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moths posted:The red ball in the lower left corner. Wait, what now? I hated the World of Darkness back in 2002 almost as much as I do now, but mechanically that game was absurdly good.
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Oct 17, 2020 00:13
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Yeah a company called Black Chantry got the license, they've been reprinting classic decks and they're about to launch a new printing. It's seriously the only TCG I've enjoyed more than the old WoW TCG, and I'm so ready for this.
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Oct 17, 2020 00:19
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I will die on the hill that you cannot have inherently evil species that are also people. The whole point of people is that they can make choices, including moral choices. Making a nonhuman person that's influenced by but not dominated by their differences is incredibly hard, maybe impossible, but "always evil" isn't it. "Always evil" is literally incompatible with "is a person." (I'd argue "always greedy" is too.) I think it'd be super awesome to come up with an RPG that expresses the nuance of how we act with or against our biases (cultural, species, whatever) in lots of complicated and defining ways, and in that context, having really strongly drawn varying biases for other species could be really interesting. But when you just say "all X are Y" in terms of mental states, you're de-personing, because for the one clear and explored example of X we have (humans), there's basically no Y that works.
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Oct 17, 2020 01:07
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Vampire was huge. It was like the 2nd card game after Magic and the WoD tie in was massive. If you want obscure WoD CCG go Arcadia. As far as I’m aware it never had any starter decks, only boosters, and nobody knew how to play it. And OTE only “got a CCG” because Atlas rolled their own. It wasn’t a bad game but I do remember a rather sad e-mail on the mailing list where either Nephew or Tweet said they’d be up for selling complete set boxes near the end of the line, but someone would have to manually unpack all the booster boxes and sort them into sets.. Also, Star Wars CCG mechanically designed to feel right? Huh, missed that in two star destroyers defeating the Empire by shooting down one tie fighter..
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Oct 17, 2020 01:10
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The World/Chronicle of Darkness thread sometimes discusses the Vampire card game. I asked in there a month or two about what to do with my sealed box of Jyhad boosters and a goon in there was extremely helpful. If you're interested in the game I'd definitely bring it up in there because it's still actively played etc.
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Oct 17, 2020 01:15
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I'm curious what the concensus is regarding by-definition racist notions of "inherently evil races" in regard to, like, Mind Flayers and stuff. They're intelligent sapient material beings bearing personality and free will, but they eat people and nobody seems to have a problem labelling them almost universally bad and killable on sight.
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Oct 17, 2020 01:41
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Asterite34 posted:I'm curious what the concensus is regarding by-definition racist notions of "inherently evil races" in regard to, like, Mind Flayers and stuff. They're intelligent sapient material beings bearing personality and free will, but they eat people and nobody seems to have a problem labelling them almost universally bad and killable on sight. they're not real. someone chose to make them brain-eaters and could just as easily not have made that choice. if you want to explore a story where the material needs of one species (eating brains) runs up against another (having brains) then go for it imo. it echoes some real life xenophobic narratives, but i reckon most of us can separate fantasy from reality
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Oct 17, 2020 01:52
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Asterite34 posted:I'm curious what the concensus is regarding by-definition racist notions of "inherently evil races" in regard to, like, Mind Flayers and stuff. They're intelligent sapient material beings bearing personality and free will, but they eat people and nobody seems to have a problem labelling them almost universally bad and killable on sight. There is a difference between "this being is inherently evil because it murders eats people to survive and doesn't care about human life" and "this being is inherently evil because it's a a dumb angry ugly looking humanoid". The second has racial connotations because normal groups of humans have been treated that way, the first doesn't really have a real-life analogue other than individual murderers who we all agree are bad.
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Oct 17, 2020 01:52
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Asterite34 posted:I'm curious what the concensus is regarding by-definition racist notions of "inherently evil races" in regard to, like, Mind Flayers and stuff. They're intelligent sapient material beings bearing personality and free will, but they eat people and nobody seems to have a problem labelling them almost universally bad and killable on sight. The almost is doing a lot of work there, though, and I think almost is totally fine. They have plenty of room (at least in many D&D interpretations) to choose to do different things, there are just a lot of factors working against it, from what they eat to the fact that most of them live in elder-brain based surveillance states. That all seems fine to me as something that happens. FATAL and friends recently covered an adventure series where there was a mind flayer traitor, too. I don't think it's bad to have "these people are usually opposed to the PCs for understandable reasons." What's great about Mind Flayers is that they do the work to establish those factors in ways that make sense and lead you to how they might be overcome (liberation from elder brains and solving the food issue). This is a strong contrast to writing "always evil" or a more wordy variant thereof - understandable factors cause Mind Flayers to be how they are, and it's clear how those factors could change.
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Oct 17, 2020 01:57
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tbh any racial coding of "near omnicidal slavers who essentially exist to dominate others" is entirely unintentional.
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Oct 17, 2020 01:59
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I remember being taught, and failing to understand, the older (Decipher?) Star Wars CCG, with the weird lightsaber icons that I think you discarded to play other cards or something. I also remember the latter, 00's Star Wars CCG that used a bunch of D6s and was actually pretty approachable and fun the few times I played it. It was really popular at my FLGS, and took up most of the tourney schedule after they kicked out all the Pokemon players for too many "shits on toilet seat" or "is a known groomer of children" in the core player base. It didn't make nearly as much money though, so that was one more nail in the store's coffin.
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Oct 17, 2020 01:59
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RIght, so if I'm getting this right, it's that they have an actual understandable rationale that makes their agendas inimical to everyone else (that in this case helpfully doesn't really map to any real-world bigotry unless you go REALLY deep down the rabbit hole) as opposed to just "they're ugly and dumb and lovely and are jealous of our freedoms" or whatever
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Oct 17, 2020 02:02
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Der Waffle Mous posted:tbh any racial coding of "near omnicidal slavers who essentially exist to dominate others" is entirely unintentional. There is this. The Aelfir from Spire are also probably not inherently evil, but they are huge bastards on a cultural and magical level... but they’re also very explicitly colonial imperialists who track better to European countries than anything else. We are as a society not used to reading colonizers racially in the same way as the colonized, or stereotypes of ‘noble savages’ and such, because racism has been a tool of colonialism. Colonizers reading as white and evil is a lot less problematic than something that plays into colonial narratives.
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Oct 17, 2020 02:06
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I feel like there are two ways to go. One, just folks. There are some bad factions of orcs just like there are bad groups of people. Enemy orcs in a dungeon are a part of some band of raiders or soldiers of a necromancer or something, other orcs just hang out at the tavern and play darts. The other way is to have creatures that aren't really recognizable as a "culture" or a people at all- they don't have families or even breed in a familiar way, they don't make tools or weave clothing, they're kinda mindless. Like, say, the demons in Doom, the Xenomorphs in the Alien movies, etc. It's hard to make "orcs" or "goblins" into that kind of thing, I think their cultural baggage is tied up in them being intelligent beings. So yeah I generally just err on orcs as folks, and if the PCs REALLY need something they can kill without asking questions, it's easy enough to set up a scenario where the bad guys are bad because they're doing bad things.
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Oct 17, 2020 02:19
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I’m sad no one mentioned the SimCity CCG, now that was a game that got the blood pumping. Zoning was a vital part of the metagame! Also, yeah, when discussing the racial politics of fantasy, it’s important to remember the power dynamics at play. Mind flayers get a pass because they are fairly strongly coded as white people, which, well, it’s impossible to be racist against white people.
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Oct 17, 2020 02:21
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SkySteak posted:This has always been an awkward part of players making skaven characters to be honest. I get that they are meant to be a divinely driven race of monstrous but goofy self destructive fascist ratmen, but that is really hard to embody for a workable PC and many people miss the fascist aspect of them anyway. One of the Warhammer RPGs, for its skaven sourcebook, describes playing a skaven PC as playing someone with 'no redeeming qualities' and to be cool as a group with selfish backstabbing. It's all well and good saying that but I don't think I have ran into any group which would be OK with that on a persistent basis, and even skaven themed one shots (including here) don't really end in any meaningful (and lore fitting) undercutting or backstabbing. You're not intended to be invested in skaven characters based on any positive traits but at the same time, they're they feel conceivably 'human' enough whilst being basically all evil that as said, it feels awkward. Okay, but what if you re-skinned Paranoia to be about a Skaven warren?
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Oct 17, 2020 02:26
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El Fideo posted:Okay, but what if you re-skinned Paranoia to be about a Skaven warren? Vulture Squadron would have to be actual vultures. Oversized anthropomorphic mutated vultures who act as enforcers.
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Oct 17, 2020 02:48
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Omnicrom posted:More or less than the Star Trek CCG? Because to this day I still don't understand WTF is up with that game. sexpig by night posted:on a scale of pokemon to dbz for pointless extra numbers and accessories what are we talkin here?  I don't think this is even the most ridiculous example. I loved the hell out of this game though, it was perfect for 10-12 year old me.
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Oct 17, 2020 02:54
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Omnicrom posted:More or less than the Star Trek CCG? Because to this day I still don't understand WTF is up with that game. sexpig by night posted:on a scale of pokemon to dbz for pointless extra numbers and accessories what are we talkin here? Wikipedia's summary is okay, but doesn't really sell how tedious it was to play a CCG in order to painfully orchestrate scenarios from the movies rather than play in a Star Wars setting or anything. In booster pack format where I sure hope you keep buying new cards because OP stuff doesn't get ruled out, counters are released for you to buy! Also the rules were just.... goddamn. Here's how you move your cards from location to location:  So much needless distinction just for ~verisimilitude~, and yes that last rule means that starship bridges or wherever you keep your pilot turn into a mass of stormtroopers to keep Lukes from running in and murdering everyone which sounds cooler in theory than practice.
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Oct 17, 2020 03:02
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I feel compelled to mention the Werewolf: The Apocalypse CCG Rage which had some great art but did not in fact feature rules on how to determine who goes first.
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Oct 17, 2020 03:03
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blackmongoose posted:
You may male an attack run
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Oct 17, 2020 03:29
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Meinberg posted:I’m sad no one mentioned the SimCity CCG, now that was a game that got the blood pumping. Zoning was a vital part of the metagame! I had a starter set for that game, which was unfortunate because you could not actually play by the rules of the game if all you had was a starter set. Which I guess was also true of Magic "starters" at the time, but still. It wasn't a terrible game -- even the half-functional version of it we were able to play -- but it made absolutely no sense as a CCG.
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Oct 17, 2020 03:43
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I have 2 starter sets for the Terminator CCG. The rules make it sound amazing with multiple simultaneous battles in different timelines. We played it and it's mostly about sitting in the gun shop hoping to draw a good gun before the Terminator tears you to pieces with its hands
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Oct 17, 2020 03:58
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I taught the Battletech CCG to a very cute babysitter who was way more interested in learning than either the game or I deserved.
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Oct 17, 2020 04:07
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I have distinct memories of watching someone in a Wizards of the Coast store play the Harry Potter card game, but I can't remember anything about how it worked. Speaking of card games, how did the new L5R living card game turn out? I know everyone was kind of alarmed by some of the card distribution in the boxes that meant you'd need to buy 3 or 4 copies of the box sets to get a play set of some cards.
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Oct 17, 2020 04:10
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My GenCon tradition (on hold for some reason) is to go to this one booth that sells dead CCGs and buy an entire one, then spend an afternoon in some hallway figuring out how to play it. Last year I got the Megaman.exe game which was weird for more or less requiring a paper foldout game board per player, but otherwise played fairly comprehensively, and the WWE card game (I can't tell what's tthe name of the game and the name of the set with that one) which is so fiendishly complicated that it's ridiculous. It's a game set where halfway through set releases they realized they needed more types of cards to sell you so they just added a whole second deck that everyone can have in addition to their regular deck during regular games. It has special cards that can only go in that deck that change the way the main deck plays. The prepackaged decks are crazy varied too. Sometimes you'll get a single wrestler (I have an Edge deck), or a wrestler with multiple personas deck (The Mystery Wrestler is Mick Foley but your first decision is which persona to use), a whole stable of wrestlers (I have Evolution), a tag team, or even some managers (I have a Paul Heyman one). It's frankly a bizarre game and we found out after buying it that it is still immensely popular and the fan community makes update decks for every year, and there's a bunch of classic wrestlers that have had fan decks made as well. Two years ago it was the Rifts CCG and the Bratz Fashion Passion Prism. Guess which one was fun.
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Oct 17, 2020 04:18
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Nuns with Guns posted:I have distinct memories of watching someone in a Wizards of the Coast store play the Harry Potter card game, but I can't remember anything about how it worked. It was very bad! I remember that this was supposed to be the third pillar for WotC along magic and pokemon but it completely bombed. theironjef posted:My GenCon tradition (on hold for some reason) is to go to this one booth that sells dead CCGs and buy an entire one, then spend an afternoon in some hallway figuring out how to play it. Last year I got the Megaman.exe game which was weird for more or less requiring a paper foldout game board per player, but otherwise played fairly comprehensively, and the WWE card game (I can't tell what's tthe name of the game and the name of the set with that one) which is so fiendishly complicated that it's ridiculous. It's a game set where halfway through set releases they realized they needed more types of cards to sell you so they just added a whole second deck that everyone can have in addition to their regular deck during regular games. It has special cards that can only go in that deck that change the way the main deck plays. The prepackaged decks are crazy varied too. Sometimes you'll get a single wrestler (I have an Edge deck), or a wrestler with multiple personas deck (The Mystery Wrestler is Mick Foley but your first decision is which persona to use), a whole stable of wrestlers (I have Evolution), a tag team, or even some managers (I have a Paul Heyman one). It's frankly a bizarre game and we found out after buying it that it is still immensely popular and the fan community makes update decks for every year, and there's a bunch of classic wrestlers that have had fan decks made as well. i used to make my dad buy me every starter set for a new game that would come out, but could never find decks of the wwe card game ANYWHERE. random boosters here and there and it lived forever the austin powers and tomb raider games were pretty good
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Oct 17, 2020 04:25
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Nuns with Guns posted:Speaking of card games, how did the new L5R living card game turn out? I know everyone was kind of alarmed by some of the card distribution in the boxes that meant you'd need to buy 3 or 4 copies of the box sets to get a play set of some cards. I think the game was really well-designed and their competitive support system was actually pretty good (they did bans and restrictions from the start, which I think you just have to do for any complex CCG) but it suffered from two main issues: (1) it was exhausting to play. Every game was super brain-burning. And (2) FFG's support for the competitive circuit outside of major events was always... lacking. If a game got very popular in your area you'd have events, but there was nothing to encourage communities to form where there were none. The card distribution didn't really bother veterans of FFG games. They always do the buy-multiple-starters thing and it's just the cost of buying into the game. It was still "just" $120 up-front, which compared to CCGs...
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Oct 17, 2020 04:29
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The thing about the Star Wars CCG is it had so many cards that only worked with other cards. There were so many mechanics that needed multiple cards to even come into play. Also for the longest time, the major characters- Luke, Leia, etc.- were rares and there were cards that only worked with them.
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Oct 17, 2020 04:33
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I got a starter kit for the Cardcaptor Sakura tcg and then never saw it again. I wonder if they actually put anything else out for it?
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Oct 17, 2020 04:37
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Maxwell Lord posted:The thing about the Star Wars CCG is it had so many cards that only worked with other cards. There were so many mechanics that needed multiple cards to even come into play. Decipher's "technique" for balancing was that they would constantly build in cards in successive expansions to negate older cards. And yes having an actual named character in your deck to run everything out of made all the difference in the world. The game is generally imbalanced toward rebels from what I distantly recall (this was the late 90's after all) because they could just force drain and run away without ever engaging the Empire. The Empire would also lose direct engagements too, because the hero cards, which light side had more of, were OP. I stopped before the ROTJ sets and whatever else came out though. It was probably the worst-designed CCG that anyone actually played at that time. You were much better off with Magic or whatever, but Star Wars mania gripped the youngins. Name Change fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Oct 17, 2020 |
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Oct 17, 2020 04:45
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Please someone find the postmortem of the big Star Wars tournament that almost ended in a fistfight because Decipher printed a bunch of broken cards that were just regular Star Wars folks but the character picture was blacked out and made them legal like the day of Worlds.
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Oct 17, 2020 05:01
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Asterite34 posted:I'm curious what the concensus is regarding by-definition racist notions of "inherently evil races" in regard to, like, Mind Flayers and stuff. They're intelligent sapient material beings bearing personality and free will, but they eat people and nobody seems to have a problem labelling them almost universally bad and killable on sight. Mind flayers have to eat brains to survive: see also, common horror tropes like "these vampires have to murder humans to suck their blood to survive", "these zombies have to eat brains to survive"... these two have both spawned non-game media like books and series and movies that explore the theme of good (and evil) people with an irresistible compulsion to commit evil acts. My wife has watched I want to say at least two, maybe three separate TV serials that explore what happens when you have (intelligent, humanlike) zombies who need brains, in some kind of real society, which then has to cope with whether and how they have a right to live vs. the rights of people not to have their brains eaten. You wind up with "solutions" like, they get the brains of people who have recently died, so they don't have to eat live people, but of course living people probably aren't cool with that idea anyway, etc. etc. And of course the "a vampire but they're good inside, can they resist their urges or not" theme has been played out so many times that it's a tired cliché. What I'm getting at is; as a setting designer, you are making a decision to create an intelligent species which requires murdering other intelligent species to live, and if you make that conscious choice, you ought to have an interesting and reasonable kind of narrative you want to build that doesn't begin and end with "...and therefore, they're always OK to kill, because they're inherently evil." Because if some of them are trying to be good but literally can't, that's just being incredibly bleak. A people with the capacity to be recognizably human and understand that they're doing something awful, who are made to be genocided by anyone with the means because they depend on doing something abhorrent to survive and can't ever stop so you have no choice but to let them eat you or kill them... this has no genuine parallel in the actual human world besides deeply racist myths used by racists to murder innocent people of different ethnicities. And if you're telling your players this, they either have to accept that Always Evil is a legit thing in this universe, or suspect that their characters are doing something real bad by treating the mind flayers (or vampires or whoever) as fully disposable enemies they can always slay with no question of establishing guilt or possibility of redemption etc. And that's the crux of the tension in this whole conversation. D&D wants to be a game where the players can roleplay characters that slay enemies without feeling awful about it. They can hew through legions of mindless skeletons and magical golems with no worries: a few might get concerned about chopping up hordes of large aggressive animals who are really just doing what comes natural; but if you want intelligent enemies, now you're either handwaving away or coping directly with the natural question any PC might raise at any point, about "are we sure any member of this species is automatically guilty as charged and can be freely executed?" In that respect they're no different from the orcs. The only real distinction is that the mind flayers aren't also assigned cultural signifiers that look a lot like those of various historically-oppressed human cultures.
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Oct 17, 2020 05:04
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I have a starter for the Rifts ccg but I gave up trying to play it because it was either missing cards or because the starter didn't come with cards it needed to be played. I also think I have some of the original Netrunner in a box somewhere, possibly unopened. Atlas Hugged fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Oct 17, 2020 |
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Oct 17, 2020 05:19
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Atlas Hugged posted:I have a starter for the Rifts ccg but I gave up trying to play it because it was either missing cards or because the starter didn't come with cards it needed to be played. The starter is all there is. I have two so technically I have enough to play it but it is not fun or interesting.
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Oct 17, 2020 05:19
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I think what I missed about the 90s CCGs was the inventiveness. Everybody wanted in on that Magic money, so we got lots of games that tried to be Magic, but then we got more. I feel like we're in that period of digital games where everybody wants that Hearthstone money, so we're getting lots of games that try to be Hearthstone, but we haven't yet gotten more. Every digital game is just smashing dudes into dudes. Where's the digital deckbuilding game equivalent of SimCity? Star Trek and Star Wars and Babylon 5 had fighting, but they were about going around and doing stuff. Heck, at this point, I'd settle for something as basic as Netrunner's asymmetry.
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Oct 17, 2020 05:50
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Darwinism posted:Wikipedia's summary is okay, but doesn't really sell how tedious it was to play a CCG in order to painfully orchestrate scenarios from the movies rather than play in a Star Wars setting or anything. In booster pack format where I sure hope you keep buying new cards because OP stuff doesn't get ruled out, counters are released for you to buy! This is literally how the Star Trek TCG worked, at least based on my incredibly limited knowledge of it.  I'm given to understand that this card basically reads "Punish your opponent for using any of the listed annoying, unintended, and/or overpowered strategies." Ban cards? What? No! Much better to give errata in the form of chase rares (of course this is a rare, you had to ask?) Sodomy Hussein posted:Decipher's "technique" for balancing was that they would constantly build in cards in successive expansions to negate older cards. And yes having an actual named character in your deck to run everything out of made all the difference in the world. Ssh! Don't spoil the secret of who made the Star Trek TCG as well! I actually have a book I got from somewhere about the Trek TCG and has insights from the developers and explains the game (Still don't get it), and MAN do these people sound like goofuses a generation removed from their design. They do, however, acknowledge that the main characters from the show (TNG at the time) were incredibly more powerful than anyone else with basically no limits on them besides "they're chase rares". Hell, even I could figure that out from looking at them... My understanding is that the original generation Digimon card game also had a similar approach to "balance", so it's a popular choice on both sides of the ocean. Said game has also functionally been dead for some on 15 years now, though they still release promo cards for it occasionally to tie-in to new franchise entries. The currently running new one seems pretty decent though, functionally being a rules hack of Duel Masters with a tug-of-war resource system. Leraika posted:I got a starter kit for the Cardcaptor Sakura tcg and then never saw it again. I wonder if they actually put anything else out for it? I saw that game once in a magazine ad, never again. Relatedly my FLGS has a handful of singles and boosters for a Nightmare Before Christmas TCG sitting around under glass.
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Oct 17, 2020 05:55
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They called the company "Decipher" because that's what you had to do to even play any of their games.
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Oct 17, 2020 06:03
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To be fair it's not like Wizards of the Coast had any idea how to design a CCG in 1994. They were deep in the age of releasing utterly unplayable cards and a whole four years later would release a set so broken they basically banned cards the day they came out. Richard Garfield just happened to be a much better game designer than any of those other bozos, so when they figured it out it was much better.
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Oct 17, 2020 06:09
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admanb posted:To be fair it's not like Wizards of the Coast had any idea how to design a CCG in 1994. They were deep in the age of releasing utterly unplayable cards and a whole four years later would release a set so broken they basically banned cards the day they came out. I don't claim otherwise, it just amuses me how goofy the Decipher crew look in hindsight. Everyone was a beginner at TCGs in the 90s and nobody had a real sense of what good design looked like, but at the same time you rarely see entire little booklets on the design process (such as it was) for these fly-by-night 90s TCGs. Well I say Fly-by-night, but the Star Trek TCG was apparently good enough they came out with a second edition. Was it less insane? Absolutely no idea.
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Oct 17, 2020 06:12
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