Greg Stolze (Unknown Armies, One Roll Engine) Appreciation Station

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Greg Stolze (Unknown Armies, One Roll Engine) Appreciation Station

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Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Borrowed a copy of Wild Talents and skimmed through it, it looks amazing.

Someone sell me on Kerberos Club, though. It's just a setting, right? Is it what I gleefully imagine it to be, a mix of Sherlock Holmes, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and Flashman? If it isn't, can it be?

# ¿ Aug 29, 2010 18:40

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 08:05

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

So for WT, if you have like, 3d in body, 3d in hyperbody, and 3d in brawling, your dice pool be 9d, right?

# ¿ Sep 2, 2010 01:42

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Rockin'. It's weird, I'm chronically unable to internalize different game systems, but WT seems pretty goddamned intuitive. I'd still have to see or read some games in action before I think I've got it down.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2010 05:20

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Wait, so booster on stat Hyperbody stat multiplies all of the capacities (lift, throw, sprint, jump) by 10? Otherwise, for things like power capacities (teleporting) you have to pick a specific capacity to boost, like range or mass?

That seems weird since that means hyperbody + boosters means you get to be The Flash and The Hulk unless you specifically take the drawbacks to reduce some of the qualities.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2010 03:19

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

If I recall right from a quick skimming, someone more or less called racist, too.

And someone else cried about how his fantasy world language isn't like real world language.

Stolze himself posted another thread about his next project, which might be about a 17th century Italy styled setting, either as part of Heluso and Milonda proper, or just its own thing.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2010 22:08

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

children overboard posted:

AAAAGH

In case anyone hasn't seen it, there is a maptools REIGN GAME recruiting here and I'm still looking for a couple of players. Saturday nights americans time.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3353745

This looks amazing, and makes angry pains in my stomach that my schedule is unruly to the point I couldn't dedicate the time.

Also, ARDWIN has one week left to raise funds, and is about 500 bux shy. Just putting that out there.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2010 04:44

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

http://www.gregstolze.com/reign/REIGN_Ardwin.zip

It's out!

# ¿ Oct 24, 2010 05:21

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

I've never actually played an ORE game, but I imagine having both stats and skills would be useful solely for the dynamic of having either a generally alright character with good stats and poor skills, or a specialist with alright stats but a few really good skills.

# ¿ Nov 27, 2010 05:01

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Doc Hawkins posted:

Or I'd steal a page from MaOCT, and make the stats be the hit locations.

What stat corresponds to getting punched in the dick?

# ¿ Nov 28, 2010 04:16

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

So what mechanics represent the childish things?

# ¿ Nov 28, 2010 04:30

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

I'm going to be running a REIGN game- the first ORE game I've ever participated in, and the first proper game I've ever personally run. Being me, I had to go out of my way to make it as complicated as possible- custom setting, a few rules modifications, etc. I'm fairly confident I can pull it off, provided I can figure out a way to balance the combat to be exciting and fun without having to run every battle against myself before I push it on to the players. It's not that combat is going to be driving the plot, of course. Any tips? (Group is 5 dudes at 100 points each, predominantly non-combative. Edit: One of them is fully combat guy, though.)

Capntastic fucked around with this message at 10:44 on Dec 21, 2010

# ¿ Dec 21, 2010 10:40

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

I'll get on that when I get a chance, before the game starts in January.

For what it's worth, the setting is a prog-rock inspired psychedelic omniverse. I asked the players to get as surreal as possible, and the current characters are a sentient mindwrecking fractal guy that houses seven distinct personalities, a wishgranter that makes deals on behalf of the cosmos, a sorcerer whose hands morph into a variety of predatorial beasties, a human cultist that was glad to be overtaken by the seed of your typical elder god horror being from the stars, and a gunslinging, rocket launching arena fighter that is a mix of American Gladiators, Tron, and Chev Chelios, but with rocket boots.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2010 11:30

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Without having the rules here in front of me, my initial assumption is that you trade the liquidity of the charge for locking it into combat. It's like the difference between having a thousand dollars in your pocket, or a gun that costs a thousand dollars- one's going to be more useful in case something unexpected shows up, but one is going to be more useful if you really need to shoot something. And combat in UA never struck me as core to the game, and the sort of thing you want to avoid altogether if possible.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2011 09:29

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

I feel that UA is one of the settings and systems that, should you be confronted with someone abusing the rules, you could be perfectly justified to have something backfire in a horrifying way, or have some NPC who abuses the rules in a worse way.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2011 11:27

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Everyone knows that UA is about attaining real magic power that pretty much only leads to your own horrible fate. I think Hawkins was hinting at some sort of bad-rules situation, which I'd be glad to hear because I've only looked into the setting of UA, which I find feel are more interesting than the rules could be.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2011 23:05

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

UA isn't ORE. In ORE, especially in Progenitor, which had a ton of hyper-charming and hyper-persuasive people in it, as well as a focus on mind-changing memetic bombs and similar, it'd be pretty impossible to play without 'social combat'. When a character's power is to literally be a 10 for charisma and force of will on a scale where 5 is the theoretical human maximum, it just makes sense for them to be able to change people's mind, even if only temporarily. Of course, in Wild Talents and Progenitor, you can use willpower points to lessen or negate these effects.

Furthermore, in Progenitor specifically, there's not much mechanical progression at all since you can't spend XP on new powers; just on improving your normal human skills.

Edit: For Unknown Armies, the setting is pretty solidly built around mind control being a no-no, thematically, of course. But Wild Talents has Mind Control as a power.

Capntastic fucked around with this message at 09:14 on Jan 10, 2011

# ¿ Jan 10, 2011 09:11

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

In Wild Talents if you kill someone in cold blood you take a trauma check, and if you fail you can choose to power through and lose a ton of willpower points, or drop out of the scene (fetal position, fleeing, vomiting) and lose less willpower points. Wild Talents is cool.

Also, you can add the Horrific tag to your powers which makes them so terrifying that they incur a trauma check on the people you harm with it. But you have to take the trauma check too. Wild Talents is cool.

Edit: Checking the rules again, another option is to simply not go through with it.

Capntastic fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Jan 13, 2011

# ¿ Jan 13, 2011 23:56

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

I've taken to skimming RPG.net lately for news on ORE and Stolze stuff, and someone asked about making duels with various weapon styles interesting in REIGN. This lead to me realizing that in Wild Talents you can add extras to hyperskills, so you could take hypersword with a bunch of levels of goes-first or interference to be unblockable, etc. I know that WT isn't hard to break over your knee, but for some reason the idea of taking a bunch of crazy extras like non-physical or penetration on hyperpunch or Variable Effect (Any Extra) on hyperkarate seems like it could be fun, stylistically.

Or you could put stuff like, uh, daze on hyperflirt. Or spray on your hyperresearch, which I guess would be like reading eight books at once. And on and on. And then you can also add flaws.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2011 11:04

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Gundaddy sounds like slang from Shadowrun. Also, the new mechanics for the thing are basically "alien rules, shotgun rules, social media rules". You can't not have a fun campaign with these toys.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2011 22:32

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Even just glancing at the focus and vehicle rules in WT always lead to me thinking up how things like aircraft carriers and the TARDIS should work. It wouldn't be too hard to do mecha that way.

I don't remember the ORE Mecha pdf being too interesting; though I don't remember if the size rules effected power capacities, with regards to range and all that. I remember seeing one of the example powers being a 4d 'railgun' harm/penetrate combo but by the numbers had a range of something like 100 yards, unless it's buffed up by virtue of being fired from a mecha.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2011 10:49

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Evil Mastermind posted:

Greg's latest Kickstarter "Dinosaurs...In Spaaace!" has 11 days left, and needs just over grand. If you haven't pledged yet, now's the time.

There's still ten of the second extra set of 30 dollar reward slots, which nets you a PDF copy, a signed softcover copy mailed RIGHT TO YOUR HOME, and some sort of cool patch thing. What's keeping you?

# ¿ Sep 13, 2011 17:37

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

That could potentially be really super fun, were I more familiar with the setting. I just have the Enchiridion though, which lacks the Heluso & Milonda info.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2011 10:18

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

I'm in Children's game, posted above. My character is an (annoyingly) pacifist sort of guy, and even then he can do many things in combat. Since this is a very Stolzy system, he can enact quite a few of the "Six Ways to Stop a Fight". I gave him a bunch of spear skill specifically so it can be used as a tool for disarms and chokeholds and all of that rather than a straight up weapon. The fact that REIGN comes pre-loaded with rules for all of that sort of stuff makes combat a lot more fun than just doing a basic "uh i attack the guy" every round.

Hopefully my character doesn't get their throat cut in their sleep from the party getting sick of them.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2011 12:46

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

The Company rules work best as representing the PC's networks and organizations they're part of. When your cyberpunk clan goes to war against a megacorp, and your party goes in to sear their mainframe or whatever, your Company can represent how much of a distraction they can make, or how well they can secure the city block you need to raid with firebombs while your party's doing the cool stuff inside.

Companies are a communal resource to be used, more than an extra party member everyone gets to order around, I feel.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2012 14:15

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Nothing's really stopping them other than point costs. The rulebook itself tells you specifically how to make a completely invulnerable character, and then tells you that this is totally fine, because a clever GM will find ways to mess with 'em anyways (like putting them in a black hole).

If you think it's gonna be a problem, try to have all the players make their characters, or at least the basic ideas, at the same time, so they can get a basic idea of what sort of characters to go for.

Edit: To clarify, if someone takes 3HD in each stat as their character's 'power', that's really not much worse than someone taking 5HD of teleport matter with boosters on mass and range. One character wants to be generally good at everything, and one character wants to be able to teleport bulldozers onto people. It's all fun! I mean, WT is hard not to break. It's all about breaking it in a fun way.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2012 03:10

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Doc Hawkins posted:

e: I hate the black hole example. I'd much rather mess with an invulnerable character by showing how they're unable to stop threats to other people.

The black hole example is more poignant for people who don't realize their motivations and allegiances can be used against 'em to drain willpower. So destroying Immortalman's prized crochet hooks is completely viable, but the knowledge that your guy can still be Removed From Play if they're careless is more concrete.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2012 03:15

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Icecream Jones posted:

developed strange and fantastic powers.

What sort of points level? I'm almost tempted.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2012 09:26

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

ThreeStep posted:

So I've been rewatching Ghost in the Shell and flipping through Wild Talents and I'm starting to think the two might go well together. Treat prosthetic bodies as having stats as being able to have stats above human norms (or maybe as Hyperstats?), user Miracles and Hyperskills to represent cybernetic advantages (e.g. cyberbrain hacking is just reskinned telepathy/puppeteering) and etc. How far off base might I be?

That's pretty much what I'd do. Just use archetypes and stuff so people can 'buy' prosthetic bodies to unlock those abilities or whatever. Of course, Eclipse Phase might do some of the body switching type mechanics a lot better, but with some tweaking you can get WT to handle that pretty good.

# ¿ May 12, 2012 08:32

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

I feel like Eclipse Phase sort of falls short if you want to pull off some seriously ridiculous powers like controlling every stoplight in the city or puppeteering people at will. EP sort of has those abilities with whatever its "magic" plot device was, but you were still limited to specific sets of spells. WT would let you be far more flexible about coming up with some oddball poo poo, I think.

# ¿ May 12, 2012 10:20

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

I know I saw someone somewhere do up Vancian styled casting as a Wild Talents power, but I can't find it.

Is this good enough, do you think?

code:

Vancian Casting (3)
Qualities: A D U.
Attacks extras and flaws: Delayed Effect �1, Endless +3, If/Then (Variable Effect requires spell in spellbook, memorization time, and spell components) �1,  
  If/Then (Created 'Spell' must have One Use flaw),  �4 Variable Effect (Vancian Spell) +2, Willpower Investment �1. Capacities: N/A.
Defends extras and flaws: Delayed Effect �1, Endless +3, If/Then (Variable Effect requires spell in spellbook, memorization time, and spell components) �1,  
  If/Then (Created 'Spell' must have One Use flaw),  �4 Variable Effect (Vancian Spell) +2, Willpower Investment �1. Capacities: N/A.
Useful (Spell Creation) extras and flaws: Delayed Effect �1, Endless +3, If/Then (Variable Effect requires spell in spellbook, memorization time, and spell components) �1,  
  If/Then (Created 'Spell' must have One Use flaw),  �4 Variable Effect (Vancian Spell) +2, Willpower Investment �1. Capacities: N/A.

Pretty much just cosmic power/gadgeteering with the proper drawbacks. You dump in willpower directly proportional to how big the spells are, dice-wise, so there's even an approximation of 'spell slots'.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2012 00:45

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Saw that someone else posted that they'd love to see integration rules for Wild Talents, realized I felt the same way. I'm psyched for the base game itself, but I love Wild Talents.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2012 08:29

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Baby Babbeh posted:

I guess it would depend on the sort of powers you get by smoking everything. Smoking Hitler's mustache would definitely get you the most epic charge ever, though.

A fossil of the first weed plant

# ¿ Sep 3, 2012 08:56

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Doodmons posted:

I had a question about Wealth levels in REIGN, regarding buying things of lower Wealth levels than what you have. It mentions that even though doing so doesn't lower your Wealth, you're prevented from just buying a billion Wealth 1 things when you're Wealth 2 because there's the table for outfitting soldiers. One problem, that's just for weapons and equipment. What happens if I'm Wealth 3 and want to buy, say, fifty Wealth 2 necklaces? This is especially weird when only two Wealth 2 necklaces make Wealth 3.

Stuff like that is basically "use your common sense" with regards to both how many things you can buy at once, (like replacing a sword once a week rather than buying 50 swords at once), as well as what makes sense for a city/town's economy being able to support. Stuff like necklaces are less commodities and more luxuries, so a character wouldn't be expected to be buying a necklace for every day of the week depending on their wealth.

I see the wealth level examples more of what your character can reasonably afford as their standard of living. The thing about the wealth system is that it works well as cutting out the "okay this costs 5cp and this costs 1gp, etc" sort of stuff, but I can see why some people would be put off by it. I can also see that some people would be likely to try to abuse it.

# ¿ Nov 2, 2012 21:38

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

So anyone besides me get a chance to thumb through the Better Angels advance PDF copy?

# ¿ Jan 26, 2013 09:35

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

I enjoyed Mask but the prose is pretty dry and some of the themes don't rise to being apparent until the end. But yeah, I can see how it would seem tabletoppy and jumpy.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2013 01:32

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

BrainParasite posted:

I have no idea what's up with that. The inside of the book is well designed and appropriately comicy.

The main image was great as a cover until they boxed it in and surorunded it with random comic book panel stuff. It's just visually noisy and weird.

But yeah, the game is awesome so who cares?

# ¿ May 9, 2013 04:11

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

rantmo posted:

I just got my copy of Better Angels! I didn't even know they were going out.

Yeah I got a mystery email from Publishers Services Incorporated and was wondering what the heck it could be

# ¿ Sep 13, 2013 20:53

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

rantmo posted:

It took me the better part of a day to narrow down the list of possibilities to it. It doesn't help that the tracking on stamps.com is slightly worse than completely useless.

Ah yes, a PACKAGE from LOCATION 3021 being sent by [REDACTED] is totally not going to make me paranoid that something terrible is going to be showing up on my doorstep

# ¿ Sep 13, 2013 21:12

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Cyphoderus posted:

Here's to hoping for less pages of metaplot and lame "canon NPCs"!

Luckily very few of the "canon NPCs"! were lame. The Freak, The Count, Alex Abel, etc are all exceedingly good, actually.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2014 23:46

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 08:05

Capntastic: Jan 13, 2005; A dog begins eating a dusty old coil of rope but there's a nail in it.

Squidster posted:

The Freak and St. Germain were both unbeatable, unkillable godbosses. Neither has stats, and they're cosmic constants in a game about shifting chaos. They could easily become two-legged railroad tracks in the hands of a poor dm.

I feel like most of the canon NPCs are great evocative characters who work great in a traditional narrative, but don't really work as well in a player-driven setting.

Yeah, UA's concepts are going to be awful poo poo in the hands of a poor GM. This goes with anything. The Freak and St. Germain aren't there to be bossfights you put your party up against. They're also not really supposed to be like, quest givers or DMPCs. They're just part of the setting, as I see it, and at worst occasional plot devices.

As for "contants in a game about shifting chaos", The Freak, St. Germain, and Alex Abel are both notorious/powerful for how they interact with the "rules" of the setting. The Freak abused how magic[k] works to become a terrifying monster, St. Germain apparently exists due to how the universe functions on a metaphysical level, and Alex Abel's whole deal is he came close to ascending and is now taking it out on all magic[k] anywhere. They exemplify how the world of UA works, in different ways. Magic[k] is bad for you!

Edit: As an aside, I agree that in general the canon NPCs are never to be taken off of the shelf except in extremely rare circumstances and only by a skilled GM. If I recall correct, the books say as much.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 01:28

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Greg Stolze (Unknown Armies, One Roll Engine) Appreciation Station

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