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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Chaosium just reported Steve Perrin's death. Steve was the original designer of Runequest (and effectively the BRP ruleset). He was a cool dude who I first met at an SCA event back in 1974. Salute to a real one.
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Aug 16, 2021 18:13
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side_burned posted:I am looking for a recommendation on a post-apocalyptic campaign, something really close to Fallout in both tone and setting. I did this ten year ago using Savage Worlds which was fine but I would prefer something a little more crunchy. IMO Fallout is the exemplar of a genre style that Gamma World invented, where the Pre-Apocalypse world left behind a bunch of robots and rayguns, but also suburban ranch houses and Coca-Cola and cars with tailfins. So you can look to old Gamma World/Metamorphosis Alpha books for inspiration. There's an OSR game called Mutant Future that is basically Gamma World using the D&D Basic system. (GW itself went through many rules changes through its history.) If you want random treasure tables where you might find a plasma pistol or a jukebox, MF will give you that. Other Dust is my favourite post-apoc ruleset. It sort-of "rationalizes" the classic Gamma World/Fallout style setting elements--mutants, robots, rayguns, y'know--with a different take. Before it collapsed, Earth was the center of an advanced civilization with space colonies, which explains the high tech, and mutations were not caused by nuclear war but by nanites going haywire. However, Other Dust doesn't have that cheeky 50s suburban nostalgia built into it. From a rules POV, I think the only thing you'll find unsatisfying is that characters themselves aren't that complicated. You have stats, skills, a couple class abilities, mutations, and equipment, without anything like the whole system of Perks from Fallout. But y'know, in my opinion, a feat system isn't a very difficult thing to houserule. Looking at variants of The Black Hack, the Wasted Hack has something like the Perks system (called Specials) and Furies of the Barrens is a much more lighthearted game with a lot of silly alien PC race options. All of the games above are variants on D&D, so mechanically they all mix-and-match with very little fuss. As others have pointed out, Mutant Year Zero seems like the kind of setting you want, but is almost certainly lighter on the rules than you want. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Aug 16, 2021 |
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Aug 16, 2021 18:20
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Someone should probably eventually mention there is an official licensed Fallout RPG out now.
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Aug 16, 2021 18:24
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Megazver posted:Someone should probably eventually mention there is an official licensed Fallout RPG out now. Is Modiphius 2d20 more or less crunchy than Savage World?
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Aug 16, 2021 18:26
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Is Modiphius 2d20 more or less crunchy than Savage World? Feels about the same. You can make a character super quick.
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Aug 16, 2021 18:29
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Dawgstar posted:Feels about the same. You can make a character super quick. Then I guess that doesn't qualify.
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Aug 16, 2021 18:31
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re: Post Apoc chat, how about GURPs if you want crunch? I don't think it's crunchy enough for you, but I like Atomic Highway.
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Aug 16, 2021 18:39
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Is Modiphius 2d20 more or less crunchy than Savage World? I haven't read all of them, but basically the crunch varies from FATE-like to fairly crunchy. The Fallout version is crunchy enough to have hit locations tables.
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Aug 16, 2021 18:39
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Is there a good RPG system that doesn't get too mechanically bogged down but also occasionally interacts with facing? It was mentioned above as one of the possible modules to bolt onto 5E that they scrapped but the Dark Souls board game's boss encounters have kinda broken my brain in terms of cool encounter design and I'm trying to figure out a way to make that work in a full RPG.
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Aug 16, 2021 18:49
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Is Modiphius 2d20 more or less crunchy than Savage World? This game has fallen apart, but here is a play-by-post very basic combat run in Conan 2d20 which should give you an idea of how much crunch there is (the game does not really distinguish between combat and noncombat skills and talents): https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3959507&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1#post513658686
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Aug 16, 2021 18:49
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Halloween Jack posted:Solid ruminations.
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Aug 16, 2021 19:23
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Rockman Reserve posted:Is there a good RPG system that doesn't get too mechanically bogged down but also occasionally interacts with facing? It was mentioned above as one of the possible modules to bolt onto 5E that they scrapped but the Dark Souls board game's boss encounters have kinda broken my brain in terms of cool encounter design and I'm trying to figure out a way to make that work in a full RPG. Iron Kingdoms has it as a holdover from the wargame it's based on but doesn't do a tremendous amount with it other than shields, backstabs, and some large monster attack arcs
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Aug 16, 2021 19:40
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Megazver posted:Someone should probably eventually mention there is an official licensed Fallout RPG out now. LOL I literally forgot it existed. It seems like it came out and immediately disappeared into the mists.
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Aug 16, 2021 20:34
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That Old Tree posted:LOL I literally forgot it existed. It seems like it came out and immediately disappeared into the mists. It hasn't officially come out, though. You can just get the full PDF with the pre-order. I imagine they'll get more promotional with the official release.
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Aug 16, 2021 20:37
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That Old Tree posted:LOL I literally forgot it existed. It seems like it came out and immediately disappeared into the mists. And by sounds horrible I mean was horrible. I did some stupid things in college.
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Aug 16, 2021 22:19
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Once you toss Luck (which is basically just there for legacy purposes, none of the Bethesda or Obsidian designers wanted it around), SPECIAL is functionally just the D&D six attribute spread. Which is still too many stats, but basically industry standard.
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Aug 16, 2021 22:41
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mellonbread posted:Which is still too many stats, but basically industry standard. Edit: Did Ropekid ever say he did not want use luck as a stat in FN:NV? side_burned fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Aug 16, 2021 |
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Aug 16, 2021 22:45
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Luck is used as a metacurrency for re-rolls and stuff like that in 2d20, basically. Dunno how well it works, but it's also also in D&D/PF these days. side_burned posted:Can you go into why its too many stats? Any amount of stats is too many stats, zero stat supremacy!
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Aug 16, 2021 22:46
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mellonbread posted:Once you toss Luck (which is basically just there for legacy purposes, none of the Bethesda or Obsidian designers wanted it around), SPECIAL is functionally just the D&D six attribute spread. Which is still too many stats, but basically industry standard. if you toss luck then it becomes "SPECIA" which is not a cool marketable acronym 
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Aug 16, 2021 22:54
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mellonbread posted:Once you toss Luck (which is basically just there for legacy purposes, none of the Bethesda or Obsidian designers wanted it around), SPECIAL is functionally just the D&D six attribute spread. Which is still too many stats, but basically industry standard.
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Aug 16, 2021 22:55
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pog boyfriend posted:if you toss luck then it becomes "SPECIA" which is not a cool marketable acronym CIS APE A SPICE SA EPIC
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Aug 16, 2021 22:58
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side_burned posted:Can you go into why its too many stats? Strength is basically a dump stat for anyone who's not a primary melee fighter - both in D&D 5E, and in most other games I've played. Combining it with Constitution into a single "Body" score makes it into something that's important to everyone. I also think WIS and INT aren't different enough to justify being separate stats, but I accept that this is a harder sell - these ones at least have some cost associated with dumping them (bad perception, fewer skill points back in the 3.PF era) My ideal spread is basically what Disco Elysium did
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Aug 16, 2021 23:00
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I don't know if there's a simple right answer to how many stats. I do think that the choice of which stats you use to distinguish should be well motivated and serve the fiction, as well as make sense to the players. The difference in that last one that I think about a lot is between Blades In The Dark and Wicked Ones. BITD has 12, WO has 9, and I consider WO to have a substantially better spread, just because it's been a frequent frustration in BITD to tell when to roll Sway vs Consort and Survey vs Study and my group has not ever felt satisfied. WO stats work largely the same but with less ambiguity.
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Aug 16, 2021 23:08
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side_burned posted:Can you go into why its too many stats? You can also look at it as archetypes; agi is the nimble fast guy, strength and endurance are two halves of the bruiser archetype. In either case it costs twice as many points to put down the basics of the brick shithouse as it does to play the nippy rear end in a top hat. Then there's splash utility; someone who primaries nippy rear end in a top hat will find a little con useful, but not str. Someone who primaries str and con will still find dex useful. There's ways around this but they all involve fiddly bullshit overcomplicating things to shore up a shake foundation. Then you have charisma gating the entire social pillar behind one stat. If you're buying a bunch of stuff with shared points they all have to return the same base amount of utility. Splicer fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Aug 16, 2021 |
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Aug 16, 2021 23:14
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Splicer posted:In either case it costs twice as many points to put down the basics of the brick shithouse as it does to play the nippy rear end in a top hat. But stat arrays are going to exist and interact with context of other rules. I am fine with any number of stats so long as the game as whole is fun to play.
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Aug 16, 2021 23:21
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side_burned posted:Edit: Did Ropekid ever say he did not want use luck as a stat in FN:NV? jamief4178 posted:Why don't you like the luck attribute? Frog Helms Fan Club posted:In Fallout 1 and 2, I don’t feel like it was utilized enough to stand on its own. Among other things, it was another attribute feeding into Crit Rate and layered on top of the other skills. Generally, I favor fewer inputs into a value over more.
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Aug 16, 2021 23:22
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side_burned posted:But stat arrays are going to exist and interact with context of other rules. I am fine with any number of stats so long as the game as whole is fun to play. Splicer posted:There's ways around this but they all involve fiddly bullshit overcomplicating things to shore up a shake foundation.
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Aug 16, 2021 23:24
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ultimately if you have an attribute based system, the more attributes you have the more people are stretched thin. this is a bad thing unless every single attribute is evenly interesting to go off. 4 attributes is very easy to make all these things interesting... 6 is harder, and so forth. there is no intrinsic problem with more attributes but it is also more trouble than it is worth
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Aug 16, 2021 23:26
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pog boyfriend posted:ultimately if you have an attribute based system, the more attributes you have the more people are stretched thin. this is a bad thing unless every single attribute is evenly interesting to go off. 4 attributes is very easy to make all these things interesting... 6 is harder, and so forth. there is no intrinsic problem with more attributes but it is also more trouble than it is worth I agree with that the fewer stats a game has the easier it is to design a system where each stat is intresting and fun to use.
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Aug 16, 2021 23:40
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Admittedly DCC is basically the only RPG I can think of where Luck being it's own stat really makes much sense due to how it's used
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Aug 16, 2021 23:45
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There's systems like Call of Cthulhu and other BRPs that have baselines for skills (but also attributes which is a bit silly) that make them reasonably usable even if you don't put points into them, even if there are a lot. You can also just have a game without uniform attributes/skills at all, like HeroQuest, I think.
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Aug 16, 2021 23:49
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drrockso20 posted:Admittedly DCC is basically the only RPG I can think of where Luck being it's own stat really makes much sense due to how it's used
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Aug 16, 2021 23:50
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Halloween Jack posted:Wow, thank you for posting this. It really sums up everything I find problematic in D&D game design. Paring it down to the essentials: I can't agree here at all. The puzzle piece you're missing is that in 2021 everyone is familiar with D&D tropes, even people who have never even heard of D&D. This is because D&D underlies such a large part of computer gaming that tropes that should have been D&D specific have escaped into the wider world. Everyone knows what hit points, character classes, and levels are, including classes like the paladin that are fundamentally weird. Nonsense like item weights that generally get ignored work ... because so many computer games have nonsense like item weight and tables of mundane equipment that generally get ignored. Because they got it from D&D. Possibly they got it in in the mid-late 70s with Colossal Cave Adventure as an attempt to move a D&D campaign onto computer because they couldn't organise a group and MUDding (and two separate games, one called dnd and another called DND), possibly in the early 80s with Zork, Ultima, and Wizardry all leaning heavily on D&D and existing computer games to found the Western RPG genre, possibly in the mid-late 80s with Final Fantasy having its combat system explicitly inspired by D&D and Dragon Quest having a lot of D&D in its inspiration to the point they were deliberately looking at D&D and doing other things. Possibly they got it in the mid 90s when the first two games of the Elder Scrolls were a translation of a D&D setting and Warcraft was ripping off Warhammer (only one step from D&D). Possibly in the late 90s/early 00s when Bioware were making Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Knights, and even KOTOR was using the d20 rules. And that's just scratching the surface. D&D's cross-pollination of computer RPGs is outright incestuous. Regardless of how you come by it shared cultural context does amazing things for accessibility. And 5e, with cultural context to do the heavy lifting does do some things pretty well. For all I think that the combat sucks thanks to the bullet sponge enemies and the DMing tools are at least 20 years behind the times it does some things right. In particular the character creation with classes and subclasses produces strongly drawn and accessible characters, while leaving alignment where it belongs as something almost vestigial.
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Aug 16, 2021 23:51
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You're right. D&D 5e is accessible because it has character classes. What?
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Aug 17, 2021 04:09
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Hostile V posted:I've gotten to the point where whenever I want to work on a wild future setting I just automatically try and steal the character generation system from Gamma World 7e because god drat does that let you get invested in your character by trying to figure out what exactly they are. someday I'll find the right genie lamp to rub and there will be a new release of Gamma World that is exactly the same as 7e right down to the nice little paperback-sized rulebooks with all of the dumb booster pack sales model poo poo totally excised
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Aug 17, 2021 04:11
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Rockman Reserve posted:someday I'll find the right genie lamp to rub and there will be a new release of Gamma World that is exactly the same as 7e right down to the nice little paperback-sized rulebooks with all of the dumb booster pack sales model poo poo totally excised 20 bucks and DrivethruRPG will send you a printed set of every card ever made. In my experience the two sets of cards are best if you ditch the "Player builds a hand of their favorites" for "Everyone draws from a stack at the center of the table" just to avoid the games getting stale.
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Aug 17, 2021 05:25
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neonchameleon posted:In particular the character creation with classes and subclasses produces strongly drawn and accessible characters, while leaving alignment where it belongs as something almost vestigial. 1) If alignment is vestigial, why should it be kept around? 2) I can kind of guess that "accessible" here means something like, "easy to fit inside a given mental framework". Is that what you were going for? Like the name/description of the class make you think of some kind of cultural touchstone, e.g. "fighter" and Conan or "paladin" and Roland? I vehemently disagree if that's the case but we'd at least be using the same term to mean the same thing. 3) I have no idea what "strongly drawn" would mean on any level. Could you elaborate? I have questions and problems with the rest, but I want to fully understand what you're saying first so we're talking about the same thing.
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Aug 17, 2021 06:07
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Xiahou Dun posted:1) If alignment is vestigial, why should it be kept around? Nine point alignment chart are iconic memes and to keep the grognards happy -that's literally the stated reasons by big brained Mike Mearls.
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Aug 17, 2021 06:23
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That's how I feel but I didn't want to put words in their mouth. For all I know they have a good reason.
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Aug 17, 2021 06:34
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I mean I'm sure a fan might have found a better use for it, but it's still worth stating it was only included for the dumbest possible reason by the actual devs. Mearls literally came out and said during next that 9 point alignment had to come back and have some mechanical interaction because everyone knew & loved alignment chart memes.
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Aug 17, 2021 06:41
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