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Gort posted:I was hoping to do a "Q" and just assign them some fun gadgets and see if they could find ways to use them This is absolutely the way, it's been a hot minute since I played/ran the game but 2e streamlines the gear part considerably by giving characters a set number of item slots that they can grab stuff for on a per-mission basis. If the DM offers some suggested items up as part of mission briefings then that can both help speed up gear selection and let you foreshadow potential challenges ahead (or reward people who pick their own items by going "ah ha here is a challenge that your pick is good for where the recommended items would have fallen flat!")
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Aug 28, 2022 20:06
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James Bond 007, SpyCraft 2e, and strangely enough, the TSR Indiana Jones game, all had pretty decent vehicle/foot chase systems. e;f slightly b
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Aug 28, 2022 22:34
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Lichtenstein posted:[Interesting points about cars] Comedy solution: All cars are like Flintstones cars, everyone has to chip in to keep them moving. That way you involve the whole party. More serious solution: Have some other relevant skill pull double duty as The Car Skill so that The Car Guy can also do some stuff elsewhere(or, perhaps, it's a general "riding/piloting" skill and in dungeons he whips out a hoverboard or a scooter or something else he can do sick tricks on in narrow environs). Less serious solution: Everyone is the car guy, because the entire game takes place on endless highways, even the dungeon is trundling along on giant treads.
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Aug 28, 2022 22:56
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Just joined a West Marches game for GURPS. Excited to try out the system.
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Aug 28, 2022 23:28
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Nessus posted:Car chases are surprisingly under-represented in RPGs given their prominence in action films. Nights Black Agents has very good chase mechanics. They are so rock solid that the later GM's Resource book repurposed the chase mechanics from the core book for other dramatic contests - such as duels, hacking, infiltrations etc.
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Aug 28, 2022 23:38
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PurpleXVI posted:Less serious solution: Everyone is the car guy, because the entire game takes place on endless highways, even the dungeon is trundling along on giant treads. Ah, Autoduel.
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Aug 28, 2022 23:41
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trapstar posted:Just joined a West Marches game for GURPS. Excited to try out the system. Is it going to use the rotating party membership that I think is an element of west march? Or set party but still an "unleveled" game world the party can interact with simulationistly? Or something else?
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Aug 28, 2022 23:41
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Is it a problem if one character in an RPG session sometimes takes the wheel and is the big star for an extended scene? Obviously it's an issue if it's happening all the time, but I don't know that the Driver stepping up and running the show for half an hour or so while the other players take the backseat is bad for the game. Provided that the game as a whole does a good job of spreading those big standout moments around over different players at different times.
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Aug 28, 2022 23:42
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Colonel Cool posted:Is it a problem if one character in an RPG session sometimes takes the wheel and is the big star for an extended scene? Obviously it's an issue if it's happening all the time, but I don't know that the Driver stepping up and running the show for half an hour or so while the other players take the backseat is bad for the game. Provided that the game as a whole does a good job of spreading those big standout moments around over different players at different times. This is an issue starship-havin' games have also encountered.
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Aug 29, 2022 00:06
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Jack B Nimble posted:Is it going to use the rotating party membership that I think is an element of west march? Or set party but still an "unleveled" game world the party can interact with simulationistly? Or something else? Not sure yet. Although the main host did say they currently have 3 different DMs. Never played a West March before or GURPS.
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Aug 29, 2022 00:19
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If you’re talking about a Fast and the Furious style game and you’re still thinking about the PCs behind the wheel of a singular car, you’re doing it wrong. Also, Agon as a Fast and the Furious game is perfect.
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Aug 29, 2022 00:24
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CitizenKeen posted:Also, Agon as a Fast and the Furious game is perfect. This is it. The correct take.
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Aug 29, 2022 00:42
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Oh dear lord what is she doing to that poor Tyger And when the fans cast down their spears And watered heaven with their tears Did she smile, her work to see? Did she who made the Glitch, make thee?
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Aug 29, 2022 01:02
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trapstar posted:Not sure yet. Although the main host did say they currently have 3 different DMs. Never played a West March before or GURPS. I'm playing in a westmarsh campaign and how we do it is we have 3-4 GMs a night, and people just jump into whatever table, so no GM will necessarily have the same players every week.,
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Aug 29, 2022 02:36
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Magnetic North posted:I swear someone posted somewhat recently about how there were great chase mechanics in, of all things, some old rear end James Bond RPG? I looked at that game when I was making Strike's chase mechanics. I borrowed some ideas from it, some from Burning Wheel's Duel of Wits. Tried to scrape off some of the overly crufty crunch in the 007 rules, remove some of the imbalance from Duel of Wits. And I think they turned out great. Obviously Strike's biggest draw is the tactical combat, but I really think the chase rules have a lot going for them. They make the driver the star character in a scene, sure. But the scene isn't half an hour, it's like 3-6 minutes, so it's not a problem at all. No different than anyone getting spotlight time. That's the thing about chases, duels, hacking, or anything that highlights one character: they should be short enough so that other players don't feel bored or left out.
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Aug 29, 2022 05:03
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CitizenKeen posted:If you’re talking about a Fast and the Furious style game and you’re still thinking about the PCs behind the wheel of a singular car, you’re doing it wrong. F&F as an Agon game is literally something John Harper has talked about, can confirm.
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Aug 29, 2022 05:58
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Lichtenstein posted:It's largely a contextual problem, like with hackers in cyberpunks, but worse. The focus on cars really tends to warp games and the GMs are only willing to go that far for them. There's basically two possibilities: an occasional car chase here and there or letting a player be the Car Guy.
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Aug 29, 2022 09:18
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Splicer posted:A good car chase is like a good fight scene, it's not just about the chase. If you're playing a game where one guy is "the driver" and now you're driving after/away from something, everyone else should be doing stuff like shooting at the target, fending off people trying to jump on, trying to hack/disarm/protect the maguffin etc. The best RPG "chase scene" I ever played was in FFGSW where we were driving a killdozer towards the mob base while they circled us and tried to bomb out our tires. Yes, which is precisely why ensemble casts of RPGs are a problem here. If you were running a game for, say, two players, it's pretty easy to give them things to do. Hell, it's even easier to just split the players (be it in a 'don't worry, you'll get your own scene too' or 'and now we cut to you disarming the bomb in the basement' way). But if every single time you want to run a car chase you need to account for car guy, gun guy, a tiktok influencer, a paraplegic hacker and a cat burglar all having things to do... you're not going to have it regularly come up in an organic way. Maybe set up a big setpiece scene or two, but you're not going to call for it spontaneously because a drug deal went wrong or something.
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Aug 29, 2022 10:08
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Just make everyone a specialist, and accept that every scene should be one person's time to shine while everyone else cheers them on (yes, combat included)
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Aug 29, 2022 12:21
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Alderman posted:Just make everyone a specialist, and accept that every scene should be one person's time to shine while everyone else cheers them on (yes, combat included) I can't imagine a better way to make me cash out and watch stuff on youtube than if there's a scene where my participation is literally completely irrelevant.
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Aug 29, 2022 14:00
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Yeah, putting a particular party member in the spotlight for one dice roll where they disarm the bomb or get the secret code from the ambassador or whatever is fine. An entire combat encounter or in-depth car chase that goes on for minutes is just going to bore most of the party stiff. If your game has an indepth minigame for a particular activity, you gotta include everyone in it.
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Aug 29, 2022 14:40
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Alderman posted:Just make everyone a specialist, and accept that every scene should be one person's time to shine while everyone else cheers them on (yes, combat included)
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Aug 29, 2022 14:51
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Lichtenstein posted:Yes, which is precisely why ensemble casts of RPGs are a problem here. If you were running a game for, say, two players, it's pretty easy to give them things to do. Hell, it's even easier to just split the players (be it in a 'don't worry, you'll get your own scene too' or 'and now we cut to you disarming the bomb in the basement' way). But if every single time you want to run a car chase you need to account for car guy, gun guy, a tiktok influencer, a paraplegic hacker and a cat burglar all having things to do... you're not going to have it regularly come up in an organic way. Maybe set up a big setpiece scene or two, but you're not going to call for it spontaneously because a drug deal went wrong or something.
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Aug 29, 2022 15:08
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I'm just going to say it again - everybody has a car. We solved this problem in D&D 4E - everybody can contribute to combat. Everybody is a combat-monkey and... We solved this problem in Blades in the Dark - everybody can contribute to a heist. Everybody is a seasoned criminal and... You want to do an epic car chase more than once or twice? Give everybody a car. Everybody can contribute to a car chase. Everybody is street-racer and... Dominic is a racer and a tough. Brian's a racer and a roguish con-man. Tej is a racer and a gadgeteer. It's made even better because - unlike combat, wherein failure is often correlated to death - in a chase you can have people halfway through the scene be taken out (crashing into a bank vault, flipping their car, etc.). The risk of failure can be a lot higher than in combat, even though you still get up to wild shenanigans.
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Aug 29, 2022 15:50
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Prime Time Adventures has a set up where its not that you specialize in a skill but that you specialize in a session. So session 3 you're hyper competent, session 4 you're incompetent (arbitrary examples, its planned out in advance by the whole party before hand), and other sessions you're normal. It's an interesting conceit. And even with that, even when I was in my episodes where I was "weak," I didn't feel like I had nothing to do, it was just less important for my character than other sessions. Which makes me think that the deeper failing is RPGs where you're never forced to show your weakpoints. My GM is very proud that when we played Transit, he managed to force me to play diplomat several times despite my being the worst character at it. It was good! It created messes that the actual good diplomats on the team had to clean up, which was a more interesting challenge for both of us than "the Diplomat just has a moment in the sun, the Warrior just has a moment in the sun, etc."
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Aug 29, 2022 15:51
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Alderman posted:Just make everyone a specialist, and accept that every scene should be one person's time to shine while everyone else cheers them on (yes, combat included) Yeah this tends to fit my experiences too, though maybe not to quite such an extreme. I think it's totally normal for players to not be on screen for sometimes hours at a time and it's not a problem at all, given some caveats. I think the most important one being that what's happening has to be interesting, which tends to mean that there has to be both meaningful stakes, and a real chance of those stakes happening. D&D combat, for example, tends to be as interesting to watch as drying paint, and I think at least part of that is the fact that the stakes of most fights tends to be expending some replenishable resources. The group having good chemistry and caring about the overall story is very important too. I recently ran a two hour Burning Wheel pvp fight while the third player was nowhere near the scene and was still engaged to the point of literally shouting encouragement at her side in the fight throughought the fight because the stakes was one party dying, and if her side didn't win her head was next up on the chopping block.
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Aug 29, 2022 15:54
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CitizenKeen posted:I'm just going to say it again - everybody has a car. Splicer fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Aug 29, 2022 |
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Aug 29, 2022 16:27
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Copy mad max fury road every time
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Aug 29, 2022 16:41
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FirstAidKite posted:Copy mad max fury road Apocalypse World keeps winning.
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Aug 29, 2022 16:44
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Splicer posted:A drug deal going wrong is the exact situation where this works perfectly. Presumably you're the ones being chased, assume multiple angry drug dealers chasing you. Drive guy is driving, gun guy is shooting, cat burglar is also shooting or throwing caltrops or whatever their combat gimmick is, the hacker is yelling directions over an earpiece while flipping through a ludicrous number of Google maps windows, and the tik tok influencer... look if you have a game which supports "gun guy" and "tik tok influencer" in every other scene you can work out something for them to do in the car chase. Stream it for clout? Sure, a bombastic gigachase with dozens of disposable mooks - this is a pretty narrow range of things to do with a car! And if you have a player that just blew their chargen budget on driving skill because he saw Bullitt last week, there's so much other stuff they'd probably like to do. How about sneakily tailing a guy that may or may not end up in a chase if blown? How about an honest-to-god race to build up street cred? Delivering 400 cases of Coors beer on a ridiculously short deadline to salvage a con that's falling apart? Trivial if you have a player or two, increasingly unworkable when you have to deal with an entire clown car. It's not impossible, of course, just a massive pain in the rear end compared to slotting and deftly compartmentalizing other rando roles into your heist or special agenting or whatever. Like, takes for example the iconic troublesome specialist that is a hacker. If you can get over the dream of making an elaborate cyberdungeon and embrace it being just a regular skill, like lockpicking, that's not that big of an overarching focus, you don't honestly have to do jack poo poo to accomodate it. Like, sure, you'll throw out some alarms and cameras for your big bank heist adventure, but if the session unexpectedly swerves into players trying to first steal the identity of a dunkin donuts store manager you can just assume the ability to operate things remotely and that's it. Yeah, the doors have a keycode lock I guess. Sure, you can make the phone ring. I guess you can plug in and add yourself to the employee list in a database, why not? The only real limitation is don't set your adventure in a damp cave patrolled by guards that don't even have a mobile phone on them - which isn't really that big of a ask. Now if you want to accomodate the car scenes, there's a bunch more practical assumptions - there needs to be something to do outside of buildings, specifically requiring high mobility above what's considered an everyday skill sufficient for most people's everyday purposes. Somehow interwoven with whatever is going on (you don't want your wheelman guy perpetually sit and sniff their own farts for the entire session and then get one obligatory getaway scene so they gently caress off), preferably involving other players and also somehow being simultaneously inherently high-profile and not singlehandedly ruining the entire game if botched. And on a right scale, where it cannot be handled on feet or easily bypassed by escaping to a place impassable for vehicles. Again, that's not impossible and not all that 9000 IQ to set up, but if you need to include it in every adventure so the player doesn't feel like they just wasted their chargen allowance (and/or that you're poo poo at reading their signals of what they want the game to be about), then the fourth time you do it, it'll get pretty obvious that you're bending over backwards to accomodate it in increasingly contrived ways. It's just a surprisingly niche skill, like pottery or safecracking, that just kinda requires you to make sure you make some upfront work accomodating it. But where it's usually trivial to slap on some safes on mcguffins, hollywood driving is kinda closer to pottery in how it actually relates to the usual adventure setups - it just requires a strong preemptive accomodation. PS. Of course, the real trouble comes from someone wanting to explicitly make cars their thing, especially if there's opportunity cost in investing in car skills at chargen. If it's one of those systems that simply uses a handful of general attributes for everything and you just want to throw in a chase or two for a change of pace, it shouldn't be that big of a deal to skirt these structural problems and snipe a point in the story when it happens to fit.
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Aug 29, 2022 16:46
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Tulip posted:Apocalypse World keeps winning. Helps that the Driver is in fact still pretty useful without their car. AW isn't really a game about car chases but it doesn't suffer for their inclusion.
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Aug 29, 2022 16:47
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Splicer posted:So this depends on whether you're running a game about car chases or a game which has a car chase in it. In the former yeah, everyone is car guy + (whatever), or car guy whose car does X Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors style. If you're running a gun game where there's a car chase then your have gun + car guy, gun + tiktok guy, etc, so you're in a chase? Great! Now everyone is shooting guns... in a car!!! Except gun + car guy who is driving the car (but still also possibly shooting guns) Oh, absolutely. But I feel like there are two separate questions: 1. How do I make car chases interesting in a game about car chases? Give everybody a car. 2. How do I make car chases interesting in a game not about car chases? Don't engage in the subsystem. How do I [engage in the subsystem] when only one player is designed for [subsystem] and the other players don't have a meaningful way to engage with [subsystem] is a very old question, going back at least to "dumb uncharismatic fighter at the diplomat's dinner". Your game is about [thing]. Do [thing]. When not doing [thing], keep it short and sweet.
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Aug 29, 2022 16:48
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The last time I was in a game like this, Shadowrun, the chase was fine because our three person party had a driver, a gunman, and a mage casting barrier spells on the road behind us. If it was a different game, like one where only the driver would be rolling, just compress it down into few quick but impactful Dice rolls; let it genuinely matter if the driver succeeds or not but don't spend a combat's level of granularity and real life time on what should amount to "I'm the one that can pick a lock" or "I'm the one that can lie".
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Aug 29, 2022 16:50
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Shadowrun dealt with the hacker/rigger problem by breaking down the barrier between the two. If you're not driving and you're not hacking, you've got drones, so you're still actually driving. (It isn't actually fixed in Shadowrun because each these specialties requires an all-consuming about of money, to say nothing of Essence for cyberware, but it's a useful object lesson.)
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Aug 29, 2022 16:53
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I think an issue being missed here is that it needs more than multiple rolls to make a sub-game. It's the same problem that plagued "skill challenges" in 4e. Even if we remove the problem with the ensemble cast and say that everyone's a driver and they're racing, you're still just rolling Drive over and over unless you somehow model some detail about the handling of the car or the area being navigated.
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Aug 29, 2022 17:03
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Right, that's why unless you're playing in a robust system like Shadowrun you make it, like, two rolls. The first is a regular old drive test to sort of set the stage (are the cops right on your tail? Or do we get to see a couple squad cars wipe out in the initial scramble? Does one hot shot unmarked car stay in their tail no matter what?) Then you give the a few options to try something dangerous, like do they take the highway in ramp where they can go flat out, or weave into the narrow side street, or maybe into the construction site? It lets the player (s) decide what might be best based on the particulars of their car, where they're going etc and then you make one more modified dive roll and it's over.
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Aug 29, 2022 17:13
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I could easily see a Car Wars style game having a number of more granular aspects of driving skill and while I only know of Car Wars itself through ads in SJG house press, I imagine it does have more detail than "Drive," even if I wouldn't be shocked if there was a top level "Driving" stat on some point.
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Aug 29, 2022 17:28
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Tulip posted:Helps that the Driver is in fact still pretty useful without their car. I’ve also seen some inventive AW games set in the Fallout setting where the Driver’s vehicle is reskinned as power armor.
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Aug 29, 2022 17:41
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Jack B Nimble posted:Right, that's why unless you're playing in a robust system like Shadowrun you make it, like, two rolls. The first is a regular old drive test to sort of set the stage (are the cops right on your tail? Or do we get to see a couple squad cars wipe out in the initial scramble? Does one hot shot unmarked car stay in their tail no matter what?) Then you give the a few options to try something dangerous, like do they take the highway in ramp where they can go flat out, or weave into the narrow side street, or maybe into the construction site? It lets the player (s) decide what might be best based on the particulars of their car, where they're going etc and then you make one more modified dive roll and it's over. Which is fine if it's a car chase happening incidentally to something else, and the driver PC has other options available. But if it's a Fast and the Furious game, then the races need to be the climactic encounters, and you can't get away with doing one of those in 2 minutes.
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Aug 29, 2022 17:50
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I think I've said it before in this thread even, but the only games I run tend to have discrete powers (4e, Sentinels of the Multiverse, etc.) and I run chases as just fights (because my chase scene inspiration is generally just old beat 'em up video game stages, like Sewer Surfin from Turtles in Time). I just have my players reskin their moves on the fly to be things like "I shoot streetlights out in front of him forcing him to slow down" and "I bend a fender into a makeshit grappling hook and hurl it at the enemy car, dragging it back towards us." Meanwhile I always have the enemy just backed up by hordes of random minion vehicles popping up out of random directions and side streets, because that's how chases work in video games for some reason, and that also gives the players a bunch to do. Generally I don't even worry about who is driving unless some player wants to do it, that's not part of my model anyway. It's just a fight where the background elements are doing a lot of parallax scrolling. Edit: To be clear, the reason I run them as just fight scenes is largely because I'm super lazy at story writing and don't find the binary question posed by chase scenes (does the bad guy get away) to be a fun thing to write two answers for. So I run them as fight scenes because they still carry the "what amount of resource drain will this scene impose on you" that any other fight does, plus you get to do cool reskinning. theironjef fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Aug 29, 2022 |
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