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neaden posted:Cortex Prime is one of my biggest Kickstarter disappointments. From a timeline that changed from 6 months to 4 years and then the fandom integration, it's really killed my interest in the game and further products from Cam. Agreed on being overall disillusioned with Cortex, though.
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Dec 3, 2021 14:57
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Yeah, much as I love Cortex as a system I don't love it enough to deal with Fandom for licensing or whatever.
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Dec 3, 2021 16:56
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Are there any good replacements, though? Most generic RPGs seem to be super focused on simulationist play, or are so rules lite as to not be there. I really like how everything ties together in Cortex with enough crunch to make different games feel distinct without falling into GURPS.
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Dec 3, 2021 19:32
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Hiro Protagonist posted:Are there any good replacements, though? Most generic RPGs seem to be super focused on simulationist play, or are so rules lite as to not be there. I really like how everything ties together in Cortex with enough crunch to make different games feel distinct without falling into GURPS. As noted by people in discussions on the matter elsewhere, strictly speaking nothing stops you from just using Cortex's mechanics to make a serial-numbers-filed-off game the same way nothing stops you from making a d20 game with ability scores and classes even outside the framework of the OGL, game mechanics aren't copyrightable, and there's actual legal precedent for "this product is COMPATIBLE with [game/car/whatever]" as a thing you put on the cover, but ultimately it comes down to how chillingly litigious you think Fandom might get about it. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Dec 4, 2021 |
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Dec 3, 2021 23:37
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Kai Tave posted:As noted by people in discussions on the matter elsewhere, strictly speaking nothing stops you from just using Cortex's mechanics to make a serial-numbers-filed-off game the same way nothing stops you from making a d20 game with ability scores and classes even outside the framework of the OGL, game mechanics aren't, and there's actual legal precedent for "this product is COMPATIBLE with [game/car/whatever]" as a thing you put on the cover, but ultimately it comes down to how chillingly litigious you think Fandom might get about it. If you're not going to be using it with anything else anyway, other than a starting point for your ruleset, maybe you don't even have to have a compatibility statement.
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Dec 3, 2021 23:49
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Hiro Protagonist posted:Are there any good replacements, though? Most generic RPGs seem to be super focused on simulationist play, or are so rules lite as to not be there. I really like how everything ties together in Cortex with enough crunch to make different games feel distinct without falling into GURPS. Fate Core and Cortex Plus/Prime (not Classic Cortex of course) are in my experience not too far apart and about as generic as each other. Cortex gets a little more fiddly and a little more gonzo.
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Dec 4, 2021 00:11
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There are many, many universal RPGs of varying degrees of complexity.
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Dec 4, 2021 01:28
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Really? I feel like Fate us very samey, with everything kind of bleeding together. But maybe I haven't seen Fate at it's best.
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Dec 4, 2021 01:44
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Hiro Protagonist posted:Really? I feel like Fate us very samey, with everything kind of bleeding together. But maybe I haven't seen Fate at it's best. When did you check it out? Some of the iterations have been decent, but yeah the early stuff was pretty rough, and I think I agree with the SA concensus that it felt more of a toolkit or starting point that wasn't finished say around Spirit of the Century, but improved a lot by Atomic Robo. On that topic, have there been many recent releases that used fate? It felt like it kinda got squeezed out by say pbta for the more lightweight story stuff, and savage worlds for adventure with some room for crunch but still lite and modular.
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Dec 4, 2021 03:13
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As the (a?) resident Cortex fanboy, there's really no other system that does what it does. Fate doesn't quite come close, nor do any other generic systems that I've been exposed to. That "your mechanics are our mechanics" clause, if true, is absolute horseshit. That's a dampener on my evening. The "no Kickstarter" and "no DriveThru" clauses are not great. They were obvious to anybody who was paying attention (Fandom didn't buy a house system to get that D&D Beyond money to let it go elsewhere), but they're still not great.
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Dec 4, 2021 06:01
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CitizenKeen posted:As the (a?) resident Cortex fanboy, there's really no other system that does what it does. Fate doesn't quite come close, nor do any other generic systems that I've been exposed to. Fate and Cortex are like 80% the same game, the only major difference is the type of dice
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Dec 4, 2021 06:19
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My experience with Cortex, based on the campaign I played using it, is that it's a Very Okay system, it wasn't really egregiously bad but nothing about it hit me like "oh wow this is tremendously amazing" either. I recall thinking it was sort of opaque with how various die types were valued relative to abilities that let you break bigger dice down into multiple smaller ones (what's the expected value of that? I don't recall ever seeing an actual breakdown of it) and other similar moments, and I can't help but feel that a good chunk (not all) of Cortex's success is down to its use in a bunch of games with popular licenses.
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Dec 4, 2021 06:47
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Piell posted:Fate and Cortex are like 80% the same game, the only major difference is the type of dice In the same way that D&D 5th and GURPS are 80% the same game except for their dice, sure. Kai Tave posted:My experience with Cortex, based on the campaign I played using it, is that it's a Very Okay system, it wasn't really egregiously bad but nothing about it hit me like "oh wow this is tremendously amazing" either. I recall thinking it was sort of opaque with how various die types were valued relative to abilities that let you break bigger dice down into multiple smaller ones (what's the expected value of that? I don't recall ever seeing an actual breakdown of it) and other similar moments, and I can't help but feel that a good chunk (not all) of Cortex's success is down to its use in a bunch of games with popular licenses. In my opinion, if you bridge those two thoughts you've hit the nail on the head. I think that what Cortex is amazing at is being adapted to IPs. I'm not going to hold it up as a paragon system or anything, but I think what it's really good at is being a middle road between a flavorless generic game and a bespoke system.
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Dec 4, 2021 07:31
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CitizenKeen posted:In my opinion, if you bridge those two thoughts you've hit the nail on the head. I think that what Cortex is amazing at is being adapted to IPs. I'm not going to hold it up as a paragon system or anything, but I think what it's really good at is being a middle road between a flavorless generic game and a bespoke system. If that's the case, and it may very well be, then it seems to me that Cortex isn't actually as useful as a licensed system for indie creators to play around in since those creators aren't likely to have a bunch of IP licenses on hand waiting to be adapted, it seems more like the sort of thing for a publisher who has the resources to throw at stuff like that. Which describes Fandom itself pretty well, but then I'd have to wonder what the value is for someone who doesn't have a Leverage or Marvel Comics in their pocket.
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Dec 4, 2021 08:18
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CitizenKeen posted:The "no Kickstarter" and "no DriveThru" clauses are not great. They were obvious to anybody who was paying attention (Fandom didn't buy a house system to get that D&D Beyond money to let it go elsewhere), but they're still not great. On one hand, I don't mind the "no Kickstarter/DriveThru" clause, because the point is that this is the noncommercial license and "you can't sell things with this" is kind of the point of the non-. On the other hand... Well, everything else about this is making me want to just never publicly post any Cortex hacks I'd make in the first place. EDIT: Kai Tave posted:If that's the case, and it may very well be, then it seems to me that Cortex isn't actually as useful as a licensed system for indie creators to play around in since those creators aren't likely to have a bunch of IP licenses on hand waiting to be adapted, it seems more like the sort of thing for a publisher who has the resources to throw at stuff like that. Which describes Fandom itself pretty well, but then I'd have to wonder what the value is for someone who doesn't have a Leverage or Marvel Comics in their pocket. I mean, you say that but a lot of game ideas start as "what if we play something like Property X, but it's also Y". From a design standpoint, Cortex does give you a really solid base to work from. It's just that there's never been that big of a community making homebrew for it that would be turned into new games, partially because Cortex keeps having licensing agreements like this. ANOTHER EDIT: I guess what I'm saying is, the reason you'd specifically want to use the Cortex license is because Cortex already has a lot of mechanical depth put into how to represent a wide range of concepts in it and it's nice to work with, not because it actually makes your audience that much bigger. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 08:44 on Dec 4, 2021 |
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Dec 4, 2021 08:24
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Lurks With Wolves posted:On one hand, I don't mind the "no Kickstarter/DriveThru" clause, because the point is that this is the noncommercial license and "you can't sell things with this" is kind of the point of the non-. On the other hand... Well, everything else about this is making me want to just never publicly post any Cortex hacks I'd make in the first place. A lot of people, myself included, do put things up on DTRPG or itch.io for free, though. Like even for a noncommercial license, this is incredibly user unfriendly to how a lot of the indie RPG/game-hacking scene works.
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Dec 4, 2021 08:46
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Kai Tave posted:A lot of people, myself included, do put things up on DTRPG or itch.io for free, though. Like even for a noncommercial license, this is incredibly user unfriendly to how a lot of the indie RPG/game-hacking scene works. I didn't think about how that. Okay, it's definitely hosed up.
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Dec 4, 2021 14:59
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Kai Tave posted:My experience with Cortex, based on the campaign I played using it, is that it's a Very Okay system, it wasn't really egregiously bad but nothing about it hit me like "oh wow this is tremendously amazing" either. I recall thinking it was sort of opaque with how various die types were valued relative to abilities that let you break bigger dice down into multiple smaller ones (what's the expected value of that? I don't recall ever seeing an actual breakdown of it) and other similar moments, and I can't help but feel that a good chunk (not all) of Cortex's success is down to its use in a bunch of games with popular licenses. It worked okay for our sci-fi Exalted game I thought, but maybe that being based on Cortex's ancestor MHR helped.
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Dec 4, 2021 15:21
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Hey, what's up using-MHR-to-run-Exalted buddy? 
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Dec 4, 2021 17:29
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The Cortex games I've read over are all fine in and of themselves, but it always did give me the vibe of a toolkit that relies a lot on eyeballing and hoping you "get" the system well enough to make something work well. Maybe the Cortex Prime rules finally give a more solid baseline to work from.... But otherwise I feel it does share that issue with FATE where it's an open box of bits and bobs, and it relies a lot on an individual creator's knowledge and understanding of the system to know what base stuff works well and what custom stuff is going to be needed to properly hook it to a new setting or genre.Dawgstar posted:It worked okay for our sci-fi Exalted game I thought, but maybe that being based on Cortex's ancestor MHR helped. The Leverage game is also great for any heist-centric game premise. I suppose that's another thing that could be seen as similar to FATE. A well-done ruleset is pretty easily re-flavored to related genres or settings and it will still run well.
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Dec 4, 2021 19:01
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I think my biggest problem with FATE has always been that it doesn't do progression very well. Maybe it's just because I played too much DND, but I always enjoyed the feeling that characters were tangibly getting better and stronger, so that there's a sense that certain things can't be confronted NOW, but will be later.
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Dec 4, 2021 19:08
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Nuns with Guns posted:The Cortex games I've read over are all fine in and of themselves, but it always did give me the vibe of a toolkit that relies a lot on eyeballing and hoping you "get" the system well enough to make something work well. Maybe the Cortex Prime rules finally give a more solid baseline to work from.... But otherwise I feel it does share that issue with FATE where it's an open box of bits and bobs, and it relies a lot on an individual creator's knowledge and understanding of the system to know what base stuff works well and what custom stuff is going to be needed to properly hook it to a new setting or genre. Yeah, it's true, Cortex (and MHR) were absolutely both systems I had to play myself to figure out how things were done. My eyes just sort of slid off the mechanics. It had to be in action.
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Dec 4, 2021 19:16
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Nuns with Guns posted:The Cortex games I've read over are all fine in and of themselves, but it always did give me the vibe of a toolkit that relies a lot on eyeballing and hoping you "get" the system well enough to make something work well. Maybe the Cortex Prime rules finally give a more solid baseline to work from.... But otherwise I feel it does share that issue with FATE where it's an open box of bits and bobs, and it relies a lot on an individual creator's knowledge and understanding of the system to know what base stuff works well and what custom stuff is going to be needed to properly hook it to a new setting or genre. How does the Leverage game stack up these days? I have a copy in some unspecified somewhere moving-apartment nexus, and it looked good, but then I got into Blades for my heist purposes so I never bothered to hunt it up to give it a proper day in court. Is it worth me doing box-spelunking to get it to a table?
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Dec 4, 2021 23:18
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Xiahou Dun posted:How does the Leverage game stack up these days? I have a copy in some unspecified somewhere moving-apartment nexus, and it looked good, but then I got into Blades for my heist purposes so I never bothered to hunt it up to give it a proper day in court. Is it worth me doing box-spelunking to get it to a table? I like it. I found character creation was simple but offered a lot of flexibility in terms of character concepts. Most of the groups I ran it with were new to RPGs and they didn't have any real struggles with the system. They were having fun but once each group started using the Flashback scenes the enjoyment went way up. For me, it does the heist part much better than say Shadowrun. For the GM side, there is a bit of learning curve to how difficult to make stuff. But I found it a lot smaller curve than D&D or other games.
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Dec 4, 2021 23:38
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Dawgstar posted:It worked okay for our sci-fi Exalted game I thought, but maybe that being based on Cortex's ancestor MHR helped. Nuns with Guns posted:The Cortex games I've read over are all fine in and of themselves, but it always did give me the vibe of a toolkit that relies a lot on eyeballing and hoping you "get" the system well enough to make something work well. Maybe the Cortex Prime rules finally give a more solid baseline to work from.... But otherwise I feel it does share that issue with FATE where it's an open box of bits and bobs, and it relies a lot on an individual creator's knowledge and understanding of the system to know what base stuff works well and what custom stuff is going to be needed to properly hook it to a new setting or genre. Yeah this is sort of my thought on it when I call it a very "okay" system that's kind of opaque. It's not bad and I don't think it's bad, but it did very much feel like there was a lot of eyeballing and "well I guess this seems right" going on and none of the resources at least at the time went into much detail about things like, as I said, splitting dice up and/or combining them and exactly how good/bad that is to do, so a lot of the time there was a feeling (for me anyway) of just rolling a bunch of dice and hoping for the best rather than having any sort of specific plan in mind when establishing rolls. And especially at that point, the lack of any information on how to hack things made it pretty much all guesswork. I assume Cortex Prime addresses this, but given the rest of the nonsense surrounding the project and that the system didn't exactly light a fire under me, I can't say I'm super invested in finding out. I'll say I agree that Fate is also a system everyone recommends for "generic" stuff that feels highly nebulous and whatever a lot of the time but the Atomic Robo version did give it a shot in the arm for me at least.
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Dec 5, 2021 00:12
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Xiahou Dun posted:How does the Leverage game stack up these days? I have a copy in some unspecified somewhere moving-apartment nexus, and it looked good, but then I got into Blades for my heist purposes so I never bothered to hunt it up to give it a proper day in court. Is it worth me doing box-spelunking to get it to a table? As far as a tight heist system goes, I like Blades in the Dark a lot. I like that it has lots of background things ticking off and I like the way it has a separate crew advancement process so the characters get stronger collectively and individually. Blades has a very specific challenge of it being keyed to its setting and city. Things like the Heat and faction rules don't work as well if you're not in Doskvol itself constantly claiming turf and getting into conflicts and needing to constantly do your crew thing to survive. While you can pull that out or modify it as many subsequent games have, I'd say it's more work to rebuild. Leverage is a good heist game that's also easy to transplant, as Thomamelas mentioned. Kai Tave posted:I assume Cortex Prime addresses this, but given the rest of the nonsense surrounding the project and that the system didn't exactly light a fire under me, I can't say I'm super invested in finding out. Yeah like I assume that Fandom is hoping it can use its fan wikis as a pool of eager free labor and its experience managing D&D Beyond to create an "open" online toolset it'll plug on all its wikis, where people can make their own custom versions of Cortex Prime to play or even cross-play between fandoms. They're preemptively telling people not to take their work and publish it elsewhere because they want to focus on concentrating it in whatever online resource they must be building. I'm a bit surprised they'd release this ahead of actually launching an online service, but maybe they're hoping to eat the bad press now and then not face as much once their online service is up?
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Dec 5, 2021 01:16
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I suspect this license release is one of the knock-on effects of the diaspora from Fandom earlier this year. Adam Bradford (creator of D&D Beyond) went to go helm Demiplane, and to my knowledge he hasn't been replaced. This license rollout feels very much like what you would expect when you have Cam Banks (who is beholden to Fandom to honor his Kickstarter) and Mellie Doucette (their community manager, who seems nice but not a veteran of any sort) on one end of the tug of war, the vultures of Fandom leadership/legal on the other, and no voice of experience / reason in the middle.
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Dec 5, 2021 01:17
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Xiahou Dun posted:How does the Leverage game stack up these days? I have a copy in some unspecified somewhere moving-apartment nexus, and it looked good, but then I got into Blades for my heist purposes so I never bothered to hunt it up to give it a proper day in court. Is it worth me doing box-spelunking to get it to a table? Blades in the Dark was written by someone who knew Leverage, who had created a popular hack to take it away from a six stat system into a three stat one, and who absolutely pillaged it to make Blades. How does Leverage stack up? I'd say that Leverage is the second best heist RPG ever created but unless what you are after is a brighter tone just about everything it offers was adapted into Blades which means that there's little core to use it. For a quick comparison Blades in the Dark is often said to be an Apocalypse World derivative - and it is. But IMO it owes even more to Leverage than AW.
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Dec 5, 2021 01:41
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https://twitter.com/WFDgames/status/1466502789304094725?t=GMFUTKJqNwWyxgpqNIdJog&s=19 Seems... weird.
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Dec 5, 2021 04:19
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Wonderfilled is not TSR/LaNasa. I think they're Stephen Dinehart's crew (Jim Ward and Giantlands).
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Dec 5, 2021 05:52
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The TSR thing is starting to get a little too labyrinthine for me.
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Dec 5, 2021 05:55
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Leraika posted:The TSR thing is starting to get a little too labyrinthine for me. Their most challenging megadungeon yet!
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Dec 5, 2021 05:57
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That's just domain squatting and neither of those are valuable domains to have. I doubt anyone will pay them for them.
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Dec 5, 2021 06:00
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In Wizards being bad news: https://twitter.com/amandahamon/status/1468264037351768066 https://twitter.com/amandahamon/status/1468264289802899460   (full attached image) Not even threaded properly.
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Dec 8, 2021 17:35
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Not even an apology.
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Dec 8, 2021 18:17
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Dawgstar posted:Not even an apology. Tweeted by some 4k follower account instead of the actual company
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Dec 8, 2021 18:19
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ShallNoiseUpon posted:Tweeted by some 4k follower account instead of the actual company Who seems to be busy with a convention.
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Dec 8, 2021 18:41
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Who seems to be busy with a convention. She's Lead Designer on the product in question, so yeah, probably out there promoting, but also probably the person who has the most ownership of the fuckup.
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Dec 8, 2021 18:45
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Toshimo posted:She's Lead Designer on the product in question, so yeah, probably out there promoting, but also probably the person who has the most ownership of the fuckup. Having interacted with this person on a professional, non WOTC basis -- can't say I'm surprised. Clarification: I don't think this is intentional or malicious on her part. Rather, attention to this kind of detail on projects was often lacking. Eastmabl fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Dec 8, 2021 |
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Dec 8, 2021 19:11
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Did she write that one Stargate adventure we? tested? Or was that someone else?
Ego Trip fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Dec 8, 2021 |
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