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Stars without Number actually does this very well with up to 5 different positions available for players and even encourages the GM to have players take over NPCs if they aren´t suited characterwise to it.
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Feb 28, 2019 11:47
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| # ? Jun 11, 2024 12:51 |
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Problem is that you have to work hard to make it so that the roles don't end up being: Pilot: rolls piloting skill each round Gunner: rolls gunnery skill each round Engineer: rolls engineering skill each round ... etc
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Feb 28, 2019 13:08
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The Elite Dangerous RPG just gives every character a ship and pilot training. Of course, you can choose to have an NPC companion who doesn't get the free training and is slightly weaker, and technically you NPC can have an NPC companion, who can in turn have an NPC companion, but only one of the starter ships can handle even a single companion, and a single pilot can technically fly anything even without a crew. You're discouraged from not having your own ship at any point, I mean if you lose your totally sweet boat and all your savings at the same time you might have to sell your assault rifle that gives you +1 to hit and has a larger magazine for half a million credits and pick up a standard one without a brand name for, like, ten. But "everyone is in their own FTL spaceship" doesn't work for every game, and keeping the party together may be like herding cats.
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Feb 28, 2019 13:09
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Probably why space games tend to work best for military campaigns, gives a reason for everyone to stick together(it's their job), plus it gives them a good reason to be able to access all the fun toys that make sci-fi as a genre worth bothering with in the first place
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Feb 28, 2019 13:14
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I've found space combat to be like 4E combat. When it's fun it's really, really fun. But if the GM doesn't put a lot of effort into each encounter, you run the risk of a group of people just standing around trying to hit each other.
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Feb 28, 2019 15:23
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Just look at FTL for inspiration.
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Feb 28, 2019 15:26
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Spector29 posted:What in the god drat is this, and why are you making me pay $99 for a PDF: Not "has available". Requires.  fake edit: does it come with the 3D printer file for the hand statue?
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Feb 28, 2019 15:39
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CitizenKeen posted:I've found space combat to be like 4E combat. What space combat systems do you like?
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Feb 28, 2019 15:40
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Oh, and Fragged Empire requires character to take levels in the four ship-level combat skills, so everyone has stuff to do during ship-to-ship combat.
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Feb 28, 2019 15:41
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CitizenKeen posted:I've found space combat to be like 4E combat. The terrain is a big problem. Everyone in a grounded campaign has a ready inventory of dozens of familiar locations. If you're getting outranged by arbalists in a tavern, the fighter knows intuitively that he can (e.g.) duck behind the bar and start chucking improvised weapons as a distraction. In space combat, you're always in the same room, surrounded by vacuum, so what are you really expecting players to come up with besides "I roll to do my job"? There's an extra order of difficulty to contrive some twist for players to interact with.
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Feb 28, 2019 17:32
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UnCO3 posted:Pilot: plots the course, evades threats, executes daredevil manoeuvres Ditch the gunner and let anybody shoot
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Feb 28, 2019 17:52
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Gort posted:Ditch the gunner and let anybody shoot
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Feb 28, 2019 18:51
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counter-counter-offer, play the FASA Star Trek RPG that was specifically designed for having entirely player character bridge crews for space battles.
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Feb 28, 2019 18:58
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I probably will, I played that bridge simulator trek game and it was p fun
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Feb 28, 2019 19:08
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Tbh if your space game doesn't have minigames for everyone during space combat, than it shouldn't involve space combat. The engineer should be patching things up, containing fires, and seeing which systems they can wring extra power from. The tactical officer should have a suite of weapons and shields to toggle. The science officer should have problems like deciphering cloaked ship locations and rigging the deflector dish into a wave motion gun. The great thing about these is that a lot of those options don't require rolling. If you aren't willing to put in that effort, than space combat should let the crew decide what resources they expend on the problem and not draw it out.
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Feb 28, 2019 19:15
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is there a (probably third party) war game that incorporates absolutely everything? Kind of like how brick wars was with legos, but for like all miniatures at specific scales?
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Feb 28, 2019 19:51
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PerniciousKnid posted:The terrain is a big problem. Everyone in a grounded campaign has a ready inventory of dozens of familiar locations. If you're getting outranged by arbalists in a tavern, the fighter knows intuitively that he can (e.g.) duck behind the bar and start chucking improvised weapons as a distraction. In space combat, you're always in the same room, surrounded by vacuum, so what are you really expecting players to come up with besides "I roll to do my job"? There's an extra order of difficulty to contrive some twist for players to interact with. There's plenty of ways that planes (and by extension spaceships that behave like planes in space) can avoid getting shot even while flying in a totally clear sky (or a completely empty patch of space). The issue is trying to do spaceship combat that just boils down to "the spaceships roll to hit" instead of actually writing dogfighting rules. See Warbirds and Tachyon Squadron for examples of how you can have spaceship combat that's interesting and moderately tactical even when there's no grid map or terrain involved (though caveat, both are mostly concerned with individually-piloted fighters, the Fate Space Toolkit is supposed to have rules for multi-crew ships eventually).
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Feb 28, 2019 21:02
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SWN has a thing where you can choose not to take damage, but roll on the Crisis table instead, which gives people extra things to worry about.
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Feb 28, 2019 21:20
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Regarding ship combat, one possible inspiration is Warframe's upcoming Railjack expansion. What's neat about Railjack is that rather than being an entirely detached minigame, it seamlessly meshes the ship stuff with the regular gameplay by requiring you to physically run around the ship to do various tasks including shootouts with boarding parties, putting out fires etc, up to having someone infiltrate the enemy ship while the engineer hacks its defensive systems It may be an option to have a small extra map representing the ship where people have to be next to specific points to do their stuff, deemphasising people being locked into specific roles and instead demanding everyone pitch in for the various headaches that pop up. Engineering probably becomes more interesting if you have to physically scramble to where the damage is and consider triage questions like "is it worth going to fix the leak in the engine right now if doing so puts me way out from wherever else I might be needed like, immediately"
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Feb 28, 2019 22:16
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Evil Mastermind posted:I would just like to point out that Invisible Sun is a game that requires about 1000 cards. It seems unethical to sell such a game expecting you to print it out yourself. It says it uses the Cypher system? Is that accurate?
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Mar 1, 2019 01:15
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The product description mentions the cards and printing them out but gently caress actually printing out cards like that.
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Mar 1, 2019 01:22
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Conversation is pretty Fragged or Invisible sun focused at the moment, but does anyone have any input on Legend of the Five Rings 5e? Is it good? I've never played the first one so nothing to compare it to. I see it has proprietary dice (like all FFGs apparently) are these necessary?
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Mar 1, 2019 04:04
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Spiteski posted:Conversation is pretty Fragged or Invisible sun focused at the moment, but does anyone have any input on Legend of the Five Rings 5e? Is it good? I've never played the first one so nothing to compare it to. Its fun! If you play in real life youll need the dice or else have to use some dice roller app which is no bueno. Online theyre supported everywhere.
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Mar 1, 2019 04:06
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Meyers-Briggs Testicle posted:Its fun! If you play in real life youll need the dice or else have to use some dice roller app which is no bueno. Online theyre supported everywhere. Was thinking of grabbing a set or two of the dice for the table if we got into it. A brief look at the PDF makes it look VERY crunchy. How does it play?
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Mar 1, 2019 04:11
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BattleMaster posted:The product description mentions the cards and printing them out but gently caress actually printing out cards like that. I think they mentioned also having some sort of companion app to help, so maybe you don’t have to print all 1000 cards? If I was playing, I’d try to deal with the decks digitally if at all possible. gently caress all the sleeves that would take: that’s more than Millennium Blades and that was Hell to sleeve.
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Mar 1, 2019 04:19
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Spiteski posted:Was thinking of grabbing a set or two of the dice for the table if we got into it. Fairly smooth. It's crunchy, certainly, but a lot of that it just a wide variety of options and choices, not super-intricate mechanical operations.
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Mar 1, 2019 08:55
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DalaranJ posted:It seems unethical to sell such a game expecting you to print it out yourself. From what I have seen posted: - It uses the Cypher system. - Its setting reads like a botnik was fed random bits of urban fantasy fiction. - A typical thing to do in the setting apparently is to walk into a shop carrying several hundred breakable crystal orbs holding the essence of ideas and exchange them for an invisible chair.
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Mar 1, 2019 17:12
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I am a person who generally enjoys Monte Cook's world-building (and really hates his mechanics). Even with that said, Invisible Sun's just seems like so much pretentious nonsense.
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Mar 1, 2019 17:21
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DalaranJ posted:It seems unethical to sell such a game expecting you to print it out yourself. But here's an example of the BS in terms of required physical components. The "Order of the Vance" has their own set of spells only they get access to, and they have to do Vancian spell prep (duh). This is handled not by spell slots, but by card size. Each spell has its own card, and the higher-level the spell the bigger the card. Your "spell capacity" is basically inventory Tetris; you have a X by Y inch grid that you have to fit your spells into to "prep" them. Which is a neat idea! Spell inventory Tetris is something that can be fun if it was designed by someone with some ability. But there's a two problems here in IS. First, all the spells are just rectangular cards with the same proportions, so it's not like you have to really sit down and figure out how to fit everything into the grid. You're just putting rectangles inside a larger rectangle. Which is dull and a bit of wasted potential, but okay whatever. (A minor thing here is that all the character abilities are described in first person, like it's a member of this group explaining it. Which means that you've got some nameless NPC telling you that the "spell space we have available in our minds is a 3 inch by 3 inch square" then telling you how much space spells take up in terms of the physical card size. Which is, well, a Choice, I guess.) The bigger problem is when you level up. Instead of increasing the size of your available spell inventory grid, you increase your "spell capacity" by picking spells and declaring that they only take up half the space. Which is to say, you declare that the 3 inch by 3 inch spell now only takes up 3 inches by 1.5 inches. Which begs the question: how does that work when I have to use physical cards? Am I supposed to fold it in half or something? Yeah, with a PDF I can just print out a copy and do whatever to it, but since Monte had to be convinced to release public PDFs I don't know how he thought this'd actually work in play. e: oh, and also: in the Order's description of how their spells work, the narrator says that as they level up they increase their spell capacity. Then on the next page it specifically says they don't increase capacity, they change the card size.
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Mar 1, 2019 17:36
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Evil Mastermind posted:The "Order of the Vance" has their own set of spells only they get access to, and they have to do Vancian spell prep (duh). This is handled not by spell slots, but by card size. Each spell has its own card, and the higher-level the spell the bigger the card. Your "spell capacity" is basically inventory Tetris; you have a X by Y inch grid that you have to fit your spells into to "prep" them. and then remembered :itsmontecook: and read the rest of your post. And I got sad. Because frankly, what you describe here is not altogether dissimilar to how Arcana Evolved worked - only it's using geometry instead of an exchange rate to go up/down spell levels. A system like this could be pretty incredible if the better spells got both bigger and more weirdly-shaped. That could justify the physical materials. But no, it's just rectangles all the way down.
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Mar 1, 2019 19:08
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Spell Inventory Tetris is a cool idea and I've seen it proposed before and there was definitely $200 of work put into loving it up that badly.
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Mar 1, 2019 19:09
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Evil Mastermind posted:Which begs the question: how does that work when I have to use physical cards? Am I supposed to fold it in half or something? Yeah, with a PDF I can just print out a copy and do whatever to it, but since Monte had to be convinced to release public PDFs I don't know how he thought this'd actually work in play. I've never played the game (although there is a physical copy at my FLGS I've picked up a few times when I needed a quick laugh) but uh this seems like you would just lay the cards over each other so one half was concealed, I'm actually kind of having trouble parsing why you think this would be an issue at all with physical cards.
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Mar 1, 2019 19:18
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What was the silly model hand for again?
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Mar 1, 2019 19:25
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I'm reading Cavaliers of Mars and I have to admit that about 10 pages into the rules section, this seems like pretty much the perfect system for running 7th Sea in. The only thing I'm not a fan of is that you roll to not get taken out at the end of every round as soon as you've taken a single point of Strain, which is going to be very frustrating the moment you roll a 1 at the end of the first turn.
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Mar 1, 2019 19:59
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Xiahou Dun posted:What was the silly model hand for again? You put a Not-Tarot-Really "Soothe Deck" card in there to mark game state, which mostly just gives small bonuses/penalties to magic of various schools. This highlights another big issue with Invisible Sun: there's a lot of stuff that in theory should be really wacky but is just mechanically boring. There are a ton of spells with crazy fluff and then just +2 to a check or something for the effect. Compare to Unknown Armies, where every magic schtick ever made for any edition of the game has at least a few totally out there unique effects. The poverty of imagination in IS really shows.
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Mar 1, 2019 21:32
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food court bailiff posted:I've never played the game (although there is a physical copy at my FLGS I've picked up a few times when I needed a quick laugh) but uh this seems like you would just lay the cards over each other so one half was concealed, I'm actually kind of having trouble parsing why you think this would be an issue at all with physical cards. But the thing is, now you've got your spell cards stacking on each other, which isn't exactly convenient when you want to read them. I admit I'm probably over-reacting (I do that, I know), but it's still the mechanics getting in their own way. Why put in a system that requires you to stack your reference materials when you could just increase the size of the grid more? Isn't that better than making people cover half their cards? It'd at least make sense if (like dwarf said) you made them actual weird-sized pieces so there's a dynamic factor to it.  Xiahou Dun posted:What was the silly model hand for again?
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Mar 1, 2019 21:32
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Xiahou Dun posted:What was the silly model hand for again? Holding what magic moon (and the associated mechanics for it) is in phase right now, I think.
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Mar 1, 2019 21:33
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Is there an f&f on it? Is it any good or just another chapter in monte cooks book of failure
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Mar 1, 2019 23:33
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Xiahou Dun posted:What was the silly model hand for again?  No seriously, it's that thing in the lower right.
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Mar 1, 2019 23:57
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| # ? Jun 11, 2024 12:51 |
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That's.... Certainly a buttplug
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Mar 2, 2019 00:04
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