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Mechanics aside, compared to Free League's Alien game I find it to be pretty lacking from a polish, presentation, and world-building standpoint. The visual design of the book is incredibly generic and doesn't lean into the terrific design sensibilities seen on screen beyond a loose, barely-there aesthetic at the edge of the analogue/digital divide. The actual art in the book is all well-painted, but the subjects and compositions are incredibly derivative of shots from the films and none stray outside the bounds of what we've already seen from this universe. We don't get a look at any locations other than generic background buildings despite many new places being described in the text. I would have loved to see a lot of the regions which were mentioned, like the LAX spaceport and warehouse district, the entertainment districts, the Santa Barbara archipelago (which iirc the comics already showed), the campus of Los Angeles University, etc. Anything new that expands the world. Also the writing of the flavor text is serviceable at best and clunky at worst in its weak attempt to at hard-boiled prose. I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't try to ape PKD's style, though not surprised. The hints of new invented concepts are often quite good, like everything surrounding the Empathizer and Sympathizer movements, which just makes it all the more frustrating that they do so little of it. Maybe my expectations were artificially high because of the quality of the Alien game and the fact that I adore the Blade Runner franchise and wanted something as fully-realized and well-crafted. The game very well may work like gangbusters as a group-play game, but until I can actually find a group to play with, I found the whole thing somewhat lacking. A somewhat weak start, but a solid foundation with a lot of potential. I'll keep buying whatever else they put out for it, I just wish it was something I could immediately fall in love with. e: Not that anyone cares, but for posterity—after really disliking the design of the city map in the book, I started playing around with the idea of creating my own more aesthetically-pleasing one which could be used as more of a quick reference guide during play. After diving into the 2049 on-screen graphics for research, I can see where the designer for this book got their inspiration for the layout for the graphic elements. I think the direction they chose was a misstep, though, because not only are the book designs lacking the subtlety and grace of the on-screen graphics, but the direction feels like a real misstep to begin with because the elements created for the screen are intended to look good in the background of a film and look good in movement, not actually be readable interfaces for real people or work as print designs. The LA map is a perfect example, where it's leaning heavily on what we see on screen in K's spinner (or maybe even using the same graphic) but on paper it's incredibly busy and hard to parse and lacking key information which a print map should have. feedmyleg fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Jun 19, 2022 |
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Jun 18, 2022 08:18
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Hadn't heart of a Blade Runner game but reading over all this: maybe some stories or genres inherently don't work for RPGs where the players automatically want to be the morally right good guys by default. Blade Runner's not really a thing where the protagonists start out questioning their role, or even one where the audience is supposed to identify with the protagonist.
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Jun 18, 2022 12:50
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I feel like 'you're not supposed to identify with the protagonist' makes it a poor choice for a role-playing game, but I am not a corporate executive so what do I know
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Jun 18, 2022 12:58
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Maybe for a role-playing game, but for a book you can sell with an official IP license, hoo boy!
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Jun 18, 2022 13:21
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Random thing: the Blade Runner PC game had a bit in the manual that talked about retiring replicants for money and using it to buy weapon upgrades. That is not actually in the game (there’s like one weapon upgrade and you don’t get it that way) but you just know some exec wrote it on a design document at some point because computer game. But then again, to convey the mood of the fiction correctly with the protagonist coming to appreciate the meaning and consequences of what they are doing it had to depend on replays, which aren’t a factor in RPGs, so Free League may have just trapped themselves.
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Jun 18, 2022 13:48
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I think you can have games where a player character doesn't "identify with" a character they're playing for various reasons, so long as the player is still comfortable and interested in playing that character. The issue comes in how player characters are morally framed within the game and the space the game's setting allows for the PCs. Like Blade Runner's most distinctive feature is being what amounts to government-endorsed contract killers in a dirty scifi noir world. The themes of identity and humanity and the related baggage around doing a job like that are compelling and worth exploring in an RPG. The running mystery of tracking down replicants and the paranoia around it are good hooks. But it's all pretty grim, and I think nowadays we'd all generally agree killing the replicants is morally wrong. I can see running a short game around the premise. I don't see how it'd be sustained across the classic multiple-meaty-supplements publication model without defaulting into generic scifi action/thriller things. And then you're falling into the same trap most licensed games do of undercutting all the actual themes and moral dilemmas of the setting so that you can keep the shallow aesthetics in service of making the world "gameable."
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Jun 18, 2022 16:13
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I think a lot of people like Blade Runner for its aesthetic primarily and the themes/characters/plot are all very secondary (or less). I've talked to plenty of people who just got something completely different out of the film than I did. If nothing else there was a pretty viral tweet last week where "looks like something out of blade runner" was being used as a pure, simple compliment. I also think it's just fine to play bad guys in your RPGs. If anything that seems to be the norm? Like the average Lawful Good Paladin in a DnD campaign is probably morally closer to Timothy McVeigh than the average, let alone good, person IRL. There is something to be said about framing and so on, like say what you will about Kill Puppies for Satan but it's pretty unambiguous that you're playing a shithead. All that said it still doesn't seem like particularly fertile soil for an RPG, at least to me. Most of the richness of the setting is very off-screen. I can kind of play around with some stuff to make it some combination of Blades in the Dark esque crime thriller and some elements of Demon: The Descent for the paranoia spy thriller hidden identity thing, but I think it'd be not super engaged with what people saw/loved about the movie.
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Jun 18, 2022 16:41
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Nuns with Guns posted:The themes of identity and humanity and the related baggage around doing a job like that are compelling and worth exploring in an RPG. .. But it’d need to be very different from a traditional RPG, and this one isn’t, unfortunately. Ditto with the Judge Dredd games.
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Jun 18, 2022 16:55
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Blade runner should be about a group of replicants trying to escape an implacable pursuing foe while dealing with their own programming limitations. Actually are there any games out there that provide mechanical support for playing robots trying to repurpose their programming to survive? That's kind of the idea behind much of engine heart but the mechanics are a little archaic.
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Jun 18, 2022 17:01
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Splicer posted:Blade runner should be about a group of replicants trying to escape an implacable pursuing foe while dealing with their own programming limitations. Promethean: The Created?
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Jun 18, 2022 17:04
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hyphz posted:.. But it’d need to be very different from a traditional RPG, and this one isn’t, unfortunately. Ditto with the Judge Dredd games. Yeah I’d agree with that. These aren’t things that are easy or even pleasant to build a massive long-running game world on without oversimplification or just taking a kind of black and white approach to the morality for the sake or justifying the premise beyond one arc. I haven’t seen the new movie yet but there’s a reason the first Blade Runner movie ends with Deckard going “gently caress this poo poo” and going on the lam.
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Jun 18, 2022 17:45
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Tulip posted:Promethean: The Created? Beat me to it. That’s literally its whole schtick, with the clarification that “robot” also means golems and various other varieties of sad pinocchios.
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Jun 18, 2022 18:41
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Tulip posted:Promethean: The Created? Wouldn't Changeling: The Lost and Demon: The Descent also fit, at least in a broad sense? Maybe even Deviant: The Renegades?
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Jun 18, 2022 19:46
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FirstAidKite posted:Wouldn't Changeling: The Lost and Demon: The Descent also fit, at least in a broad sense? Maybe even Deviant: The Renegades? Yeah, if you drop/reskin the explicit magic and add some grungy future tech, a solid half minimum of nWoD is at least Blade Runner-adjacent. But they were asking specifically about playing as replicants being hunted and figuring out what it means to be people without being human and that’s exactly what Promethean is designed to do. It’s on the nose enough that listing other things would be pragmatically indistinguishable from lying.
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Jun 18, 2022 20:15
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Tulip posted:Promethean: The Created?
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Jun 18, 2022 20:16
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Splicer posted:Is there one that requires slightly less hacking to run a bunch of station bots realising they haven't gotten any new orders since the humans had lifterbot bring that <error: object not found> aboard? ????????? That’s a starting group of characters without any hacking in Promethean.
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Jun 18, 2022 20:18
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^^^^ lol that is trueFirstAidKite posted:Wouldn't Changeling: The Lost and Demon: The Descent also fit, at least in a broad sense? Maybe even Deviant: The Renegades? I almost wrote DTD but then figured that would sacrifice clarity. CTL would also work I just don't know it as well as I haven't actually played or run it, while I'm very experienced with PTC at this point (it's creeping up on AW for total amount of time spent on a game). Splicer posted:Is there one that requires slightly less hacking to run a bunch of station bots realising they haven't gotten any new orders since the humans had lifterbot bring that <error: object not found> aboard? That is closer to DTD, whose whole schtick is "you used to be an unquestioning extension of god's will, then you developed the ability to question it so now you're a defective, outcast divine being." Though DTD would be kind of basically not great if the bots are not also trying to pretend they're not-bots to humans (though human vs bot might not be the divide, could take NieR's machine vs android for example, but you gotta have the deception element). Either way I don't know if I'd say any of them would be "minimal" hacking since, even if the premises match, I consider the mechanical core to be rotten and I haven't played a WOD without 8 million house rules in years (the vast majority of the house rules being "this subsystem? we're reducing it to a single roll").
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Jun 18, 2022 20:22
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Yeah this is all with the assumption of using nWoD and comparing the lines to each other : at its best, nWoD is functional and fine, I guess ; at its worst it's god drat Mummy or a bunch of poorly thought out subsystems tacked on that ruin what (little) is actually good about the core gameplay loop.
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Jun 18, 2022 21:24
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Tulip posted:Either way I don't know if I'd say any of them would be "minimal" hacking since, even if the premises match, I consider the mechanical core to be rotten and I haven't played a WOD without 8 million house rules in years (the vast majority of the house rules being "this subsystem? we're reducing it to a single roll").
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Jun 18, 2022 21:28
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Leraika posted:I feel like 'you're not supposed to identify with the protagonist' makes it a poor choice for a role-playing game, but I am not a corporate executive so what do I know That feels like it would be a problem for basically all types of fiction
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Jun 18, 2022 22:00
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Splicer posted:Blade runner should be about a group of replicants trying to escape an implacable pursuing foe while dealing with their own programming limitations. The problem is that the setting smacks you on this. If you're a Nexus-6, the absolute best you can hope for is to escape for the remainder of 4 years then die (although I don't know if that's what you meant by "programming limitations" which are very variable based on which version you're reading/watching). If you're a late Nexus, you aren't being hunted just for being a rep.
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Jun 18, 2022 22:37
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Surely being in organized crime with a side of contract assassinations and/or cultism is morally wrong, but we like Blades in the Dark too.
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Jun 18, 2022 22:46
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Splicer posted:Yeah "but I don't want to run wod" was my original response Whelp, guess I should learn to read. My bad. Moderately reskinned Monsterhearts? I feel like there's something closer out of the box, but it's not coming to me.
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Jun 18, 2022 22:47
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My Lovely Horse posted:Surely being in organized crime with a side of contract assassinations and/or cultism is morally wrong, but we like Blades in the Dark too.
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Jun 18, 2022 23:03
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hyphz posted:The problem is that the setting smacks you on this. If you're a Nexus-6, the absolute best you can hope for is to escape for the remainder of 4 years then die (although I don't know if that's what you meant by "programming limitations" which are very variable based on which version you're reading/watching). If you're a late Nexus, you aren't being hunted just for being a rep. If you're a Nexus 8 (Bautista in the second film) then you are. The era this is set in would be perfect for that.
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Jun 18, 2022 23:06
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Xiahou Dun posted:Whelp, guess I should learn to read. My bad.
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Jun 18, 2022 23:07
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My Lovely Horse posted:Surely being in organized crime with a side of contract assassinations and/or cultism is morally wrong, but we like Blades in the Dark too. I'm going to unwind the two issues balled up in this. First: I don't object to playing immoral or whatever characters in a game overall. You're playing scummy criminals in Blades and that's fine. Even the functional-but-not-formally-finished Bluecoats supplement acknowledges that at best you're a "lightly corrupt" government-backed street gang. In any case you're going in knowing you're not playing "good" people, and you're acknowledging you're fine with that. When I said before that I think you can play games and not "identify with" a character, Blades is a good example of one of game where that's pretty possible because you're (probably) not a murderer, thief, devil-worshiping cultist, whatever. There might be some things you relate to, but the characters in the game (probably) have a lot fewer compunctions about breaking the law than you. Second: What I personally don't think works well is Blade Runner an ongoing premise. The small glimpses we get of the world are centered around very narrow and definitive hooks of "hunt down the replicants" and "internally debate about if it's wrong to treat the replicants like poo poo?" When you picture playing a Blade Runner game most people would expect both the Blade Runners and replicants to be at the center of it. It sounds like the core book that just came out is specifically about playing as a team of Blade Runners. So the core gameplay loop is detective-ing out and hunting down replicants. As a short game, that seems fine, I just don't see how you could make one or more D&D splatbook-sized books out of it without spreading the whole concept thin. Blades is a game about doing whatever it takes to claw your way up to a place of security or burn yourself out trying. The jobs a crew takes aren't solely and completely about hunting down a small band of rogue artificial humans who probably just want to escape a short life of slavery and abuse. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Jun 18, 2022 |
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Jun 18, 2022 23:46
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Yeah I think you'd want to spin out from the "be like the movie Blade Runner" into like...using some of the surface aesthetics to spin out into more expansive cyberpunk. How much would really be Blade Runner specific and why you'd choose Blade Runner over Infinity or Shadowrun or, uh, Cyberpunk, well, open question. I've been surprised sometimes with how far you can stretch an aesthetic. To me the biggest one is The Road Warrior, which is like, somewhere between 1 and 4 movies* of which the one that did the most inspiration is frankly kind of bad, but I've played half a dozen video games and The King poo poo of All RPGs are based on it but really just from a kind of basic aesthetics level. There's just something about fighting with cars in a post apocalyptic desert that really speaks to the Australian/American soul. *a lot of this stuff came out before Fury Road so including it feels dishonest but I mean, it does exist now Splicer posted:Yeah "but I don't want to run wod" was my original response I can't lie that's a fair response as a rule. I'm not even sure my current mage campaign is really WOD at this point cuz we removed merits, beats, most skills, social maneuvering, huge swathes of combat, etc. Like I like a lot of the outermost layers of CoD stuff - I like the things in Promethean and Demon and Vampire that is like, the supernatural template stuff and specific to those lines. But the stuff that's like, the core base rules just suuuuuucks.
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Jun 19, 2022 00:23
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Tulip posted:I can't lie that's a fair response as a rule. I'm not even sure my current mage campaign is really WOD at this point cuz we removed merits, beats, most skills, social maneuvering, huge swathes of combat, etc. Splicer fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Jun 19, 2022 |
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Jun 19, 2022 01:32
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Finally found a time where I can talk about Promethean and it'd be relevant to the conversation and of course it ends up being in the context of Blade Runner, a thing I know nothing about lol. The true Promethean experience.
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Jun 19, 2022 01:40
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Tulip posted:Yeah I think you'd want to spin out from the "be like the movie Blade Runner" into like...using some of the surface aesthetics to spin out into more expansive cyberpunk. How much would really be Blade Runner specific and why you'd choose Blade Runner over Infinity or Shadowrun or, uh, Cyberpunk, well, open question. Don't forget Fist of The North Star deriving a lot of its aesthetics from Mad Max and in turn establishing the visual tropes of Post Apocalyptic anime, manga, and video games to a degree that can still be felt to this day in Japan
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Jun 19, 2022 01:43
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FirstAidKite posted:Finally found a time where I can talk about Promethean and it'd be relevant to the conversation and of course it ends up being in the context of Blade Runner, a thing I know nothing about lol. The true Promethean experience.
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Jun 19, 2022 01:51
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Splicer posted:I'm not asking in the context of blade runner! I'm asking in the general case of an RPG where you play as specific purpose robots trying to adapt to situations beyond the scope of their original programming. Like the story "Who can replace a man?" or this short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49t-WWTx0RQ
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Jun 19, 2022 01:53
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Hostile V posted:Engine Hearts is an old indie darling about a bunch of robots and sapient item machines living in a world without humans. Splicer posted:Actually are there any games out there that provide mechanical support for playing robots trying to repurpose their programming to survive? That's kind of the idea behind much of engine heart but the mechanics are a little archaic. Plus it's point buy with flaws. (I ran a short game in it ages ago. It was fun but I started quickly bumping into the limitations) Splicer fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Jun 19, 2022 |
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Jun 19, 2022 01:57
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Leraika posted:I feel like 'you're not supposed to identify with the protagonist' makes it a poor choice for a role-playing game, but I am not a corporate executive so what do I know thx John Wick
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Jun 19, 2022 02:11
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Splicer posted:I'm not asking in the context of blade runner! I'm asking in the general case of an RPG where you play as specific purpose robots trying to adapt to situations beyond the scope of their original programming. Like the story "Who can replace a man?" or this short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49t-WWTx0RQ A long time ago I came across an rpg that was in progress called something like Robots and Rapiers. In it, you play Renissance era swashbuckling robots - but in reality, the world was created as an amusement park for human guests and all the robots were programmed to believe that their world was real for the humans amusement. A huge war broke out and they left. Now robots are starting to realize "Hey, there's something strange going on." The PCs are some of those robots and have to decide if they're going to keep the facade up or let everyone know what's up. The interesting thing was the the GM made player's characters for them, but as the PCs began to push against their programming they lose features and can put them where they want. So if you start off as a brash swordsman who only lets his sword do the talking, you can overwrite your programming when you fight it and become someone who talks their way out of situations. Googling it gives me a link to the website which says it's sold out, some links about the alpha (which might have been what I read), and what seem to be some  site that have what I think are also the alpha rules. Maybe someone has read it or knows if the full game came out?
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Jun 19, 2022 02:20
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Splicer posted:So core rules aside, what does pta do to support the whole "working within my limited programming" thing? I'd say there's a few avenues that Prometheans have for that, but the big one is Refinement & Role, which some players over in the WOD thread have even complained feels too much like playing a programmed robot: refinements are stuff like "Copper" and "Lead" and such and define what part of life the Promethean is currently attempting to mimic in their quest to become a real boy, and "Role" is a more narrow focus within that. So a "Copper Sage" is expected to be act like a wise know-it-all that is shepherding concealed knowledge. You fulfill the role by either helping another Sage, or by teaching somebody to fill in for you. Conversely you can break role by dispensing wisdom freely rather than only rationing it out to the deserving. So you have a role, and that role has limits on your behavior. How tight those limits are seems to be a GM thing - you can make it very tight such that anything you can do that isn't on-role is a breaking point, I ran it as only things that are really contradictory to role cause breaking points. In addition to roles having limits where you break out of them by going too against role, if you stick in a role too long you can become Stuck In A Rut, or further Petrified. Petrificati are basically a type of antagonist that Prometheans can become by getting too into a given role and deciding they just want to be a cop without experiencing more fully what humans can be. So I'd say that if you wanted to simulate that robots part, the players start as petrificati, or even just stuck in a rut. All that said I think for a long campaign this might not be what you seem to be about? Like the point of Promethean is that the PCs are people who learn, bit by painful bit, how to expand themselves into full people with the full range of human emotions and experiences, so they'd outgrow the starting limits of their programming quite quickly. But "I am a computer that was put into a body and programmed to be x" is...really a very "canon" starting point for Prometheans. I can't like, seriously encourage people to get into PTC if they aren't already into WOD but there's some stuff there I guess you could take and graft onto a Transit or Monsterhearts game.
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Jun 19, 2022 03:50
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Xiahou Dun posted:Yeah this is all with the assumption of using nWoD and comparing the lines to each other : at its best, nWoD is functional and fine, I guess ; at its worst it's god drat Mummy or a bunch of poorly thought out subsystems tacked on that ruin what (little) is actually good about the core gameplay loop. I remember when they were doing the previews for Mummy, theys aid they were brinking back powers that changed the dice Tn and I went "...why?"
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Jun 19, 2022 04:22
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MonsieurChoc posted:I remember when they were doing the previews for Mummy, theys aid they were brinking back powers that changed the dice Tn and I went "...why?" That was the dumbest loving idea and it still pisses me off. I know for a fact they didn’t bother to check the math on that because anyone who could knows it’s an absolutely bonkers thing to do from the outset.
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Jun 19, 2022 05:53
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MonsieurChoc posted:I remember when they were doing the previews for Mummy, theys aid they were brinking back powers that changed the dice Tn and I went "...why?" In fact we know why: it was to make a rhetorical splash.
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Jun 19, 2022 05:57
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