
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The new Bundle is original flavor Vampire: the Masquerade.quote:For just US$8.95, you get all three titles in our Player's Collection (retail value $39) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks:
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Feb 6, 2015 19:38
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Getting pretty tired of all the older/history stuff, show me something new and interesting... I like BoH for taking a chance on weird indie stuff, not keeping White Wolf in eyeliner and RatM CDs. 
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Feb 7, 2015 01:49
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In this particular case I'd be more excited by a more recent oWoD Vampire bundle. 2nd edition is over 20 years old at this point and both thin on content and kind of shonky from a rules standpoint. (I mean, oWoD is never exactly elegant, but there have been multiple revisions inbetween 2nd edition Vampire and the current Kickstarted Anniversary Edition that represents the state of the art that could have been offered instead without majorly cutting into their bottom line.) And those other books pretty much date back to the same era.
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Feb 7, 2015 03:16
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Yeah, V:tM 2e is interesting from a historical or completist perspective, but that's it; there's not much reason to reference it when it's been notably refined twice over. I'm amused by the fact that Kindred Most Wanted and Children of the Inquisition are both in there, for those who want to fill their games with packs of ridiculous elders to slap PCs around with.
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Feb 8, 2015 11:11
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As a bit of self-promotion, I decided in the spirit of the holidays to spread the love for under-appreciated Pathfinder and OSR concepts (cool fighter feats, playable monsters, alignment-free games, etc) by having a week-long sale of my entire product catalog 50% off from today until February 19th on Drive-Thru RPG and RPGNow. Here's the Drive-Thru Link. And RPGNow.
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Feb 12, 2015 06:46
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You beat me to it! I was just about to post that. I really liked your Nice Things for Fighters supplement and now I'm eyeing the OSR monster classes.
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Feb 12, 2015 07:02
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All the official D&D stuff on DriveThru is on sale right now, with the Rules Cyclopedia available for $5.
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Feb 12, 2015 17:47
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New Bundle of Holding up, of Indie Game Developer Network games: Base tier: Centurion: Legionaries of Rome Edara: A Steampunk Renaissance Psi-punk BTA: curse the darkness (yes, all lowercase) Fortune's Fool Misspent Youth Spark Wu Xing: The Ninja Crusade I have heard of Misspent Youth and Spark, both seem fairly well regarded. Anyone want to sell me (and/or the thread) on others? Because right now they don't seem very exciting.
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Feb 20, 2015 03:09
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Wu Xing's the only one I'm familiar with, and it's pretty much literally "Naruto: The RPG." "Ninja" in the setting is defined as someone with awakened chi powers who do weird ninja tricks with them, and they're organized into clans and villages. Thanks to ninja loving around with the imperial family, the current emperor's declared a war on the clans. It's a weirdly nineties RPG take on things, with the clan writeups having insulting stereotypes about each other, at least one clan that's playing both sides of the crusade, etc, etc. Uses a variant of the same system as Part Time Gods, Apocalypse Prevention Inc, and their not-Aberrant game whose name I can't think of at the moment.
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Feb 20, 2015 15:35
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You're thinking of Amp: Year One. It's more like the Heroes TV show than Abberant, in that metahumans are just beginning to appear instead of picking up five years after the fact. Wu Xing is a good game, but it is on the crunchier side. It's a game where you have to keep track of each individual's initiative constant because it can move up or down based on your actions or attacks, but they do a pretty good job at trying to keep situational modifiers to a minimum.
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Feb 20, 2015 15:46
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Misspent Youth is a pretty fun little game where you're kids fighting the system, and one of its core mechanics is how much of that youthful naivety do you give up to ensure your team succeeds. The format is a little static, where X scenes occur and then you have the deciding one. It does have the problem where all your actions are tied to the last scene, so we all blew out auto-success at that stage at the end of each run. Still, having skating contests in the abandoned subway tunnels was radical
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Feb 20, 2015 15:59
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The latest Bundle of Holding is a bunch of Hillfolk materials. I regrettably know nothing of Hillfolk save that it's by Robin D. Laws and, quote, the "cable series RPG." Is it any good? Also, DriveThruRPG is holding a sale for a bundle of assorted books (most noticeably, PFRPG with a side of Savage Worlds and trace amounts of some other stuff) to support a guy whose girlfriend died of a heart attack. 
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Feb 24, 2015 20:53
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Jonathan Thompson is a really great guy and it sucks that this happened. Also his company, Battlefield Press, has a non skeevy Cthulhu in a high-tech society game that's worth picking up anyway. Eldritch Skies.
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Feb 24, 2015 21:14
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Bundle of Holding needs to fix the links they send out in their emails. I always get a "This looks like a phising attempt, do you really want to proceed?" dialogue box whenever I click them. (using Thunderbird)
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Feb 24, 2015 21:55
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Foglet posted:The latest Bundle of Holding is a bunch of Hillfolk materials. I regrettably know nothing of Hillfolk save that it's by Robin D. Laws and, quote, the "cable series RPG." Is it any good? I think it's a solid game that takes the right kind of group to work. Reading it (and Hamlet's Hit Points, Laws' book on understanding the emotional ups and downs of three movies) will help you understand why dramas are often structured the way they ae and how you can steal a few of those tricks even if you're not running DramaSystem. If they add anything else to the bundle, HHP would be a logical choice. I have played a few small games of DramaSystem and I really like it. It's not as simple as something like Fiasco, but the point economies can lead to some really interesting reversals and developments. As an example, the players in my Dungeon World game made some of their own antagonists using DramaSystem and thus created awesome villains who are somewhat sympathetic and prone to sabotage one another. I tried running a con game of it, but I don't actually feel it works especially great for that. The system is fairly simple, but it leans on the relationships between characters. The whole first session should really be defining your character and - just as importantly - their relationship to the other characters. You end up with this delightful character map that's full of story possibilities. However, there's no real way to shortcut the fun of making those character links by using pre-gens. How much the individual pitches appeal to you will depend on your tastes, but I found them fun to read through. Overall, I recommend it - but it's not a crunchy game, it's focused much more on emotional beats than on equipment lists.
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Feb 25, 2015 00:05
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Note that one of the necessary qualities of a Hillfolk-friendly gaming group is "large". It's written for, IIRC, at least 5 players. So I backed it but have never had an opportunity to run it.
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Feb 25, 2015 01:12
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I've been reading through it, and it seems good, but the author makes some really optimistic assumptions about the play group. "Like many of the grounds for challenge, this problem is more theoretical than actual. Players don’t want to repeat themselves." I've played in more than one group that I quit because jesus christ do some people love to freak out when you ask them to do anything other than cookie cutter dungeon crawls. That's a fine assumption when you live in area with enough gamers to self select, but if not, good luck.
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Feb 25, 2015 01:37
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I backed Hillfolk just to encourage Laws to put out Feng Shui 2 to be honest. I don't like the game at all. It feels like a rules system for a pretty boring creative writing class. Of course I don't like games like Fiasco so my opinion is immediately suspect on this forum.
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Feb 25, 2015 01:42
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Hillfolk is great but it's also very much a group storytelling thing, it's not a conventional "game" in the way most RPGs are. It's very much built around having dramatic personal confrontations between the players, and the referee is really just there to flesh out the world and prove hooks but not to drive the plot like other games. It's a blast to play, though, I wouldn't knock it without trying it. Running it is pretty eye-opening, just reading the book doesn't give an indication of how it actually tends to play out.
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Feb 25, 2015 02:16
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I prefer GM driven plot so
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Feb 25, 2015 02:33
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I prefer GM driven plot so Okay, great? Then DramaSystem is not for you. It's worth expanding on this, I guess, that DramaSystem doesn't give the GM unlimited authority - they get to call scenes, but so does everyone else. This didn't appeal to me much at first, but it makes you as GM be clever with your scenes and resources. You also still get the pick the "theme" of the session, which is pretty important if people are buying into it. Some players do find DramaSystem more creatively tiring for exactly that reason - they have to call scenes and decide who's in them. Then they have to think about how the scene played out and who got what they wanted. It's more proactive thinking than tackling a dungeon or even a mystery usually is. But with the right group, it's really, really fun. I like it because it's pretty different from anything else on my shelves.
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Feb 25, 2015 04:53
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Yea Hillfolk is great but DramaSystem is straight up 'a story game' to the extent of being what every grognard spitting that phrase out like poison imagines.
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Feb 25, 2015 05:39
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It's an interesting contrast in that the only other game I know that makes "scenes" as explicit as Dramasystem, in that they get established formally and get called at the end and stuff, is Tenra Bansho Zero where the GM has absolute authority on what the scene is, who's in it, where it is, what's happening and when it gets called.
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Feb 25, 2015 12:21
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Scene framing like that seems to be a thing in FEAR studios games. Double Cross does something similar, and there's an actual cost to buy into scenes.
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Feb 25, 2015 12:43
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Feng Shui has sort of a scene framing.
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Feb 25, 2015 18:18
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It's great if you want the players to do all the heavy lifting, most of the time as a GM you're just watching and taking notes to figure out little twists to throw at them. Also it's great at cons to watch total strangers go from being shifty and shy to Lord of the Flies in two hours.
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Feb 27, 2015 06:11
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With Great Power is a comic book superhero game, with the emphasis way more on the comic book than the superhero. You use scenes to collect playing cards which you can then spend in later scenes.
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Feb 27, 2015 13:58
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| # ? Jun 6, 2024 15:33 |
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A couple more bundles for charity causes: The Game Masters Memorial Fund Charity Drive (some PFRPG + some Savage Worlds + some assorted stuff) Help Joe Bundle (the two or three titles I had time to check out were PFRPG) And another one just to lighten it up a bit: GM's Day Mega Adventure Pack (ten adventures for PFRPG. Huh, I had no idea we had a GM's Day...) edit: ...which turned out to be the anniversary of Gary Gygax's departure. 
Foglet fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Feb 27, 2015 |
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Feb 27, 2015 15:12
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