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MonsieurChoc posted:Eclipse Phase is the closest thing we got to a Gunnm/Battle Angel Alita rpg. Jovian Chronicles can do Gundam pretty well.
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Jan 4, 2022 02:30
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Jovian Chronicles can do Gundam pretty well. Gunnm isn't Gundam.
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Jan 4, 2022 04:03
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Hostile V posted:I got that Nemesis book. Is Abby Soto mentioned yet? Also, I noted it had pretty good reviews on GoodReads. 
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Jan 4, 2022 04:14
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MonsieurChoc posted:Eclipse Phase is the closest thing we got to a Gunnm/Battle Angel Alita rpg.
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Jan 4, 2022 04:55
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hyphz posted:Is Abby Soto mentioned yet?
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Jan 4, 2022 06:01
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PurpleXVI posted:As it was, it was this super unsatisfying mid-point between the overly crunchy old system(which had a shitload of morphs that were just objectively sub-par, garbage choices) The morph stuff in 1e was a baffling mix of sensible (if mechanically uninteresting) choices and every supplement adding just a ton of really boring trash that was, quite often, intruding on the niche of one of the core book morphs, or invalidating balance decisions in the core morphs. What especially comes to mind are the sheer number of morphs that were just the Olympian-but-better, Olympian-but-slightly-different, or not-an-Olympian-but-can-do-its-job-anyway, or the sheer number of COG-boosting morphs. In the core book a +10 bonus to something was pretty cool, with all the supplements there's a lot with +10 and you're looking for the +15. It also just upset the balance and narrative that the core book morphs conveyed, which was that synthmorphs were generally superior in every way except they couldn't get the high stat-boosts, and were kind of balanced out by a social stigma. Uplift morphs were kind of niche, but they did get access to INT-boosting which was actually pretty rare. And then the supplements are just full of synthmorph doing everything: a synthmorph with a +10 COG boost! A synthmorph with a +10 SAV boost! Play a synthmorph, there's no reason not to anymore! I also realised when reading GURPS: Transhuman Space, Biotech, and Ultra-Tech that... oh no... a good four fifths or so of the core book morphs are just copied from GURPS' genetically engineered body-templates. And while GURPS has many of the same issues when it comes to swapping bodies around with all the stuff you have to recalculate, GURPS is also a system that really lets you get in there and make things have mechanical differences. GURPS can have a great variety of morphs because it has tons of levers and switches for things to be unique with. EP1e tries to have roughly the same variety of morphs but shoved into a system with like a tenth of the mechanical variety. That's one of the things that makes morphs in EP1e so samey: they're supposed to have more variety but the system just can't represent it.
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Jan 4, 2022 15:52
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LatwPIAT posted:The morph stuff in 1e was a baffling mix of sensible (if mechanically uninteresting) choices and every supplement adding just a ton of really boring trash that was, quite often, intruding on the niche of one of the core book morphs, or invalidating balance decisions in the core morphs. What especially comes to mind are the sheer number of morphs that were just the Olympian-but-better, Olympian-but-slightly-different, or not-an-Olympian-but-can-do-its-job-anyway, or the sheer number of COG-boosting morphs. In the core book a +10 bonus to something was pretty cool, with all the supplements there's a lot with +10 and you're looking for the +15. I feel like part of the disparity in morphs comes from the fact that 1st edition, to some degree, wanted to be about gear acquisition and scarcity. The idea is that they intended the player characters to be beaming to a new location around the solar system at the start of every adventuring and having to acquire gear and morphs for themselves on their own, which is why you have morphs that are blatantly mechanically superior to others - You need something to give players who gently caress up their acquisition rolls. The thing that always bugged me the most with the way morphs were designed was the sheer number of them that were only differentiated by the stat boosts or built-in implants: In a setting where your option for bodies also includes stuff like "Giant crab" or "Space whale" it just feels really dumb to have two dozen different templates that amount to "Basically a regular human but it gives slightly different stat boosts". Really I feel like it would have been better if they'd taken the design philosophy of morphs in a more customized direction, where there are some basic templates to work off of that the GM is more heavily expected to customize on an individual basis to better reflect that fact that human bodies are unique commodities. I also feel like a much better solution to the problem that wouldn't have led to the problem of introducing even more dispirit mechanics into the system would be to just have a player's Aptitudes directly tied to the morph they're in. Like, players would only have skill ranks tied to their character, and aptitudes tied to their morph, then you add the two together after sleeving to get the number you're rolling under for skill checks. KingKalamari fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Jan 4, 2022 |
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Jan 4, 2022 16:47
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Been out of the thread a while and catching up. Good news: finally have a game starting again. Apocalypse World in a green-hell swamp apocalypse with some neat characters so far, I'm pretty hyped. Mirage posted:If you wanna get really out there for your SF space adventures, there's always Transit: The Spaceship RPG, where every PC is an AI and their bodies are starships crewed by filthy biologicals. A Transit game done well is one of my grail games, even if I wasn't totally sold on the system when I read it. It's just conceptually so different that I want to try it at least once. hyphz posted:A strange wish to run something that isn’t broken and people genuinely enjoy but with no idea what it is. Mood. Right now I'm in a bit of limbo hell on my own "running things" front with no idea whether I even want to run a game again, ever. Spent a good chunk of yesterday getting mocked by game-specific communities for wanting to cut back combat mechanics for systems that do everything I want well except combat, so that's kind of set the tone for the week. I don't even know how you would run a zero combat RPG and still keep it interesting, but I clearly can't keep combat interesting either and I'm tired of "kill our problems" being the solution to everything. Even infects my solo game experiments because it's an easy fallback. "But it's an RPG, so I can just modify the rules and make it work" is a poisonous thing to remember when trying to figure out why no game has really been working for me for years. 
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Jan 4, 2022 17:23
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MonsieurChoc posted:Eclipse Phase is the closest thing we got to a Gunnm/Battle Angel Alita rpg. I genuinely think you could do it with Hard-Wired Island, which is probably intentional.
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Jan 4, 2022 21:43
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Dawgstar posted:I genuinely think you could do it with Hard-Wired Island, which is probably intentional. Nice, I got a copy but haven't done more than skim yet.
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Jan 5, 2022 03:36
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KingKalamari posted:I feel like part of the disparity in morphs comes from the fact that 1st edition, to some degree, wanted to be about gear acquisition and scarcity. The idea is that they intended the player characters to be beaming to a new location around the solar system at the start of every adventuring and having to acquire gear and morphs for themselves on their own, which is why you have morphs that are blatantly mechanically superior to others - You need something to give players who gently caress up their acquisition rolls. LatwPIAT posted:The morph stuff in 1e was a baffling mix of sensible (if mechanically uninteresting) choices and every supplement adding just a ton of really boring trash that was, quite often, intruding on the niche of one of the core book morphs, or invalidating balance decisions in the core morphs. What especially comes to mind are the sheer number of morphs that were just the Olympian-but-better, Olympian-but-slightly-different, or not-an-Olympian-but-can-do-its-job-anyway, or the sheer number of COG-boosting morphs. In the core book a +10 bonus to something was pretty cool, with all the supplements there's a lot with +10 and you're looking for the +15. Personally for me the main "these are always sub-par" choices were all the pod morphs, which was frustrating because it was also where all the interesting "not just another human with good stats"-morphs were! Their only real advantage was built-in weapons which were always super inferior to just using a gun. I got the idea that they were meant to be omnipresent and thus usually what people had available but... The whole "you're beaming around the system!"-thing, sure, that might've been intended but it clashed massively with all the morph mechanic depth and customization. Why spend any time customizing a morph at chargen if you'll never get to use it? Not to mention the book-keeping associated with morph swapping, Christ. I generally found the assumptions of players ego-casting everywhere and their supposedly dying regularly to mesh clunkily with everything else and excised them. Physical travel only, remove all the save-or-die trash. SkyeAuroline posted:I don't even know how you would run a zero combat RPG and still keep it interesting, but I clearly can't keep combat interesting either and I'm tired of "kill our problems" being the solution to everything. Even infects my solo game experiments because it's an easy fallback. Generally the games I run have very little combat and people keep sticking with them or coming back for new ones, strangely enough. I feel like the trick is that when players try non-combat solutions(which may or may not result in as many or greater casualties and just running in there guns blazing), be generous with letting them function. If a player comes up with an elaborate idea and the others back it up, it's clearly something they'd have fun with, try to have fun with it, too, that way everyone wins. Secondly, treating NPC's as people with motivations and desires like not dying, tends to result in a lot less combat even popping up because you don't have just mindless drones blasting away at the PC's at first sight. You have creatures with motivations that allow them to be negotiated with, avoided or neutralized in ways that aren't flat combat which... it may be a matter of what your players prefer, but the players I usually have tend to favour befriending or misleading everyone they run into when given the option. In general players seem to be averse to just opening fire on someone or something that doesn't do that to them in the first place. If animals present a threat display, machines a warning or sapients ask the players to please step off, they're somewhere they're not meant to be, players often seem to switch gears to negotiating or avoiding. Almost like most people have a sort of fundamental aversion to un-necessary violence.
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Jan 5, 2022 04:04
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I'm still pretty amused that in my first session of promethean, the players busted into a guy's house (he was selling alchemicals) and shot one of his guards, who *promptly* started pleading as he was bleeding on the floor and the player just immediately said out of character "Well poo poo, time for a tone switch." I'd say one out of every 5 sessions had combat and frankly it was too much.
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Jan 5, 2022 04:59
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PurpleXVI posted:Personally for me the main "these are always sub-par" choices were all the pod morphs, which was frustrating because it was also where all the interesting "not just another human with good stats"-morphs were! Their only real advantage was built-in weapons which were always super inferior to just using a gun. I got the idea that they were meant to be omnipresent and thus usually what people had available but... Yeah, that definitely makes sense, and even just allowing the players the option to spend CP buying morphs and gear at chargen is such a huge trap option in the system. Like I mentioned before, I think the simpler solution for them to better achieve what they were going for mechanically would be to just tie your aptitudes directly to the morph your character's in and make your morph and gear choices at chargen completely separate from buying your skills and traits. Honestly another sort of integral problem Eclipse Phase has in how its mechanics relate to its setting is a sort of uncertainty as to what players they actually want to really support players doing - Sort of a case of trying to do everything and not really succeeding at anything. There are a bunch of points in the in-game fiction where Firewall operatives are presented as super disposable egos kept in deep freeze until they're needed for an operation, at which point they're shoved in a body and thrust into the thick of things, while other points present operatives as being far more autonomous and self-directing. It's kind of a case where they present a lot of specific information about the setting, but never get specific about the parts that are most important to the kind of game they seem to expect people to play. Also everything relating to Gatecrashing feels completely disconnected with the rest of the setting and system and feels like it should have been its own mini-setting. It's actually kind of funny we're getting into this discussion specifically, because the Eclipse Phase campaigns I've been involved in were GM'd by an internet friend we have in common.
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Jan 5, 2022 05:43
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Buying gear or sleeves at chargen would make sense if it was a guarantee. Like "everyone else has to scrounge, you're set up to always have at least this baseline or can easily always have a kit designed around X" but at that point you'd be pricing things differently and have a different tone.
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Jan 5, 2022 06:00
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I'm pig ignorant and mostly saying this to be corrected/called an idiot in order to further discussion but : Considering that two big parts of Eclipse Phase are exploring transhumanism and the premise of exchanging morphs (via getting e-mailed into new bodies), why isn't your character explicitly just your ego while your morph is part of a setting for a given adventure/chapter and you have an actual robust system for the GM to give a new set of morphs that are adapted as part of the set up in a way conceptually broadly similar to an encounter budget. So the PC's are playing Bob, Hrothgar and Kyoko ; they're being sent to do [complicated diplomatic and explorational sci-fi stuff], so they're given 3 morphs (or more! hell, maybe fewer somehow) with a crunchy narrative economy on the back-end for the GM to arrange with some kind of intra-party parity between the PC's morphs and as well as parity between the PC's and their obstacles ; the game-play loop is the mechanical interplay between the ego-based stats the PC's have as part of character creation, what the morph gives them and the exploration of the grey area in between, with that also providing thematic resonance with a more traditional plot-based adventure where they're negotiating xenon mining rights with anarcho-communist space punks or whatever. Like, that would actually be a game about the themes Eclipse Phase is nominally trying to explore, instead of this weird simulationist thing where you're doing spreadsheets of mechanical octopus math. Does that make any sense?
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Jan 5, 2022 07:12
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Xiahou Dun posted:I'm pig ignorant and mostly saying this to be corrected/called an idiot in order to further discussion but : Primarily things are not this way because the designers of Eclipse Phase do not actually give much thought to the new technologies they're introducing. Fundamentally "transhuman" society is the exact same as what we have now except there's a better internet and a communist planet. Like, everything about Eclipse Phase has some intense "design by committee"-feel to it, in the sense that they had 15 people in a room, each person conceived of and slapped in a particular thing, and then some of those things ended up being "orphaned" as only the original writer cared about them(like the slime mold trader aliens, the Factors), flapping around like a weird, vestigial bit of tissue that no one ever addressed or surgically removed for the betterment of the whole. Other things got more interest, like the exsurgents and TITANs which pop up all over the loving place, but in those cases it just turned out the developers did not A) know how to develop and B) did not know how to write. There's absolutely space to make a very interesting game based on elements of Eclipse Phase, but all of them at once do not work. Like if we had super-easy and ubiquitous brain editing and copying, then that could make for some fascinating dystopias, some interesting conversations about mental illness(like WHAT is a mental illness? do the people of a utopia get to decide what mental illnesses they want to keep and which need to be edited out for the good of the whole? is that mental illness part of who they are, fundamentally, or somehow separate?) or copying minds. If we had a nanotech infiltrator plague that could subvert a super-ubiquitous, life-improving technology like easy nanotech manufacturing, what sort of measures are reasonable to take to protect everyone? Is it acceptable to roll back a post-scarcity society to one that has scarcity? If all our major life-controlling/guiding AI's rebelled or went insane at once, what would happen? How would we fight back? Could we fight back? The problem is trying to do them all at once and then, again, not really considering their impact on society. All these interesting/horrifying technologies are largely just introduced to explain gear/plot devices so you can go shoot at Space Cthulhu and his Space Minions who have vague goals, always attack on sight and have save-or-die attacks all over the place. Plus the developers also have this weird hard/soft sci-fi split. Like you're allowed to have NANOTECH SPACE MAGIC, you're allowed to have FTL TELEPORTATION PORTALS, you're allowed to have super-easy psycho-surgery and mind copying... but you're not allowed to have, say, whatever technology would make it easy for an on-mission PC to swap into a new body if the first one gets blown up.
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Jan 5, 2022 07:35
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Imho this game would be better if titans and their stuff were omitted (or relegated to rare finds of unknown origins) and the whole game was about spy wars between various nations of the solar system. That would probably make the whole thing more focused.
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Jan 5, 2022 09:01
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Covermeinsunshine posted:Imho this game would be better if titans and their stuff were omitted (or relegated to rare finds of unknown origins) and the whole game was about spy wars between various nations of the solar system. That would probably make the whole thing more focused.
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Jan 5, 2022 09:32
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Personally I come on the other side, that the Titans and how a society reacts to them should be the defining aspect. Something like Bloom, where the debate over how best to deal with the existential threat of the Titans is the primary philosophical point of contention between different factions. In that case, focusing on Firewall agents would make more sense - you're part of a rogue/independent agency that believes cooperation and versatility is key (so you can be from any society) but you're also 'undercover' everywhere as well. Also, like, move the timeline ahead by at least 10 years. 5 years after the Collapse is way too soon, that's not post-apoc, that's still just an Apocalypse.
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Jan 5, 2022 16:07
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The thing is, I think that focusing on either of those aspects could work and, in a way, show just how big a problem Eclipse Phase has with the "Design by committee" feel Purple brought up. You could easily improve the game by just focusing on: - Being anarchist secret agents mucking with inter-system politics - Being Space Delta Green combating Space Cthulhu and his minions - Being Space Delta Green dealing with the remnant conspiracies left behind by Space Cthulhu - Being Space Delta Green dealing with stuff like Exhumans, Ultimates and other cases of transhuman technology run amok - Being regular transhuman anarchist trying to subvert the inner system hypercorps - Being Gatecrashers exploring the Pandora Gate network and encountering Big Dumb Alien Objects ...And the list goes on and on. The setting is basically built from smushing a bunch of concepts that you could honestly build an entire game around into a big pile, and ending up with a confused mess. This is not helped by the developers' own pro-transhuman technology bias that ends up negatively affecting the playability of the setting. I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea that speculative transhuman technology would be a good thing for humanity, but the developers are so firmly of the idea that changing your mind and body throguh technology is great that it ends up working against a bunch of the themes that they seem to want to explore: The books often gloss over some of the broader ethical conundrums that mind uploading and psychosurgery present and they present one of the most prominent, villainous factions, The Jovian Republic, as being hardline bioconservative...Which ends up making them almost entirely useless as a villain faction because there's nothing they can do to really pose a serious threat to the transhuman uber-gods that surround them. I'm also just going to say that even the things they focus on with regards to The TITANS and the exsurgent virus end up being the least interesting: It mostly focuses on body horror mutations, but to me the real horror inherent to the virus is the way it's supposed to almost imperceptibly subvert a victim's mind. 1e had a few entries scattered throughout that presented the idea of TITAN sleeper agents, people who had been subverted by the virus but showed no physical symptoms who were subtly working within society to meet the virus' alien machinations, which I think is way more unnerving and creepy than "Hyper-contagious virus that turns you into a meat monster"
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Jan 5, 2022 16:25
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Tibalt posted:Personally I come on the other side, that the Titans and how a society reacts to them should be the defining aspect. Something like Bloom, where the debate over how best to deal with the existential threat of the Titans is the primary philosophical point of contention between different factions. Again the main problem with the TITANS is how vaguely defined they are despite all the wordage spent on them, and what is defined is usually really bad. What is well-defined: the many ways in which they can save-or-die the PC's. What is undefined: any example goals or guiding logic other than "kill many mans." Which means that for all that they're meant to be horrifying or interesting, generally the only thing you will ever do with them is walk in a wide circle around them or bring the tactical nuclear weapons. You can't negotiate with them, talk them down, find common ground, attempt to cure Exsurgents, etc. it all just ends in blood. Plus the generally... uncreative ways in which the Exsurgent virus works. It turns you into a monster and then you kill people which is just... completely loving dull? In general that whole aspect could do with some subtlety. Make players question whether they're dealing with brainwashed or willing TITAN cultists, or just a transhuman art project enclave, when things get weird. Rather than making it obvious from all the crab hands and glowing space wizard powers that bad stuff is going down. Maybe have some more potentially beneficial Exsurgent strains like Watts-McLeod(and also, lol, make the psi powers not suck absolute poo poo), so that the question of "should we make a deal with AI Satan to help us survive in a hostile universe?" is an open one rather than a by-default closed one. As for the timeline I think ten years is an underestimate. In EP2, we're 20 years past the Collapse, which to my mind would still be "all these political entities are still going to be undergoing wild instability, half of them won't even have a flag, they're still trying to get everyone fed and incarnated." Like the existing political situation I could maybe believe as being 50 years after Earth's annihilation, but that would be it. Either that or actively embrace the post-Collapse chaos, go: "hey, Earth got hosed up bigtime, now all the grip that all the assholes had on the system is temporarily weakened, things are shaky and mutable. This is your chance as a [monsterman/Firewall Agent/communist/sentient weed plant] to change the way things work."
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Jan 5, 2022 17:17
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Oh, absolutely I would make the TITANs a much more open question. Like, I would make the answer to the question 'Were the TITANs trying to destroy us?' a matter of debate in the setting. Most people obviously come down on 'Yes!' but letting there be a faction that thinks the exsurgent virus is a possible boon and not be objectively wrong would help the setting a lot. I would also put Prometheus much more front and center in Firewall as an explanation for why the organization is so successful but also why absolutely no one will work with you. It seems to have humanity's best interest and you're definitely preventing a lot of terrible situations from getting out of hand, but can you really trust a TITAN?
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Jan 5, 2022 17:39
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Tibalt posted:Oh, absolutely I would make the TITANs a much more open question. Like, I would make the answer to the question 'Were the TITANs trying to destroy us?' a matter of debate in the setting. Most people obviously come down on 'Yes!' but letting there be a faction that thinks the exsurgent virus is a possible boon and not be objectively wrong would help the setting a lot. Weren't the Prometheans a rival project, unrelated to the TITANs?
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Jan 5, 2022 17:53
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Yeah but that's dumb To expand on that thought, first there's the mythical element: Prometheus was a Titan who helped humanity. Why use the names if you aren't going to draw parallels to the myths? Second, thematically, it makes more sense for Prometheus to be just as vulnerable and at risk as the rest of Firewall - why shouldn't they be at risk of infection too? Finally, logically, the whole point of the exsurgent virus is that it can infect anything -why would Prometheus be immune but the TITANs weren't? Tibalt fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Jan 5, 2022 |
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Jan 5, 2022 18:00
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MonsieurChoc posted:Weren't the Prometheans a rival project, unrelated to the TITANs? Yes, The Prometheans were a different group of advanced AIs being developed in secret at around the same time as The TITANs that were specifically designed to be "friendly" to transhumanity and helped to mitigate the damage the TITANs caused during The Fall. Making them a faction with a separate origin from The TITANs is honestly a decision I didn't particularly care for as I think them just being a group of TITANs that didn't get subverted by the virus is a way more interesting writing decision
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Jan 5, 2022 18:01
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KingKalamari posted:Yes, The Prometheans were a different group of advanced AIs being developed in secret at around the same time as The TITANs that were specifically designed to be "friendly" to transhumanity and helped to mitigate the damage the TITANs caused during The Fall. Making them a faction with a separate origin from The TITANs is honestly a decision I didn't particularly care for as I think them just being a group of TITANs that didn't get subverted by the virus is a way more interesting writing decision Honestly I can see the benefit of either approaches.
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Jan 5, 2022 19:14
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MonsieurChoc posted:Nice, I got a copy but haven't done more than skim yet. Respectfully to the original poster, literally the only thing HWI has in common with Battle Angel is that it has cybernetics. It's also not a very mechanically robust system. While not everything needs to be crunchy, I would personally find it wildly unfulfilling if the final race against Jashugan came down to "burn all your prep, then rub your highest modifiers against one another until you win."
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Jan 5, 2022 19:34
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PurpleXVI posted:(and also, lol, make the psi powers not suck absolute poo poo)
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Jan 5, 2022 19:39
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grassy gnoll posted:Respectfully to the original poster, literally the only thing HWI has in common with Battle Angel is that it has cybernetics. On the meso and micro level you'd want to have robust clicky-feely sensations from the gameplay but you would also not want to have to do a lot of stacking of modifiers. It would be a license that definitely would want something like Comp/Con. (Pocket Nova, clearly.)
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Jan 5, 2022 19:45
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mellonbread posted:I assume you're talking about the 2e psychic powers, because the ones in the original game slapped. Sure "read minds" and "psi blast" and all the other spells that you cast on other people sucked, but the ones you could cast on yourself were totally broken. Extra speed, buffs to the stats that actually matter, and that "emotion control" sleight that just negates the mental disorder you get from being a psychic in the first place. I'm sorry, what? The original game's powers were just as incredibly bad as the second one's. In fact as far as I could tell they were largely the same. There were a couple of "mother may I"-powers that could be abused if you were good at smooth-talking the GM into mathematics affecting everything, for instance, but that was it. KingKalamari posted:Yes, The Prometheans were a different group of advanced AIs being developed in secret at around the same time as The TITANs that were specifically designed to be "friendly" to transhumanity and helped to mitigate the damage the TITANs caused during The Fall. Making them a faction with a separate origin from The TITANs is honestly a decision I didn't particularly care for as I think them just being a group of TITANs that didn't get subverted by the virus is a way more interesting writing decision Personally I just think having the TITANs go rampant because of a virus is also the least interesting approach they could have taken and robs the TITANs of a lot of potential agency and personality. Have the exsurgent virus be something that maybe a few of them bump into after fleeing Earth. Perhaps the TITANs, being patterned to some extent on human minds, are just as vulnerable to making poor, emotionally-based decisions as humans are. Maybe a group of them get convinced, due to faulty information and latent emotional issues, that humanity is planning to shut them all down, and decides to shoot first. And once they start the war, every other TITAN has to pick a side, and even the ones fundamentally sympathetic to humanity realize that if the humans win, they probably won't ever trust a TITAN to have free reins again. There, boom. You now have TITAN motivations, TITAN factions, TITAN personalities beyond "spooky and spacey." Humanity starts blasting the hell out of Earth, the TITANs flee through the Pandora gates before they get locked in(and maybe a few are still on Earth, either having been trapped or choosing to remain, perhaps hoping to unfuck the planet a bit as they do so), and now you can encounter everything from a TITAN that just wants to play Minecraft on an alien world somewhere, to TITANs that are intentionally plotting against humanity, to TITANs that are trying to find the right diplomatic approach for a reconciliation with humanity and so on. Plus if the TITANs aren't just insane and unperceivable, if they want something other than total destruction, that will also lend some flavour to anti-human plots even if you keep them all as hostile. Some of them may want to retain some human infrastructure(or human slaves), while others want total annihilation of everything related to human culture and technology, and thus even two fundamentally hostile forces can clash.
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Jan 5, 2022 20:16
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KingKalamari posted:The thing is, I think that focusing on either of those aspects could work and, in a way, show just how big a problem Eclipse Phase has with the "Design by committee" feel Purple brought up. You could easily improve the game by just focusing on: Splicer fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Jan 5, 2022 |
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Jan 5, 2022 20:25
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Splicer posted:Then release Eclipse Phase: Gatecrashers which contains a lot of well-polished rules for gatecrashing as anarchists and corps and whatever, and does contain rules for custom sleeves (purchased with separate points) because what sleeve you take through the gate is actually relevant. They did and it was called Gatecrashing. It was the… third supplement released I think? Unfortunately EP just doesn’t have the mechanical structure to really handle any kind of campaign, even ones given books about it. It’s very bad 90s/early 00s design that way.
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Jan 5, 2022 20:38
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SkyeAuroline posted:
I have thoughts but I think we need to unpack the question a bit first. Is the issue "an RPG is only interesting when the characters' lives are at stake", "RPGs have more interesting mechanics for fighting than talking", or both? Nessus posted:I think Alita would work very well for a PBTA system of some kind on the macro-level because it's all about trying to pursue your wild unrealistic goal and then either grow through your failure to achieve that goal, or worse, to achieve it. I don't think anybody in that comic ever actually gets what they want, but by gum they keep chasing it! Tenra Bansho Zero contains pretty much all of Battle Angel/Gunnm's ingredients (at least original flavor, Last Order and onwards is a whole other thing), along with a lot of other stuff you may wanna scrape off for a purer cyberpunk experience, but the crucial bit is that it 100% commits to the character development bit above, almost as literally as possible-- mechanical development of your character is directly tied to their emotional development (you can also totally go out in an apotheosis of glory like Jashugan). It also has, I think, enough cyberware and martial arts crunch to be interesting without going full Shadowrun gear porn levels. I love that game.
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Jan 5, 2022 20:42
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I've always found the kijin stuff to be the most numberfuck and least interesting part of TBZ.
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Jan 5, 2022 20:56
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Leraika posted:I've always found the kijin stuff to be the most numberfuck and least interesting part of TBZ. I don't disagree, but like I said it's got enough moving parts to play with without becoming completely numbing (I can't even get through Shadowrun character creation any more). I like pretty much everything else in TBZ better but the cyber stuff is fine and gets the job done. Its greatest sin is just being vanilla compared to all the nuttiness of all the other subsystems.
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Jan 5, 2022 20:59
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm sorry, what? The original game's powers were just as incredibly bad as the second one's. In fact as far as I could tell they were largely the same. There were a couple of "mother may I"-powers that could be abused if you were good at smooth-talking the GM into mathematics affecting everything, for instance, but that was it. I dug up a couple of my old character sheets and the actually good sleights are
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Jan 5, 2022 21:04
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Parkreiner posted:I have thoughts but I think we need to unpack the question a bit first. Thoughts are welcome but the issue is neither; the issue is "I have no idea how to come up with meaningful and interesting scenarios that don't at some point involve fighting, in any genre whatsoever". RPGs are plenty interesting to me regardless of mechanics as long as there's some conflict going on; none of my few long-term RPG memories have anything to do with the mechanics. Combat is just easy. Social play is far more appealing to me but also far more difficult. (Sidebar later.) Likewise to other non-combat mechanics that don't cleanly fall under "social play"; I gravitate towards domain play, games with creative approaches to problems, hell, I've had a "parkour runner" cyberpunk character on the backburner for years now who's seen the table once and abjectly failed, but I'm still interested in games that do cool things with infiltration & movement mechanics that aren't pure fiat... It does help fighting's case that most RPGs have pretty solid structure to their combat system, to where if roleplaying is faltering/failing you can fall back on just the rolls and mechanics and still get the "complete" game experience. I don't know if that's coherent enough expanding on the question to clarify the direction to take thoughts in? It's not that the mechanics for fighting are "more interesting", they just provide more structure for a failing GM. Sidebar: Social play is especially hard for me for actual disability reasons. I have documented frontal lobe damage that seriously impacts my memory. I can't keep NPCs (or my own PCs) consistent even with notes as a result- every time I play them is effectively the first time, I have no memory of how I ran them before or any of those little things that slip into a depiction. You can't have meaningful social play & development with a character that keeps changing into something else when you're not looking, as a player or as a GM. It doesn't matter how much I write down or keep track of, this just happens, constantly. Compare fighting, where all I need is the mostly-unchanging list of my gear & skills and the completely unchanging list of combat mechanics... there's only one I can engage consistently with without it being effectively "the first time every time". So I need to figure out how to make social play *consistent* at the same time as I make it *interesting*. This all kind of diverges away from your initial pair of options though. (There is a potential second sidebar expanding on this that takes the question of handling combat in an entirely different direction, but it's "grimmer than the average E/N thread" depressing and I don't want to dump that on this thread unprompted.)
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Jan 5, 2022 21:06
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Weird question that I might ask here because I thought of it gamer-adjacently and someone might know: Where did the negative/cringey jester/storyteller stereotype (Tingle, Ray McCooney, etc) originate?
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Jan 5, 2022 21:16
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grassy gnoll posted:Respectfully to the original poster, literally the only thing HWI has in common with Battle Angel is that it has cybernetics. For Alita I think I'd want primarily a rules-light / narrative-first style game for the vast majority of the story and even regular combat, but then Motorball, specifically, is a carefully siloed tactical minigame. 
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Jan 5, 2022 21:32
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mellonbread posted:Nah. Emotion Control doesn’t really work like that: it just gives a bonus against emotional manipulation (the stuff about resisting unwanted emotion is flavorful, but not really a mechanical effect). Multitasking also doesn’t let you spend twice as much time doing something, because it’s gives you a separate action and EP doesn’t really have rules for two people, let alone two thought processes, cooperating like that. At least it did’t until they added a rule to let you convert extra actions to doing things faster in the Player’s Guide. (That said rolling two separate hacking actions against the same target is almost always better than rolling one with a small skill boost.) However, consider also: Downtime: For when you want to trade difficult-to-heal Stress Points for easy-to-heal physical damage. Enhanced Creativity: Bully your GM into giving you +20 to basically all tests because to some degree, don’t all problems require a little bit of creativity to solve? High Pain Threshold: Sure, the mental disorder for being a Psi-Chi is somewhat inefficient compared to just buying High Pain Threshold as an Ego Trait, but it stacks with other High Pain Threshold effects because while GURPS can note that the effect of a psychic power or a mental trait is to give you the High Pain Threshold Advantage, which does not stack with itself, EP has no such restrictions. Continue fighting at maximum capacity longer than anyone else! Pattern Recognition: What Investigation, Research, or code-breaking test doesn’t, in some way, involve recognizing patterns? At least that’s what you should pester you GM with until he relents and just accepts that you get +20% all the time. Predictive Boost: +10 to anything that involves predicting the outcome of something? By now your GM should be very tired of arguing with you over when you get to apply bonuses from Psi-Chi sleights and this should come to a neat +10% to basically everything. Sensory Boost: This is +20 to basically every Perception test.
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Jan 5, 2022 21:35
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