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I haven't read World Wide Wrestling by you could do it similar to hope they handle not all the characters being in the same match.
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# ? Nov 25, 2016 23:15 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 18:10 |
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Kwyndig posted:No there is not. Outside of some kind of fantasy setting where detectives are also lawyers you'd need two characters per player or people would be sitting out on a lot of the action, as well. I think GURPS Cops had info on doing L&O style games, but I don't remember where I put my copy so I can't say how useful it would be outside of GURPS. in a game like that, I'd take every player having a cop and a lawyer character each as a given, which wouldn't be that much of a strain on resources in a game with lighter rules
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# ? Nov 25, 2016 23:25 |
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Nuns with Guns posted:speaking of is there a good Law & Order rpg? because a game with both a police detective phase and a trial by jury phase sounds really fun. If there's not, someone needs to make one so I can run Ace Attorney in it.
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# ? Nov 25, 2016 23:38 |
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Waffleman_ posted:If there's not, someone needs to make one so I can run Ace Attorney in it. You could help with the 'bullshit lawyer superpowers' supplement
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# ? Nov 25, 2016 23:40 |
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my group may well be niche nerdlords but we'd devour a well made Law and Order type game, but yea aside from books like GURPS Cops and the assorted 'intrigue' splats for the fantasy games and all having sub-sections about how to do a court scene I've yet to see it done.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 00:01 |
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Nuns with Guns posted:speaking of is there a good Law & Order rpg? because a game with both a police detective phase and a trial by jury phase sounds really fun. In Mutant City Blues you play actual cops, so getting enough evidence to convict without doing anything that might let the perp get off on a technicality is a big part of the game. You're cops rather than lawyers though, so aside from building the case and being a special witness in court, you don't have a big part to play once you get them behind bars. Law & Order: X-Men Edition is a pretty rad concept for a game, anyway, though. Also it gave us the Quade Diagram, which is baller enough for the game to deserve a look just for that.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 00:14 |
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The best legal system game is Sea Dracula.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 01:29 |
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Zark the Damned posted:You could help with the 'bullshit lawyer superpowers' supplement I totally fuckin' would, too.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 03:05 |
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An ensemble play model would make sense- say you have two players, they could play the first half as the detectives then turn into the prosecuting attorneys. The one challenge would be the one there is for all detective-like games, making sure you avoid dead ends and never have the players miss so much that they can't actually find who did it. You might have to go kinda meta and make it clear that "This is the guy you have to get, you just have to put together a case." I dunno.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 03:13 |
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Golden Bee posted:The best legal system game is Sea Dracula. Not emptyquotin' dis. (The mere existence of Sea Dracula makes me feel warm inside.)
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 03:15 |
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Maxwell Lord posted:The one challenge would be the one there is for all detective-like games, making sure you avoid dead ends and never have the players miss so much that they can't actually find who did it. You might have to go kinda meta and make it clear that "This is the guy you have to get, you just have to put together a case." I dunno. the gumshoe system's solution to that is simple and elegant enough to translate to any other game: don't make vital clues missable by chance. Trail of Cthulu even namedrops law & order when it explains clues: quote:In a fictional mystery, like Columbo, a medical mystery like House, or a police procedural like House or Law and Order, the emphasis isn't on finding the clues in the first place. Usually, the heroes are drowning in clues. When it really matters, you may get a paragraph telling you how Holmes crawled around on the carpet with his magnifying glass, or see a montage of serious-looking dudes with Luminol and Ziploc bags. But the action really starts after the detectives - the Investigators - gather the clues.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 04:14 |
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Edit: The post I was responding to was way further back than I thought, whoops.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 04:21 |
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I forgot about Double Cross, the Japanese RPG about high schoolers who get infected with a crazy superpower-inflicting disease, which along with Nuns' reminder of Bubblegumshoe brings the overwhelming and far too overused number of high school RPGs written within recent memory to seven or so.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 04:24 |
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Double Cross at least isn't exclusively about teens and high school. I mean, it's a game where a valid character is a talking vampire dog.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 04:29 |
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I think the best game to base a Law and Order style game on would probably be Leverage but co-opting the Troupe mechanic from Ars Magica. If you're unfamiliar, in Ars everyone controls a Wizard character who is the players main PC, but wizards mostly stay at home and do research and boring poo poo, so there is a shared pool of adventurer characters that anyone can play and you generally form parties of those characters to go on missions for your wizards to collect magic flowers or holy grails and such. So in a Law and Order game instead of Wizards you'd have the Lawyers/Legal team and then the shared characters would be cops, detectives, medical examiners, informants and characters of that ilk.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 05:12 |
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Kenzer Co, the Knights of the Dinner Table RPG publisher, also has under their belt an RPG called Aces and Eights which is perhaps the single most ridiculously crunchy western RPG ever created, to a degree that sometimes seems to border on parody. The reason I'm bringing it up is because among its many subsystems for many aspects of old western life it has a no-fooling trial-by-jury minigame where you can play out western courtroom dramas as your cowboy is tried for cattle rustling.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 06:13 |
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Nuns with Guns posted:the gumshoe system's solution to that is simple and elegant enough to translate to any other game: don't make vital clues missable by chance. Trail of Cthulu even namedrops law & order when it explains clues: yea really I don't think you can beat Gumshoe's approach. The point is it's a puzzle not a scavenger hunt. It's absolutely not fun to be told 'uh you guys were supposed to check behind the sofa in the study and pass a check to find the blackmail letter...' but it's much more fun to have the letter and go 'what the gently caress does this mean' as you try to make it make sense with the rest of your clues. edit: also fitting the cop show style, Gumshoe nails it well with its whole 'there's no 'bluff' skill, that poo poo's in how you use your already existing connections and knowledge' style for social checks. Instead of the guy who maxed out Bluff stealing the show you get moments like that bit from Futurama where Hermies completely dominates in an office full of government bureaucrats because of course he would that's his thing. sexpig by night fucked around with this message at 06:51 on Nov 26, 2016 |
# ? Nov 26, 2016 06:46 |
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The real problem with a police procedural game is collecting enough head shots of moderately recognizable character actors to be the criminal of the week. "poo poo, he's played by Francis Capra? Well, that puts him at the top of the suspect list."
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 08:13 |
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The real problem with a police procedural/courtroom drama RPG is that inevitably whoever wrote the game - or, failing that, whoever winds up running it - is going to inject their own dumbass nerd-truths biases. Even if somehow you manage to avoid some kind of gross opinions about race, poverty, sex crimes, violence, etc., the game would have to include a thorough primer on how the criminal justice system actually works - for real, or whatever fictionalized version the game decides to use instead. Because people don't know poo poo. I recently spent over a week enduring jury selection for a murder trial and I had the dubious pleasure of having to listen attentively to juror questionning. I can say with full confidence that at least 95 percent of average people not only have no clue what the fifth amendment is, they can't even manage to understand that it's important, even after having it patiently and repeatedly explained to them. Just as an example. Other apparently super-common opinions include the idea that cops have super-powers of observation that make their witness testimony more reliable than normal people, the idea that public defenders are bad people (but prosecutors are good guys!), and a strong, unshakable belief that defendants are obligated to prove their innocence, even after the judge and both attorneys have carefully explained what the legal presumption of innocence means. RPG nerds might be generally better educated than the average juror in my county, but I doubt it. The majority of people in that room were professionals, often people.with degrees. They let off anyone who would have a financial hardship being stuck in a month-long trial, so the people who were left excluded the poor... and I live in the san francisco bay area, education levels are fairly high. You could just ape what happens in TV shows, but... ugh, then you'd be contributing to the problem.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 09:54 |
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Leperflesh posted:RPG nerds might be generally better educated than the average juror in my county, but I doubt it. Come on man, don't set yourself up for disappointment like that.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 10:36 |
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Leperflesh posted:The real problem with a police procedural/courtroom drama RPG is that inevitably whoever wrote the game - or, failing that, whoever winds up running it - is going to inject their own dumbass nerd-truths biases. No One Cares, Leperflesh Seriously, absolutely nobody cares about your Super Insightful Experience of sitting through a jury selection, this was completely unprompted and doesn't actually contribute to the conversation that was going on. You just wanted to swoop in and show off how much you claim to know about something. Alaois fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Nov 26, 2016 |
# ? Nov 26, 2016 16:57 |
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Alaois we know you try to be an rear end in a top hat about absolutely everything all the time, but could you just not?
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 17:15 |
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Terrible Opinions posted:Alaois we know you try to be an rear end in a top hat about absolutely everything all the time, but could you just not? Someone has to actually step in and say something to him before he writes another loving novella about Conan.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 17:25 |
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Alaois posted:Someone has to actually step in and say something to him before he writes another loving novella about Conan. Thank god you're here to defend us. I don't know what we'd do without you.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 18:17 |
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You could actually do a convincing legal procedural game if it were card based and focused on the personalities and circumstances rather than the actual nuance of law. Like a hyper focused cop could get Tunnel Vision card that benefit his investigation in the Law phase, but hurts the case in the Order phase (by not investigating alternate suspects.j Basically you'd want a two stage game, risks in the first stage make the second stage harder - but without gambling it'd be possible to lose the game before you get to " & Order."
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 18:39 |
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Alaois posted:No One Cares, Leperflesh I'm sorry my posting doesn't meet with your approval. I'll try much harder in the future to shape my posts to better suit your tastes.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 18:55 |
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Aloha Louis makes some good points. The closer you set a game in real world systems the more likely you are to turn gamenight into an argument. The definition of someone using the book to slow down play & win is rules lawyering.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 19:34 |
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Well, I mean, if things get too bad, you can just throw the book at them.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 19:48 |
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Booo. Hiss.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 20:06 |
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Golden Bee posted:Aloha Louis makes some good points. No, actually he's just a lovely poster and while I've had my disagreements with Leperflesh I'd rather read a dozen essay-long effortposts of his than some driveby dickhead playing self-appointed content moderator.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 21:02 |
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i'm of the opinion that it is possible to make a police/law procedural game without it turning into some weird political message but I guess we'll never know since this game does not technically exist
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 21:54 |
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As someone who has been a litigation lawyer, an RPG that even tries to approach anything like an actual courtroom situation sounds like simultaneously the most and boring and most infuriating game imaginable. There's probably a way to gameify it that could abstract most of the actual procedural stuff out though I suppose.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 22:27 |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuGJOdyoLo4
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 22:50 |
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Leperflesh posted:You could just ape what happens in TV shows, but... ugh, then you'd be contributing to the problem. I'm not sure a tabletop RPG is where you try and raise awareness of the realities of our legal system. It needs to be a fun story, not a trial primer. Ultimately it'd have to ascribe to the rules of drama. I feel lazy in bringing up Dramasystem, but it could work for doing a single trial - the real issue is that something like L&O would require a lot of one-shot characters which Dramasystem would need some tweaking to handle. But it'd be a good place to start - one of the main issues I could see in doing trials in RPGs is that there isn't much reason for witnesses to cave in aside from the handwaviness of most persuasion skill mechanics, and Dramasystem fixes that. Of course, it would also presume players would have to be taking up all the roles - prosecution, defense, and judge at the very least. If you're looking to a game where players are solely on the defense or prosecution team, it would probably require something different.
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# ? Nov 26, 2016 23:54 |
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This Shintiara RPG looks weird. I cannot decide whether 20 years of thought is a big good sign or red flag.
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# ? Nov 27, 2016 00:12 |
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Twenty years is a red flag for me. There's also a crazy amount of wasted space in those sample pages, the art looks like vintage Erol Otus, and near the end there's a brief piece about how the system is percentile based, but with a third d10 that can drastically change the result of a roll. I vote dumpster fire.
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# ? Nov 27, 2016 00:37 |
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Hiro Protagonist posted:This Shintiara RPG looks weird. I cannot decide whether 20 years of thought is a big good sign or red flag. Any time it opens with "I've been working on this for X decades" it's a big red flag. Like that is not a selling point.
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# ? Nov 27, 2016 00:41 |
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I've been working on this setting for 20 years! (Setting is a pretty basic fantasy/science fiction mashup)
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# ? Nov 27, 2016 01:00 |
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unseenlibrarian posted:Any time it opens with "I've been working on this for X decades" it's a big red flag. Like that is not a selling point. yea I'm all for supporting passion projects but it feels like 'I've worked on this for decades' always means 'I've tinkered and reduced this down so much that it almost always isn't as strong as I think it is anymore'. Pretty much applies to most creative works really, the longer you've spent tinkering and futzing with it the less likely your original vision being there is. It doesn't help that this Waffleman_ posted:I've been working on this setting for 20 years! (Setting is a pretty basic fantasy/science fiction mashup) also seems to be true in this case.
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# ? Nov 27, 2016 01:16 |
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# ? May 16, 2024 18:10 |
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That's not how black holes work. For one thing, Shintiara would be destroyed by radiation long before it reached the event horizon.
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# ? Nov 27, 2016 02:20 |