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Halloween Jack posted:I feel strongly that games where you can do stuff like swap bodies should not have a fine-grained bean-county realistic system that tries to measure the precise biological differences between a bunch of alien species and make distinctions between different types of handgun. Yes, this is one of the big problems with EP 1e - it makes actually resleeving a huge pain. LatwPIAT posted:It's a clunky system with a combat action economy that makes Shadowrun look restrained in comparison, and it's a system full of traps where you can end up putting valuable character generation points in perishable categories like morphs or gear, losing you up to a fifth of your build points. As a system it insists on making you count out your purchases down to the individual credit, yet at the same time makes money near-obsolete through the presence of near-ubiquitous (or at least player-accessible) nanomanufacturing, so half the time it's all for nought. It's definitely extremely clunky. I'm not saying it's a good system but it's an okay one, unlike Shadowrun.  Incidentally there's a pretty easy fix to the "perishables" issue (points spent on morphs are spent instead on the morph pool and gear is treated as an intrinsic part of a character which can't be taken away permanently).
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Jul 3, 2018 22:51
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remusclaw posted:Discussion attempt! Tracking individual units of currency (at least in a system where money actually means something for character advancement) is a gigantic pain in the rear end, because it means that as a GM you have to track all the inflows and outflows to keep the players "on budget" for their level. It sucks, I hate it, alternate resource systems like Fragged Empires's or even relatively primitive ones like Resources dots in the Chronicles of Darkness are vastly superior for the simple reason that they don't require me to be an accountant on top of an encounter designer and improv theater director. And you still get to shop! In FE's case you even still have to budget, it's just that your budget determines "how much good stuff can I have at one time and maintain in working condition" instead of "well if I sell this old poo poo for 1/2 normal cost will I have enough coins to upgrade to..." etc. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Jul 3, 2018 |
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Jul 3, 2018 23:45
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As an actual accountant, I have but one thing to say. gently caress that. That is all.
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Jul 3, 2018 23:49
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remusclaw posted:Discussion attempt! I really like the way the new Delta Green handles money/equipment. Basic equipment is pretty simple - you're assumed to have the standard tools that you would need as part of your profession. If you need anything beyond that - such as specialized tools for your profession or
The GM can also grant the party equipment that DG thinks the party will need during the course of their mission (which, depending on how well DG understands the mission, may or may not be of use). Basically though, if you want to acquire more gear - you better have the skills needed to manipulate the bureaucracy, smooth-talk your friends, or balance your books well enough to avoid pissing off the people you need most when poo poo goes sideways. And in Delta Green, poo poo usually goes in all different directions.
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Jul 4, 2018 01:25
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So I bought that Colonial Gothic bundle of holding cause it was actually a good deal, anyone have any thoughts on this line?
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Jul 4, 2018 01:42
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Are there any good reviews of Battle Century G I should read?
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Jul 4, 2018 01:51
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S.J. posted:Are there any good reviews of Battle Century G I should read? I mean, I can give my opinion from running a goon game that imploded because of...well, me actually. At least, I think so. It's been a while. I forgot what killed it. Player drop-outs, maybe? The combat system is the main draw. My players loved the combat and so did I. I was a little slow at first with it, but the first expansion has a bunch of example monsters that are fun to run, good challenges, and cut down on prep by a lot. We had a ton of fun playing it. To explain, the combat is very tactical but simple to understand. There are few modifiers and junk to remember, but placement, range, and positioning are key. So, in the end, everyone ends up with a lot of really cool and calculated moves all going off at once while I have fun fighting them with some really awesome and clever monster that spoil some of their strategies. If you want tactical, it's great. Out of combat, it's serviceable. The draw is the combat. Out of combat, it's basically like D&D where you mostly do one-off with some hand-wavey stuff. It works just fine, it's clearly not the main draw, and it's not a detriment to the overall designer intended experience. Also, the fact that I was doing alien monsters invading and attacking mech pilots let to some fun weirdness. Biological monsters never lose access to their systems, but do halve their modifiers to those systems when stressed. So it lead to an interest mismatch. Quick warning, out of mech combat is super one-sided and your players will struggle. Learned that the hard way. But it can be fun to do "run away" events where a mech attacks them when their away from base in their civvess and they have to run away and hide on map until they can get to base and suit up. Of course, you can only do that once per campaign before it gets boring. Covok fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Jul 4, 2018 |
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Jul 4, 2018 01:56
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remusclaw posted:I find myself falling back to my statement regarding shopping being fun. It is absolutely a feel thing, but the satisfaction of buying the thing you want in a game can sometimes actually approach tha satisfaction of doing so in real life, with all the same general issues therein where once purchased the item loses all it's luster and a new goal appears.This is a feature I am not sure can be replicated in a resources system, though I am not sure it is necessarily one that is worth the trade-offs? I mean absolutely, looking for and buying things is something many people enjoy but its also gotta be a key part of how your system works if you're including it. Take the FFG WH40k Rogue Trader rpg. A game that is ultimately all about getting yourself blinged out. Problem is the core premise of the game is you start rocking in a huge km long space with a legion of troops, support vehicles, aircraft and equipment so it makes it pretty irrelevant to go out and buy a gun or figure out how much money you have. So a traditional money and shopping system doesn't really work for that kind of game.
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Jul 4, 2018 02:00
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I keep coming back to my idea for a cyberpunk RPG where there are no attributes or skills or the like, chargen is entirely based on purchasing gear from a shopping list.
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Jul 4, 2018 02:10
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isn't that what a point buy system is
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Jul 4, 2018 02:21
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LatwPIAT posted:Eeeh... Luckily 2e fixes a lot of those problems. The most extra actions a character can get is one per round, and it requires spending a limited morph-related resource, which most morphs have something like 1-4 of until they take a long rest. Morphs, augments, and gear are all purchased at character creation with Morph Points, completely separate from ego's CP. No longer are credits individually counted, there's an abstracted resources system that meshes pretty alright with the way favors and rep work. And there's vastly less recalculating of stats when you change morphs, since all that changes is your health stats and the morph-resource pool values. Life-path character creation is also the default, so it doesn't take nearly as long to whip up a character. Hacking looks a little better but I haven't playtested it yet, and combat mechanics are virtually the same besides the lack of extra actions. Also, psi is much more interesting. Still a crunch-heavy system, but not painfully so anymore.
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Jul 4, 2018 02:31
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xiw posted:Mongoose traveller is just fine if you want retro engineering sf with trading and lifepaths and you can use the excellent online traveller galaxy map I can't link on the bus. Traveller has a great setting that's been in development since about 1980. The map site is: https://travellermap.com/ Just zooooooom in.
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Jul 4, 2018 02:54
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Covok posted:I mean, I can give my opinion from running a goon game that imploded because of...well, me actually. At least, I think so. It's been a while. I forgot what killed it. Player drop-outs, maybe? Yeah, the out-of-mech stuff is called 'intermission' for a reason. While the game has combat rules for pilots, you shouldn't overuse them; the pilot scenes are more for generating special ability resource points through RP and problem solving. The tactical elements are great. Different kinds of mechs feel and play differently, and are easy for players to experiment with. It's has pretty solid advice for how to construct encounters, though I fudged the numbers a bit because the numbers given kinda expect you to be playing the enemy about as competently as your players are engaging you, and I prefer when players are able to exploit weak enemy tactics. My only major complaint is that I found players were kinda hitting the extent of their character/mecha concept by about 2/3rd through a standard 'season' length campaign, and didn't have a great idea of what to do with their points after than except pump stats.
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Jul 4, 2018 03:13
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remusclaw posted:I find myself falling back to my statement regarding shopping being fun. It is absolutely a feel thing, but the satisfaction of buying the thing you want in a game can sometimes actually approach tha satisfaction of doing so in real life, with all the same general issues therein where once purchased the item loses all it's luster and a new goal appears.This is a feature I am not sure can be replicated in a resources system, though I am not sure it is necessarily one that is worth the trade-offs? Buying poo poo with money is a quick and easy progress bar reward to add to a game, but adding it badly leads to dumb behaviour down the line. I've rambled on about the marginal utility of money and how RPGs don't really model it before, with the short version being that if you're going the individual gold pieces counting route you need to implement a mechanic analogous to some form of progressive tax system + living expenses or you end up with money just breeding more money (which is the lesson Monopoly is supposed to teach us about the importance of land taxes). Money breeding more money isn't the end of the world but increasingly larger amounts of money require increasingly more expensive things to save for it, or else it ultimately becomes meaningless, and therefore worthless and therefore unfun. Which is again fine as long as you introduce new progress bars to supplant the old ones by adding different higher tiered currencies. WoW does all of these, via repair and auction house costs that scale with earning power, by constantly switching what tokens you need for each zone, and via increasingly expensive one time purchases. Most of this doesn't translate well to tabletop because Alcoves & Accountants is considerably more time consuming when you're tracking it all by hand. It should be theoretically possible to make an RPG money system with the same progress bar behaviour as counting your golds to buy a sword without it actually being counting your golds to buy a sword, preserving the Skinner box benefits without the inherent in-play downsides. Does intentionally and expressly including such hooks enhance or detract from the RPG experience? Is the "fun" delivered by exploiting our brains' buggier design flaws meaningfully different from the "fun" delivered by the aspects we "deliberately" engage with? Discuss. Splicer fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Jul 4, 2018 |
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Jul 4, 2018 03:26
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Yeah, I think I come at RPG gaming from something of an old school focus, if only because my entry into such gaming was with Palladium Ninja Turtles and 2nd edition AD&D, so the assumptions of that sort of gaming do effect how I feel gaming is supposed to be. A lot of that is very grindy and without examining that, I just kind of looked at what I enjoyed about that sort of gaming and tried to express what it is that makes it appeal to me as opposed to more refined systems. Thinking about it for more than a moment, especially with the issues laid bare in front of me like this, I am reminded of why I burned out on that sort of game in the first place; the grind, and the book keeping that it entails in tabletop. You can make it work, but it is exactly that, work, and whatever fun is made doing that work might not match up with the fun that can be had when that work is handled by a more agreeable subsystem that frees up time and effort for more interesting things. remusclaw fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Jul 4, 2018 |
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Jul 4, 2018 03:44
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Splicer posted:Money breeding more money isn't the end of the world
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Jul 4, 2018 03:57
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How would BCG play with everyone piloting kind of similar robots with minor variations, like an 08th MS Team or a Macross situation?
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Jul 4, 2018 04:26
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Blockhouse posted:How would BCG play with everyone piloting kind of similar robots with minor variations, like an 08th MS Team or a Macross situation? It can run that. In that case I'd probs use the Frames rule to let different players take different loadouts and special abilities for their mechs, on top of a basic, balanced package. e: When i wanted to run a more serious gundam game, though, I just told all the players to make their mechs feel military hardware-y. Like give it a model number, MAT-M2 Catapult, that sort of thing, and specifically define your weapons as something that sounds realistic in a sci-fi sense: autocannons, surface to air missles, ect. Basically like Battletech. fool of sound fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Jul 4, 2018 |
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Jul 4, 2018 05:01
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mllaneza posted:Traveller has a great setting that's been in development since about 1980. The map site is: Ha ha ha, it autogenerates wiki entries based on the world codes. E: Tuxedo Catfish posted:DriveThruRPG top sellers list: I meant to ask, is this excluding D&D 5e by virtue of that appearing in it's own sales category, or does 5e not have very high sales on this platform? DalaranJ fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Jul 4, 2018 |
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Jul 4, 2018 06:08
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People that for sci-fi go "Eclipse Phase! oh wait, but the rules..." do know that there's a fully official Fate Core conversion for it, right? It's called Transhumanity's Fate, and it's free (in the sense of under a sharealike license, buy it if you like it and want to support it) just like all the rest of the material. You need Fate Core to use it... but that's also free. You also probably want the Eclipse Phase core even though most of the fluff is reprinted... but that's also free.
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Jul 4, 2018 07:05
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gradenko_2000 posted:isn't that what a point buy system is I mean I guess in a strict sense but what I mean is that by far the biggest hurdle I've seen people run into with "I'd love a new system for running Shadowrun in" is the fact that most alternatives out there don't give you 20+ pages of cyberware and guns to browse through, and it occurs to me that there's a conceptual space for a cyberpunk game where your mundane attributes and skills are simply irrelevant in the bigger picture because all that poo poo is obsolete, all that matters is your gear, so chargen would literally be "you have X thousand future funbucks, here's the gear section."
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Jul 4, 2018 07:34
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bewilderment posted:People that for sci-fi go "Eclipse Phase! oh wait, but the rules..." do know that there's a fully official Fate Core conversion for it, right? It's called Transhumanity's Fate, and it's free (in the sense of under a sharealike license, buy it if you like it and want to support it) just like all the rest of the material. It seems that what a lot of people are looking for is a middle ground between Eclipse Phase's intense (and poorly-implemented) crunch, and Fate Core's... Well, Fate-ness. Fate has never been a good system for the "gear porn and shopping lists" sort of gameplay that's been discussed in the last page or so, and it doesn't do horror well. That said, if you're not looking for those things, yeah, bewilderment is right, check out Transhumanity's Fate.
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Jul 4, 2018 08:43
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Blockhouse posted:How would BCG play with everyone piloting kind of similar robots with minor variations, like an 08th MS Team or a Macross situation? Fine as long as you're not trying to force them to have identical loadouts. BCG mechs are made up of three things: stats, upgrades and weapons. Except for a few of the upgrades (i.e. transforming or combining) none of those dictate how a mech would look, so you can have players make whatever mech they want to make mechanically and then go "you're all variations on [insert mech here]" - the one with the sniper loadout and stats is just the sniper variant, the one with the artillery stuff is the cannon variant, etc.
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Jul 4, 2018 09:07
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Kai Tave posted:I keep coming back to my idea for a cyberpunk RPG where there are no attributes or skills or the like, chargen is entirely based on purchasing gear from a shopping list. I kinda made that game. Only it's not just buying gear from a shopping list to create characters, gear is literally the only thing that matters.
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Jul 4, 2018 12:17
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DigitalRaven posted:I kinda made that game. Only it's not just buying gear from a shopping list to create characters, gear is literally the only thing that matters. drat this owns
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Jul 4, 2018 12:37
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DigitalRaven posted:I kinda made that game. Only it's not just buying gear from a shopping list to create characters, gear is literally the only thing that matters. gradenko_2000 posted:drat this owns  But seriously, this is a really cool idea!
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Jul 4, 2018 12:45
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 I'm beginning to think I should do a Patreon for this kind of thing. It's  doing layout and poo poo to put a tiny game on DTRPG that ain't going to make any money, but seeing some return for the random game ideas I have would be awesome, both to provide the impetus to release them wider and because capitalism demands the trade of time for money in order to ensure the security of food, shelter, and shiny games.But again,
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Jul 4, 2018 14:51
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I'm just going to copy paste how Reign handles Wealth, because I feel like it hits a sweet spot between "here is the difference between playing a rich merchant and a poor beggar" and "you don't need to keep track of every ducat and florin":quote:Money should not bethat important in fantasy games.I realize that this statement will shock and confound many readers, but there it is. While poverty is often a motivating force for fantasy heroes, the actual handling and management of cash are not heroic actions. Do you want to spend your precious gaming moments tracking your nickels and dimes, or gloriously conquering your neighbors? Money has its place. It’s important to know whether your character has the funds to arm that peasant uprising, and it’s fun to wow the local gentry by strewing diamonds about as if they meant no more to you than earwax.
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Jul 4, 2018 17:10
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https://twitter.com/ImperatorOfPuns/status/1014550588930052104
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Jul 4, 2018 18:05
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I found a comic book I think people here might like. It's called Modern Fantasy. It's pretty fun. It's like imagine a fantasy world out of D&D advanced to the Modern Age. So the Barbarian isn't fighting hordes, he's your sexist boss. That wizard is your annoying roommate who mooches off of you. And you are a ranger from the woods who came to the city for adventure and ended up with a lovely office job. The current storyline seem to be centered around a magic amulet and the local Mafia and some weird dark cult. Thanks to a bizarre series of circumstances, the main character, who is a ranger who works in an office job, gets wrapped up in all of it and now has to save her own skin.
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Jul 4, 2018 18:55
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https://twitter.com/extranapkins/status/1014565136001101825
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Jul 4, 2018 19:29
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More busy garbage in those pics than a Michael Bay Transformer movie.
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Jul 4, 2018 20:06
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DigitalRaven posted:I kinda made that game. Only it's not just buying gear from a shopping list to create characters, gear is literally the only thing that matters. Well aside from creating your own gear rather than choosing from a premade list this is basically more or less exactly what I was envisioning.
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Jul 4, 2018 20:09
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System Mastery's review of D&D 4th edition is so spot on and so very entertaining. https://systemmasterypodcast.com/2018/07/03/dungeons-dragons-4th-edition-system-mastery-125/
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Jul 5, 2018 03:01
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Whose got that 'Do you really want to play D&D' doc that gives your other things you'd probably prefer.
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Jul 6, 2018 02:36
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kingcom posted:Whose got that 'Do you really want to play D&D' doc that gives your other things you'd probably prefer. Right here!
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Jul 6, 2018 02:58
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LongDarkNight posted:More busy garbage in those pics than a Michael Bay Transformer movie. Dummy
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Jul 6, 2018 03:01
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Thanks!
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Jul 6, 2018 03:34
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I feel like Fog of Love should be on that list these days with the critical reception its gotten. It's as much a roleplaying game as Quiet Year is, I feel.
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Jul 6, 2018 04:45
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paradoxGentleman posted:I'm just going to copy paste how Reign handles Wealth, because I feel like it hits a sweet spot between "here is the difference between playing a rich merchant and a poor beggar" and "you don't need to keep track of every ducat and florin": Seconded. Reign's method does indeed kick rear end. That is why Strike! has a Wealth system that takes that as a starting point, reconciles it with how rolls work in Strike!, adds on a few mechanical hooks, and fixes some of the more obvious problems that arise from Reign's version. (Problems that aren't very big if you agree with Stolze's thesis that buying stuff shouldn't be a big part of the game and only come up occasionally, but that grow the more you try to use those rules.)
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Jul 6, 2018 05:43
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