|
ninjoatse.cx posted:Blades in the Dark has the Traumas, which pile up to make you nigh unplayable, but you do get better at your core activities, if you don't build up Traumas too quickly. They should make games where your traumas make you more effective. Metal Gear style. Or Batman.
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 04:24
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 05:15 |
|
|
A Dirty World by Greg Stolze does that, in a way. The way to become a loving wrecking ball is to get the poo poo kicked out of you first. it's a Noir RPG so it makes a lot of sense.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 04:29
|
|
|
I always think the term heartbreaker means someone is going to get heartbroken. Either the creator because they don't know anything other than DnD exists and so they are heartbroken to find that their amazing new game is just derivative. Or the potential players because there is some kernel of innovation there that's hampered by all the DnDisms. Of course I've also encountered heartbreakers for games other than DnD, World of Darkness seems to spawn them a lot.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 05:56
|
|
|
Bucnasti posted:I always think the term heartbreaker means someone is going to get heartbroken. Yeah it does seem to be a matter of what game you're most nostalgic about and you had ideas to either fix stuff or add seasoning to taste. Arguably a lot of newbie pbta shovelware occupies a similar design space.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 06:05
|
|
|
Bucnasti posted:I always think the term heartbreaker means someone is going to get heartbroken. Heartstakers!
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 06:14
|
|
|
theironjef posted:Heartstakers!
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 06:16
|
|
|
dwarf74 posted:Is that the term for Buffy/Angel remakes? Stuff like Vampire Diaries, sure, why not.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 06:26
|
|
|
Runa posted:Arguably a lot of newbie pbta shovelware occupies a similar design space. Oh, yeah, if we're going off the "one great new mechanic, everything else clumsily or thoughtlessly derivative" definition, there's absolute loads of PbtA like this, and it is indeed heartbreaking
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 06:31
|
|
|
If the CRPG had given you some nostalgic hankering for TTRPG Rogue Trader, what kind of ruleset would you use nowadays?
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 15:38
|
|
|
Griddle of Love posted:If the CRPG had given you some nostalgic hankering for TTRPG Rogue Trader, what kind of ruleset would you use nowadays? https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3464821 Wrath & Glory is a faster ruleset, more adventurous I guess. Imperium Maledictum is the spiritual successor to the old FFG rulesets, so probably closer to the CRPG.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 15:40
|
|
|
ImpMal has explicit rules for "your boss is a Rogue Trader" and is definitely hands-down the better option but it cannot be emphasized enough that there are no answers short of playing a minis game that will give you the X-Com RTS gameplay and buff/chain system for the purposes of actual gameplay, actual 40k TTRPGs that aren't the wargame are a lot more stripped down and faster and not necessarily positionally-focused. But if you wanna gently caress around and lie to people and roleplay, absolutely do ImpMal.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 16:01
|
|
|
Also do any of the newer systems have rules for customizing your own ship?
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 16:35
|
|
|
Yeah, ship customization and asset/organization (colony) building are pretty high on the list of desirable features, I feel.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 16:44
|
|
|
I would run it in GURPS.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 17:15
|
|
|
theironjef posted:When I first started our show System Mastery, we got asked about heartbreaker's all the time but neither of us were forgers or had heard of Edwards. We eventually settled after reading a bunch of them that a heartbreaker was a game that was "D&D but the author really thought that it need one or two big changes to fix it and then it would be perfect, then the world harshly disagreed." Eventually we started finding White Wolf and even Palladium equivalents out there, but like for us the most classic distillations were always "I like D&D but the religion in it isn't just Catholicism and they got the alignments all wrong."
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 17:25
|
|
|
I’m in the market for a Shadowrun 2nd Edition heartbreaker or five.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 17:27
|
|
|
Subjunctive posted:I’m in the market for a Shadowrun 2nd Edition heartbreaker or five. Have you heard of Eclipse Phase? I think it might qualify. Equally heisty, more sci-fiy, less (but still a bit) magicky, plenty of gear porn even though there is only one stat line per type of weapon, and instead of an elf, dwarf or Kenku you can be an AI, a pig person or a raven. Eclipse Phase 2 is out, and it's so open source the writers just publish it for free. And despite all this there is still next to no one playing it. Griddle of Love fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Jan 18, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 17:50
|
|
|
Griddle of Love posted:Have you heard of Eclipse Phase? I think it might qualify. That sounds familiar, I think I bought the PDF at some point. I’ll dig for it and see if I’ve looked at it. Thanks!
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 17:51
|
|
|
Iirc Eclipse Phase started as a Shadowrun hack.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 17:55
|
|
|
Eclipse Phase is an achievement, but it also does exactly what I wouldn't want from a Shadowrun heartbreaker: lots of fussing with your cyberware and whatnot. Even Cyberpunk RED, which is simpler than 2020, has you making sure you have enough Interface Plugs to connect your stuff. I don't care about that. I'm not working on an actual car, here.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 18:14
|
|
|
Eclipse Phase 1e is overcomplicated, I haven't heard much to the contrary about 2e, and also it's got a bit of stain by association with people who think its particular Torment Nexus future is a good thing. I'm sure there are people into it who don't think that, but it's a social game and that's my only exposure to actual Eclipse Phase players.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 18:21
|
|
|
disposablewords posted:Eclipse Phase 1e is overcomplicated, I haven't heard much to the contrary about 2e, and also it's got a bit of stain by association with people who think its particular Torment Nexus future is a good thing. I'm sure there are people into it who don't think that, but it's a social game and that's my only exposure to actual Eclipse Phase players. EP presents Torment Nexus users as the baddies, along with different flavors of fascists, hypercapitalists, and other libertarians. Sadly despite this there's still a regular need for push-back against the people who post fan made 'hacking flowcharts' that include 'extract credentials under torture' as a viable node, and people who think the warrior-poet fascists may be onto something. 2e is definitely easier to use, I'd say easier than the Shadowrun editions I am familiar with. Switching bodies doesn't alter all your stats & skills anymore, and the advice to be mobile and not hoard gear puts a soft cap on how complex characters can get.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 18:51
|
|
|
2e is a welcome simplification, but does not fix the problems with 1e. You no longer have to recalculate stat bonuses on a resleeve, but those pale in comparison to the laundry list of morph and ego traits, implants and gear that have to be accounted for. Statting up a single NPC is as painful as it was in 1e, requiring all-of-the-aforementioned plus the core stats and skills. Hacking has not improved enough that I'd want to deal with it at the table. Gear and morph bloat were not fixed - you still have Hazers and Rusters and all the other Splicer-but-one-different-thing bodies that get their own stat line. Fundamentally, the game's assertion that bodies and equipment are disposable is at odds with the Shadowrun-but-D100 system where equipment is the primary deciding factor in who lives, who dies and why. But I'm going to go further and say the mechanical issues were never the real problem with Eclipse Phase, or at least not the reason nobody played 1e and even fewer people play 2e. The real challenge is the setting has a huge amount of information that has to be absorbed by the players in order to do anything, with few established fictional cognates to streamline the process by analogy. Killing someone, stealing an item, breaking into a location, traveling to a distant land and other standard RPG fare all work differently in the world of Eclipse Phase, and if the players are not superfans who devoured the setting books they'll be blindsided at every turn. If you want to listen to this happen in real time I recommend the RPPR Actual Play of Think Before Asking, a module I really like but does nothing to help the issue.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 19:32
|
|
|
So that sounds like it has the exciting secondary possibility of, you get a table of people who know the lore together... but several of you have significantly different readings of the text!
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 19:52
|
|
|
I ran a campaign and it was a blast, but we subbed in rolemaster for combat and skills. It's perfect for solar system tourism, fist fights on Venusian aerostats 40km above the surface, doomed last stands from disposable clones, that kind of thing.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 20:04
|
|
|
sebmojo posted:I ran a campaign and it was a blast, but we subbed in rolemaster for combat and skills. It's perfect for solar system tourism, fist fights on Venusian aerostats 40km above the surface, doomed last stands from disposable clones, that kind of thing. Nessus posted:So that sounds like it has the exciting secondary possibility of, you get a table of people who know the lore together... but several of you have significantly different readings of the text! There is the related issue of the books treating setting elements differently across splats, as part of the general trend of RPG settings toward conspiracy bloat. The Exsurgent Virus is treated as a GM only secret in the 1e corebook, discussed only in hushed whispers by conspiracy theorists. In Sunward all of the Martian Rangers know about it because of the TITAN Quarantine Zone, and many of the rangers are lifeloggers whose adventures are broadcast across the planet. And in X Risks they say the Argonauts developed a software antivirus that detects it in computer systems and released it on github, making it public knowledge to anyone in the setting with an internet connection. Neither of these issues are unfixable, and Eclipse Phase is far from the only game that has them. I had a similar problem with the Dune 2d20's treatment of shields. If a shielded car hits a shielded person, do they bounce off each other or get stuck together? Does a shield protect me from fall damage? If a shielded guy got eaten by a worm, would the auger bits of the worm's teeth be jammed by the shield until the battery ran out? Could the wearer protect themselves from heat diffusion by reducing the permeability of the shield membrane so not even air could get through? Could they wear oxygen tanks to avoid suffocation? These are all things the players will try, and the book is silent on the subject. The challenge for the GM is rewarding player creativity while still coloring inside the lines of what the novels describe as a foundational setting element (shields making large scale projectile weapon warfare impractical, leading to the paradigm of elite swordmaster assassins butchering each other in close quarters).
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 20:23
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:One particular thing I like is when people set out to rationalize AD&D, and give up when they realize how hard it is. I don't exactly mean making everything work according to a single die mechanic, like 3e/D20 did. Like if a snake poisons you, but you have a Heal Poison spell, is your magic stronger than the snake's venom? I think the new edition of Synnibarr had a mechanic for it that they called "Cogency," and Fantasy Imperium wanted to do something similar, but it seems that they just forgot about it so they could get the book published. So you wind up with spells that are like "Wolf Senses: This spell makes your senses as sharp as a wolf's" with no information on what that means to the rules. (Or maybe that example was from The 5th Cycle, I don't remember.) I always think of 5th cycle as the original Heartbreaker. Subjunctive posted:I’m in the market for a Shadowrun 2nd Edition heartbreaker or five. Cities Without Number with a bit of stuff from Worlds Without Number would be a reasonable replacement for SR rules IMO.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 21:06
|
|
|
Ghost Leviathan posted:They should make games where your traumas make you more effective. Metal Gear style. Or Batman. I bet you’d be into Unknown Armies, especially the latest one (though all of them feature this heavily). Not that trauma is necessarily seen as good in UA; it’s just that trauma often makes some number go up.
|
|
#
?
Jan 19, 2024 17:01
|
|
|
Yeah, trauma in Unknown Armies often makes you a more effective operator in the Occult Underground, which is usually the complete opposite of being a good or functional person outside of it (which is why "mundane person who can engage in normal social interactions" remains a viable character archetype in even high-powered UA games)
|
|
#
?
Jan 19, 2024 23:24
|
|
|
Antivehicular posted:Yeah, trauma in Unknown Armies often makes you a more effective operator in the Occult Underground, which is usually the complete opposite of being a good or functional person outside of it (which is why "mundane person who can engage in normal social interactions" remains a viable character archetype in even high-powered UA games) It's true. All the Freak had to do to claim supreme power as a Godwalker and a Epidomancer was never be able to look at themselves in the mirror again.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2024 00:35
|
|
|
Been working on a bit of a history of Charisma as an attribute. Asked some colleagues for some Charisma examples from their campaigns but folks didn’t really have any outside of asking for a charisma roll and then demanding they rp it out the way it was rolled. One colleague stated they had been using chatgpt to make some programming examples and it decided when they were making variables based on the D&D stats that that if Intelligence exists then Outelligence does too. Who am I to disagree?
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2024 00:48
|
|
|
remember the D&D edition that added Comeliness as a stat? definitely made sense to put physical attractiveness separate from charisma, and make it a stat you'd have to invest in, and basically by definition a dump stat for everyone who didn't need it, so your whole party was a bunch of uggos except the one weirdo who took a optional class from wilderness survival guide or whatever
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2024 01:05
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:remember the D&D edition that added Comeliness as a stat? definitely made sense to put physical attractiveness separate from charisma, and make it a stat you'd have to invest in, and basically by definition a dump stat for everyone who didn't need it, so your whole party was a bunch of uggos except the one weirdo who took a optional class from wilderness survival guide or whatever Indeed, the first Unearthed Arcana. 1985. Just an absolute trash book, even at the time everyone hated it, it was crammed full of mistakes and dumb overpowered poo poo. Also comeliness. At least that nonsense never quite crawled its pointless rear end into a PHB.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2024 01:30
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:remember the D&D edition that added Comeliness as a stat? definitely made sense to put physical attractiveness separate from charisma, and make it a stat you'd have to invest in, and basically by definition a dump stat for everyone who didn't need it, so your whole party was a bunch of uggos except the one weirdo who took a optional class from wilderness survival guide or whatever You've forgotten Palladium IQ Mental Endurance Mental Affinity Physical Strength Physical Prowess Physical Endurance Physical Beauty Speed I love how they've been consistent throughout all of the Palladium games I have, in all of the editions I have of them. I actually like the idea of "Mental Affinity" as a stat instead of Charisma, but definitely not how Palladium does it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2024 02:24
|
|
|
ninjoatse.cx posted:You've forgotten Palladium In Beyond This Point Be Dragons, Arneson had it as, “Appearance: Seldom used, and it can be ignored, but it makes for some interesting situations when a male player is captured by a 'witch, for example - will she turn him into a swine or keep him for a lover? The reverse is also true. Loyalty: Optional and can be ignored, but it can cause for players some interesting and perhaps awkward situations. For example, how well a player can give or take orders and the reaction to a real or supposed insult, or the likelyhood that a player will risk his life for you in a dangerous situation.” Later, in the Holmes box, it was, “Charisma is a combination of appearance, personality, sex appeal, and so forth. It’s most important aspect is leadership. A character with a charisma below 13 can not hire more than 5 followers and their loyalty will be lukewarm at best - that is, if the fighting gets hot there is a good probability they will run away. On the other hand, someone with a charisma of 18 can win over a large number of followers (men or monsters) who will probably stand by him to the death. Also a female with a high charisma will not be eaten by a dragon but kept captive. A charismatic male defeated by a witch will not be turned into a frog but kept enchanted as her lover, and so forth.” …and so forth.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2024 02:46
|
|
|
In the earliest versions of DnD Charisma was the only stat that had an effect on gameplay by dictating how many followers you could hire. Since it was really more of a skirmish game at the time this was really powerful. All the other stats merely adjusted your rate of xp gain if they had an effect at all.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2024 03:14
|
|
|
Antivehicular posted:Yeah, trauma in Unknown Armies often makes you a more effective operator in the Occult Underground, which is usually the complete opposite of being a good or functional person outside of it (which is why "mundane person who can engage in normal social interactions" remains a viable character archetype in even high-powered UA games) Exactly what I was thinking of, ha. It's the kinda thing that works if you're actually gonna have those effects, and with those kinda urban fantasy games that play with occult vs public socialisation it's an interesting dynamic by default. Having a little weirdness is good, reminds me of people talking about werewolf forms in WoD; having the in-betweeny ones seems weird but makes sense that shapeshifters would adjust the dial to take forms that suit particular needs, and also interesting that going full monster wolf is used both for mortal combat and high ritual. Leperflesh posted:remember the D&D edition that added Comeliness as a stat? definitely made sense to put physical attractiveness separate from charisma, and make it a stat you'd have to invest in, and basically by definition a dump stat for everyone who didn't need it, so your whole party was a bunch of uggos except the one weirdo who took a optional class from wilderness survival guide or whatever The Book of Erotic Fantasy brought this back lol The take on Charisma as a 'sum of its parts' stat is actually one of the better design choices latter day D&D made, (and I don't think they necessarily realised this) since it means you can have characters with high or low Charisma played in very different ways from other ones. Your character can be attractive if you want them to be, that's just separate from their social skills and presence. Even without getting into how physical attractiveness is extremely subjective. Ghost Leviathan fucked around with this message at 05:15 on Jan 20, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2024 05:11
|
|
|
Ghost Leviathan posted:The take on Charisma as a 'sum of its parts' stat is actually one of the better design choices latter day D&D made, (and I don't think they necessarily realised this) since it means you can have characters with high or low Charisma played in very different ways from other ones. Your character can be attractive if you want them to be, that's just separate from their social skills and presence. Even without getting into how physical attractiveness is extremely subjective. AD&D2e's "Player's Option: Skills & Powers", a last-ditch attempt to breathe life into TSR-era D&D, did this with all six attributes. Strength was split into Muscle and Stamina, Dexterity into Aim and Balance, Constitution was Health and Fitness, Intelligence into Reason and Knowledge, Wisdom into Intuition and Willpower, and Charisma into Leadership and Appearance. I guess they thought "Comeliness" had too much baggage. You could take points from one sub-attribute and put it into another, since they had different effects on your PC's abilities, but they had to be no more than four(?) points apart. That book was a min-maxer's dream at the time. There was absolutely nothing like it in the D&D sphere until 3rd Edition came out a few years later.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2024 06:52
|
|
|
Ghost Leviathan posted:They should make games where your traumas make you more effective. Metal Gear style. Or Batman. Scars in Deviant: The Renegades can make play very difficult if you lose some Instability rolls and get a load of temporary ones that make being a functional person impossible. A lot of progression is trying to manage that while waiting for the Scars that the player feels they can work with to bind to the next Variation (power) that they want.
|
|
#
?
Jan 21, 2024 16:00
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 25, 2024 05:15 |
|
|
Griddle of Love posted:If the CRPG had given you some nostalgic hankering for TTRPG Rogue Trader, what kind of ruleset would you use nowadays? I wrote a PbtA Rogue Trader hack years ago, you can find it here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B3c8gGVv-YzVTHQ3M0ppWFhKOEE?resourcekey=0-qUXRwBHqe5AT8-qvreQ0LQ&usp=drive_link. It's been run a few times on here as a forums PbP, and I had several fantastic in-person campaigns of it back in the day. Warning: requires some assembly.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2024 00:37
|
|