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cptn_dr posted:Is there a game that does any of these three things well at all? Because if there is, I feel like there's a lot of goofy fun to be had. You could probably modify Gamma World 7e for that purpose pretty easily
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Feb 26, 2019 01:10
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drrockso20 posted:You could probably modify Gamma World 7e for that purpose pretty easily This was gonna be my answer if nobody else said it.
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Feb 26, 2019 01:14
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xiw posted:SF's one of those broad fields where I don't think 'generic' SF games will ever be that great. I think the reason for this is that the best science fiction tends to be a vehicle for exploring social or philosophical areas in a fun way or from an unconventional perspective. Consider stuff like Planet of the Apes, the Last Man on Earth, Twilight Zone, the good episodes of original Star Trek, Logan's Run, or Farenheit 451. Rendering them down into a stew of their component tropes does a huge disservice to the subject matter, and most genetic scifi games are happy to do just that. But a good scifi story maintains a tight focus on the setting's impact of the setting on the characters. And that's impossible with a genetic setting. The best examples of this (that I can think of) in an RPG are Paranoia and Twilight 2000.
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Feb 26, 2019 01:18
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I just put out Gender Repeal Party, a freeform larp about gender euphoria. It's out for pay what you want!
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Feb 26, 2019 01:29
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That looks rad! Especially since there's a lot of bullshit around self-ID'ing gender in NZ at the moment, I can think of a lot of friends who will appreciate the game.
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Feb 26, 2019 01:34
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cptn_dr posted:That looks rad! Especially since there's a lot of bullshit around self-ID'ing gender in NZ at the moment, I can think of a lot of friends who will appreciate the game. We definitely live in a moment where it feels like an important thing to write and hopefully play/run one of these days. I hope your friends will have fun with it!
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Feb 26, 2019 02:20
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Has anyone run or played Bluebeard's Bride? Thinking of giving it a go for my local gaming club, with X-cards and an explicit code of conduct stated.
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Feb 26, 2019 04:17
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Arivia posted:Has anyone run or played Bluebeard's Bride? Thinking of giving it a go for my local gaming club, with X-cards and an explicit code of conduct stated. The One Shot podcast did a run of it, it might've been the creator that ran it for them? They seemed really in to it and it's something I wouldn't mind running someday in the proper mindset for my group.
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Feb 26, 2019 15:05
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moths posted:I think the reason for this is that the best science fiction tends to be a vehicle for exploring social or philosophical areas in a fun way or from an unconventional perspective. Shock: Social Science Fiction by Joshua AC Newman does this in a generic way by letting you make the setting conceits. It's obviously a lot more loose than something like Traveler which gives you a big setting.
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Feb 26, 2019 15:15
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potatocubed posted:Tangential note: I know Fragged Empire is good for crunchy scifi games, but what other good scifi games are out there? It's not something I'm super-interested in so most of it passes me by, but I feel I should have more than one game to recommend people that isn't Starfinger. I, too, love me some Starfinger. Lemon-Lime posted:Genesys is a bad system and I really would not recommend it to anyone. It's an especially bad system for Star Wars. As we used to say in summer camp, "two truths and a lie". I think Genesys is great. I think FFG is easily the best interpretation of Star Wars in an RPG to date (besting even a personal favorite of mine, the ol' WEG d6). The catch is that FFG really wants the game to be about a "thing". It does Rogue One well, where you're all fighting for the rebellion. It does Clone Wars well, where you're all badass Jedi. It does Solo well, where you're all smugglers and criminals looking for your next score. What it doesn't do as well, RAW, is "Prequel Jedis with Han Solo" that I think most people want to play. Ashen Stars is awesome. Gumshoe games are great fun and if you've never played one, I highly encourage it. Scum and Villainy is a great standalone hack, and I think is as good or better than Blades in the Dark. Serf posted:Stars Without Number Revised is very good, imo. The basic rules are free, but if you pick up the deluxe edition it adds some cool poo poo like transhuman characters/campaigns, full AIs and mechs. Stars Without Number is amazing and simple to get into. It doesn't have as much "numbers go up" as I often like in my scifi, but it's so good. The one that I'm mildly surprised to not see mention is Star Trek Adventures. It doesn't do "generic scifi", but it does Star Trek and it does it incredibly well. Star Trek is great scifi for, as moths said, "exploring social or philosophical areas in a fun way". You can run great Star Trek style episodes with meaningful moral and philosophical questions that are filled with wild antics and tough choices, and you don't ever have to grab a phaser if you don't want to.
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Feb 26, 2019 15:53
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CitizenKeen posted:I think Genesys is great. I think FFG is easily the best interpretation of Star Wars in an RPG to date I think you're nuts. FFGSW does literally everything Star Wars incredibly badly because it is an incredibly crunchy high-lethality system (never mind the badly-implemented tiered resolution and custom dice designed to make FFG a pile of free money). Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Feb 26, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2019 16:34
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Lemon-Lime posted:I think you're insane. You and I seem to disagree about a lot of things, so that surprises me not in the least. You're welcome to play your own elf games. I think Genesys is fantastic. The custom dice are the best thing I've encountered in role playing since... Fate, at least. Two axis resolution is incredibly rare. Apparently ORE has it, but I have yet to encounter another system that has a proper two-independent-axes resolution mechanic.
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Feb 26, 2019 16:38
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i haven't read genesys yet, but the ffg star wars game is indeed quite bad. gorgeous books, but not much worthwhile in the mechanics
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Feb 26, 2019 16:39
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Serf posted:i haven't read genesys yet, but the ffg star wars game is indeed quite bad. gorgeous books, but not much worthwhile in the mechanics Genesys is Star Wars without classes ("Specializations"), and some refinements to vehicle rules and such. It's the same game.
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Feb 26, 2019 16:40
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FWIW I've played a bunch of FFG Star Wars and it never seemed especially high-lethality to me. Maybe I was doing something wrong or just didn't have enough combats, but dying seems pretty tough. Weapons deal a bunch of damage relative to people's soak and wound points, but getting to zero just knocks you out. To die you have to suffer a crit and roll a modified 151+ on d%. That'll happen if someone shoots you while you're already down, but coup de grace rules exist in d20, too. The best-ever actual play podcast, Campaign, ran for over a hundred episodes and had exactly one near-lethal incident, which resulted in the character suffering that most Star Warsy of maimings, a severed hand. And while they didn't roll dice as often as they should have for non-combat stuff, which is pretty typical for podcasts, they nevertheless generally did their combats by the book.
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Feb 26, 2019 17:11
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drunkencarp posted:... shared experiences ... I have about 100 hours of gameplay under my belt, and I've never understood criticisms of the game referring to it as high lethality. I've always found it to be pulpy and swashbuckling with pretty impervious characters. My players go down, they take their critical, but I've never lost one. I wish I could fly-on-the-wall those games where everyone is dying.
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Feb 26, 2019 17:21
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You have to roll really high on the crit chart (and roll well enough to activate a crit in the first place) to kill someone. So high that it's literally impossible without modifiers that increase crit rolls. If someone is straight rolling high enough to kill at the beginning or middle of a fight, they're tuned way too high for the group and that should either be made explicitly clear (Darth Vader himself is bearing down on you) or you need to adjust the fight down.
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Feb 26, 2019 17:25
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It is incredibly easy to get knocked down by a couple of blaster shots, which makes it "high lethality," not the fact that characters are dying irrevocably. e; pretend I used "rocket tag combat" instead if you like that term better, I use the two interchangeably. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Feb 26, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2019 17:50
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I mean, if you just stand around in the open shooting and waiting to get hit, yeah, I can imagine you'd get hit a lot. I'll admit FFG Star Wars does a piss-poor job of emulating the Star Wars motif of "everybody is bad at shooting unless you're aiming at Storm Troopers", but I think that's because players don't like missing all the time. I can understand why, if you think "rocket tag combat" and "high lethality" are interchangeable, we'd be looking at the game differently, yes. "Fight in a room until the other side is dead" is not something Star Wars FFG does well outside of lite saber combat. That kind of combat is something that is incredibly common in RPGs and almost non-existent in Star Wars, so there's definitely a disconnect there. I see a lot of rookie Genesys GMs structure combats as "They're here to kill you and you're here to kill them - good luck!" when it's better to structure fights as "You're here to rescue the merchant prince and they're here to stop the merchant prince from leaving - good luck", because that's how the movies structure most of their fights, unlike most RPG GMs.
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Feb 26, 2019 17:57
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This is probably just my failing memory; I can't think of a time in the movies or other shows where, once someone is actually shot, they aren't incapacitated temporarily, immediately dead, or dying with death imminent. This doesn't apply to Force users, like Kylo pounding his bowcaster wound to focus his anger. Chewie gets hit in the arm in Force Awakens and is immediately out of the fight to the point he has to be helped back to the ship. Leia gets a gut shot or rib wing and is down and out for a bit then shoots someone with a minor trick to temporarily save herself and Han. Even Jedi aren't immune, a bunch of them die on Geonosis and during Order 66 though that last one isn't really a fair fight. I've just never seen this as a problem to the universe. 
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Feb 26, 2019 18:06
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Even personal experience can be a tricky way to judge games because there's a lot of cases where the GM/group is playing the game horribly wrong.
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Feb 26, 2019 18:16
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Admiral Joeslop posted:This is probably just my failing memory; I can't think of a time in the movies or other shows where, once someone is actually shot, they aren't incapacitated temporarily, immediately dead, or dying with death imminent. This doesn't apply to Force users, like Kylo pounding his bowcaster wound to focus his anger. That's because hit points aren't actual meat, there a will to keep fighting, losing hit points isnt just getting hit, it's every near miss and being forced back along the way.
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Feb 26, 2019 18:28
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An actual laser blast would make a charring hole at where it hit a human being, Lucas is a drat fraud
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Feb 26, 2019 18:35
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Moriatti posted:That's because hit points aren't actual meat, there a will to keep fighting, losing hit points isnt just getting hit, it's every near miss and being forced back along the way. I agree completely with that, HP should never 100% represent actual meat space, especially in games like DnD where permanent injuries or something like a broken arm doesn't really have official support.
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Feb 26, 2019 18:50
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Plutonis posted:An actual laser blast would make a charring hole at where it hit a human being, Lucas is a drat fraud Blasters aren't lasers, they're actually charged particles. The glowing comes from the targeting lasers used to ionize the air to direct the particles. This is why blasters have recoil, and furthermore makes the Force more plausible because 
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Feb 26, 2019 19:18
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Admiral Joeslop posted:I agree completely with that, HP should never 100% represent actual meat space, especially in games like DnD where permanent injuries or something like a broken arm doesn't really have official support. Okay, but you seem to think it works like that in Star Wars: Admiral Joeslop posted:This is probably just my failing memory; I can't think of a time in the movies or other shows where, once someone is actually shot, they aren't incapacitated temporarily, immediately dead, or dying with death imminent. This doesn't apply to Force users, like Kylo pounding his bowcaster wound to focus his anger. When Luke, Leia and friends are being shot at by Stormtroopers, that's because the films want a scene where our daring heroes do daring things and then succeed despite adversity. Having the heroes shrug off blaster hits like they're nothing would hurt the stakes that have been established for this fictional universe ("people die when they are shot with a blaster rifle, therefore characters must respect the threat of being shot"), so the bad guys miss, because the author has decided the heroes aren't dying in this scene. RPGs do not have a single author who has full control over the narrative, and what actually happens in a scene is (generally) shaped by dice rolls (random chance). When Bob, Jane and friends are being shot at by Stormtroopers in a Star Wars RPG, it's because the table wants to recreate the same kind of tone as the films: daring heroes doing daring things and then succeeding despite adversity. When blaster bolts are made lethal in the fiction, that's because you're playing a Star Wars RPG and Star Wars says blaster bolts are lethal, not because you want the players to be afraid that their characters will be hit by a single attack (that would make them camp out in cover for the entire fight, which is emphatically not the tone set by the Star Wars films). The fact that this is an RPG and not a film means: 1) you can't just have everyone miss 99% of their attacks while making the 1% of remaining attacks one-shot characters, because missing is not fun and neither are small chances of dying from a single dice roll 2) the things that happen in the fiction ("the heroes charge down a bridge while 20 Stormtroopers fire at them") can be completely divorced from the things that happen mechanically When the heroes charge down a bridge while 20 Stormtroopers fire at them in a Star Wars RPG, here is what is happening: - mechanically, a number of those Stormtroopers' attacks are hitting. The characters are taking damage, and that damage is depleting their HP pools. - narratively those Stormtroopers' attacks are all missing because per the fiction established by the Star Wars films, being hit by a blaster bolt would cause a character to be seriously injured. When a hero gets hit by a blaster shot and gets knocked out in a Star Wars RPG, here is what is happening: - mechanically, their HP pool has been depleted and they are KOed. - narratively, a single Stormtrooper has finally managed to land a shot, and the character is now seriously injured because that is what being hit by a blaster bolt does. If you write a Star Wars RPG where players have to live in fear of their characters being hit once and then going down, where it isn't possible for characters to run around in the open doing daring action stuff while being shot at by Stormtroopers (while the game does not become mechanically un-engaging because everyone is missing all the time), you have written a bad Star Wars RPG. If you write a Star Wars RPG where players have to worry about picking a dozen talents with ridiculously niche applications and choosing from 20 minutely-different models of blaster rifle instead of weapons having no real mechanical significance and instead being whatever fits the character archetype or the scene, you have written a bad Star Wars RPG. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Feb 26, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2019 19:21
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bbcisdabomb posted:Blasters aren't lasers, they're actually charged particles. The glowing comes from the targeting lasers used to ionize the air to direct the particles. TIL.
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Feb 26, 2019 19:31
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My first star wars RPG experience left me feeling really weird. We were going to play a game where my character was a mysterious mentor figure who would end up helping train two wayward jedi on the fringes of the galaxy. So the two jedi who have just met are on the run from local authorities when my character arrives to offer them an escape route. They ask why they should trust me and the GM calls for a persuade kinda roll. Perfect, I have four dice. I roll: nothing. Perfectly canceled nothing. So I stammer at them for a minute and the GM, desperate to move the story along, says people who have sensory powers should roll because something may be coming. I do, so I roll: nothing. Perfectly canceled nothing. This continues. My first five rolls of the game are either drastic failures or nothing. I have 120 more xp than anyone else. Eventually they go with me because that's the game anyway. Maybe they feel sorry for this sad old man, who stands still at each moment of drama. theironjef fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Feb 26, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2019 19:37
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Lemon-Lime posted:When the heroes charge down a bridge while 20 Stormtroopers fire at them in a Star Wars RPG, here is what is happening: That can too easily get horrible, though. I once ran a game of Spycraft which has a similar rule for gunfire for both PCs and non-mook enemies - that any HP damage from guns that isn't a kill is instead a fatiguing movement that avoids the shot. It got silly when an opponent could step out from behind cover, immediately have the PCs 4-5 guns fired at them, and somehow perform a spectacular acrobatic display which avoids all of them, only without moving (his square did not change) or using cover (his AC did not change).
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Feb 26, 2019 19:44
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theironjef posted:My first star wars RPG experience left me feeling really weird. We were going to play a game where my character was a mysterious mentor figure who would end up helping train two wayward jedi on the fringes of the galaxy.
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Feb 26, 2019 19:52
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theironjef posted:My first star wars RPG experience left me feeling really weird. We were going to play a game where my character was a mysterious mentor figure who would end up helping train two wayward jedi on the fringes of the galaxy. I'm okay with doing something like if you try to reconcile it with the plot continuing on for comedic effect (like you did, I guess), but generally the advice is to not roll for something if failure would halt the plot.
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Feb 26, 2019 19:54
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Well the problem wasn't a fail plot. If my character had failed or crit failed or something, we would have had some momentum or improv choices. Those repeated nothing rolls though were just improv road blocks.
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Feb 26, 2019 20:02
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No net successes is a failure though 
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Feb 26, 2019 20:03
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BattleMaster posted:No net successes is a failure though The distinction happens here because you can fail a roll with "advantages" in Genesys, which are supposed to toss you a narrative or mechanical bone despite failing, but it's also possible to just plain fail a roll with no fancy symbols to move the plot forward.
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Feb 26, 2019 20:08
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Lemon-Lime posted:The distinction happens here because you can fail a roll with "advantages" in Genesys, which are supposed to toss you a narrative or mechanical bone despite failing, but it's also possible to just plain fail a roll with no fancy symbols. A straight up cancelled nothing roll is a failure with no additional effects at all. It sucks when it happens because it feels like d20's pass or fail system and that's no fun. I'm sure someone somewhere has come up with something to mitigate it but dice are gonna dice sometimes.
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Feb 26, 2019 20:12
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Hit points are... bad
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Feb 26, 2019 20:26
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My 2 cents about ffg star wars. Love the dice. Hate the featitis, and the nickel and dime bonii, not to hot about star fighters either
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Feb 26, 2019 20:30
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I just wanted to step in to say "FFG Star Wars really doesn't have the problem of jedi being better then anyone else, you can totally have a mixed group and it'll work out fine, just keep everyone at the same XP level." Oh wait, "and also it has the Gambler, maybe the best and most thematic class made for an RPG"
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Feb 26, 2019 20:40
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I haven’t played in any FFG starfighter combat. Is it as tedious in play as it seems on paper?
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Feb 26, 2019 20:41
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vuk83 posted:My 2 cents about ffg star wars. Which is then buried in 350 pages of feat bloat and gear porn and skills modifiers.
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Feb 26, 2019 20:49
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