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I love stunting and I hate stunting. On the one hand, I love stunting because it motivates less participatory players to get more descriptive and put in more effort by dangling a mechanical bonus in front of them. On the other hand, because stunts are so easy to get, everyone keeps doing it, all the time, and sometimes it slows things down or after the 10th attack of the battle it's hard to come up with a fresh description. You also literally can't stunt, especially now that they've apparently increased the stunting bonuses, because it's just so vital to your point pools. Also am I reading it right that you can "farm" initiative off of a weak enemy and then use that to murder a tougher enemy? Because mechanically it sounds potentially interesting but thematically it sounds like the protagonists ignoring the big bad for three rounds while they kick over one of his henchmen, kicking him whenever he tries to get up and then suddenly they turn towards the boss and annihilate him in a single round.
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Mar 24, 2019 20:32
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PurpleXVI posted:I love stunting and I hate stunting. On the one hand, I love stunting because it motivates less participatory players to get more descriptive and put in more effort by dangling a mechanical bonus in front of them. Ideally any scene of whatever kind of action doesn't drag on or get bogged down by minutiae to the point you suffer stunting fatigue, but that's easy to say before writing a combat system that takes its own whole session to resolve on the regular. Also while Willpower is still pretty important, stunts at least were decoupled from your basic "do fun things" currency, so it's not quite as harsh if you can't come up with something fun to narrate. quote:Also am I reading it right that you can "farm" initiative off of a weak enemy and then use that to murder a tougher enemy? Because mechanically it sounds potentially interesting but thematically it sounds like the protagonists ignoring the big bad for three rounds while they kick over one of his henchmen, kicking him whenever he tries to get up and then suddenly they turn towards the boss and annihilate him in a single round. Technically you can get into that situation, and I won't even say it's player error/failure of engagement with the premise of the game, but it's a pretty narrow failure state. If the BBEG in the fight is a miniboss, well, that's fine to happen sometimes honestly. If it's THE BBEG there are many complications to ensure that doesn't happen unless the GM is being pretty lazy. And then, at mook-killing levels, I seem to recall mooks are bunched up together into a single mass that doesn't even provide Initiative.
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Mar 24, 2019 20:52
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Night10194 posted:Yeah, stunting partly just pisses me off because I used to do freeform RP on MUDs and I remember vividly being told like 'You need several paragraph long poses for every action' instead of just, say, letting two characters have a conversation. It reminds me of that kind of stuff. Everything has to be a big production all the time.
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Mar 24, 2019 21:23
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Nessus posted:As a fast-typing veteran of these games, yeah it can get tedious, although it also allows you to multitask if you know that after you write your paragraph you can at least go freshen up your coffee rather than needing to be at the proverbial IRC window. I once literally managed to leave, make dinner, and come back, and get halfway through eating it, before my turn came up, because of all the stunting.
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Mar 24, 2019 21:33
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In my limited experience stunting just made the game really narratively weird because the incentive to get bonus dice just made everyone try to overact even when the situation or narrative didn't call for it like sometimes you can just talk to the guy or unlock this lock you don't have to also do triple backflips Also yeah as a fellow veteran of MUSHes it really depends what you want to cover and even with length readability is a prime factor; you can have a single paragraph dense block that's harder to read than a few of interspersed action and dialogue.
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Mar 24, 2019 22:11
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There's enough folks who MUSH with me to vouch that I am Queen Shortpose so it doesn't always have to be massive but...yeah stunting with variable bonuses is like, oh I have to go really over the drat top
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Mar 24, 2019 22:14
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My experience with stunting as a GM is that I really loving hate stunting. I get the idea that it's supposed to encourage a cooperative storytelling experience, but what I usually see happens is the players all act on their own with no attempt to create a consensual game experience and babble on with ridiculous bullshit stunts to maximize whatever benefit they can. Then I'm supposed to sit in judgement of that and give awards, so it got to the point where I just stopped giving a poo poo and gave an award based on how difficult I thought the player was going to be if I didn't give them the award they wanted. If anything it actually made the game less of a cooperative experience overall, sure there were good moments but the exhausting and boring parts outweigh the good ones by a hefty margin. On top of that there are players who don't like being 'encouraged' to get involved in the game if they just don't feel in the mood for it tonight, once again I get the idea behind it, but it's just generated more bad feelings than good overall. But the thing I really hate about it is that it slows the game down, which is a major problem for a game with an action resolution mechanism as glacial as Exalted's.
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Mar 24, 2019 22:32
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A lot of Exalted's problems seem to boil down to it being an anime game that's deeply in denial that it's an anime game.
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Mar 24, 2019 22:51
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 Part 15: A Night On The Town  https://youtu.be/KONdZzgxE4o Night City is the default setting for Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. It’s located between Los Angeles and San Francisco, near San Jose according to the Cyberpunk 2077 wiki. The metro area has a population of about 5 million, and the city itself is situated on a large bay. There’s a sidebar that explains that Referees are encouraged to export the “feel” of Night City to craft a CP2020 version of their own city. However, the detailed maps are provided for gaming groups that don’t live near a big city. Also, it’s the 80s/early 90s; an RPG company is going to publish all its campaign notes. Night City was founded in 1994 by a developer named Richard Night in response to the Collapse. Night incorporated a group of suburbs on California’s coast into an urban center free of the blight that was damaging the rest of the country’s cities. The corporate dream city does not go as planned, and in 1998 Night is assassinated by the mob. Following the assassination the mob-controlled Night City goes to poo poo, as rival gangs and mobs turn the entire city into a war zone. In 2009, the Corps decide they’ve had enough and use covert strike teams to break the mob’s control and revitalize Night City - or at least the parts they care about. By 2020, Night City is pretty comparable to all the urban centers: a pristine core, a well guarded shell of suburbs, and a mantle of poo poo in between. The current mayor is Mbole Ebunike, a corporate puppet. He’s currently up for re-election, so outing him could be a good campaign hook. The police force is mostly corrupt save for the Psycho Squad. Night City has public transportation, but there’s no information on what it costs to use. The airport can handle international flights, but not sub-orbital. The city is on State Highway 828, which connects to I-5....hey remember that the focus is on the feel?  The map of Night City describes a variety of locations. The places that get the most descriptions are bars. Because despite the game saying otherwise, it’s the Eighties and you got to start an RPG in a bar. There are 10 on this map, each different in ways that are pretty inconsequential. Other locations highlighted are warehouses, the specific street corners gangs meet, department stores. Like the sidebar said: the feel of the city! After the map comes a random encounter table. There are three depending on the time of day, but there’s no distinction for where the PCs are in Night City. The Referee rolls on the same table whether the PCs are in the Corporate Plaza or in the Combat Zone. So let’s roll a set of encounters for a day in Night City. Jamie, Kimmy Chi, and maybe a couple other PCs are doing a job that starts them off getting the mission from a bar in the Combat Zone in the early afternoon, picking up a trail outside an exclusive Chinese restaurant that evening, and then finally making a delivery in a garage under Arasaka Tower after midnight. The group doesn’t waste a lot of time with the broker offering the job. The Referee feels she ought to do something to spice up the scene. She rolls a 48, indicating that the group runs into two Corporate Execs from a mid-sized firm, here in the Combat Zone. The Ref rolls to see what they are doing and gets a 6 - they are lost and ask the group for directions to a restaurant. One of the players assumes this has something to do with the mission (even though the Referee is careful to use a different restaurant) and it takes about a half hour to drop the tangent. The group gets to the restaurant and are in place to set up a trail. The Referee decides to inject a bit of nightlife that might complicate their efforts. The Ref rolls a 25. Six street punks, “looking for credits to feed their habit”. Since the group is broken up, the Ref rolls to see which character they approach, and gets Kimmy. The description says they’ll rush anyone not in Corporate or Booster colors. Kimmy has neither, but he is wearing full body armor and brandishing a heavy SMG. The punks are armed with knives. The referee doesn’t even run the fight, but just has the street punks walk up, realize this is dumb, and then leave. The group eventually get the item they need and arrive at the garage for the drop off. The Referee sees there’s still some time left before the players need to head home, and momentarily forgetting where this garage is located, makes a roll on the after midnight encounter table. She rolls an 92. And so our heroes arrive at the drop-off point only to find that it’s currently the site of a gang war between neo-fascists and Brady Bunch cosplayers! The characters help the Brady family, and it’s only after the fight is over that one of the players says “wait, aren’t we supposed to be under Arasaka Tower?” The table goes silent before everyone bursts into laughter. The rest of the campaign is now about Corporate-sponsored bum fights. (The above chain of event presumes that our good Referee has taken the time to prepare stats for all the possible encounters, because the book sure hasn’t! And the different types of gangs are different enough that as written you can’t reuse stats. A Booster isn’t the same thing as a Crhomer, that’s insane!) The section ends with 18 NPCs living in Night City, compressed into two pages. The info on these NPCs is pretty threadbare, and only a couple of them have enough to form into a plot hook. The NPCs come with a list of attributes and nothing else. Also the Solos have Reflexes above 10, indicating they were copied from 1st edition without change.  Next Time: and the rest SirPhoebos fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Mar 24, 2019 |
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Mar 24, 2019 22:56
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Cythereal posted:A lot of Exalted's problems seem to boil down to it being an anime game that's deeply in denial that it's an anime game. Considering some of the anime I've seen and read about, being a baroque mess of conflicting themes and, fundamentally, tearing itself apart between scientifically cataloging its own mythology and "lol wouldn't this be awesome!?" seems pretty on-point, denial or not.
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Mar 24, 2019 23:12
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PurpleXVI posted:I love stunting and I hate stunting. On the one hand, I love stunting because it motivates less participatory players to get more descriptive and put in more effort by dangling a mechanical bonus in front of them. Or the more verbose players who are comfortable with bullshitting their actions drown the quiet one out. I like the idea too, but as one of the designated quiet people at the table, it's never worked particularly well for me. And holy poo poo, keep me away from the twits who think pose length is a yardstick of quality. I write. I write well. I do not write quickly, and I do not write verbosely for its own sake. If we're one on one and you've got me seriously enthusiastic, I can produce a great deal. If everyone in a scene is posing to make an editor cry red ink tears... I'm not in that scene for long.
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Mar 24, 2019 23:35
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Sorry, what does “pose” mean in this context?
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Mar 25, 2019 00:33
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Xiahou Dun posted:Sorry, what does “pose” mean in this context? Same as post does in PBP.
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Mar 25, 2019 00:34
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Huh. Cool. Never seen that before. I’d just assumed it was a typo the first time I read it. Also unrelated but I am actually drafting up a Torchbearer review, I just want to write ahead a chunk so updates aren’t “in real time”, so to speak. People who are competent, how much do you recommend writing in advance before you post content?
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Mar 25, 2019 00:41
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Xiahou Dun posted:Huh. Cool. Never seen that before.
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Mar 25, 2019 00:52
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Xiahou Dun posted:Huh. Cool. Never seen that before. As much as it takes so you finish the project when life inevitably intervenes. But seriously everyone is different and you learn what you need. I for instance need to stop having people visit me so I get out more than one ipdate a week so I can finish Dark Revelations.
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Mar 25, 2019 00:58
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Xiahou Dun posted:Huh. Cool. Never seen that before. Back when I was unemployed I would make posts as soon as I wrote up the relevant section. But that's not applicable anymore, so I often save individual sections and chapters as drafts. When I have at least three-quarters to 90% of a book done do I start making posts. As I post to multiple forums I write things up in RPGnet BBCode which is applicable to here (minus left/center/right align), GiantITP, and similar websites. I also do all of my posts on Google Docs which autosaves your drafts every few seconds in the event of Internet disconnections and power outages. I cannot stress this part enough; too many F&Fers have lost countless hours of writing this way by doing it as a forum post, only to have their session time out. Or writing it on Word only for their computer to shut down.
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Mar 25, 2019 02:26
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Night10194 posted:Yeah, stunting partly just pisses me off because I used to do freeform RP on MUDs and I remember vividly being told like 'You need several paragraph long poses for every action' instead of just, say, letting two characters have a conversation. It reminds me of that kind of stuff. Everything has to be a big production all the time. Wait, hang on. Were you ever on ExaltedMU? Tales of the River Province, etc? I was really active there and now I'm curious if I knew you.
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Mar 25, 2019 02:47
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RiotGearEpsilon posted:Wait, hang on. Were you ever on ExaltedMU? Tales of the River Province, etc? No, I was not. I've never played anything Exalted related.
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Mar 25, 2019 02:49
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Part 16: I Have No Scenario And I Must Screamsheet  The final section of Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. starts with a bunch of news articles written in-universe. The first set of articles are music articles and reviews. This is one of the few points of frustration with Cyberpunk’s worldbuilding. For the most part it does a great job even if it gets redundant at parts. But they put in a lot of words into how important Rockerboys are, and I dig that. But I have no idea what they sound like, and it bugs the hell out of me! These articles don’t help the matter, because they’re in universe and assume the reader knows what type of music so-and-so plays. Just tell me someone these Rockerboys are comparable to, I can figure out the rest. Besides my general frustration there are two notable tidbits from these otherwise similar articles. First, a year after trashing Arasaka’s main U.S. office, Johnny Silverhand has shifted gears entirely and is bitching about cloning. No wonder Arasaka was able to bounce back. The second detail is about a different band discussing how a corporation tried to discredit them with false rape allegations. Uggggggh.  After the Rockerboy stories we get two articles on how individual Nomad packs formed. These are at least useful for someone trying to flesh out a backstory and wants to borrow elements from it. Then there’s a couple of articles about the gangs of Night City. We get the names of several of them. The only one that really stands out are a neo-luddite, anti-cybernetics gang called “The Inquisition”. They’re played straight by this book, but I’d bet a Eurodollar they were added just so even this game wouldn’t be free of Monty Python references. There’s one article here that I actually enjoyed, which was “One Night with the Trauma Team” which gives the daily log of a Trauma Team AV-4 barging into dangerous situations, rescuing who they can, recycling who they can’t, and fighting off their big competitor, “R.E.O. Meatwagon”. The article makes playing a Trauma Team sound very fun.  The book concludes with 9 Screamsheets and 10 Scenarios along with them. The Screamsheets have a few related articles, and on the flipside is a scenario. Despite a lot of space seemingly given to each scenario, a lot of the times it’s used on stuff that won’t be important to running the scenario. So we get to know all these specs for a made-up semi, but not the stats of the mooks being sent to intercept it. Here’s a summary of the ten scenarios:
 And that’s the end of the book. Final Thoughts: Even when I was still a kid, I could tell that Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. was a game trying to be something bigger than just fight scenarios, but didn’t really know how to achieve that. I always go back to putting the Rockerboy as the very first role in the book. Being able to grab a guitar and move thousands was supposed to be important, but it ultimately can’t be when it has only a half a page of rules compared to dozens given for shooting guns. And giving Rockerboys the same rules space would not have helped matters either - the role would just have the same problems as the Netrunner. Like many RPGs, the story of CP2020 is incomplete without the supplements. In the core book, the authors are able to stick to a consistent tone, and capabilities can remain within set bands. But that changes when it comes to selling supplements. The core sets an upper limit to how much cyberware a player can expect to carry around, until the supplements let them be Robocop 2. The game is set in urban environments, until supplements fling the players out into space. And there are still limits to what a Megacorporation can get away with, until supplements have them nuking each other. But that is a tale for another time. The End https://youtu.be/OP63BRzKmB0 Final 2020/2020 Count: 10
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Mar 25, 2019 02:52
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Question for FATAL & Friends As I said at the end of my review, the full story of CP2020 is in the supplements, of which there were a ton. What would you like to see reviewed next? Chromebook 1 & 2: Characters in CP2020 are very defined by their gear, and the Chromebooks keep adding more and more stuff to what they can spend money on. Chromebook 2 in particular is where the gear power-level shoots up dramatically Solo of Fortune: While technically a 1st edition sourcebook, its got a lot that is relevant for how to make distinct gun-shootermans. Night City: Because what else do gaming groups want but block-by-block descriptions of a made up city? Surely they couldn't make up locations, that would be crazy! The Corporation Report, Volume 1: It's Saburo-kun's wacky ninja squad! Plus some Europeans who are deadly serious about selling you a Cuisinart. Tales of the Forlorn Hope: a series of missions set out of a vet bar in Night City's Combat Zone. Readers Choice: if you've got something you want to see, give a recommendation.
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Mar 25, 2019 03:12
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SirPhoebos posted:Question for FATAL & Friends The first two Chromebooks, just because of the hilarity of the out-dated fluff in the first one and how OP it gets in the second.
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Mar 25, 2019 03:13
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Xiahou Dun posted:Also unrelated but I am actually drafting up a Torchbearer review, I just want to write ahead a chunk so updates aren’t “in real time”, so to speak. People who are competent, how much do you recommend writing in advance before you post content? Depends a lot on the tone you're going for. If you're going for a more humorous tone, just writing it "in the moment" when your emotions(disgust, excitement, bafflement, etc.) are fresh probably delivers some of the punchier writing, but if you're trying to be serious and analytical, you probably want to do multiple drafts. Everything I reviewed I more or less wrote-as-I-read because I'm a jackass.
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Mar 25, 2019 03:14
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PurpleXVI posted:Depends a lot on the tone you're going for. If you're going for a more humorous tone, just writing it "in the moment" when your emotions(disgust, excitement, bafflement, etc.) are fresh probably delivers some of the punchier writing, but if you're trying to be serious and analytical, you probably want to do multiple drafts. I do the same, except I pre-read the material a few times and think some before I sit down to write. It's why I have the occasional typo; I'm writing in the moment.
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Mar 25, 2019 03:20
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Best part about Exalted stunting is pulling out the five dollar words. Nothing like diving into a coruscating spiral where your jade daiklave leaves a nacreous sheen through the air behind it.
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Mar 25, 2019 03:22
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theironjef posted:Best part about Exalted stunting is pulling out the five dollar words. Nothing like diving into a coruscating spiral where your jade daiklave leaves a nacreous sheen through the air behind it. It's fun to play with words.
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Mar 25, 2019 03:35
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my group likes Stunts in Exalted, but that's because we've played together for years and know how to make eachother go 'haha nice' and the unspoken rule is always 'look just do ANYTHING not lame and you get 1, if this is the climax of a fight or something you'll for sure get 2 or 3' so it's very low pressure. I wouldn't call it a good mechanic for randos or whatever.
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Mar 25, 2019 03:43
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That Old Tree posted:Very early on stunts were just a flat "be more interesting than 'I attack' and get +2 dice", I think with some discussion of maybe a Willpower or two per scene based on relevant Intimacies. But I guess that wasn't complicated and judgy enough. If you really dig into what a 1e Stunt is, the rule for a 1-die stunt is that it has to use sensory language and it has to be more than just "I do the thing", and the rule for a 2-die stunt is that it has to involve the environment or one of your character's Intimacies. It's very simple and the ST doesn't have to put in much effort in determining which level a Stunt is: Did it involve describing the attack in terms of what it sounds, looks, or smells like? 1 die. Did it involve the environment? 2 dice. It's so basic that when you think of what your Stunt will be, you already know how many extra dice you're getting. Clang of my armour echoing off the walls? Walls are the environment, 2 dice. This is not communicated well, and the vague "more dice for describing things better" description and the idea that really cool descriptions give 3 dice became what people remembered, which led to this idea that you always had to launch into lengthy, florid descriptions, which fed back into people's understanding of how the game was supposed to be played... ...which eventually led to 2e, which formalizes that, yeah, your ST just kind of tries to rate your Stunt on their personal and arbitrary scale based on how fancy it was. 3e is similar, but also provides examples of what a Stunt should be like, which are: a) Lengthy like oh god Mørke shut up don't make people do this for every Stunt b) They all assume that the action succeeds, which teaches people to think up Stunts that sound really dumb when they inevitably fail 3e also has a really boneheaded idea that Stunts should be carefully paced such that Level 2 stunts are a once-a-fight event and Level 3 stunts are a once-a-story event, while also you're supposed to award them based on how cool the description was - so what do you do when someone pulls of three Level 2 Stunts in a row? Just tell them the last two don't count? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Mar 25, 2019 03:52
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My GM always used the 1E Exalted scale so much that I tended to assume it was actually in the 2E books somewhere and I'd just overlooked it.
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Mar 25, 2019 04:09
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As far as I know, Exalted 2e at core retains the environment rule for two-dot stunts (see pg 123), though it and 1e use a different definition of "scenery" which in 2e contains "setting details." (You could stretch 1e's definition as allowing two-dot stunts which are well-suited to the scene on an aesthetic or tonal level, even if they do not interact with the physical environment. I've never encountered that in the wild, though.) Edit: Though I suspect people would read 2e's language as "you must do at least this to get two dice" where 1e suggests "if you do this, you definitely get two dice." Five Eyes fucked around with this message at 04:37 on Mar 25, 2019 |
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Mar 25, 2019 04:34
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Frankly having an overcomplicated stunt that fails spectacularly is a complete joy to behold and was great when I was playing a game of Spellbound Kingdoms with some other goons. It really gets annoying though and I'm pretty eh on the subject.
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Mar 25, 2019 04:45
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LatwPIAT posted:...which eventually led to 2e, which formalizes that, yeah, your ST just kind of tries to rate your Stunt on their personal and arbitrary scale based on how fancy it was. Since it doesn't require a lot of work, I'm looking at the books and I…don't really see the distinction you're making here. I think the 1E section is better written, especially the stuff about 3-die stunts, but they're otherwise largely the same. They even both put the idea front and center that the ST is evaluating stunts and awarding dice according to their discretion. quote:3e is similar, but also provides examples of what a Stunt should be like, which are: I think the stunt section for 3E is outright terrible, with it's incredibly vague language that's just about "being cool" and the sidebar with stunt examples is mostly boring and overwritten, but it's honestly very short and I don't see the "stunt economy" thing you're referring to at all. Also, the presumption of success in stunt descriptions was firmly established by the 2E section. In fact, the most overly florid, long stunt example is 2E's.
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Mar 25, 2019 04:54
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That Old Tree posted:Since it doesn't require a lot of work, I'm looking at the books and I…don't really see the distinction you're making here. I think the 1E section is better written, especially the stuff about 3-die stunts, but they're otherwise largely the same. They even both put the idea front and center that the ST is evaluating stunts and awarding dice according to their discretion. My recollection is that 2e was less rigid in the criteria it suggested for evaluating stunts, but it's been a while since I took a deep look at it, and I think my 1e book is under a pile of other books perched precariously atop it, themselves hidden under a pile of socks, so checking the exact text is not quite as easy for me. 
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Mar 25, 2019 05:13
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PurpleXVI posted:
That was my experience with Feng Shui, where you're supposed to come up with a cinematic descriptioin of every attack. It's fun, but in a longer combat you definitely start to feel the benefits of just being able to say "I make an attack" occasionally.
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Mar 25, 2019 10:27
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Im not a fan of stunting from a pure math standpoint. It introduces this bonus variable that either breaks the curve or has to assumed to be there but its implementation at table isnt strictly defined.
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Mar 25, 2019 10:46
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Deptfordx posted:That was my experience with Feng Shui, where you're supposed to come up with a cinematic descriptioin of every attack. It's fun, but in a longer combat you definitely start to feel the benefits of just being able to say "I make an attack" occasionally.
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Mar 25, 2019 10:52
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2E Exalted also very much had a rocket tag issue where things were either over very quickly if someone actually managed to land a hit early, or took forever if the dice weren't anyone's friends. It was rare that you dealt with an enemy that took a lot of meaningful hits but still took a while to wear down, on account of being relatively easy to hit but mainly defended by tons of health levels and soak. Because as it was designed, health levels and soak were really easy to tear through.
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Mar 25, 2019 13:12
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PurpleXVI posted:2E Exalted also very much had a rocket tag issue where things were either over very quickly if someone actually managed to land a hit early, or took forever if the dice weren't anyone's friends. It was rare that you dealt with an enemy that took a lot of meaningful hits but still took a while to wear down, on account of being relatively easy to hit but mainly defended by tons of health levels and soak. Because as it was designed, health levels and soak were really easy to tear through. Also it felt like the only way to build a defense was to go with a Perfect Defense.
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Mar 25, 2019 14:02
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Dungeons: The Dragoning: 7.5E You had one goddamn job, Pen-Pen Dungeons: The Dragoning was originally made up as a game-within-a-game for an Adeptus Evangelion campaign. The idea was that the pilots spent their off day playing an RPG for a light-hearted comedy session in between fighting aliens, and that the only RPG that existed and was commercially viable was Dungeons: The Dragoning. This game was created by White Wizard's Workshop, an unholy amalgam of all of the major/popular RPG and wargaming companies (except Palladium, apparently; RIFTS did not survive Second Impact) and was thus a total mess of mashing up 7th Sea, Planescape, 40k, Exalted (a LOT of Exalted), WoD, Warhammer Fantasy, D&D, and everything else. Which is a cute idea for a breather session in an Evangelion game. Then, for some reason, the people from that game decided to actually make Dungeons: The Dragoning: 7th Edition. Make it and release it. So here it is, in front of me, and it is dumb as hell. It's a silly joke of a game system, except that it's 400 pages of rules and fluff, at which point a joke has gone a little far. But that's the thing; unlike with AdEva, there's very little that's seriously creepy here. There's no GM advice to promote weird power games between players, there's no Unshippable, there IS a Social Combat system but it's more of a joke about Social Combat systems than anything else. DtD is, for all intents and purposes, a harmless and silly thing that someone put a little too much effort into. But it produces a weird RPG that I can write about for the internet, and I did actually play this game, so it fulfills my criterion for reviewing it. Now, as this is a game produced in the grim post-Impact world, some corners had to be cut. You see, without penguins around to inspire good game design, guess what resolution mechanic replaced d20 as the most prominent resolution mechanic in gaming? Will it be the simple percentile? Will it be something silly like d6-d6 from Feng Shui? Could it be the One Roll Engine or Cardinal? No. It is the Roll and Keep system. From Legend of the Five Rings and 7th Sea 1st edition. Yes, if Antarctica had exploded, we would be stuck making Raises and rolling 5k2 in almost every RPG that exists. Behold, the terrible cost of the Katsuragi expedition and the awakening of the Giant of Light. Pen-Pen was not enough penguin to inspire better game design. Not that the little bastard tries. Just lounges around all day, being the obligatory mascot character demanded by marketing. I'm on to you, Pen-Pen. In the game's defense, it does begin with 'Please don't mistake this for a real roleplaying game, this is a silly joke game made for fun'. I just feel like if you're going to put 400 pages worth of effort into your silly joke game, you could try to make it a little more playable. I've made this same mistake with a very old comedy RPG I wrote for fun, where I baked a bunch of jokes about RPG mechanics into the mechanics; I ended up with a mess of a game by doing that. So again, my hands are not clean of tang in making this critique. I did the same thing these authors did a long time ago! And it was a bad idea when I did it, and it's a bad idea here. If the joke is 'these rules are unplayable', then it's best to keep the game to a bunch of people playing Mornington Crescent/Calvinball and make that the game. Because in the end, that's how DtD is going to come out. You can play the game as presented. It will be a goddamn mess. Because the point is supposed to be that the game isn't just a fluff mashup of all those RPGs listed up above, the joke is it's a mechanical mashup, too. You make a Hero. You assign their Dots as if it was a White Wolf game. You roll and keep like it was 7th Sea. You pick out Artifacts and Daiklaves and poo poo. You have Book of 9 Swords Sword Schools as Martial Arts charms. You have the entire D&D magic system bolted onto 40kRP's Perils of the Warp. You have a Career Track like WHFRP2e but without any of the stuff that made its Career system fun. You fly around on giant spelljammers covered in eagles and skulls. 12th and 13th century foreigners surround you. Your sword is unbelievably dull (unless it is a Daiklave). Dinosaurs are here (with chainguns strapped to their heads, obviously). And so I must make sense of these convoluted situations. Also the book starts off with a parody of the infamous Privateer Press 'Play Like You Got A Pair' stupidity from early War Machine, while claiming it is a simple and elegant rules system that has left behind complications like THAC0 for the purity of Roll and Keep. "We didn't set out to reinvent the wheel, we covered it in eagles and skulls, threw it into space, and used it to slay a Void Dragon." Everything in this book will be written in the same breathlessly over-the-top tone, which I can't really get annoyed about because fair enough, that's the tone they're parodying and that's part of the joke of the game. Making fun of the hyperbolic style of 40k and its competitors like early War Machine (I have no idea if War Machine ever toned it down later) is fine. One thing you notice quickly reading this book, though, is that everything is a reference. Very little of the humor manages to stand on its own; right off the bat at Character Creation we get Andrew Ryan's speech from the beginning of Bioshock but instead about 'is a man not entitled to the grandest of adventures!?' with various stereotypical RPG voices saying NO because it would be 'overpowered' or 'unbalanced'. DtD is, uh, not a game that's going to concern itself with game balance, at all. When you're parodying Exalted 2e (among a dozen other things), it's a good excuse not to bother with anything like 'elegance' or 'game balance' or 'playability'. You could argue that's just being true to the source. Still, the constant references can get tiresome; I'd have preferred it if the book had spent some more time developing its own voice and some more of its own humor rather than relying entirely on 'I recognize that thing!!!' humor. It also begins with a quick explanation of the version of Roll and Keep we'll be using here. It's a simple XkY, where you roll X dice and keep the highest Y and add them together for your result. Dice that roll a 10 explode, and keep rolling until they stop rolling 10s, then that exploded dice's total counts as a single kept die. So if I roll 10, 10, 8 on 3k2, then roll 10 and 5 on the next roll, then roll 4, I've rolled a 24 on one die and a 15 on the other, for a 39 on the roll. Instead of the 7th Sea raise system, you instead use Raises like they were 40kRP/WHFRP Degrees of Success; for every 5 you beat your TN by, you score a Raise (if it's important) and for every 5 you fail by, you get Check. Free Raises are just extra Raises that get added if you succeed at all. This is going to be a long one, folks. And a long one that's going to require me picking through a badly edited book an awful lot, because there's a lot that's really unclear in these rules. Expect updates to be a bit slower than usual as I try to parse this and put into terms that can be understood, because this is a free RPG mostly made by one guy on a dare and released as a joke. Clarity was not one of the goals here. Next Time: The Making of a Hero
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Mar 25, 2019 15:08
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I don't think DtD was ever meant to have its own voice or humor.
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Mar 25, 2019 15:42
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