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why did you have to open that box? we keep that box closed for a reason!
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May 1, 2019 02:34
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJXSWfT04M edit: It's actually a bit NWS so I linked it, it's the Kickstarter Nonstarter (retsuprae) version of the kickstarter video for that anime nazi game
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May 1, 2019 02:43
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In any case if you want a modern BESM with functional mechanics, OVA already exists.
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May 1, 2019 02:55
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Evil Mastermind posted:That's hilarious. BESM is one of those games that works as well as the players and GM can agree to make it work. There are so many ways to break it by accident that a player who's trying can spoil everyone's fun real easy.
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May 1, 2019 04:10
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I still can't help but have a slight fondness for the original 1e BESM, it's charmingly simple. It's just not even remotely good game design for reasons already mentioned, and literally nothing about it or the later editions are anything vaguely resembling "balanced". Also gently caress McKinnon. He already ran his company into the ground and stole from people, he's had his chance.
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May 1, 2019 05:15
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I can't get my head around why someone would want a specifically "anime" RPG. It's a medium, not a genre, and I'm pretty sure the setting conventions/worldview/style of, say, your Cowboy Bebop, your Escaflowne, your Lupin III, your Gundam, your Evangelion, your Twelve Kingdoms, your Trigun, your Dragonball Z, your One Piece, your Death Note, your Revolutionary Girl Utena, your Grave of the Fireflies and your (insert high school hijinks anime pandering to ephebophiles here) are all so incredibly divergent that it makes no goddamn sense to try and make a system which would incorporate all of that. Any system broad enough to cover all that ground would effectively be an entirely generic game... at which point, what is "anime" about it, when it's presumably also broad enough to cover ample non-anime material? EDIT: I mean, I get the answer to "Why would you want a specifically 'anime' generic RPG?" is "because weeaboos", it just bemuses me that weeaboos are sufficiently brokebrained that they don't get that every tabletop RPG is an anime RPG if you choose to imagine the action that way. Warthur fucked around with this message at 13:18 on May 1, 2019 |
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May 1, 2019 13:14
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The genre is "Suncoast in the 90's."
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May 1, 2019 13:19
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What's a Suncoast? Google suggests it's a bank, or possibly a hotel.
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May 1, 2019 13:25
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It’s the same reason why people want generic Tolkien fantasy settings. You could ask the same thing as to why these D&D books don’t have anime pictures - if you want high fantasy just imagine it yourself. I play story games like Kingdom and Fiasco (which is pretty drat anime) with no pictures in the books nowadays but for the typical kind of RPG book, it doubles as a coffee table art book.
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May 1, 2019 13:28
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Warthur posted:What's a Suncoast? Google suggests it's a bank, or possibly a hotel. Suncoast Motion Picture Company. They were in malls all over the place in the 90s. They had an anime section, with wall scrolls and other merch as well. Basically babby’s first weeaboo store. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suncoast_Motion_Picture_Company
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May 1, 2019 13:39
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Warthur posted:What's a Suncoast? Google suggests it's a bank, or possibly a hotel. It's like a Game Stop but for videos, with a Southern California/Hollywood theme. Lots of shelves of DVDs and associated kitsch. Some of the "anime as a universal concept" comes out of the perception of anime as the very narrow band of action shows and harem poo poo that was being exported to the English-speaking world in the 90s and early 2000s on Toonami and Saturday morning cartoon blocks. And then you had the unofficial translations that were coming over for that very specific type of hardcore fan... BESM is very much rooted in a "reenact your favorite Toonami show!" attitude. The problem is that's wildly outdated now that it's easier to access good shows across genres the same way you can video games or comics, and it's easier to approach anime as just another variation on animation as a medium with countless subgenres that would all be emulated differently in a game. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 13:54 on May 1, 2019 |
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May 1, 2019 13:51
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Depending on the local store, Suncoast was also notable for not separating the anime section for age-appropriateness, leading to hilarious situations where Gramma would buy her grandkid one of those Japanese cartoons, only to be horrified and pissed off when it turned out to be, for example, Legend of the Overfiend. Some stores overreacted and put 18+ stickers on all their anime, leading to great frustration on the part of budding fans and the equally funny situation where the most innocent kiddie show was basically rated X.
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May 1, 2019 13:54
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Catalyst have announced 6th edition of Shadowrun, supposedly due out this Gen Con https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcR4iQWQcCE For whatever reason they've done this on a little-watched youtube video, with no social media posts on their accounts, or anything on their website, but that's probably par for the course for them. They seem to also have a half-dozen books due to come out, so i'd expect some of them to be shelved/converted but it'll be a.n.other cycle of the guns, cyberware, magic, decker, rigger etc. books.
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May 1, 2019 14:00
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PST posted:Catalyst have announced 6th edition of Shadowrun, supposedly due out this Gen Con That is absolutely par for the course for them. The 'announcements' section of their forums hasn't had an official product announcement since ~2014, or a post since 2017. Their takeaway from the 5e launch was apparently 'we made too much of a big deal of it' so they're saying nothing.... and playtesting nothing, given we're just hearing about it at the time it would need to be heading to the printers for a full run by GenCon. If there is a way to step on their own dick, CGL will find it and go at it with gusto.
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May 1, 2019 14:21
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Warthur posted:What's a Suncoast? Google suggests it's a bank, or possibly a hotel. 
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May 1, 2019 14:23
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Evil Mastermind posted:Thanks, now I feel really old. Don't, I think it's more that we didn't get anything like that in the UK!
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May 1, 2019 14:51
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Flavivirus posted:Don't, I think it's more that we didn't get anything like that in the UK! Even then, you'd be paying like $60 for a VHS tape with four badly-dubbed episodes max. And the anime was always next to the softcore porn stuff for some reason, and had the adult anime mixed in with the "regular" shows. e: Nuns with Guns posted:BESM is very much rooted in a "reenact your favorite Toonami show!" attitude. The problem is that's wildly outdated now that it's easier to access good shows across genres the same way you can video games or comics, and it's easier to approach anime as just another variation on animation as a medium with countless subgenres that would all be emulated differently in a game.
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May 1, 2019 15:06
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I asked for Excell Saga for Christmas one year because I was an Edgy college student. And my sister ended up getting the one assigned to buy it for me. (We did a secret Santa-ish thing) she sent to Suncoast and went to buy it, asking if it was porn(because, you know, it was right next to ninja scroll) His response of "don't worry, it's pretty softcore" did not put her at ease. But she bought it anyway reasoning her little brother wouldn't ask for porn for Christmas. And I didn't. At least not intentionally. No one told me about the final episode basically being a giant middle finger to the censors.
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May 1, 2019 15:11
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Warthur posted:EDIT: I mean, I get the answer to "Why would you want a specifically 'anime' generic RPG?" is "because weeaboos", it just bemuses me that weeaboos are sufficiently brokebrained that they don't get that every tabletop RPG is an anime RPG if you choose to imagine the action that way. BESM doesn't work, of course, but it appears accessible. And "accessible" is the name of the game when your first products are fan bibles with RPG rules attached. Evil Mastermind posted:Thanks, now I feel really old. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 15:30 on May 1, 2019 |
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May 1, 2019 15:27
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Halloween Jack posted:I like telling the kids what loving idiots we were. Driving to the mall to buy four episodes of Hellsing for $30. And those were 2002 dollars! Or two episodes of Ranma 1/2 for $80, and being thankful it was at least an official tape and not a twelfth-generation fansub so washed out as to be nearly unwatchable. Oh yes, I remember the dark ages. I remember them all too well.
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May 1, 2019 15:38
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I figured the BESM system was just slapped together to go along with the various licenses they picked up at the time. poo poo like Tenchi Muyo and whatever else was popular at the time. Only later became a “universal” system. I have their version of the Game if Thrones RPG. The Art was really pretty, but that was the only thing that stuck out about it. It was supposedly dual-started for d20 and their Tri-Star system.
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May 1, 2019 15:38
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Evil Mastermind posted:
Generally this was done to blend the regular porn tapes with the anime porn. FYE might still do this? They definitely did a few years ago but they've gone the same way as Gamestop and become less and less about selling media in favor of selling merch for media.
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May 1, 2019 15:43
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Yeah. I think I paid $30 each for Macross Plus and Macross II, but how the hell else was I going to get more Robotech in 1996? 
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May 1, 2019 16:20
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We had Manga Video in the UK, which were reasonably priced, but badly dubbed. They mostly skewed towards 15 and 18 rated things, resulting in anime also having a bad rep here. (Age ratings in the UK are actually legally binding which they don't seem to be in the US?)
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May 1, 2019 17:08
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Halloween Jack posted:Counterpoint: when BESM came out, your choices for a universal RPG tended to run to extremes, with stuff like Risus at one end and Hero System at the other. There weren't really games in the middle, like Atomic Robo or Marvel Heroic, that gave you that mix of narrative freedom and mechanical structure. None of this bodes well for it having a viable place in the market these days, though. It feels to me like FATE has largely eaten up the gap in the market BESM used to occupy. PST posted:Catalyst have announced 6th edition of Shadowrun, supposedly due out this Gen Con https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtcHfpf5SQU If they are actually streamlining to the extent that it sounds like they are I am cautiously optimistic - I never liked limits, and the idea of using Edge a bit like Advantage in WFRP4 as a means of eliminating situational modifiers seems genuinely clever. (Derivative, in some aspects, but clever people know when an idea's good enough to borrow). The Quickstart version might be the less crunch-heavy version of the game we all wanted Shadowrun: Anarchy to be before it tried to be the narrative Shadowrun storygame nobody asked for.
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May 1, 2019 17:25
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Rhandhali posted:I figured the BESM system was just slapped together to go along with the various licenses they picked up at the time. poo poo like Tenchi Muyo and whatever else was popular at the time. Only later became a “universal” system. The big thing with MacKinnon as a designer is that he doesn't seem to really believe in design as a thing you can really bring to bear on RPGs. This is the company that started printing games with a manifesto that included "Min/Maxing and Munchkinism aren't problems with the game; they're problems with the player." Given that his board games don't have totally abysmal ratings, I assume he brings a higher level of design chops to those, but it's hard to imagine wrangling BESM into being a well-made game without changing the rules almost beyond recognition. The Game of Thrones RPG they did was a full-on d20/OGL game, and MacKinnon himself is only credited with some of the editing, while like a dozen other people did the actual writing and design. Of course, that was just before the company went belly up, so there's a good chance those folks didn't get paid what they were promised for it.
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May 1, 2019 18:26
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Tri-Stat sure got its back broken when it tried to emulate super-hero stuff. Boy howdy. You thought it was easy to accidentally make a broken character before?
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May 1, 2019 19:37
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I'm totally down with the basic idea behind Tri-Stat/BESM - a version of Champions that doesn't require a degree in tax accounting to make a character, or a hexagon battlemap and 12-segment speed chart to play one. The published results, however...
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May 1, 2019 19:47
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The Origin Award nominees are up (it's the awards that only those attending Origins vote on) and it's the usual headscratch list, especially in rpgs https://www.originsgamefair.com/origins-awards-nominees
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May 1, 2019 20:18
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FMguru posted:a version of Champions that doesn't require a degree in tax accounting to make a character, or a hexagon battlemap and 12-segment speed chart to play one. Hey now, you only need one statistician/accountant/savant to play HERO, as long as they're very well-caffeinated and particularly eloquent. Everybody else can just be a regular math nerd.
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May 1, 2019 20:20
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I think “anime” games are a historical oddity. It’s like Toon; it calls itself a “cartoon RPG”, but it’s explicitly a Tex Avery RPG. Nobody would use it for doing Transformers or The Simpsons, but in the context of its time it’s clear what it meant. “Anime” likewise, originally just meant a few genres that were seen as uniquely anime and identified as such (in the UK we certainly got Miyazaki - especially Lapira - on children’s broadcasts but it was never called “anime” or any reference made to its origins), which seems to have been mecha and Teenagers From Outer Space. Why they would continue calling games that in the current situation I have no idea, other than weeb marketing. After all, we know that D&D is the most anime game available..
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May 1, 2019 21:53
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PST posted:The Origin Award nominees are up (it's the awards that only those attending Origins vote on) and it's the usual headscratch list, especially in rpgs That is a singularly  list.It's not all bad but there sure are a lot of products I'd describe as "comfortably resting on their laurels".
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May 1, 2019 22:11
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Alien Rope Burn posted:That is a singularly Invisible Sun 
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May 1, 2019 22:18
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hyphz posted:Invisible Sun Like I said.
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May 1, 2019 22:22
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Alien Rope Burn posted:That is a singularly I suppose any 'only available through kickstarter' would count, but I can't recall seeing a 'collector's/limited edition' on a list before, especially when it's about 8 times the price of the regular game (Flash Gordon Limited Collector's Edition) Also apparently the Vampire 5th edition nomination lists the artists rather than Hite et al as the designers.
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May 1, 2019 22:28
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What I want in Shadowrun is more things for her characters to choose and less math and fewer rolls for me, and every edition so far has given me exactly the opposite.
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May 2, 2019 00:18
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Pope Guilty posted:What I want in Shadowrun is more things for her characters to choose and less math and fewer rolls for me, and every edition so far has given me exactly the opposite. Except Anarchy, which was sort of a prat fall.
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May 2, 2019 01:34
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Dawgstar posted:Except Anarchy, which was sort of a prat fall. Anarchy could have been good if they'd actually published a complete game instead of a 75% draft.
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May 2, 2019 07:10
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The elevator pitch for Anarchy sounds like exactly what I want, and then you read it and it's like "this is a narrative game! now grab a bucket of dice" and completely misses its own point.
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May 2, 2019 07:12
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I own the Star Trek Adventures starter set and it's a...very solid piece of starter set. Box is ridiculously sturdy, comes with the dice and tokens you need - though they clearly cheaped out on them, aiming for lower-quality d6's(it uses special D6's) and generic d20's. Seriously, these are the purchase seperate dice - use the font, nice little starfleet logo for the natural 1, nice logo on the d6's... But it comes with three nice little interconnected adventures, a bunch of tokens, like, four maps for the handful of combat encounters the lil minicampaign has - it's solid through and through. I think the command division book also deserves to be there - the STA line has stupid-high production quality. Great art, extremely thematically appropriate content, and it really is built for trekkies. Nice to see that level of effort in a licensed game. Invisible Sun is a meme game - I don't know why it's there.
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May 2, 2019 07:46
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