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going through my podcasts the other day I found that RolePlaying Public Radio has just done an episode for playtesting Red Markets 2nd Edition. As it turns out, the official announcement that Red Markets 2e was in development was made back in June of this year. I haven't listened to the entire episode yet but it starts with perhaps one of the biggest changes, where the group can elect to have a job simply yield 10 Bounty per 1 Haul instead of going through the whole Negotiation minigame, which is a huge load off my mind as this was always a daunting ball of mechanics before you ever got to the meat-and-potatoes of the game. So far I've also identified refinements to the skill system, and changes to rules when fighting Zombies/Casualties so that the distance of the Casualties, and the amount of Casualties, no longer have to be tracked separately. I'm a huge fan of Red Markets - still have an original hardcover of the first run, so I'm very excited about the game getting a new lease on life.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:14
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I like the idea of Negotiation a lot, but yes, in my one stab at running RM (via the very complete and complex QuickStart adventure, mostly for ease since I did read the full book first) it was really just Way Too Much to get your head around at the very start of the game, especially since it then has almost no bearing on gameplay during the actual mission. I like Red Markets 1 very much as an artifact and a statement of intent, but it probably does need a lot of editing and adjustment to be a good game manual.
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Aug 10, 2023 16:24
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Red Markets rules but negotiation sucks. It's a mandatory minigame you play at the beginning of the game... to see if you get to play the game. It's not even that difficult, if you've got the right character class in the party then that guy can just roll his negotiation skills and shoot all the way up to the top of the track. But then it's just a class tax, and calls into question why it's in the game at all. There's not any decision making or even any actual negotiating. You don't give up something to get something else, or make a false offer to disguise your true intentions. You just push as hard as you can while the other guy pushes back equally hard. In the episode where he lays out the 2e changes, Caleb admits that even he didn't use the negotiation rules when he ran the game on the show. Which makes sense. If you're running an actual play show and have a scenario in mind to fit into a three hour podcast slot, you aren't going to spend the first hour determining whether the players get to go on the adventure and what the stakes are. Other promising changes workshopped in the episode include a revision to the skill system to just use the standard stat/skill combo from every other RPG. Caleb finally admits that Ross was right about the dedicated door-holding skill being a bad idea. Lore is probably getting segmented into its own section of a two or three book PHB/DMG set, which I think is the wrong decision. I think the hundreds of pages of backstory should be cut down to almost nothing. Red Markets is a superb setting because of how well it communicates its themes through gameplay, not because of its tedious lore filibuster.
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Aug 10, 2023 16:50
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This all sounds pretty good. Red Markets is currently in the fun to read, sounds hard to play category for me so streamlining is very welcome
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Aug 10, 2023 16:54
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Ross also goes into the changes he'd make to Base Raiders, which I also largely agree with. Greatly streamlined power creation system (the one in the book is bloated and borderline unusable) and a reduced emphasis on managing XP debt from powers acquired in-play (Ross himself rarely used the power acquisition rules in his games). In many ways Base Raiders is the opposite of Red Markets. Red Markets' premise sounds dull as poo poo (yet another zombie apocalypse, this time with a focus on economics) and has some of the best macro-level systems design and environmental storytelling I've ever seen in a game. Base Raiders has a rock solid setting (Venture Brothers, but you're treasure hunters looting the abandoned Venture compound for super science) and possibly the worst implementation of the FATE system ever. The power creation system is nonfunctional and the rules don't provide any actual support for the core premise. It's a dungeon crawler without any rules for building and stocking dungeons, other than a price sheet for ripping copper wire out of the walls.
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Aug 10, 2023 17:26
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Matt Forbeck just published the Marvel Multiverse RPG and going through it, it has the same problem every super hero game has: enemies are created exactly the same as heroes, which means if you aren't using AIM Lackeys or Doctor Octopus straight from the book, as a GM, you're gonna have to actually create, from scratch, every. single. villain. which is exhausting and taxing on the GM. When will more games understand what 4e did, that monsters and heroes are different and serve different purposes and should have different creation rules?
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Aug 10, 2023 20:25
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Shrecknet posted:Matt Forbeck just published the Marvel Multiverse RPG and going through it, it has the same problem every super hero game has: enemies are created exactly the same as heroes, which means if you aren't using AIM Lackeys or Doctor Octopus straight from the book, as a GM, you're gonna have to actually create, from scratch, every. single. villain. which is exhausting and taxing on the GM. When will more games understand what 4e did, that monsters and heroes are different and serve different purposes and should have different creation rules? I feel like this is one of many ways in which the superhero genre as seen in comics is a surprisingly poor fit for an RPG game, or at least ones built along the tactical wargame lineage of D&D. Like, whenever a superhero has a significant power boost or addition to their power suite it’s a really big deal that usually comes along with its own storyline and usually goes away eventually, whereas in RPG circles it’s kind of unusual if characters do not continually make incremental or sizeable improvements in power and skill.
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Aug 10, 2023 20:49
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in the main book they give 2 options: either run stories that take place at various levels (so the players are playing daredevil and moon knight, thwart kingpins plan to dig up some ancient artifact, but then it turns out to be a shiar space egg, so now those same players switch from dd and mk to playing Thor and hulk blasting into space to punch god) or to just give them a power level bump at the end of every 6th game/story arc ending, which is more in line w the heroes journey but eminently unbelievable when a tier 1 guy like Hawkeye in the course of a years play passes spidey to become silver surfer
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Aug 10, 2023 20:53
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Tarnop posted:This all sounds pretty good. Red Markets is currently in the fun to read, sounds hard to play category for me so streamlining is very welcome My experience with it was that the book has a really hard time explaining the finer details of certain things, but once you understand what it's trying to say with its sometimes overly vague descriptions and poor organization of information, it's a very easy system to run in practice. I put some of the blame for this on the Quickplay being poorly written, but the main Red Markets book really, really needed another editing pass. Once you ignore the negotiation minigame, the system is a breeze to run and its tips for having players design their own missions are good too. I kinda feel like this game winged itself a bit with its huge lore dump at the front of the book and confusing organization, because it is a game that I think a lot of people would be able to run if the book were better. As it is, this is one of my favorite examples of an RPG text and the game described therein being very different things. Red Markets the book needs a lot of work. Red Markets the game (outside of negotiation) is one of the best resource management scavenger games I've played.
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Aug 10, 2023 21:00
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Shrecknet posted:in the main book they give 2 options: either run stories that take place at various levels (so the players are playing daredevil and moon knight, thwart kingpins plan to dig up some ancient artifact, but then it turns out to be a shiar space egg, so now those same players switch from dd and mk to playing Thor and hulk blasting into space to punch god) or to just give them a power level bump at the end of every 6th game/story arc ending, which is more in line w the heroes journey but eminently unbelievable when a tier 1 guy like Hawkeye in the course of a years play passes spidey to become silver surfer Superhero stories in the Western mold don't really include characters "levelling up" or equipping new gear very often, aside from in their origin (going from "wow, how do I use these powers?" to "I'm using my powers!") and it's always awkward when games (e.g. Marvel's Avengers) try to crowbar a loot system into the genre. Honestly, classic D&D-style level-ups feel more appropriate for shonen stories, which much more frequently revolve around characters acquiring new abilities and powers to face more dangerous foes.
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Aug 10, 2023 21:00
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Parkreiner posted:I feel like this is one of many ways in which the superhero genre as seen in comics is a surprisingly poor fit for an RPG game, or at least ones built along the tactical wargame lineage of D&D. Like, whenever a superhero has a significant power boost or addition to their power suite it’s a really big deal that usually comes along with its own storyline and usually goes away eventually, whereas in RPG circles it’s kind of unusual if characters do not continually make incremental or sizeable improvements in power and skill. You could still have characters get better at using their core abilities if they start out having just gained them. Like you could have Light Man, who just knows how to glow really brightly, then over time he learns to focus his light into flashbangs, lasers and illusions as he comes to understand his new abilities and perhaps has a wise elder hero mentor for a while. I feel like that's pretty true to most superhero characters in their origin/early stories. It's once they've calcified that they only gain new powers when they're hit by the corporate Reboot Beam. But that's around the point where I feel like a superhero game story arc should also be ending and characters given a chance to retire. Or, hell, roll with the superhero comic thematics entirely and say that corporate has rebooted your character with a new and edgy background, which involves their getting some new powers.
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Aug 10, 2023 21:06
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Honestly that rank system in there bugs the poo poo out of me too because Marvel is all about mismatched team ups and toppling the big bads with clever tricks and here's a game where clever tricks will just run up against enemies that can't be affected with them. Plus it just leads to constant dumb nerd arguing that could have been avoided. Like where does this doofus get off making Squirrel Girl rank 3 when her win list includes every rank 5 in the book?
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Aug 10, 2023 21:14
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I think in long-running comic book titles, the superhero doesn't get progressively significantly stronger with each issue because they want to keep publishing issues in that vein for years. But a superheroes game doesn't have to only emulate the longstanding well established power level of say, spider-man or wonder woman, across five hundred issues. You can also look at limited series for inspiration, or just focus on an extended origin story for a character. The first year of Tony Stark's development of the Iron Man armor certainly includes a significant ramp up of capability and power... or if you like the modern marvel movies, Captain Marvel covers an arc from normal human to galaxy-trekking superpowered hero with enough events in one film to cover quite a few adventuring sessions. That said, I think a superheroes RPG that is broadly kitchen-sink should cover both things - if your game is focused entirely on characters who level up and gain in power, it's hard to do a multi-year campaign with characters that stay within a particular power band throughout.
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Aug 10, 2023 21:21
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I do want to call out Marvel Heroic's "spend XP on new stuff during an arc, but when you start a new plot arc you just remake your sheet to reflect the new normal instead of constantly growing one sheet" and Sentinels of the Multiverse's "you don't really get more powerful, advancement is purely in the form of reflavoring things and changing what options you took" approaches. They're both systems where the answer to advancement is kind of just not having normal advancement where you're constantly more powerful, but imo it's also the only good way to have a Justice League situation where you have Cyborg growing from a rookie to a respected member of the team, Batman switching between a gritty detective and a guy who knows space martial arts as the story demands and Superman consistently just being Superman in a traditional superhero game.
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Aug 10, 2023 22:46
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Nickoten posted:Red Markets the book needs a lot of work. Red Markets the game (outside of negotiation) is one of the best resource management scavenger games I've played. I definitely got the sense there was something worthwhile lurking under the cruft, so I'm keen to see a 2E
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Aug 11, 2023 00:10
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Nickoten posted:My experience with it was that the book has a really hard time explaining the finer details of certain things, but once you understand what it's trying to say with its sometimes overly vague descriptions and poor organization of information, it's a very easy system to run in practice. I put some of the blame for this on the Quickplay being poorly written, but the main Red Markets book really, really needed another editing pass. The current playtests and seeing what's changed has been really good; it now feels like there's an actual reason to want to own a melee weapon for dealing with Casualties with the rules they've been testing (lethal damage now takes out Casualties equal to that damage so you can be a big badass swinging an axe and taking out more at once, previously it was one success = one down, back up and keep baiting them after you, and a ton of melee weapons have upgrades that add a flat + to damage dealt) and the revamp of the initiative system is also good and also just plain consolidating the skill system so you have derived skills too. I'm looking forward to trying to playtest it with my group if I can.
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Aug 11, 2023 00:58
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Lurks With Wolves posted:I do want to call out Marvel Heroic's "spend XP on new stuff during an arc, but when you start a new plot arc you just remake your sheet to reflect the new normal instead of constantly growing one sheet" and Sentinels of the Multiverse's "you don't really get more powerful, advancement is purely in the form of reflavoring things and changing what options you took" approaches. They're both systems where the answer to advancement is kind of just not having normal advancement where you're constantly more powerful, but imo it's also the only good way to have a Justice League situation where you have Cyborg growing from a rookie to a respected member of the team, Batman switching between a gritty detective and a guy who knows space martial arts as the story demands and Superman consistently just being Superman in a traditional superhero game. Yeah, using Sentinels to build like "classic Nightcrawler" and then also "Nightcrawler but he's really into that sword these days" was a revelation. The fact that they didn't cheat the system themselves and happily built their in-universe Superman equivalents Heritage and Legacy with exactly the same tools that players get to build a starting character was impressive as well.
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Aug 11, 2023 01:18
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I love making supervillains so I've never felt it was a chore when I was running Superworld, V&V, or Champions
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Aug 11, 2023 02:22
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On the side topic of games with good superpower builds; I’m running Deviant: the Renegades, my first CofD game for a while, and Ive never had this much fun making NPCs in a CofD before. Having particular fun finding some weird character OCC/RCC from Rifts and redesigning it with Deviant.
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Aug 11, 2023 03:04
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Gatto Grigio posted:On the side topic of games with good superpower builds; I’m running Deviant: the Renegades, my first CofD game for a while, and Ive never had this much fun making NPCs in a CofD before.
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Aug 11, 2023 03:12
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Already made a Juicer! … … he got his super-speed stolen by the zombie PC with Inhuman Digestion before being killed and partially eaten. 
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Aug 11, 2023 03:24
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Gatto Grigio posted:Already made a Juicer! Try some of the variant juicers! I like the one who doesn't just have a heart attack and die as per God's plan, but basically just turns into a giant sodium/lithium chemical fire. That's still alive! Great technology, RIFTS!
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Aug 11, 2023 03:44
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Nessus posted:Now when you say super-speed... Super-speed was Enhanced Speed 5, entangled with the Perilous Variation Scar (uses takes 1 agg each time they activate the entangled Variation) I based my Juicer off of the Hyperion Juicer (+ acid blood, thats how Deviant rolls), but a Mega-Juicer based Devoted could be fun. (I guess the zombie PC is now technically a Murder Wraith) I’m playing fast-and-loose with my Rifts inspirations. Already featured a Crazy (killed by the cohort), a Tattooed Maxi-Man (his legal name), a Psi-Stalker (killed by the cohort), and Dog-boys (one which has befriended the cohort), and a Cyber-knight (NPC Renegade ally). Currently working on a Glitter Boy and a Gargoyle. Gatto Grigio fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Aug 11, 2023 |
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Aug 11, 2023 07:05
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Leperflesh posted:I think in long-running comic book titles, the superhero doesn't get progressively significantly stronger with each issue because they want to keep publishing issues in that vein for years. This kind of thing is why I like the idea of the Justice Society from DC (even if their writers aren't always great 🫥). You can have the same superhero, but they might be a different person under the mask, with similar but not exactly the same power sets. Sometimes, it might be the old character's protégé or child, and the new character might have their blessing. Other times, it could be a young upstart taking the mantle by force, and calling themselves by the old hero's name for some purpose. Either way, having legacy characters like this can provide an out for a GM to give players once they've gotten to the point where all they're dealing with is cosmic threats. Not only that, but by having legacy characters, all kinds of neat game altering concepts can be introduced. Things like time skips (and possibly time travel to back when the original characters were in their prime), new villains, new technology, the older heroes coming out of retirement this one time and so on, can be brought to the game to extend the life of the game and the shared universe the group is creating. Honestly, I'd love to run a game with legacy superheroes at some point, with the added twist that once we get to the next generation the players have to make a legacy character of another player's hero. I think it would be neat to see what players think about the other characters and come up with.
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Aug 11, 2023 14:31
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Aniodia posted:This kind of thing is why I like the idea of the Justice Society from DC (even if their writers aren't always great 🫥). You can have the same superhero, but they might be a different person under the mask, with similar but not exactly the same power sets. Sometimes, it might be the old character's protégé or child, and the new character might have their blessing. Other times, it could be a young upstart taking the mantle by force, and calling themselves by the old hero's name for some purpose. Once I again, allow me to suggest Spectaculars, a superhero game built from the ground up for playing legacies of characters. It's light, but it's great.
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Aug 11, 2023 15:05
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I'll second Spectaculars. It's probably too light for a lot of people, but I enjoy it quite a bit for one shots. Plus it has a lot to offer even if you don't use the actual dice resolution it suggests — a lot of the value comes from the communal writing prompt stuff.
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Aug 11, 2023 16:06
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BinaryDoubts posted:Superhero stories in the Western mold don't really include characters "levelling up" or equipping new gear very often, aside from in their origin (going from "wow, how do I use these powers?" to "I'm using my powers!") and it's always awkward when games (e.g. Marvel's Avengers) try to crowbar a loot system into the genre. Honestly, classic D&D-style level-ups feel more appropriate for shonen stories, which much more frequently revolve around characters acquiring new abilities and powers to face more dangerous foes.
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Aug 11, 2023 16:13
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Even the Japanese media that does show character power growth like MHA is super easy to do in systems that prioritize sideways development, like building a season 1 Midoriya in Sentinels that breaks his fingers flicking stuff super hard and then turning him into later model Deku that can whip around all fast and do crazy super kicks is a breeze, he just doesn't prioritize massive damage that also self-inflicts a little anymore, there's moves enough for both.
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Aug 11, 2023 16:31
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I see that Spectaculars is a box set which unfortunately costs £73 here in the UK. Is it going to be a pain to play from the PDFs? I can get the cards and such printed and sleeved no problem
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Aug 11, 2023 17:29
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Splicer posted:Superhero RPGs usually just take dungeon crawl hack and slash and loot RPG mechanics and slap superhero words on them, when the superhero stories they're trying to emulate are less about numbergoup and more about narrative tropes and sideways development. Base Raiders was intended to play like a superhero flavoured dungeon crawl hack and slash and loot RPG, which they tried to implement by shoehorning dungeon crawler mechanics into a system that's less about numbersgoup and more about emulating narrative tropes and providing sideways development. Honestly, the parts of Base Raiders that are still mechanically interesting for me are the parts where they try to fit vaguely gritty dungeon crawling into Fate. I wouldn't say they did much on that front that can't be replicated by just applying any generic Fate fractal advice to dungeons, but it's the part that stuck in my head. (And I'm someone who wanted to like Kerberos Club Fate's power building for far too long, so you know I'm serious when I say I've thought a lot about Base Raiders.)
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Aug 11, 2023 17:32
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I wish that Double Cross didn't feel quite so stagnant once you got your main attack and defense combo down because it's still my favorite superhero rpg and building combos feels really fun.
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Aug 11, 2023 17:35
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Double Cross seems very, very cool, but I have a hard time understanding how the mechanics come together. The translation is a lot of text and doesn't make much use of tables or graphs. For example, a lot of Syndromes make use of multiple skills for their abilities. Besides variety, is there a reason not to just max out one Stat/Skill and use that for all your powers?
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Aug 11, 2023 17:44
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Halloween Jack posted:Double Cross seems very, very cool, but I have a hard time understanding how the mechanics come together. The translation is a lot of text and doesn't make much use of tables or graphs. It Depends (but not really). Part of the fun imho is figuring out how to make that work but my brain was broken from a young age by 3.5
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Aug 11, 2023 17:49
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Oh, I forgot, you tried to explain this to me in another thread. Thanks for explaining the Neumann multi-weapon powers. I'm just still trying to figure out how e.g. a Hanuman could make use of both the Melee and Negotiation powers without splitting their effectiveness in half. (Hanuman in particular has some powers that technically use Negotiate but don't actually require a roll, but you get the idea.) A Chimera/Neumann who uses Mind to become a kaiju seems very fun.
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Aug 11, 2023 17:54
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Splicer posted:Superhero RPGs usually just take dungeon crawl hack and slash and loot RPG mechanics and slap superhero words on them, when the superhero stories they're trying to emulate are less about numbergoup and more about narrative tropes and sideways development. I'll take your word for it, but that's surprising to me. My experience with superhero games is limited to Champions and HERO system back in the olden days, and then PDQ T&J. None of those are built like dungeon crawl games. I wonder why someone would look at those games and I assume others in the genre and go "I know, what the world needs is a superhero game that is a lot more like D&D!"
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Aug 11, 2023 17:54
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CitizenKeen posted:Once I again, allow me to suggest Spectaculars, a superhero game built from the ground up for playing legacies of characters. It's light, but it's great. I want to run a campaign of Spectaculars so badly, but trying to set it up on Roll20 is annoying.
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Aug 11, 2023 17:54
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Leperflesh posted:I'll take your word for it, but that's surprising to me. My experience with superhero games is limited to Champions and HERO system back in the olden days, and then PDQ T&J. None of those are built like dungeon crawl games. I wonder why someone would look at those games and I assume others in the genre and go "I know, what the world needs is a superhero game that is a lot more like D&D!" VVV the concept I had in mind was The Marvelous Doctor Morbius
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Aug 11, 2023 17:58
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Halloween Jack posted:Oh, I forgot, you tried to explain this to me in another thread. Thanks for explaining the Neumann multi-weapon powers. I'm just still trying to figure out how e.g. a Hanuman could make use of both the Melee and Negotiation powers without splitting their effectiveness in half. (Hanuman in particular has some powers that technically use Negotiate but don't actually require a roll, but you get the idea.) You probably wouldn't want to use both at the same time (Syndromes tend to try to give a variety of playstyles, to varying degrees of success - Chimera had basically nothing to offer <RC> characters until later books and Solaris is Solaris) but pick one and roll with it. A Chimera/Neumann could be a very anime Jekyll and Hyde.
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Aug 11, 2023 17:59
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There's a relatively decent OSR superhero game called Guardians. I have played or run most of the ones from the 70s through now, and S5E is the most interesting one (aside from Spectaculars, of course) I've seen recently. ICONS is fine, I guess, but I like the ruleset less than I like 5e's for some reason (maybe because I am a grog).
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Aug 11, 2023 18:25
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Leperflesh posted:I'll take your word for it, but that's surprising to me. My experience with superhero games is limited to Champions and HERO system back in the olden days, and then PDQ T&J. None of those are built like dungeon crawl games. I wonder why someone would look at those games and I assume others in the genre and go "I know, what the world needs is a superhero game that is a lot more like D&D!" There may not be many people that say they need a super hero game that's more like DnD... But there's a lot of people out there that say "I need my DnD game to have more super powers in it". For that matter there's a lot of people out there that say "I need my DnD game to have more of <kinky sex/super powers/dragons/technology/super spies/race cars/cyborgs/kinky sex with cyborg racing car dragons> in it" and that's how we get terrible games.
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Aug 11, 2023 18:27
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