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So, uh... is the entire Spellpunk Cyberfight book written like the DTRPG description of the core? Because that is quite a choice.
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Dec 21, 2021 07:23
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Antivehicular posted:So, uh... is the entire Spellpunk Cyberfight book written like the DTRPG description of the core? Because that is quite a choice. A large part of it is, though many of the fiction chunks are written in slightly less busted English.
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Dec 21, 2021 08:12
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Antivehicular posted:So, uh... is the entire Spellpunk Cyberfight book written like the DTRPG description of the core? Because that is quite a choice. Chuck Tingle presents 5e
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Dec 21, 2021 16:00
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It is imperative our roleplaying manual be fun to read on the toilet
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Dec 21, 2021 16:51
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Countblanc posted:It is imperative our roleplaying manual be fun to read on the toilet the vast majority of roleplaying games agree with you, so yes?
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Dec 21, 2021 17:17
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There doesn't appear to be a Mythras/BRP thread. Just confirming its non-existence.
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Dec 21, 2021 17:26
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Arivia posted:the vast majority of roleplaying games agree with you, so yes? You're allowed to poke fun at things you think are silly that the public zeitgeist likes
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Dec 21, 2021 18:54
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PurpleXVI posted:A large part of it is, though many of the fiction chunks are written in slightly less busted English. As is much of the GM advice, it seems.
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Dec 21, 2021 19:11
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hyphz posted:As is much of the GM advice, it seems. It does have some of the best overall GM advice I've ever seen in a published product SOURCE: I bought a copy and it is well worth the moneys.
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Dec 21, 2021 20:12
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Nothing gets the bowels churning quite like a good tabletop RPG book.
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Dec 21, 2021 21:02
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Nuns with Guns posted:Nothing gets the bowels churning quite like a good tabletop RPG book. That's really not the best way to get more fiber in your diet, friend.
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Dec 21, 2021 21:08
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Lemniscate Blue posted:That's really not the best way to get more fiber in your diet, friend. I'm halfway through the Exalted 2e core book now and I feel this is too far to turn back.
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Dec 22, 2021 06:44
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Rolling into the holidays a little slimmer than I'd like to be, wallet-wise, so I've got a Sale and a Reverse Sale running to get me some Christmas presents of my own: If you're a big MORK BORG fan, you can't go wrong with the Beer Money Borg Bundle on DriveThruRPG, containing everything I've done for Mork Borg so far at a convenient $7.77 price point. This is the fast and cheap option and likely to get me some brewskis so I can prevent myself from throttling my uncle who only leaves his den for the holidays and spends the rest of his time playing video games and being rude to his wife. If you want to feed my very expensive and foolhardy consumerist lifestyle, I'm running the I Need $150 More To Buy The Three Newest Age Of Sigmar Battletomes Reverse Sale, formerly the Formerly the I Need $125 To Buy The Three Newest Age Of Sigmar Soulbound Books Reverse Sale, I reached that goal and am exceedingly bad at math so don't look too deeply into the name, okay! Everything I sell is now 50% more expensive on Itch.io, or you can get it all for the opposite of a bargain but cheaper than buying individually for $100. This will give me books to curate delicious lore and make my Soulbound table yet more enthused with the ways of their tumultuous lives. If you can help make my Christmas a merry one filled with consumption both Capitalist and Alcoholic (and possibly Old Timey Prospector if I drink way too much), I'd super appreciate it. Otherwise happy assorted holidays and do something nice for someone, okay???  Skeleton drinking beer included for my gratification and your attention. sasha_d3ath fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Dec 22, 2021 |
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Dec 22, 2021 13:47
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Hey guys - anyone here played Fading Suns 4ed? My friends want to play some fading suns and wonder if this is worth a go or should we just go full nostalgia
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Dec 22, 2021 14:44
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Covermeinsunshine posted:Hey guys - anyone here played Fading Suns 4ed? My friends want to play some fading suns and wonder if this is worth a go or should we just go full nostalgia I've been vaguely interested since I saw the amazing cover of one of its core books, but also it has, like, three or four core books? Well, that's my story.
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Dec 22, 2021 14:50
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Covermeinsunshine posted:Hey guys - anyone here played Fading Suns 4ed? My friends want to play some fading suns and wonder if this is worth a go or should we just go full nostalgia I'd be curious about this as well, despite having like three editions previously, they're really all just minor edits on the first edition, like re-arranging some chapters, fiddling a few numbers, etc. I would love to know more about an ACTUAL new edition.
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Dec 22, 2021 19:05
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It's funny, since in every other field I've ever heard of, that's what an edition is and a complete rewrite is something else. I wanted to start a conversation about something: Why aren't there more and more successful science fiction RPGs, and why is there no generally-recognized flagship for the genre? It seems like fantasy dwarfs sci-fi, in sales and the ease of finding a game running, outside of a couple big franchises. There are no hard-and-fast statistics available, but from what I can gather, these are the most commercially successful sci-fi RPGs (in no particular order): Traveller Star Wars (both WEG and FFG) Cyberpunk Shadowrun Rifts Warhammer 40K Gamma World 7th Edition ?Possibly Star Frontiers, Paranoia, and Battletech I assume a big part of the problem is that science fiction is, practically speaking, much broader than fantasy. Aficionados can talk for days about the differences between fantasy franchises, but I think that e.g. LOTR, the Rings, the Dying Earth, ASOIAF, The Witcher, Wheel of Time, Moorcock's Young Kingdoms, and several other franchises I could name have a lot in common. You could put a D&D style "adventuring party" in all of these settings and the players could have a certain set of expectations in place. Even within far future sci-fi, you can't go from like Dune to Foundation to the Forever War in the same way. That said, there's a clear preference for three subgenres: over-the-top post-apocalypse, cyberpunk dystopia, and "space truckers wandering a cosmopolitan galaxy." But no franchise has dominated the market and served as the flagship RPG for sci-fi the way D&D continues to dominate fantasy. (Traveller did when there were few other options, but it was eventually overtaken by Star Wars.) Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Dec 22, 2021 |
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Dec 22, 2021 19:18
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Fantasy games already draw out the physics nerds in their thousands so I imagine the workings of any sci fi game you care to try and make already seize up during the conception stage from the sheer weight of irl science arguments.
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Dec 22, 2021 20:30
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I think it's because of the old fantasy standby of magic. It has two effects: a) it adds a nice progression to combat. First you just use swords and staves, then you have to deal with magic missiles, then fireballs, then flight and so on. Sci-fi combat is likely to be much more heavily gun based, and most RPGs are already terrible at gun combat; but in addition, if there are rocket launchers or jetpacks or whatever in the setting then you can just buy them straight away. This is probably why Starfinger made the weird choice to gate equipment behind level, but we all know how much sense that made. But most sci-fi RPGs don't really bring that in; it's just level 1, shoot alien with laser, level 20, shoot alien with laser better. b) it lets antagonists be centralized to a degree where PCs can meaningfully influence them with their small scale actions, and where their personal power mirrors their world power. Evil wizard oppressing a village? You can storm his tower and kill him, no problem, but he'll fight you with evil magic. Evil corporation oppressing a colony? Well, what are you going to do, storm into their offices and kill the CEO? He's a rich dude in a suit, no dramatic conclusion in that fight. And if you do, they'll just promote someone else. So what, walk around the corporate offices machine-gunning everyone you see? That's.. rather uncomfortable to start with, and even if you could destroy the corporation, doing so would probably mess up a ton of innocent people who either indirectly worked for the corp or depended on its supplies.
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Dec 22, 2021 21:15
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Scifi game devs shouldn't despair – RPGs are also terrible at melee combat. 
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Dec 22, 2021 21:18
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hyphz posted:Evil corporation oppressing a colony? Well, what are you going to do, storm into their offices and kill the CEO? He's a rich dude in a suit, no dramatic conclusion in that fight. And if you do, they'll just promote someone else. So what, walk around the corporate offices machine-gunning everyone you see? That's.. rather uncomfortable to start with, and even if you could destroy the corporation, doing so would probably mess up a ton of innocent people who either indirectly worked for the corp or depended on its supplies. Ah, but the CEO has been using his money to buy himself a mech suit which, of course, is part of his big CEO chair, so you're going to fight him in his office, blast him out of the window, he lands on the helipad, and then you engage in a duel with him while corporate security tries to stop you. Also once the corporate skyscraper blows up(in the background as you jetpack away from it), everyone realizes they didn't need the MoronCorp products after all and resolve to buy local. Like, this is only lame if you let it be lame. Walking down the cubicle farm? The grunt workers are running for the hills(while also picking up a few expensive fax machines while they go), and the people you're gunning down are paid-up, fully-invested corporate rentacops and/or managers who dive out of their offices with machine guns because they're sure to get a promotion if they take you out.
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Dec 22, 2021 21:32
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I think one of the reasons there’s not a single flagship game might be that so many of the big names are licensed properties. There's some overlap between Star Wars, 40k and Trek nerds, but probably not as much as between Tolkien and D&D fans.
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Dec 22, 2021 21:39
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There's two sort of thoughts I have in regards to the fantasy dominance of TTRPGs: The first is the simple fact that D&D is not only the most well known and successful TTRPG property, but also the general "face" most people associate with roleplaying games in general. As has often been discussed on this forum: to many people, roleplaying IS D&D and that leads to the particular strain of fantasy D&D traffics in being a lot of people's understood default as to the type of setting and assumptions of RPGs as a whole. The "D&D-like fantasy" setting has also become a very broadly understood setting archetype that's been picked up by the public at large because of the success of not only D&D but also video games and media that's taken direct inspiration from D&D. My second idea is one that's a little less fully-formed, so don't mistake the next couple of paragraphs as me speaking authoritatively or making strong assertations. This is going to be much more a case of me working out ideas by thinking aloud... I feel like the origins and conventions of the science fiction and fantasy genres leads to the public at large having a much clearer picture of what a generic fantasy setting looks like vs a generic sci fi one. The fantasy genre as we know it largely emerged as an outgrowth of older folk and mythological storytelling traditions which heavily dealt in things like archetypes and existing tales that were changed and expanded upon as they moved from one teller to another. This not only leads the fantasy genre being better geared to support characters that can be moved across settings within the genre without feeling out of place (To a degree), it also affects how settings are designed within the fantasy genre. The philosophy that separates science fiction from fantasy also plays into this: While there are exceptions and edge cases, what's really at the core of a science fiction story is exploring how a particular piece of technology or hypothetical scientific principle interacts with people and society: It's very much focused on exploring the granular details of speculative scientific ideas. That's why a lot of science fiction settings are built around the idea of a particular piece of technology existing, whether that's FTL, cybernetic augmentation, mind uploading, time travel, etc. This kind of makes it harder to make a generic, kitchen sink sci fi setting because it would necessitate including a lot of different speculative technologies from a lot of different types of subgenres and, because the genre as a whole is more concerned with the how these technologies interact, it's going to make something that feels very different from any of the stories it borrows ideas from. Like, Alien would have been a very different film if they had lightsabers or mind uploading, or time travel.
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Dec 22, 2021 21:44
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I think that touches on the other issue - that "sci-fi" is pushing it as a single genre definition. It's almost as bad an RPG category as "anime". Even if you just say "time travel" as a subgenre, that could be Primer, Back to the Future, or The Returner. I don't think anything could do all three.
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Dec 22, 2021 22:04
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Good point. I mean they can't even keep straight what kind of stories they want to tell and what the setting is like from one series of Star Trek to another. Often not even between episodes in the same series.
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Dec 22, 2021 22:06
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Didn't D&D as such get rolling out of efforts to expand and spice up medieval wargaming, too? Imagine if RPGs grew out of, I don't know, wanting to have an even better version of Clue.
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Dec 22, 2021 22:25
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hyphz posted:I think it's because of the old fantasy standby of magic. It has two effects: Starfinger... he's the man, the man with the cosmic touch... (sorry, had to milk this typo for all it's worth!) quote:b) it lets antagonists be centralized to a degree where PCs can meaningfully influence them with their small scale actions, and where their personal power mirrors their world power. Evil wizard oppressing a village? You can storm his tower and kill him, no problem, but he'll fight you with evil magic. Evil corporation oppressing a colony? Well, what are you going to do, storm into their offices and kill the CEO? He's a rich dude in a suit, no dramatic conclusion in that fight. And if you do, they'll just promote someone else. So what, walk around the corporate offices machine-gunning everyone you see? That's.. rather uncomfortable to start with, and even if you could destroy the corporation, doing so would probably mess up a ton of innocent people who either indirectly worked for the corp or depended on its supplies. That's why I think a lot of sci-fi stories are of a different genre. In Star Trek you're part of a huge organization yourself, and each adventure is exploring a thing or resolving a localized problem. Or in Traveller you're jumping from one mostly small job to the next.
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Dec 22, 2021 22:27
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KingKalamari posted:There's two sort of thoughts I have in regards to the fantasy dominance of TTRPGs: Pretty much this. It's also worth nothing that you can fit a ton of fantasy settings into D&D, and run loads of different campaigns with it. Much less so for sci fi. This also makes every fantasy setting occupy a mind space with D&D. Every souls-like can fit into D&D pretty nicely with just a bit of tweaking. Nobody's playing more Star Wars when Cyberpunk 2077 came out.
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Dec 22, 2021 22:28
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I think it's because there are no generally accepted baseline setting assumptions for sci-fi as there are for fantasy. Things like elves and dwarves, dragons, strange ruins and old treasures, monsters, and a general medieval pastiche. D&D certainly has had an influence in kind of cementing those setting assumptions, but were influenced in turn by books and stories that I think helped create that mindset that D&D was able to capitalize on. Everyone* has a vague idea of what a dwarf or dragon or a goblin is, or that gold is precious and valuable, and so on. Sci-fi is too specific and settings largely exist in ways that aren't easily generic-ized. Like, elves have shown up so many places that they don't automatically register as something from, say, Tolkien, but you can have one and it provides a level of context. Copyright aside you can't really throw a Wookie or Vulcan into your story with the same effect. I think it's because a lot of fantasy tropes are tied to folklore we're familiar with, and sci-fi generally isn't, so while certain concepts have been filtered through the lense of a particular author or game publisher, they can still be familiar without being tied to a particular story. With sci-fi, you really only have rockets and ray-guns and BEMs and at this point I think a setting with just those by themselves feels pretty quaint. I'd say only gray aliens of UFO lore are the only thing to have that kind of cultural presence, and even they are getting kind of retro. As mentioned Traveller really was the only one to try that style of familiar but not specific setting assumptions, but still has been pretty tied to the Third Imperium for over 30 years.. Even then, Traveller style scfi/space opera has lost popularity since maybe the 80s, even in the more commercial/pulpier end of the genre, with some exceptions. So I don't know if it's even really possible to make a default "sci-fi RPG" in the same way that D&D (and imitators) can be a "fantasy RPG". As for games that are my current white whales, Rolemaster/HARP currently occupies the fantasy slot in my mind (about a year ago it was 13th Age, and before that Hackmaster 4th and before that Tunnels & Trolls, and so on, and I'm sure it'll come back around to those eventually, but it seems that I can only get invested in one "fantasy RPG" at a time,) but Unknown Armies, something with Savage Worlds, Mutant Epoch, and the new Twilight 2000 currently occupy my mental "wanting to play/run" mental space (most likely run because I think the only game that has a non zero chance of having me a actually play in it is D&D 5e). Of course I got a whole mess of other stuff in my shelves that comes and goes from my attention too. E;fb by KingKalamari who makes the same points Dr. Sneer Gory fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Dec 22, 2021 |
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Dec 22, 2021 22:32
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Nessus posted:Didn't D&D as such get rolling out of efforts to expand and spice up medieval wargaming, too? Imagine if RPGs grew out of, I don't know, wanting to have an even better version of Clue. yeah D&D literally started out as a homebrew scenario for the wargame Chainmail kludged together with systems from various other historical wargames. which has some amusing implications of its own -- the "armor class" system in D&D (supposedly) comes from a naval combat game, for example https://dmdavid.com/tag/the-tangled-origins-of-dds-armor-class-hit-points-and-twenty-sided-die-rolls-to-hit/
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Dec 22, 2021 22:39
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There's no reason you couldn't run most scifi shows streaming today in some kind of semi-generic system. They're mostly about grizzled dudes getting beat up, all the ~deep science fiction~ is set dressing. But who wants to buy a generic space man game in tyool 2021 when you can buy The Official The Expanse RPG?
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Dec 22, 2021 22:53
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i refuse to believe that The Expanse isn't just a prettied up version of someone's TTRPG campaign log in the first place
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Dec 22, 2021 22:55
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I thought the authors had admitted that??
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Dec 22, 2021 22:56
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PurpleXVI posted:
Coolness Averted fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Dec 22, 2021 |
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Dec 22, 2021 23:38
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Plus like, the shareholders will pick another CEO? That's fine. Just means that a fight against the cybernetically enhanced shareholders and their bodyguards is next. It'll give you room to escalate.
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Dec 22, 2021 23:45
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Coolness Averted posted:Yeah, you could just as easily make the same sort of critique and meaningless scenario in generic fantasy "oh the evil king is the big bad? He's just an inbred habsburg with no real ability to fight or do anything of note. He inherited the throne through birth. You kill him? Fine another dynast just follows in succession. Oh and now the innocent peasants are gonna die in the chaotic fight for the throne."
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Dec 22, 2021 23:51
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Splicer posted:Eh, fantasy as a genre tends to assume monarchism good, specific king bad. Space Capitalism good, specific Space CEO bad is a bit less universal. I don't think fantasy tends to assume monarchism is good, most fantasy just doesn't have any active republican movements so there are only different monarchs to choose between, not alternatives to monarchism entirely(except for theocracies, which are always evil in fantasy). I mean the only times I can think of monarchs being present and lauded while republicans are also present, and mocked, is oddly enough Terry Pratchett.
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Dec 22, 2021 23:54
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Splicer posted:Eh, fantasy as a genre tends to assume monarchism good, specific king bad. Space Capitalism good, specific Space CEO bad is a bit less universal. So you're saying we should overthrow the monarchy and institute a Dictatorship of the Magic Proletariat?
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Dec 22, 2021 23:55
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Asterite34 posted:So you're saying we should overthrow the monarchy and institute a Dictatorship of the Magic Proletariat? familiars of the world rise up, you have nothing to lose but your binding spells
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Dec 23, 2021 00:00
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e: nm
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Dec 23, 2021 00:02
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