Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!
Well, there's enough Star Wars material out there you could argue either way. The WEG version had a huge impact on the fandom early on, and it's a fairly traditional game aside from the Force / Character Point mechanic. You can argue whether or not it gets the feel of the original films down or not but I think the whole franchise is too big to pin down to just the movies anymore, regardless of what's "canon" or not, for what that's worth for RPGs (not much, in my opinion). I know what I'd do, but what I'd do is even more niche and back-to-the-movies than I think most people would think of for a Star Wars game.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

potatocubed
Jul 26, 2012

*rathian noises*

Alien Rope Burn posted:

what I'd do is even more niche and back-to-the-movies than I think most people would think of for a Star Wars game.

Is it 'watch the good movies while playing Twilight Imperium'? Because that would make for a pretty fun day.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!
Nah, it's more use Spirit of '76 and basically ignore everything that isn't in the first movie, just go back to when you could still be like hey what is that weird alien, isn't that weird, I know nothing about its life story or species, let's make that up ourselves instead of knowing its wookiepedia entry as a Secret Background Jedi That Saves Luke Off-Screen Like All The Time, Honest.

ProfessorCirno
Feb 17, 2011

The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!
Gear porn is popular with nerds for the same reason TV Tropes is popular with nerds.

Big Hubris
Mar 8, 2011


Brainiac Five posted:

Like, only the Death Star escape and the rescue of Palpatine and the arena fight are pulp stories. I well remember all the Robert E. Howard stories split between paranoid fiction and a guy meditating with a hermit.

Pulp, as it is understood today, relies on action which is understood on both a campy level and a straightforward level where the events are reliant on an implicit ridiculousness and excess without making things explicit.

Most of Star Wars separates the action and the camp, or makes the action explicitly campy. The tension of neo-pulp is relatively rare. I suppose that what will pop up next is a definition of pulp that includes everything in Star Wars, so I do want to point out that by extension this makes the French New Wave and Kurosawa films "pulp".

People would probably do better if they admitted they don't really like the "game" part of "role-playing game" to themselves.

Under the definition you supplied, Raiders and Star Wars are pulp. I understand the desire to separate them from Flash Gordon and it's racism, but Star Wars absolutely came from Flash Gordon and other similarly trashy but respectable punchy fiction centered around violence and grounded in human misery.

Bongo Bill
Jan 17, 2012

People think that Star Wars is a dramatic adventure story where the bad guys have red laser swords and the good guys have blue laser swords. They are wrong. It is a dramatic adventure story where the bad guys have red laser swords and the good guys have green laser swords.

Bongo Bill fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Sep 9, 2016

Brainiac Five
Mar 28, 2016

by FactsAreUseless

ErichZahn posted:

Under the definition you supplied, Raiders and Star Wars are pulp. I understand the desire to separate them from Flash Gordon and it's racism, but Star Wars absolutely came from Flash Gordon and other similarly trashy but respectable punchy fiction centered around violence and grounded in human misery.

It also came from Dune, Hidden Fortress, Alphaville, Lady Snowblood, Dog Star Man, wartime propaganda movies, and the Vietnam War and New Left. Indeed, you could argue that all of those provide more of a direct influence on Star Wars than Flash Gordon or Lensman, especially when it comes to what people remember about the movies.

Not to mention that Flash Gordon has never been respectable, dude.

I find it interesting, though, that people think that Star Wars, a movie where close to a third of the running time is spent in a dystopian fusion of nuclear weapons and surveillance systems, is best represented by being pure fun and fluff. Frankly, The Spook Who Sat By The Door is far more Star Wars than y'all's proposals for games.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Terrible Opinions posted:

Because you legitimately truly enjoy all the fiddly little numbers. You don't just have guns A and B you have gun's A1 through Z56. People enjoy meticulously making model trains, play paradox strategy games, playing dwarf fortress, and building hugely fiddly rpg gear. Is that really so hard for you to believe? Do you think every D&D/Shadowrun player is just lying to themselves?

My one comment on this entire not-really-about-TG-as-an-industry-tangent is that while I don't think every D&D or Shadowrun player is engaged in serious self-delusion, at the same time I'm intensely skeptical that there's a 1-1 correlation between everyone deeply engaged in the charop minigame and people who regularly actually play the games they're designing characters and shuffling numbers for, much in the same way that people deeply invested in the metaplot of the World of Darkness and people who regularly play World of Darkness games aren't two perfectly overlapping circles. In fact I'll go one further and suggest that these things are both popular among their respective adherents for the same reason, that they give people an avenue to engage with the game on some level even when they can't actually play the game.

Brainiac Five
Mar 28, 2016

by FactsAreUseless

Kai Tave posted:

My one comment on this entire not-really-about-TG-as-an-industry-tangent is that while I don't think every D&D or Shadowrun player is engaged in serious self-delusion, at the same time I'm intensely skeptical that there's a 1-1 correlation between everyone deeply engaged in the charop minigame and people who regularly actually play the games they're designing characters and shuffling numbers for, much in the same way that people deeply invested in the metaplot of the World of Darkness and people who regularly play World of Darkness games aren't two perfectly overlapping circles. In fact I'll go one further and suggest that these things are both popular among their respective adherents for the same reason, that they give people an avenue to engage with the game on some level even when they can't actually play the game.

This is too close to "everyone who really plays RPGs wants them to just be Apocalypse World hacks and Fate" for comfort.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Brainiac Five posted:

This is too close to "everyone who really plays RPGs wants them to just be Apocalypse World hacks and Fate" for comfort.

Well I'm not really sure what you mean by that but assuming you're disagreeing with me I recall actual White Wolf employees at the height of metaplot madness more or less acknowledging that they sold a fair amount of sourcebooks on the strength of people buying them for the metaplot and to figuratively read on the toilet. I don't think it even requires metaplot of crunchy charop to suggest quite reasonably that a bunch of gamers buy way more games than they'll ever actually wind up playing in their lives. Being really into charop or metaplot doesn't mean you can't and/or don't also play the game as well, but one of these activities can be engaged in on your own in essentially a drop-in-drop-out basis while the other requires a lot more logistical wrangling and serious time commitment, so to be frank it's a lot easier to dither about with numbers or the intricate details of vampire-owned Sheboygan Falls than it is to arrange a regular gaming group, especially as people get older and responsibilities accrue.

I mean this isn't only a thing that happens with RPGs either, you get it with other sorts of games too. The board game Kemet has an extremely out-of-playable layer of pre-planning and strategizing based around which special abilities you want to buy the next time you play, shaping the strategy you work towards. The X-Wing miniatures game, or any point-based miniatures game at all really, gives people endless avenues for theorycrafting and listbuilding and coming up with crazy combos and poo poo even when you aren't actually playing, and I'd wager that more people who identify as 40K fans spend most of their time tweaking and workshopping their amazing armies that one day they'll totally play instead of actually playing 40K on a regular basis.

Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.
I think it's possible to run Star Wars both crunchy and fluffy and whoever owns the rights to Star Wars at any given time would endorse either playstyles for whatever reason (:10bux:). Personally though, I do have fun with a large list of gear to comb through... not for the six types of heavy blaster rifle but I like all the highly-situational gadgets and wacky devices section of a gear list. And then I get mad because my carry limit/starting cash isn't enough to get all the coolest ones!! :mad: I think if you're going to go deep into weapon and vehicle mods for a game though, building them off an assortment of tags and upgrades the like in Technoir and Fragged Empire seems like the best way going forward. Especially when they offer up some pregen options that industrious players can use as a baseline to swap bits in and out of at chargen or later on

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
I'm actually kind of surprised that nobody's ever made, for example, a cyberpunk RPG where characters are entirely a product of their equipment...in a future where any part of your self can be carved away and replaced with something better, your natural traits and skills don't really matter that much, do they? It doesn't matter if your natural reflexes might be good compared to an unaugmented person when someone with the latest in superconducting nervewires can effortlessly run rings around you, and nobody cares what a good shot you are when expert marksmanship is an outpatient procedure you can get at any black market clinic.

The Chairman
Jun 30, 2003

But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun
Isn't that essentially Eclipse Phase sleeves?

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

The Chairman posted:

Isn't that essentially Eclipse Phase sleeves?

I mean sort of but even Eclipse Phase has Attributes and Skills that are independent of sleeves and the sleeves act more like equipment modifiers to your "natural" numbers, I'm talking a game where there's no such thing as a Strength score or a rating in Firearms. Do you have Atlas mk.3 synthetic muscle grafts? Great, those come with the following tags which confer the following benefits and expand your assumed capabilities with regard to feats of strength thusly. Do you not have some sort of strength-enhancing cyberware? Then you probably aren't going to be punching through walls or ripping car doors off their hinges. What happens when someone with strength augs gets into a fistfight with someone who doesn't? Nothing that needs to be rolled for.

Chargen is literally "You have X-hundred thousand futurebucks to spend, here's the equipment chapter."

Tuxedo Catfish
Mar 17, 2007

You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.
I play tons of actual videogames with the equivalent of "crunchy" system mastery / optimization, I like it in my RPGs too.

I mean, I'm still very much of the "maximum depth at minimum complexity" school of thought, not more for more's sake, but I want more D&D 4E and the RPG equivalent of Warmahordes (in terms of elegance of the rules, not so much directly porting those rules to an RPG format which worked out... less well.)

S.J.
May 19, 2008

Just who the hell do you think we are?

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

I play tons of actual videogames with the equivalent of "crunchy" system mastery / optimization, I like it in my RPGs too.

I mean, I'm still very much of the "maximum depth at minimum complexity" school of thought, not more for more's sake, but I want more D&D 4E and the RPG equivalent of Warmahordes (in terms of elegance of the rules, not so much directly porting those rules to an RPG format which worked out... less well.)

The Warmahordes RPG is a lovely RPG version of the tabletop universe, quite frankly. Every time I think about it I get upset.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

I play tons of actual videogames with the equivalent of "crunchy" system mastery / optimization, I like it in my RPGs too.

I mean, I'm still very much of the "maximum depth at minimum complexity" school of thought, not more for more's sake, but I want more D&D 4E and the RPG equivalent of Warmahordes (in terms of elegance of the rules, not so much directly porting those rules to an RPG format which worked out... less well.)

4E's actually a good example to bring up because for me, one of the biggest draws in 4E was the combat system actually being fun to play instead of a perfunctory chore like it feels in a lot of other games, but it turns out that you can make a game that preserves that same sort of tactical combat and even a lot of the character building decision points without necessarily needing the ability to stack a dozen different +X modifiers together when charging/using radiant attacks/whatever. I'm not trying to dispute that people who love crunchy charop are deluding themselves into only thinking they're having fun, but there's a middle ground between something like Shadowrun or D&D3E on one end and Lasers & Feelings on the other, and some types of crunch frequently run orthogonal to others instead of in a directly complimentary fashion.

Haystack
Jan 23, 2005





Serious question: What are some crunchy games/systems that you all think of when you think "good crunchy game," and why?

For instance, I'm always really impressed by how well Ars Magica's rules work to flesh out its core themes. I'm sure it mechanically breaks down here and there, but I feel like that doesn't matter because the book makes it abundantly clear what the spirit of the game is.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
I think that GURPS does a good job of being "modularly crunchy", in that you have a good control over how fine-grained the mechanics are, and even turning the complexity up to 11 works out pretty well as long as you're all on-board with how "zoomed-in" the combat is.

People might disagree that 4th Edition D&D is a "crunchy" game to begin with, but I think it does a good job of using every cog and wheel in its machinery to produce interesting tactical combat.

HackMaster is on my bucket-list of games I want to run and play, but a read of it also gives me the impression that it was very well thought-out and uses its crunch intelligently.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

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

S.J. posted:

The Warmahordes RPG is a lovely RPG version of the tabletop universe, quite frankly. Every time I think about it I get upset.

I mostly remember getting mad that trollkin had Int penalties. Someone didn't read the trollkin fluff!

Elfgames
Sep 11, 2011

Fun Shoe

Haystack posted:

Serious question: What are some crunchy games/systems that you all think of when you think "good crunchy game," and why?

For instance, I'm always really impressed by how well Ars Magica's rules work to flesh out its core themes. I'm sure it mechanically breaks down here and there, but I feel like that doesn't matter because the book makes it abundantly clear what the spirit of the game is.

Last stand Is pretty much the perfect crunchy game in my oppinion it has actual fun tactical combat with lots of decisions and doesn't indulge itself in a bunch of worthless +numbers like D&D

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

Kai Tave posted:

I'm actually kind of surprised that nobody's ever made, for example, a cyberpunk RPG where characters are entirely a product of their equipment...in a future where any part of your self can be carved away and replaced with something better, your natural traits and skills don't really matter that much, do they? It doesn't matter if your natural reflexes might be good compared to an unaugmented person when someone with the latest in superconducting nervewires can effortlessly run rings around you, and nobody cares what a good shot you are when expert marksmanship is an outpatient procedure you can get at any black market clinic.

Honestly high-XP Cyberpunk 2020 characters end up this way, once your relevant stats or skills are maxed all there is to differentiate you is cyberware and equipment. "Meat is murder" used to be the jokey meme with an old group of mine because the more meat you had left... well.

Liquid Communism
Mar 9, 2004

коммунизм хранится в яичках

Haystack posted:

Serious question: What are some crunchy games/systems that you all think of when you think "good crunchy game," and why?

For instance, I'm always really impressed by how well Ars Magica's rules work to flesh out its core themes. I'm sure it mechanically breaks down here and there, but I feel like that doesn't matter because the book makes it abundantly clear what the spirit of the game is.

Shadowrun 2nd Edition, before the magic creep got too bad, is both crunchy and a legitimately pretty good game.

I've enjoyed games of GURPS, BESM, and even the old Iron Crown Middle-Earth Roleplaying Game (which is thankfully more streamlined than Rolemaster, the Game of Charts).

frankenfreak
Feb 16, 2007

I SCORED 85% ON A QUIZ ABOUT MONDAY NIGHT RAW AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY TEXT

#bastionboogerbrigade

Liquid Communism posted:

the old Iron Crown Middle-Earth Roleplaying Game (which is thankfully more streamlined than Rolemaster, the Game of Charts).
I think that's the one I had that and if I remember correctly, it really tried to sell you Rolemaster, though. A lot of "this is what you can do with this game, but in Rolemaster you could do so much more...". Also "more streamlined than the Game of Charts" is deceptive since that book still had more than enough charts.

DigitalRaven
Oct 9, 2012




Kai Tave posted:

I'm actually kind of surprised that nobody's ever made, for example, a cyberpunk RPG where characters are entirely a product of their equipment...in a future where any part of your self can be carved away and replaced with something better, your natural traits and skills don't really matter that much, do they? It doesn't matter if your natural reflexes might be good compared to an unaugmented person when someone with the latest in superconducting nervewires can effortlessly run rings around you, and nobody cares what a good shot you are when expert marksmanship is an outpatient procedure you can get at any black market clinic.

I had a spare half-hour, so I made this. Give it a whirl, debug it, whatever. If people think it's worth it, I'll add in feedback, tidy it up, and stick it on DriveThru for a buck or two.

Meat is Murder
A cyberpunk roleplaying game where whoever has the best stuff wins

This is very unapologetically 80's cyberpunk --- cybernetics rather than gene-tailoring and poo poo like that. All money is in Euro, and all numbers are written in European notation; one hundred thousand Euro is €100.000,00 but nobody cares about cents. Cash is good. Stuff is better.

Conflict Resolution
Both participants in a conflict declare *what they want*. If they're in opposition --- one person wants something that would hurt, kill, or deprive another of *stuff*, you have a conflict.

If neither of you have tech, neither of you gets what you want. Stop being boring.

If one party has equipment with a trait that applies to the conflict and the other doesn't, the person who brought the gun to the knife fight wins. You bring meat, you *lose*. gently caress you. If you live, buy yourself better.

If both parties have equipment with appropriate traits, each one rolls 1d6 and adds +1 per ten thousand Euro. You get what you pay for. Yes, if someone has an €80.000 DaCri neuro-overclocker and the other has a €10.000 Atari cortical stimulator, the Atari user loses automatically. Again, tough poo poo. Buy more, buy better.

When you win a conflict, you get *what you want*.

When you lose a conflict, you don't get *what you want*. You can downgrade the severity of the consequences on you by deactivating a bit of tech. The GM decides how this works, but it's always an option if the only other choice is serious injury or death. You can't use de-activated tech at all.

In order to re-activate tech, describe how you fix it, and spend a quarter of its value in Euro to reactivate it (half-value if it's upgraded).

Character Creation
Make up a name, decide on a general personality, and a sense of what you can do --- what some other games call a concept.

You have €200.000 to spend on equipment. You can't spend more than €100.000 on any one thing. See the equipment section for how that works.

Nobody cares what your meat can do.

Equipment
Rather than providing a specific list of poo poo, this is how you make stuff.

  • Each piece of equipment comes with one trait. Traits describe the kind of actions that the equipment can help with.
  • Determine a brand for your tech.
  • For every extra €20.000 you spend, determine one special feature --- a brand, a model name and number, a special customization, that kind of thing. While it won't help in conflicts, it can help with roleplaying.
  • When you get more money after a job, you can sell your old poo poo and buy new, or upgrade.
    [list=1]
  • If you sell, you get your street price back. You can, if you want, swap out the equipment's trait. If you've got a €20.000 Iwashita cyberarm, you can upgrade to a €30.000 Sarif Industries ChromeWear cyberarm.
  • If you upgrade, it costs twice as much but you add an extra trait. If you customize said €20.000 Iwashita cyberarm, it costs €20.000 to make the device worth €30.000 in total. It also costs half-value to fix, rather than quarter-value. You may have broader applicability, but it takes more work to fix.
[*]If you haven't customized your gear, each piece can only have one trait. To get more traits, you have to spend on new stuff.

Traits
These are shamelessly stolen from Technoir. Each has suggestions for cyberwear. You don't have to have it as cyberwear --- Detect could be a swarm of camera drones, while Fight could be a mono-edge knife. You have imagination. Use it.

  • Coax: Influencing and manipulating people. Scanning micro-expressions and dumping pheromones into the air.
  • Detect: Notice details and track people. Milliwave radar and cybereyes.
  • Fight: Making people hurt up close. Martial arts skillwires, implanted arm-razors.
  • Hack: Defeating computer-based security and interact with technology. Cyberdecks, headjacks, and magnetic palm implants
  • Move: Being faster than other people. Cyberlegs, reflex stimulators.
  • Prowl: Get around without people seeing you. Thermoptic camoflage, electromagnetic scramblers
  • Shoot: Making people hurt from afar. Implanted submachine guns, smartgun palm-link.
  • Think: Be smarter than other people. Neuro-cognitive overclockers, internet smartlink.

Playing the Game
If you don't know how to play a roleplaying game, god help you because I sure won't.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
I think "lots of charts" gets an unfairly bad rap. It lets you

(A) design for a spectrum of results better than a binary pass/fail against a target number. And sure, maybe your system has a method by which you still get partial successes and partial failures based on how close you get to the target number, but expressing that is still done faster via a chart.

(B) display that spectrum of results clearly. Rolling a 3 means this, a 6 means that, a 10 means this other thing, and so on.

The sin of Rolemaster was that it asked you to add three or more two-digit numbers, along with possibly subtracting one or two more, but once you had that result, charts aren't all that bad, especially these days where it should be trivial to make sure everyone has a copy of the charts they need.

Like, instead of trying to explain/understand THAC0, just give players an index card of the roll-to-hit chart.

Liquid Communism
Mar 9, 2004

коммунизм хранится в яичках

frankenfreak posted:

I think that's the one I had that and if I remember correctly, it really tried to sell you Rolemaster, though. A lot of "this is what you can do with this game, but in Rolemaster you could do so much more...". Also "more streamlined than the Game of Charts" is deceptive since that book still had more than enough charts.

Oh, yes. But it caught me at an impressionable time with a really good GM, so I had a lot of fun.

The Deleter
May 22, 2010

Kai Tave posted:

I'm actually kind of surprised that nobody's ever made, for example, a cyberpunk RPG where characters are entirely a product of their equipment...in a future where any part of your self can be carved away and replaced with something better, your natural traits and skills don't really matter that much, do they? It doesn't matter if your natural reflexes might be good compared to an unaugmented person when someone with the latest in superconducting nervewires can effortlessly run rings around you, and nobody cares what a good shot you are when expert marksmanship is an outpatient procedure you can get at any black market clinic.

I'm currently a sucker for dice pools so I might knock up something on my break around this concept.

Lightning Lord
Feb 21, 2013

$200 a day, plus expenses

Halloween Jack posted:

I remember spending hours making Shadowrun characters. One bit I'll never forget is the choice between the Colt Manhunter and the Ares Predator. Both guns were heavy pistols with the same Concealability rating that did the same damage. But the Ares Predator came with a smartlink, while the Manhunter only had a laser sight.

Everyone in my group bought the Manhunter and paid a hefty cost to outfit it with an internal smartlink, instead of buying the Predator, basically the same gun that already had a smartlink for far less money. Why? Because the Ares Predator holds 15 bullets and the Colt Manhunter holds 16. We never ever ever played a game where we were down to our pistols, we meticulously counted bullets, and that last bullet mattered. I don't know how many people ever did.

RPGs with long lists of weapons made more sense in the 90s, when you couldn't just go on Wikipedia to learn every technical detail about exotic guns like the Pancor Jackhammer or Deckard's jury-rigged Steyr-Aug from Blade Runner or whatever. Books like the Street Samurai Catalog are cool because they're actually more about telling you about the setting and implying how the game should be played. (And if I remember right, the SSC introduced things like knockout-dart-guns and net guns to encourage players to consider different tactics. Some of the later sourcebooks also introduced new security gear that was really for the PCs to fight against, not to use.)

But the Predator is the iconic pistol of Shadowrun! Plus it looks like Robocop's gun.

Also your point about equipment lists being worldbuilding one of the best points in this discussion/argument. I have the D&D Encyclopedia Magica books out on my desk and I've been flicking through them absentmindedly lately. It's a gigantic list of basically every magical item in every version of D&D up until 1995, Clearly culled directly from their original source with no editing, it claims to be for "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" (which in 95 meant 2E) but is full of 1E and Basic stats and terms. Part of the charm IMO. Also great inspiration for any kind of game. Also, regardless of what you might think of the mechanics, the old Shadowrun books had superb development of the setting through stuff like this and the presentation as filez from the Super USENET that was the Matrix, complete with comments.

Actually a cool RPG book would be something that has a handful of generic statblocks for equipment but has a bunch of ways to fluff it. so you get the stats for SHOTGUN, then here's some models of shotgun described with pictures, maybe here's a list of minor modifiers the GM or players can attach to the individual fluff descriptions to distinguish the weapons if that's what they want.

This might help those of us in here who cannot appreciate the simple fun of a wacked out equipment list due to excessive crunch or narrative disconnection enjoy what is simply one of the greatest pleasures of the RPG genre. After all, isn't this poo poo cool?



Magnusth posted:

I'm a huge star wars dork and in.my ealier years, I would now and then browse wookiepedia for fun.

Incidentally I like Stars both Wars and Trek, and I find Wookiepedia nigh impenetrable, but Memory Alpha easy to deal with, even the stuff about novels.

Covok posted:

I guess I'll pop in and say that customized lightsabers are still canon post-EU purge. The mini-arc in the Clone Wars 3-D TV series, which is still canon, dedicated to establishing how each lightsaber is unique to each jedi and even talking about the little bits that make them unique is still there.

Anyhoo, I really think this is one big non-argument. The fact is, games are about having fun and that means different things to different people. When you make a game, you should make something you want to play yourself instead of trying to hit some objective "fun" or something like that. So, if people like crunchier systems, they're going to make that if that's what they're passionate about. It's also hard to argue if one style of game is better than another as it really comes down to taste. It's easy to argue for what you prefer, but that doesn't mean its true for everyone or objective.

The purge was basically Disney making a new EU, with the Greatest Hits of the old stuff eventually ported back in. Thrawn showing up again pretty much clinches this.

And cool post. I agree 100%. Sometimes people lose sight of this in pursuit of gaming perfection - what's worth fighting for in our little realm is that games work well, no matter what school of design they're from.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I think "lots of charts" gets an unfairly bad rap. It lets you

(A) design for a spectrum of results better than a binary pass/fail against a target number. And sure, maybe your system has a method by which you still get partial successes and partial failures based on how close you get to the target number, but expressing that is still done faster via a chart.

(B) display that spectrum of results clearly. Rolling a 3 means this, a 6 means that, a 10 means this other thing, and so on.

The sin of Rolemaster was that it asked you to add three or more two-digit numbers, along with possibly subtracting one or two more, but once you had that result, charts aren't all that bad, especially these days where it should be trivial to make sure everyone has a copy of the charts they need.

Like, instead of trying to explain/understand THAC0, just give players an index card of the roll-to-hit chart.

Agreed.

Another sin Rolemaster committed was baroque names for stats, attributes, skills and such that were oddly shortened. Probably as a way to distinguish it from D&D. Look at Palladium's games for another (although not as bad IMO) example. The skills are particularly bad in this way - Pulling my Shadow World book off the shelf, what the gently caress is "LorT" or "OutA"?

Still, a lot of the genre assumptions in the core books seem interesting, and Shadow World is certainly a cool setting.

Haystack posted:

Serious question: What are some crunchy games/systems that you all think of when you think "good crunchy game," and why?

Pendragon, because it's so laser focused on it's theme that everything is designed around supporting it. It's hard to imagine Pendragon being used for anything but Arthurian adventures, and why would you want to anyway, it's just so drat good at it. Err, barring that hack designed for Gloranthan use, Pendragon Pass. That I want to try.

Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 12:19 on Sep 9, 2016

Doodmons
Jan 17, 2009
Good crunchy games I can think of are usually crunchy either because they're focused on a single concept that requires them to be complex to do it justice (Tenra Bansho Zero, Legends of the Wulin, Pendragon, Demon: The Descent), or their crunch is actually well thought out and adds something to the game (GURPS).

Tekopo
Oct 24, 2008

When you see it, you'll shit yourself.


GW and FFG have ended their licensing agreement, for anyone interested. By the end of february next year no more GW licensed products will be available, which seems to include Talisman/Fury of Dracula etc.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Well, that sucks and is stupid. So, I guess GW working as normal then.

e: poo poo, I just realized that means no expansions for Warhammer Quest. Goddammit GW! :argh:

long-ass nips Diane
Dec 13, 2010

Breathe.

Everyone should buy Chaos in the Old World ASAP

Tekopo
Oct 24, 2008

When you see it, you'll shit yourself.


Also probably Fury of Dracula 2e as well.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

And Warhammer Quest: Adventure Card Game.

Humbug Scoolbus
Apr 25, 2008

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
Clapping Larry

LatwPIAT posted:

Gear porn is awesome.



It is. (I love that system and Living Steel and the Aliens RPG.)

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Tekopo posted:

GW and FFG have ended their licensing agreement, for anyone interested. By the end of february next year no more GW licensed products will be available, which seems to include Talisman/Fury of Dracula etc.

https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2016/9/9/a-new-path-forward/

Here's the presser on it.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

Kai Tave posted:

My one comment on this entire not-really-about-TG-as-an-industry-tangent is that while I don't think every D&D or Shadowrun player is engaged in serious self-delusion, at the same time I'm intensely skeptical that there's a 1-1 correlation between everyone deeply engaged in the charop minigame and people who regularly actually play the games they're designing characters and shuffling numbers for, much in the same way that people deeply invested in the metaplot of the World of Darkness and people who regularly play World of Darkness games aren't two perfectly overlapping circles.
I can look back on games I played and enjoyed 20 years ago and say "I would have had more fun if I hadn't taken certain assumptions for granted, and if I hadn't spent countless hours on stuff that wasn't important to actually playing." While still acknowledging that I did have fun. A lot of people really can't, though, and this is how you wind up with people who think game design is trying to steal their childhood.

Lightning Lord posted:

But the Predator is the iconic pistol of Shadowrun! Plus it looks like Robocop's gun.

Also your point about equipment lists being worldbuilding one of the best points in this discussion/argument. I have the D&D Encyclopedia Magica books out on my desk and I've been flicking through them absentmindedly lately. It's a gigantic list of basically every magical item in every version of D&D up until 1995, Clearly culled directly from their original source with no editing, it claims to be for "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" (which in 95 meant 2E) but is full of 1E and Basic stats and terms. Part of the charm IMO. Also great inspiration for any kind of game. Also, regardless of what you might think of the mechanics, the old Shadowrun books had superb development of the setting through stuff like this and the presentation as filez from the Super USENET that was the Matrix, complete with comments.
Equipment lists by themselves aren't actually great worldbuilding. Some items in the list can make people think more about the setting and the playstyle--entries for ten-foot-poles, mirrors, stakes, etc. imply things about D&D where the book might otherwise fail to explain itself well--but they're usually not worth it in proportion to the space they take up. Going back to the example of the Street Samurai Catalog:



This entry contains some nice worldbuilding, but it's an entire page devoted to one piece of gear. You don't get that from a table.

quote:

Actually a cool RPG book would be something that has a handful of generic statblocks for equipment but has a bunch of ways to fluff it. so you get the stats for SHOTGUN, then here's some models of shotgun described with pictures, maybe here's a list of minor modifiers the GM or players can attach to the individual fluff descriptions to distinguish the weapons if that's what they want.
Fragged Empire dogg.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

"I have written a great deal over the years about the ‘greatest danger’ facing Games Workshop. It has usually been in response to the expression of some fear of imminent doom. When will the world tire of miniatures? (It won’t; these are not fashion items, they are hobby collectibles.) Won’t all your customers move on to computer games instead? (They didn’t; most of our current customers weren’t born when the Atari ST came out.) How about other games like Pokémon or role-playing games? (Who can remember them, now?). The evidence is there for all to see, but when it wasn’t I was seen as complacent in the face of these real dangers. I don’t think that was complacency, it’s just that we here all make a living from serving collectors and we understand them and their needs. These are paper tiger dangers. The real danger is us." - Tom Kirby, GW Chairman, 2013

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Sorry to double-post, but:

Lightning Lord posted:

Actually a cool RPG book would be something that has a handful of generic statblocks for equipment but has a bunch of ways to fluff it. so you get the stats for SHOTGUN, then here's some models of shotgun described with pictures, maybe here's a list of minor modifiers the GM or players can attach to the individual fluff descriptions to distinguish the weapons if that's what they want.

Let me tell you about Fragged Empire...

  • Locked thread