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Halloween Jack posted:I know that lowest-common-denominator stuff is often popular, but I'm shocked at the amount of critical praise for what is a thoroughly mediocre product in every way (except the art). But enough about Next.
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May 17, 2016 15:19
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Halloween Jack posted:I know that lowest-common-denominator stuff is often popular, but I'm shocked at the amount of critical praise for what is a thoroughly mediocre product in every way (except the art). But even apart from the mechanical wonkiness (your character is forced to be hyper-specialized, XP as save-your-rear end points, overvaluing cyphers, why are we multiplying by 3 just use a different loving die), the settings are dull as poo poo. I already talked about how Numenera is, but the whole point of The Strange is that you can be from or visit an infinite number of alternate realities. Only in the core book we get two in any detail: the Generic Fantasy World (although admittedly more Sumerian than Western European) and Generic Sci-Fi World. Anything interesting that got any useful detail was in supplements.
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May 17, 2016 15:25
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Before Numenera came out, Cook blogged his design goals for a new game and they were all really good, sensible, and modern. I'd love to find that post because it really changed my perception of him; He doesn't set out to design regressive crap but it turns out that's just what he's good at. He's not afraid of new ideas, (which might be why he left the Next team) but he's also not really great at coming up with them. I feel like he's a better contributor than initiator, if that makes sense. I suspect he'd be happier working with someone at Modipheus or Pelgrane. My "dream team" is actually Cook and Luke Crane: Cook could certainly give Crane the much-needed direction to avoid his default "crawl up my own rear end in a top hat" instinct, and isn't going to turn people off with larp wizard speak. And Crane would never let Cook rehash / reheat his same tired mechanics and concepts, either.
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May 17, 2016 16:15
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moths posted:Before Numenera came out, Cook blogged his design goals for a new game and they were all really good, sensible, and modern. I'd love to find that post because it really changed my perception of him; He doesn't set out to design regressive crap but it turns out that's just what he's good at. Or maybe not; I mean he is generally all about making wizards the best.
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May 17, 2016 16:30
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All I know about Numenarra is I kickstarted (at the basic digital-only level, so I think like $25) the Planscape: Tides of Numenarra vidyagame several years ago, and it still hasn't come out, but isn't dead yet either. At the time I knew basically nothing about the setting and was KSing it entirely on the basis of who was making it, and that Planescape: Torment is a much-beloved old game. I still know almost nothing about the setting. But: I could see this game going two different ways. Maybe because Numenarra is uninspiring and boring, the game will suck. OR, maybe because the people making this game are cool and good, they'll inject some life into the setting and make it a better more interesting place to have pen & paper RPG games in. I hope it's the latter.
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May 17, 2016 16:32
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moths posted:Before Numenera came out, Cook blogged his design goals for a new game and they were all really good, sensible, and modern. I'd love to find that post because it really changed my perception of him; He doesn't set out to design regressive crap but it turns out that's just what he's good at.
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May 17, 2016 16:33
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I think Numenera clearly wants to be the Dying Earth, and perhaps other "science fantasy" books in the subgenre it came to exemplify, from The Night Land to The Book of the New Sun. Problem is, such world generally don't benefit from being extremely detailed and historied. (In Vance's Dying Earth, civilization is older than every D&D campaign setting combined; so many empires have risen and fallen that history only matters to arch-wizards, who are all vain dilletantes anyway.) The Dying Earth style actually benefits from modules--details of some isolated pocket of civilization, what makes it cool and interesting, and the opportunities for adventure there. This applies whether you want to do Cugel, Thundarr, or Kamandi. A game that was really concerned with the mood and theme of the subgenre would have mechanics that put across the idea of innocence and hope juxtaposed against jadedness and greed. What we get is lazy d20 rules, and laughable narrative rules that are chasing current trends. The result doesn't look like it's chasing trends, though, it looks like a throwback to the mid-90s.
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May 17, 2016 17:15
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Evil Mastermind posted:doesn't really get how narrative mechanics actually function. Robin Laws' Dying Earth game (which is great) is an interesting example of the tension between narrative mechanical style and the demands of RPG publishing. His core book was full of advice like "don't bother with a detailed map" and "the monsters are vague collections of contradictory 'facts' that the GM decides the truth of on the spot" - and the supplements and adventures (mostly by other writers) are full of gridded maps and detailed monster writeups. The Star Trek Technical Manual/Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe/Lord of the Rings Appendices approach to world description is really, really hard to get away from.
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May 17, 2016 17:32
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FMguru posted:This is my vote. I get that he wants to move forward and is excited about narrative mechanics (and that is a thousand time more admirable than thinking the hobby peaked at Gary's table in 1975), but he's just too inured in the old simulationy way of doing things to really grok how narrative rules work (he did get his start writing rules expansion modules for Rolemaster, after all, and that's a hard habit to unlearn). The character connections in the Cypher System have zero mechanical weight. Yet somehow they're better than aspects.
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May 17, 2016 18:04
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That's just classic "you know this is true in the game because it's written on a character sheet" thinking.
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May 17, 2016 18:11
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Leperflesh posted:I could see this game going two different ways. Maybe because Numenarra is uninspiring and boring, the game will suck. OR, maybe because the people making this game are cool and good, they'll inject some life into the setting and make it a better more interesting place to have pen & paper RPG games in. I hope it's the latter.
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May 17, 2016 18:18
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Evil Mastermind posted:Well, to be fair so are his fans. I've told this anecdote before, but last year I was in a Numenera demo (with a truly terrible GM, so that didn't help my impression of the game) and one of the players told me that Numenera's character bonds were better than Fate aspects because "they tell you how your characters are related!" Not true! Some of the connections make you a huge rear end in a top hat for no good reason, as several of the...'I am a blank blank who blanks' powersets include a rule for interacting with your connections that ultimately boils down to "If you miss an attack with this, you hit them instead"
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May 17, 2016 18:35
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Halloween Jack posted:That's just classic "you know this is true in the game because it's written on a character sheet" thinking. But even a year later it still boggles my mind that this guy thought "this thing that's just a line with no mechanical weight or use beyond backstory" is somehow better than "this thing is a mechanical pillar of the system and is used to reward in-character behavior".
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May 17, 2016 18:47
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Lemon-Lime posted:RPGs are always better when they're explicitly designed to be played one specific way. Nah. They just make designers angrier when you don't play them that way. Google "SS in the Valley." Reskinning, house rules and other tweaks are part of the pleasure of gaming, and beyond folks for whom a given game will fit hand in glove, this sort of creative tweaking is inevitable. You can go too far in supporting it and lose your game's sense of identity, but if your favourite ways to play a game have any integrity in the way you present them, people should pick up on that, and you don't need to take responsibility for every variation folks come up with. Vis a vis SS in the Valley, reading Baker trying to come up with some reason why Dogs doesn't work for it was sort of sad. I mean poo poo, have we come to the point in design-first purism where nobody can say, "That poo poo is repugnant, don't do it?" You'll always have people who just want to blow poo poo up, power trip, or violate social norms inside a fictional box, and trying to design to prevent it is foolhardy, especially when an informal word of caution is a more efficient way to go about it. Then again, I've seen people powergame loving Fiasco by competing to gently caress up in some spectacular way the fastest/most and congratulating themselves about it, which is in fact a really boring way to play, because there's no tragicomic arc and nothing to lose, so people who play against intent can sometimes freshen things up.
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May 17, 2016 18:53
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Nah. They just make designers angrier when you don't play them that way. Google "SS in the Valley." I got a wikipedia page on a steamship.
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May 17, 2016 19:11
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Reskinning, house rules and other tweaks are part of the pleasure of gaming, and beyond folks for whom a given game will fit hand in glove, this sort of creative tweaking is inevitable. You can go too far in supporting it and lose your game's sense of identity, but if your favourite ways to play a game have any integrity in the way you present them, people should pick up on that, and you don't need to take responsibility for every variation folks come up with. But on the converse, most people are terrible game designers much the way they are likely to be terrible anything. They are more likely to make bad choices that lead to a worse play experience than the converse - this is how you get poo poo like "rulings not rules" and a thirty-year old tradition of people making lousy house rules that drive people away from their table and the hobby. What's worse is that they don't have the critical faculties to even realize half the time that that they are sabotaging their own play experience and end up blaming the game they were never playing the way the designer intended anyway. The other half the the time usually they're optimizing play for the preferences of (if you're lucky) half the group and alienating the other half. People with genuinely good design chops will be able to dismantle the game as a whole and see how to mess with it to get something new. There are plenty of potentially interesting hacks of DitV, and that's basically how you got PbtA out of Apocalypse World. But when you're talking about what the designer should be thinking about when assembling the game, he/she should be putting something out there that is as likely as possible to yield a fun play experience, and nine times out of ten that means presenting a honed and focused product that does only one thing, does it as well as possible, and explains HOW and WHY it does that one thing well.
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May 17, 2016 19:21
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MalcolmSheppard posted:You'll always have people who just want to blow poo poo up, power trip, or violate social norms inside a fictional box, and trying to design to prevent it is foolhardy, especially when an informal word of caution is a more efficient way to go about it. Then again, I've seen people powergame loving Fiasco by competing to gently caress up in some spectacular way the fastest/most and congratulating themselves about it, which is in fact a really boring way to play, because there's no tragicomic arc and nothing to lose, so people who play against intent can sometimes freshen things up. That group of power gamers would probably have a good time with D&D 4e or Strike!, where the game rewards pulling off rad, synergistic combos.
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May 17, 2016 19:40
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Leperflesh posted:At the time I knew basically nothing about the setting and was KSing it entirely on the basis of who was making it, and that Planescape: Torment is a much-beloved old game. I still know almost nothing about the setting. Planescape: Torment is up there with the original Deus Ex, in terms of Best Computer Games You'll Ever Read.
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May 17, 2016 19:47
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homullus posted:Planescape: Torment is up there with the original Deus Ex, in terms of Best Computer Games You'll Ever Read. What? Deus Ex's gameplay is fantastic.
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May 17, 2016 20:08
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unseenlibrarian posted:Not true! Some of the connections make you a huge rear end in a top hat for no good reason, as several of the...'I am a blank blank who blanks' powersets include a rule for interacting with your connections that ultimately boils down to "If you miss an attack with this, you hit them instead" Well that's what you get for picking "I am a loving rear end in a top hat who shoots his teammates."
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May 17, 2016 20:13
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Ferrinus posted:What? Deus Ex's gameplay is fantastic. And unlike Planescape, Deus Ex's mechanics aren't a chore to play.
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May 17, 2016 20:31
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Ferrinus posted:What? Deus Ex's gameplay is fantastic. Unless you ever try shooting a gun.
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May 17, 2016 20:33
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Covok posted:I got a wikipedia page on a steamship. Apparently it's a Dogs in the Vineyard hack where you play as the SS. I'd ask why it exists but I'm fairly sure I already know the answer.
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May 17, 2016 20:58
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Evil Mastermind posted:I really, really wanted to like Numenera and The Strange. Like I said, Numenera wants to be 80's sci-fantasy stuff like Thundarr and those old Marvel toyline comics like Crystal, Visionaries, and Sectaurs. The Strange is a multiverse-hopping thing that is straight up my jam. With the failures of Numenera being as obvious at they are, what WOULD you recommend for a Thundarr / Kamandi / Vance -esque style game in the very weird future?
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May 17, 2016 21:49
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ProfessorCirno posted:With the failures of Numenera being as obvious at they are, what WOULD you recommend for a Thundarr / Kamandi / Vance -esque style game in the very weird future? Masters of Umdaar (a Fate World) is supposed to emulate Thundarr, at least. Having never seen Thundarr I couldn't tell you if it does, but it's pretty good nonetheless.
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May 17, 2016 22:21
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ProfessorCirno posted:With the failures of Numenera being as obvious at they are, what WOULD you recommend for a Thundarr / Kamandi / Vance -esque style game in the very weird future? I never played it or read it, but Cartoon Action Hour(?) is all about 80s shows like He-Man.
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May 17, 2016 22:43
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senrath posted:Apparently it's a Dogs in the Vineyard hack where you play as the SS. I'd ask why it exists but I'm fairly sure I already know the answer. Charitably, we could assume the author is a prepubescent atheist who thinks that, like, religion's totally like Nazism, man! Uncharitably, they're probably unironic Nazi fanboys.
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May 17, 2016 22:49
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ProfessorCirno posted:With the failures of Numenera being as obvious at they are, what WOULD you recommend for a Thundarr / Kamandi / Vance -esque style game in the very weird future? potatocubed posted:Masters of Umdaar (a Fate World) is supposed to emulate Thundarr, at least. Having never seen Thundarr I couldn't tell you if it does, but it's pretty good nonetheless. This is Thundarr, by the way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhAobPugvsk Oddly, there's very few RPGs out there that try to emulate that era of sci-fantasy comics and cartoons. Which is odd, because they were all over the place in the 80's because they were prime toy licencing material. He-Man, Thundercats, Crystar the Crystal Warrior, Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light, Sectaurs, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, probably a ton more I'm forgetting. I don't think you really need a genre-enforcing ruleset for stuff like this, but it'd be nice if people would at least make generic settings based on this stuff.
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May 17, 2016 23:19
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Ferrinus posted:What? Deus Ex's gameplay is fantastic. gtrmp posted:Unless you ever try shooting a gun. It is perfectly acceptable for the default reload key to be semicolon instead of r.
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May 17, 2016 23:34
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ProfessorCirno posted:With the failures of Numenera being as obvious at they are, what WOULD you recommend for a Thundarr / Kamandi / Vance -esque style game in the very weird future? I mean, I suppose it depends on what sort of gameplay you're looking for because those sorts of settings are relatively uncomplicated to pencil in as you go. If you want something crunchy and like tactical combat then the 4E-derived Gamma World is excellent. Meanwhile Fate has enough hacks and variants out there that it could easily handle the sorts of characters you'd find in such settings. If you want something more old-school sandboxy then Kevin Crawford's Godbound is a reasonably solid OSR-ish game with, at least in the beta, some evocative setting writeups, all by one of the OSR's least insufferable creators.
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May 17, 2016 23:52
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The SS Dogs in the Vineyard follows up here: http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?PHPSESSID=7449088d675b1aa68a8656e13bf7bdd5&topic=16895.msg179303#msg179303 Pretty hard to read this as nazi fanboys - it's chilling and horrible and not intended to be played obviously.
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May 18, 2016 00:14
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Yeah, the thing about that 80's style of sci-fantasy is that there's no real "genre rules" you'd need to enforce mechanically. It's more about the feel and tone of the presentation, I think. Which is why I'm surprised there's not more settings like that, because it's not about putting together mechanics, it's about presentation. Oh, wait, that's right...a lot of designers are terrible with tone. (In all honesty, a Weirdworld style sci-fantasy setting based on "stuff that EM loved when he was a kid/really digs in the past few years" is one of those projects I'd love to do but know I'd never start, let alone finish.)
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May 18, 2016 00:15
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xiw posted:The SS Dogs in the Vineyard follows up here: http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=16895.msg179303#msg179303 is a non-broken link
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May 18, 2016 00:32
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xiw posted:The SS Dogs in the Vineyard follows up here: It sounds exactly like the sort of self-congratulatory transgressive exploration you used to get from the nth Vampire LARPer whose character was a Nazi, where it's not Nazi fanboyism but let's say that it's an excess of interest. (It kind of reminds me of 3:16, where it's a terrible tragedy that you're massacring a gazillion aliens using rules tailored for doing so. Oh, it's terrible!) My point is that Baker obviously wishes it somehow broke Dogs to play it this way (b-but town creation rules!) instead of stepping up and just saying that it's grody poo poo, take a step back. You cannot design a game that makes bad taste impossible.
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May 18, 2016 02:41
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MalcolmSheppard posted:It sounds exactly like the sort of self-congratulatory transgressive exploration you used to get from the nth Vampire LARPer whose character was a Nazi, where it's not Nazi fanboyism but let's say that it's an excess of interest. (It kind of reminds me of 3:16, where it's a terrible tragedy that you're massacring a gazillion aliens using rules tailored for doing so. Oh, it's terrible!) My point is that Baker obviously wishes it somehow broke Dogs to play it this way (b-but town creation rules!) instead of stepping up and just saying that it's grody poo poo, take a step back. You cannot design a game that makes bad taste impossible. By god I will try! Actually, probably not. but if I ever design a game from the ground up again, at least it won't be as bad as Cthulhutech. Speaking of which I had heard they were doing a second edition with all the skeevy poo poo taken out. Has that shown up yet, or am I being horribly optimistic about any changes to the setting?
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May 18, 2016 02:52
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Kwyndig posted:By god I will try! Let me clarify: You can't design a game that makes the players' bad taste impossible. On the designer's side? Oh man. Then again, there's goofy bad taste and icky bad taste. Goofiness is golden. World of Synnibarr, man. Immortal. Gaze upon it: http://www.invisiblewar.com/ Then you have ambiguous cases like Rifts where there's so much charming wackiness and a character class around shooting a giant gun, but then there's the Fascists Are the Real Heroes side.
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May 18, 2016 04:38
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Kwyndig posted:. Last I looked, which was a bit ago, all that was out was a very bare bones alpha rules PDF you could get off DTRPG. (It looked better than the original but still not very good.) There was some discussion directly with one or two authors on RPGnet where they seemed genuinely interested in not being gross, but also kind of struggling with how to write a game about magitech power armor soldiers fighting space slugs in neo-hyper-Shadowrun without including at least some rape. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 05:42 on May 18, 2016 |
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May 18, 2016 05:36
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MalcolmSheppard posted:It sounds exactly like the sort of self-congratulatory transgressive exploration you used to get from the nth Vampire LARPer whose character was a Nazi, where it's not Nazi fanboyism but let's say that it's an excess of interest. (It kind of reminds me of 3:16, where it's a terrible tragedy that you're massacring a gazillion aliens using rules tailored for doing so. Oh, it's terrible!) My point is that Baker obviously wishes it somehow broke Dogs to play it this way (b-but town creation rules!) instead of stepping up and just saying that it's grody poo poo, take a step back. You cannot design a game that makes bad taste impossible. These people are known as wehraboos among wargamer and military historian circles.
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May 18, 2016 05:55
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ProfessorCirno posted:With the failures of Numenera being as obvious at they are, what WOULD you recommend for a Thundarr / Kamandi / Vance -esque style game in the very weird future? https://www.rpglibrary.org/settings/thundarr/
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May 18, 2016 06:26
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Dovetailing from the Cook discussion earlier, the latest Bundle of Holding is Malhavon Press' greatest hits: Ptolus and the Books of Experimental Might in one package, and Arcana Evolved in the other
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