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Cascade Jones posted:Shadowrun Anarchy is great for groups (like mine!) where players don't want to play Full On Shadowrun but still want the Shadowrun Experience. We didn't use the Cue super narrative system exactly, but it works as a standard RPG, lighter crunch version of Shadowrun. It's just that Shadowrun fans don't really want light crunch. Yeah, if you use it RAW, Anarchy gets rid of like 95% of the crunch and replaces it with a lot of "ask the table". I personally didn't like it much, but that was mostly because the structure was very loose and didn't feel it was worked with much. Like, I wanted an actual light crunch, at most light-medium crunch, game, not a game with nearly no crunch at all, vague guidelines that lack any sort of goals to the game and a bunch of extra stuff on your character sheet that didn't do much. The Cue system as a whole seems like someone badly explained Fate to someone else, then that second person made Cue inspired by the bad description without any real follow-up questions, stapling it to the bare bones of another system that was already there. We did get a few sessions in, though, and it was wasn't bad, it just didn't give me much to be excited about. It's great for one-shots and mini-arcs.
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Sep 14, 2017 05:44
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Kwyndig posted:The Warhammer RPG sound neat but I don't think this version breaks a lot of new ground in fantasy play except for by having you start as pig farmers and beggars. The magic system is interesting and dangerous, although there's good odds the players will not interact with it significantly. (They almost certainly won't at the outset of the game.) It's still a mid-00's game, with some clear roots in the d20 system, but it's solid for what it is.
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Sep 14, 2017 06:02
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Going back to the Bag of Holding Deal, I was wondering: Compared to Mongoose Traveller, is there any advantage to the GURPS systems or is it merely a preference? Part of me wonders if it's simply convenient people who already use GURPs or if there is something more to it!
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Sep 14, 2017 06:14
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:That's Dungeon Crawl Classics. That only really applies to Level 0 characters in DCC, characters past that are actually pretty tough if the players don't do anything particularly stupid
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Sep 14, 2017 07:40
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FMguru posted:It always to involve ideas of games that are totally lethal and hardcore you guys!
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Sep 14, 2017 09:02
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FMguru posted:The CoC one always pisses me off because in the titular story, the character goes one-on-one with the big C, defeats him by driving a speedboat through him, and manages to escape. In Dunwich Horror, which is the closest thing to a story about a group of PC investigators, the protagonist manage to triumph over the cultists and their monster. The idea that Lovecraft is all about hopeless doom isn't supported at all in the fiction, but people who consider themselves purists seem to think the only proper way to play CoC is for everyone to understand they're all screwed from the start. The doom is definitely there in the stories, but it's not the "immediately eaten by monsters" or "driven raving straitjacket mad" kind of doom, it's the the universe is vast and uncaring and I am very small and powerless kind of doom. In an ongoing CoC game, I think the way to do it would be to try to give the impression of mounting a long-term delaying action against the inevitable. Long-term as in the current PCs might live to die of old age, inevitable as in whatever we humans do, one day it's not going to be enough. e: In case it's not clear, I'm agreeing with you that the "everyone is dead and insane" style of CoC play is a generally lovely gaming experience and isn't true to the fiction either. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 12:28 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 12:14
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Zoro posted:IIRC, the 3rd edition is the ground breaking one and was the prototype for the FFG SW game. The 2nd one was once described to me, earnestly, as "THE GAME WHERE YOU ROLL UP A PIG FARMER, GO OUT OF YOUR VILLAGE, AND DIE COVERED IN poo poo AND POOP!" It personally doesn't interest me. Generally pithy statements about what a game is like started life as jokes about stereotypes, but over time broken telephoned into ~*totally accurate*~ received wisdom about what they're solely about with no exceptions. I ran a semi-heroic Call of Cthulhu game involving people who get sent to a freaky science fantasy world that drew more from Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith and it was like pulling teeth convincing my friends, who had never played it before, that it wasn't going to be about either getting slain by glancing at a monster or blowing up shoggoths with dynamite while tommygunning cultists. I think they were legitimately shocked when they were allowed to actually talk to monsters. drrockso20 posted:That only really applies to Level 0 characters in DCC, characters past that are actually pretty tough if the players don't do anything particularly stupid Yeah and I've said this before, but DCC is good about not cordoning off weirdness behind higher levels. The default tone does away pretty thoroughly with killing rats and goblins, like one of the official 1st level adventures involves dealing personally with chaos gods. Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 12:28 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 12:23
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AlphaDog posted:In an ongoing CoC game, I think the way to do it would be to try to give the impression of mounting a long-term delaying action against the inevitable. Long-term as in the current PCs might live to die of old age, inevitable as in whatever we humans do, one day it's not going to be enough. That's exactly the tone Delta Green tries to convey. It's possible to temporarily win over the Opposition, especially when you have the US government at your disposal, but it's only ever temporary, and always comes at a dire cost.
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Sep 14, 2017 12:27
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gradenko_2000 posted:That's exactly the tone Delta Green tries to convey. It's possible to temporarily win over the Opposition, especially when you have the US government at your disposal, but it's only ever temporary, and always comes at a dire cost. Yeah, temporary victories with a cost is what I was getting at. Cthulhu isn't killed in the story. He's forming back together as the boat steams away. Johansen isn't dismembered or driven stark raving mad, he escapes, get rescued, and suffers from what would now probably be called PTSD - never talks about it, writes that he'd like to die if it'd get rid of the memory, etc. The last few paragraphs are about how Cthulhu's probably trapped and how he will certainly be back. Is Delta Green any good? It's not the cthulhu-y game with all the rape and stuff, right? Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 12:43 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 12:38
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AlphaDog posted:Is Delta Green any good? It's not the cthulhui game with all the rape and stuff, right? Delta Green is the Cthulhu game about conspiracies and government agencies, created originally in the 90s in the wake of X-Files. It was updated recently through a kickstarter campaign. It's quite good. The pile of trash you're thinking of is Cthulhutech.
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Sep 14, 2017 12:44
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Lightning Lord posted:Delta Green is the Cthulhu game about conspiracies and government agencies, created originally in the 90s in the wake of X-Files. It was updated recently through a kickstarter campaign. It's quite good. Thanks! I might check DG out, then. My main group's been getting our horror fix with Dread for the last however long, but scheduling's a bitch these days and something we could play live online (or PBP or something not in-person) would be cool. Government agents vs cosmic horrors is something I could probably sell everyone on.
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Sep 14, 2017 12:50
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I heartily recommend Delta Green. The 90s edition was a contemporary-90s, X-Files-esque setting for CoC, but the recent re-release updates the timeline to today. The basic premise is that you're government agents working under a blackedy-black super top secret agency, and you need to contain Mythos breakouts while shielding the public, maintaining plausible deniability, and staying sane and alive. The setting details layer-on issues like the surveillance state, the Global War on Terror, the push-pull between recovering Mythos artifacts for research versus just destroying them, and two disparate Delta Green groups: "Cowboys" were agents cut loose from the bureaucracy when DG went quiet in the Clinton years, while "The Program" are under the official agents after DG was reactivated in the wake of the GWoT. Mechanics-wise, the big advancements are Bonds, which represent family and friends that act as Sanity Ablative Armor at the cost of your relationships, as well as Vignettes, which represent the things you do between DG missions and how you deal with the fallout of battling the Mythos. The "Need to Know" version has all the rules you need to play, and comes with a starter scenario: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/175760/Delta-Green-Need-to-Know I'm also going to throw in this link to a document for 900+ pregen agents, so that you never have to delve into explicit character creation ever again: http://www.delta-green.com/2017/03/800-pre-generated-characters-for-your-delta-green-game/ And this collection of "Shotgun Scenarios", or short descriptions of DG missions you can go on: http://fairfieldproject.wikidot.com/shotgun-scenarios
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Sep 14, 2017 13:03
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I also really like RPPR's run of Delta Green scenarios. They make good listening if you're into that sort of thing. http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/category/systems/call-of-cthulhu/delta-green/
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Sep 14, 2017 13:23
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gradenko_2000 posted:I heartily recommend Delta Green. The 90s edition was a contemporary-90s, X-Files-esque setting for CoC, but the recent re-release updates the timeline to today. I second this. DG's update to today has done nothing but improved the game - although some mechanics haven't gone beyond CoC (given that it was developed before CoC 7th was a thing), they've implemented other mechanics that aid the game greatly. The ones I can think of off the top of my head is the 'don't make people roll for things unless it's dramatic' and the related implementation of skill thresholds (a la Trail of Cthulhu) for gaining clues. It's a great way to keep things moving and reduce pointless dice rolls. Also, the advancement to the modern day added sensible fluff/crunch to the game. I particularly like the refinements to acquiring goods, which instead of being real world money and very crunchy, is now sort of like the acquisitions from more recent 40k games (Rogue Trader, Black Crusade, Only War). Yeah, there are quite a few things that you can acquire that aren't at a great expense, but for big-time government/restricted toys, you've got to play the bureaucracy - and hope the bureaucracy doesn't notice and start following the paper trail. gradenko_2000 posted:Mechanics-wise, the big advancements are Bonds, which represent family and friends that act as Sanity Ablative Armor at the cost of your relationships, as well as Vignettes, which represent the things you do between DG missions and how you deal with the fallout of battling the Mythos. This. Bonds are absolutely terrific, and I love that you take a few quick minutes to talk out what happens in the downtime between missions (Vignettes). When you use your Bonds to blunt the hits to your sanity, you have to talk out how that relationship deteriorates as a consequence during the Vignettes. It really drives home that the cost of your work isn't just your own personal sanity - it takes its toll on the people around you. It's not all downside though - work long enough with your team, and you start substituting those dwindling Bonds with Bonds with your teammates. After a certain length of time, who really understands you best - your spouse, or the person you managed to escape with after collapsing a cave full of Mi-Go scientists?
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Sep 14, 2017 13:30
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The other thing I'll mention about DG is that they developed a "Lethality Rating" mechanic to handle things like machine gun fire. It was born out of this one particular CoC game where Ross Payton of RPPR used a German U-boat's machine gun on a lifeboat full of Innsmouth-looking sailors, and it took a literal hour of rolling dice to process all the hits.
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Sep 14, 2017 13:36
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'm also going to throw in this link to a document for 900+ pregen agents, so that you never have to delve into explicit character creation ever again: There's only one teensy problem with those pre-generated characters - and I'll be frank, it's a personal nitpick rather than anything systemically incorrect with them and is more akin to  - and not a single one of them that I've reviewed so far is adapted to violence/helplessness (e.g., none of the Soldiers or Special Operators are adapted to violence). This is fine if you want to play up the costs/consequences of violence, but as someone who's played a pre-made adventure/run a one-shot, I'm in the camp of 'it's never a bad idea to have at least one character adapted to violence' if you're doing one of those. If nothing else, it adds some tension as those characters try to convince Trigger-Happy not to turn a house full of cultists into chunky salsa. It also doesn't explicitly discourage every character from engaging in violence because every now and again, it really is the best solution to the problem at hand (such as the aforementioned house of cultists).
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Sep 14, 2017 13:47
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There's also The Laundry Files for another take on 'government employees fight cthulu'
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Sep 14, 2017 14:21
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Lightning Lord posted:Delta Green is the Cthulhu game about conspiracies and government agencies, created originally in the 90s in the wake of X-Files. I still have that copy of TUO. Delta Green was awesome then, and the new version is even more awesome.
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Sep 14, 2017 14:22
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AlphaDog posted:The doom is definitely there in the stories, but it's not the "immediately eaten by monsters" or "driven raving straitjacket mad" kind of doom, it's the the universe is vast and uncaring and I am very small and powerless kind of doom. gradenko_2000 posted:The other thing I'll mention about DG is that they developed a "Lethality Rating" mechanic to handle things like machine gun fire. It was born out of this one particular CoC game where Ross Payton of RPPR used a German U-boat's machine gun on a lifeboat full of Innsmouth-looking sailors, and it took a literal hour of rolling dice to process all the hits. Lightning Lord posted:I ran a semi-heroic Call of Cthulhu game involving people who get sent to a freaky science fantasy world that drew more from Lord Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith
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Sep 14, 2017 14:47
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drrockso20 posted:That only really applies to Level 0 characters in DCC, characters past that are actually pretty tough if the players don't do anything particularly stupid Yeah, level characters in DCC are effectively double the level of what they would be in a modern D&D game. The funnel is very much that and one of your funnel characters can literally be a poo poo farmer. Also, by the time you get to your second career in WFRPG, it's usually something cool and not a pig farmer. Even then, you don't have to start as a pig farmer and some of the "bad" starting careers have good benefits. None of them to my knowledge are, "Look at this poo poo covered loser who's going to get ripped to shreds by Beastmen the second they walk outside the city." It's not that way in DCC either. What it comes down to is the people who talk about how you play a loser who get instakilled either played in the game being run poorly, didn't know what they were doing, or played the way they think the game should be run based on conjecture or heresay. This doesn't apply to DCC as much because there's a lot of instant death in the level 0 modules and combat is super deadly at level 0. That's mainly why they give you 4 characters instead of 1, because that's the only way to make that fun. EDIT: Delta Green is amazing and highly recommend it as a modern day horror game. It has a lot of merits over 7th edition CoC as well but I won't go as far as saying one is better than the other. I do appreciate lethality and the lack of the luck stat. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 15:33
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:None of them to my knowledge are, "Look at this poo poo covered loser who's going to get ripped to shreds by Beastmen the second they walk outside the city."   I mean overwhelmingly the starting careers are at least good for something, and it's literally one session worth of XP to switch to any starting career you want. Also the game says specifically your group can choose to just select their own starting careers if you want. e: lol I didn't notice that Dung Collector starts with Fearless. That's actually pretty hilariously good.
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Sep 14, 2017 15:45
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fool_of_sound posted:
Their talents aren't bad and their stat array isn't bad either. Yeah, it's a poo poo collector but they're not going to get instakilled was my point.
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Sep 14, 2017 15:48
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Rat catcher sounds silly but they have some really good equipment like their rat hunting dog
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Sep 14, 2017 15:50
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LuiCypher posted:There's only one teensy problem with those pre-generated characters - and I'll be frank, it's a personal nitpick rather than anything systemically incorrect with them and is more akin to Hey, thanks for this! I appreciate that. I didn't really look through all the pregens in details because whoah that's a lot, but I totally get your point.
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Sep 14, 2017 15:51
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Angrymog posted:There's also The Laundry Files for another take on 'government employees fight cthulu' I only read the overview of this so somehow it conceptually formed in my mind to be a game about stopping cultists from destroying the world by using bureaucracy as a bludgeon. "No, sir you cannot bring this two ton mass of onyx and jade shaped into who knows what into our country. You'd best take it back where you found it! Oh, you can't because it sank into the ocean? If you ask me the bottom of the ocean is a great place for this monstrosity. If you're having trouble I can dial a crane operator, but it's Sunday, do there's going to be an extra surcharge."
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Sep 14, 2017 16:02
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DalaranJ posted:I only read the overview of this so somehow it conceptually formed in my mind to be a game about stopping cultists from destroying the world by using bureaucracy as a bludgeon. I mean, you're not that far off. The novels are about stopping cultists from destroying the world by using your incredible IT troubleshooting prowess. They're kind of tedious, honestly. Dunno about the RPG.
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Sep 14, 2017 16:04
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One brief pedantic nitpick about Delta Green unless they changed it in the latest edition is that you don't work for a government agency, the actual official Delta Green was disbanded after a disastrous mission, but its members went underground and continue to operate in secrecy without official support. Technically Delta Green is composed entirely of rogue agents.
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Sep 14, 2017 16:37
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They came in from the cold post 9/11, though a lot of that generation is still around. That's why the distinction between Cowboys and Program mentioned above.
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Sep 14, 2017 16:46
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Kai Tave posted:One brief pedantic nitpick about Delta Green unless they changed it in the latest edition is that you don't work for a government agency, the actual official Delta Green was disbanded after a disastrous mission, but its members went underground and continue to operate in secrecy without official support. Technically Delta Green is composed entirely of rogue agents. It's both. The official Delta Green was reactivated during the Bush years, but the rogue agents left over from the deactivation*, now called Cowboys, refused to come in from the cold. The idea is that you have the game take on two different flavors: the Cowboys have a freer hand in what their operations, but they have zero budget and zero support. The Program can order a tactical strike on a site, but they have to deal with the bureaucracy, clean-up, witnesses, paperwork, and requests to hold off because the eggheads want to take a look at this stuff. Or you could have both factions running around in your world. * Delta Green's Cold War-era operations, and the disastrous Cambodian incursion that lead to the shuttering of the agency will be detailed in The Fall of Delta Green, which is being written by Ken Hite as a GUMSHOE game
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Sep 14, 2017 16:49
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Zoro posted:IIRC, the 3rd edition is the ground breaking one and was the prototype for the FFG SW game. The 2nd one was once described to me, earnestly, as "THE GAME WHERE YOU ROLL UP A PIG FARMER, GO OUT OF YOUR VILLAGE, AND DIE COVERED IN poo poo AND POOP!" It personally doesn't interest me. WHFRP 1e (which is what I played) and 2e are less "GRIM DARK IN A WORLD OF GRIM DARKNESS AND YOU WILL DIE" and more "Monty Python's Life of Brian the RPG".
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Sep 14, 2017 17:07
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gradenko_2000 posted:Hey, thanks for this! I appreciate that. I didn't really look through all the pregens in details because whoah that's a lot, but I totally get your point. It's a little pedantic (hence the ), but it's something to consider when drafting pre-gens for a quickie. Note: I didn't review them all, I used my researcher's instinct and just reviewed the careers most likely to be adapted to one of them. In this case, violence (which means the Soldier and Special Operator careers), and when I saw that they all lacked 'adapted to violence', I just made a solid guess that none of them had any adaptations whatsoever. It makes sense, really. These characters were probably chugged out of a simple program using the baseline character creation rules (since character gen is actually pretty straightforward in the new DG - no point-buy unless you really want it), but adding in the adaptations would complicate the math in weird ways (since they reduce statistics and bonds, which requires a second primary/secondary characteristic calculation). gradenko_2000 posted:Or you could have both factions running around in your world. Always do both. Gotta get that tension of encountering a group that's trying to do the exact same thing you are, but your different methods to reach somewhat similar results means you can't necessarily abide the other to go along unimpeded. You're not necessarily going to outright kill each other, though, just make things difficult. Of course, you could also throw in MJ-12 as the other government boogeyman to set up an even more complicated triangle, especially when they're trying to pass themselves off as either Cowboys or the Program. Cease to Hope posted:WHFRP 1e (which is what I played) and 2e are less "GRIM DARK IN A WORLD OF GRIM DARKNESS AND YOU WILL DIE" and more "Monty Python's Life of Brian the RPG". Definitely. An initial read of the books makes it come across more like 'a bunch of friends getting together to try to get rich quick' rather than 'poo poo-covered peasants press-ganged into fighting Chaos'. LuiCypher fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Sep 14, 2017 |
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Sep 14, 2017 17:22
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LuiCypher posted:Definitely. An initial read of the books makes it come across more like 'a bunch of friends getting together to try to get rich quick' rather than 'poo poo-covered peasants press-ganged into fighting Chaos'. Especially 1e - which is in that bundle! - Chaos is barely a presence, and the Chaos books weren't even released until many years later.
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Sep 14, 2017 17:47
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Cease to Hope posted:WHFRP 1e (which is what I played) and 2e are less "GRIM DARK IN A WORLD OF GRIM DARKNESS AND YOU WILL DIE" and more "Monty Python's Life of Brian the RPG". The system also includes Fate Points to save you from certain death, and a fairly forgiving (if random) chargen system that lets you fix a broken stat. I'm re-reading now that I got the bundle, and it's better than I had remembered. Of course, the main issue I had with it didn't show up until play - combat can turn into a big whiff-fest, unless you are paying close attention to special actions (aiming, all-out attack) and tactics (ganging up on people). And don't have most enemies parry; it makes stuff drag.
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Sep 14, 2017 18:20
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Dodging, parrying skaven are just the most obnoxious little FUCKS
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Sep 14, 2017 18:25
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So I just found out that Dan Harmon wrote the Dead Alewives Dungeons & Dragons sketch and I'm a bit shook.
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Sep 14, 2017 22:01
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So, re: WFRP, I played in a fairly disastrous attempt at a campaign years and years ago. I am not sure if this was 1E or 2E. But basically, the GM had "all of the campaign books" for some longrunning adventure series. We made characters; I chose the 'be slightly older and so more experienced' and still had a less than 40% chance to hit a person in combat. Granted, I had rolled Thief, so I had some other abilities...but my best scores were all in the 30-40% range. The adventure itself involved us having ale spit on us by noblemen and then being blamed for their murder, and then being nearly killed ourselves by enemies described as random street thugs, and then being railroaded into investigating some crap happening in the sewers. We discovered that the 'stuff happening' was 'chaos stuff' as one might expect (I really don't recall much more than that) and we took some steps to solve the immediate problem that would stave off our executions, but did not report the greater threat to the council. After how shittily literally every person in the module had treated us, we felt they deserved what they got, and left. This pretty much killed the campaign right there since the module assumed we'd be more heroic to people who were using us as scapegoats and forcing us to do their dirty work. Some of that might have been the GM who definitely had the attitude of 'this is REAL medieval game none of this cinematic entitlement' but I don't think the 'literal shitfarmer' impression people have of WFRP is completely misguided. It certainly felt that way playing in that game. The reviews here have made me more interested in the setting, and willing to look at the system again--this campaign was a really long time ago.
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Sep 14, 2017 22:09
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Waffleman_ posted:So I just found out that Dan Harmon wrote the Dead Alewives Dungeons & Dragons sketch and I'm a bit shook. Only funny thing he ever wrote.
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Sep 14, 2017 22:18
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occamsnailfile posted:Some of that might have been the GM who definitely had the attitude of 'this is REAL medieval game none of this cinematic entitlement' but I don't think the 'literal shitfarmer' impression people have of WFRP is completely misguided. It certainly felt that way playing in that game. The reviews here have made me more interested in the setting, and willing to look at the system again--this campaign was a really long time ago. Honestly, the fact that there really is a shitfarmer probably gave off the wrong impression to some mediocre/bad GMs. I can see someone hearing that it's the real shitfarmer game by word of mouth and perpetuating that when they ran it. To be honest, the first time I heard about WHFRP 2e, I heard it described as the shitfarmer game and it would not be out of character for GW to make a shitfarmer game. I'm glad I'm reading the books now, even if it is just the .pdfs.
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Sep 14, 2017 22:22
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Sep 14, 2017 22:34
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gradenko_2000 posted:I heartily recommend Delta Green. The 90s edition was a contemporary-90s, X-Files-esque setting for CoC, but the recent re-release updates the timeline to today. Is the new core rulebook out yet?
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Sep 14, 2017 22:35
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