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If you're interested in Houses of the Blooded, buy and read Blood and Honor first. It's much more focused, cohesive and comprehensible (um I guess just a completely better game in every way). Then look at Houses, it will make more sense.
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Apr 16, 2013 17:29
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silby posted:The inventory system is slightly fiddly but not at all gimmicky. I first got to play at BurningCon in October when the game was still called Dungeoneers & Dragonslayers, and the inventory system totally enchanted me. Our GM gave us our starting weapons and armor, and told us to fill the rest of our inventory with food and light sources. Like Burning Wheel, the game's subsystems interact subtly, so the limited inventory space (you have to track what is in each hand, your satchel/backpack, etc.) ties into the rules for lighting (don't run out of torches or lamp oil) and the rules for exploration (don't run out of food). Thanks for the info! I'll have to keep an eye on it and see how it looks when it's released.
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Apr 16, 2013 18:07
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Almost any game Luke puts out will be an instant buy for me. They are always fun and insightful. With that said, I am a little disappointed because I already have so many dungeon crawling games I want to play. I wish he had done his take on a western or a sailing adventure. A sailing adventure would have lots of inventory concerns too, come to think of it.
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Apr 17, 2013 03:25
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Jimbozig posted:Almost any game Luke puts out will be an instant buy for me. They are always fun and insightful. With that said, I am a little disappointed because I already have so many dungeon crawling games I want to play. I wish he had done his take on a western or a sailing adventure. A sailing adventure would have lots of inventory concerns too, come to think of it. You suddenly made me realize how much I want a maritime RPG. Anything like that exist?
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Apr 17, 2013 04:07
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Beat to Quarters is based around being a sailor during the Age of Sail; that might be worth a look.
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Apr 17, 2013 04:28
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Jimbozig posted:With that said, I am a little disappointed because I already have so many dungeon crawling games I want to play. Yeah, despite some very talented people working on them, it's somewhat disappointing. I don't care for that game format in general, have no nostalgia for it (I started roleplaying with Rifts and Shadowrun), so there's all these products using interesting design to create a type of game I have no interest in. Are there any good lightweight/indie cyberpunk games?
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Apr 18, 2013 17:30
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I also can't be hosed to care about Yet Another Indie D&D Heartbreaker, especially since it focuses on the fiddly bits and DW exists. Not the biggest fan of BW and Crane either. Ghost//Echo is cyberpunk-ish and two pages even.
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Apr 18, 2013 17:38
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Personally, I kinda like the idea; it's more about the survival aspects of adventuring than the combat aspects. I'd be interested to see how they did it, and whether or not it's actually interesting to play. I certainly wouldn't mind playing that game at some point.
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Apr 18, 2013 17:44
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There's technoir for straight-up cyberpunking.
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Apr 18, 2013 17:48
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MadRhetoric posted:I also can't be hosed to care about Yet Another Indie D&D Heartbreaker, especially since it focuses on the fiddly bits and DW exists. Not the biggest fan of BW and Crane either. It seems to be focusing on the exact opposite end of the dungeon-crawling spectrum as Dungeon World, actually. DW mostly ignores the gritty survival-horror aspects of dungeoneering that Torchbearer is focusing on, falling somewhere toward the pulp / Big drat Hero end of the spectrum.
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Apr 18, 2013 17:55
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Evil Mastermind posted:There's technoir for straight-up cyberpunking. Based on the preview stuff available, this looks like exactly what I'm looking for. Copy ordered. Thanks!
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Apr 18, 2013 18:53
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Ghost//Echo is pretty good for one shots actually. I keep going back and forth on the drawing board to make EP run in something actually good in terms of a system, trying to incorporate it into something like The Regiment or other *World hacks, but it's near impossible if you're trying to tie all the setting info in. Even if you limit morphs to more humanoid versions (whether bio or synth) like Nova Praxis does it just makes poo poo too fiddly without somehow forcing a 50 option skill list into AW/DW, and at that point treating it like World of Dungeon skills (where even on a 6- you succeed a little) just breaks it. I want to run/play the world of Eclipse Phase but I don't want to be bogged down in an equipment list spanning 150+ pages, morphs spanning 50+ pages, and skills/firing rates bogging poo poo down yet are integral to the setting that's 90% crunch over 4 books now. Fenarisk fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Apr 18, 2013 |
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Apr 18, 2013 19:12
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Kestral posted:It seems to be focusing on the exact opposite end of the dungeon-crawling spectrum as Dungeon World, actually. DW mostly ignores the gritty survival-horror aspects of dungeoneering that Torchbearer is focusing on, falling somewhere toward the pulp / Big drat Hero end of the spectrum. Yes, which is why I don't care.
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Apr 18, 2013 19:46
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Sir Kodiak posted:Yeah, despite some very talented people working on them, it's somewhat disappointing. I don't care for that game format in general, have no nostalgia for it (I started roleplaying with Rifts and Shadowrun), so there's all these products using interesting design to create a type of game I have no interest in. Are there any good lightweight/indie cyberpunk games?
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Apr 18, 2013 20:41
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Apparently Torchbearers will be Kickstarted. Also apparently they don't make any money on any of the Burning Wheel games because they're not popular enough to have economy of scale kick in enough to defray the production costs. Which, if true, is...startling. And unfortunate. I honestly couldn't tell you if I'll ever get to play any of them but there's some amazing design in there and they're clearly a labor of love.
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Apr 19, 2013 04:11
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malkav11 posted:Apparently Torchbearers will be Kickstarted. Also apparently they don't make any money on any of the Burning Wheel games because they're not popular enough to have economy of scale kick in enough to defray the production costs. Which, if true, is...startling. And unfortunate. I honestly couldn't tell you if I'll ever get to play any of them but there's some amazing design in there and they're clearly a labor of love. Where did you hear that? I thought Luke was living off his game design moneys up until he got his job at kickstarter just recently. I might well believe it about BWG because that book is super nice and very cheap.
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Apr 19, 2013 05:09
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Jimbozig posted:Where did you hear that? I thought Luke was living off his game design moneys up until he got his job at kickstarter just recently. I might well believe it about BWG because that book is super nice and very cheap. Part 2 of the Forbes coverage mentions the economics of BWHQ and talks about the Kickstarter plans: Forbes posted:“I like to say that I run a shipping charity for gamers,” Crane says. “I create games and ship them to hungry gamers for pennies. We’ve never made any money doing this and I don’t believe we ever will. Not even Mouse Guard brought in enough to pay even minimum wage to all of the people who worked on that book. ”
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Apr 19, 2013 06:40
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silby posted:Part 2 of the Forbes coverage mentions the economics of BWHQ and talks about the Kickstarter plans: Should switch to Kickstarting ebooks, yeah.
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Apr 19, 2013 06:48
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I hear PDFs are relatively cheap to produce.
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Apr 19, 2013 12:42
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Back at the first BurningCon in 2010, Luke showed off the sales figures for Burning Wheel to that point. Burning Wheel had sold something in the neighborhood of 5,000 copies in eight years, and each supplement ranged from around half to a quarter of that. Burning Empires was a fraction of that. Mouse Guard by itself had sold around 10,000 in two years and was constantly going back to the printers for new runs, but that's a licensed product so we don't really know how much he makes off of it. Luke was one of the only full-time professional game developers, true, but he lived like a starving college student in an apartment shared with like four or five other people. The move to Kickstarter probably singlehandedly doubled his income, if not tripled.
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Apr 19, 2013 16:11
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Swagger Dagger posted:I hear PDFs are relatively cheap to produce. Yeah I really don't have sympathy for a bad businessman who can't get with the times.
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Apr 19, 2013 19:19
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It's worth mentioning that Mouse Guard and Burning Empires are both available in PDF, but the books are gorgeous. Here's an anecdote, which you can take however you like. I've introduced Burning Wheel to something like 20+ people now, spread across several distinct groups, all but two of which have no overlap or even contact with each other. Without fail, everyone who liked the game immediately went out and tried to pirate it. Not "search for a PDF for sale," straight-up piracy. And I get that, and there's compelling evidence to suggest that in some media piracy leads to increased sales. But when they failed to find it in pirated PDF format, they all went out and bought dead-tree copies. Would BWHQ get more sales of Burning Wheel Gold if they released a PDF version? Yeah, probably. But I can totally get why they don't, given that they're not relying on said sales to keep body and soul together.
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Apr 19, 2013 20:09
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Speaking of Mouse Guard, anyone know where I can buy a copy in the UK that doesn't cost £100? 
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Apr 19, 2013 22:16
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Fenarisk posted:Yeah I really don't have sympathy for a bad businessman who can't get with the times. He got with the times.
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Apr 19, 2013 23:51
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Hell, Freemarket is available in PDF. It's just Burning Wheel that isn't, and that appears to be arbitrary personal preference on Crane's part. Which, y'know, whatever. That said, the only way I could see PDFs dramatically impacting the profitability of their operation is if they stopped producing print books entirely or moved to print on demand. The problem is that they don't have enough prospective customers for economy of scale to help with printing the books, and PDF sales at -best- wouldn't do much to offset that, if they didn't straight up cannibalize buyers for the print version. I mean, 5,000 copies across eight years? (I assume multiple editions, too.) That's just not a very large market, and they're really nice books.
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Apr 20, 2013 06:37
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I don't really like that game but I backed it for $50 because I hope it pushes him to make some PDF's of BW Gold. Yes, you can find and pirate the book in mere minutes, but I'd rather just buy a PDF from Crane himself so I can slap it on my iPad like I do with all the other PDF's I buy. I know it's a personal preference but it's becoming a more practical and mainstream one, to be able to go to a game night or game store and literally pick from any of 20 something game lines in a small 5 pound device. Plus it can integrate such ease of use and quality of life improvements like Eclipse Phase does with bookmarks or Nova Praxis does with everything in the augmented edition.
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Apr 21, 2013 00:43
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I can't think of a better way to lead into this, so I'm just going to say it: Ribbon Drive, Joe McDaldno's game about telling stories on the open road, is back in print. It's up on DriveThru for 8 bucks and on Buried Without Ceremony for 15 plus Shipping. Buy The Quiet Year while you're there.  Pretty sure it doesn't come with the CD is used to, but I think that's perfectly fine.
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May 12, 2013 02:31
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I remember Joe being referred to as the king of the moon people earlier in the thread.
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May 12, 2013 03:32
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CNN Sports Ticker posted:I remember Joe being referred to as the king of the moon people earlier in the thread. Yeah, he's kind of off on his own doing really weird stuff. The Quiet Year is like nothing I've played, but it's very unique and lets you tell really cool stories. Perfect Unrevised is REALLY intense, once you get to the heart of it. It's very much a game about people being broken (and trying to break back) by an oppressive regime. It's a rough pitch, because who wants to roleplay Room 101? Ribbon Drive, however, is like no game I've ever read. There is nothing in that book that doesn't belong. Everything reinforces this 'story about letting go' premise. I have been trying and failing to explain it to someone for about half an hour. Just, goddamn, Ribbon Drive.
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May 12, 2013 04:04
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I've got the first edition of it but never convinced people to play it with me. It's such a great idea for a game. I backed The Quiet Year at a level that got me the beautiful beautiful game as well as Perfect Unrevised and Monsterhearts. I basically want to play all of his games forever.
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May 12, 2013 04:34
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This is actually the perfect segue to talk about the Ribbon Drive game I was in last Thursday! My book came in earlier that day. It was a great printing, though my sister thought it was a Jehovah's Witness pamphlet when she saw it on the counter. I grabbed three buddies on Skype and we got to playing! The actual rules were a little hard to explain over the call, but everyone figured it out in play. There were four mixes: This Is Not For The Pure Of Heart!, about seedy things and evil deeds, So Long!, about endings and changes, Songs to Drive By, which were long jam band type songs for the open road, and J.O.N.I.X.-1, which were songs with acronyms and numbers in the titles. We used 8tracks to make the mixes, and plug.dj to stream them in real time using YouTube and Soundcloud. Once the mixes came together, it formed into a story of four drug running friends breaking away from their Southern mob boss and heading to Vegas to form their own dealing operation. Some highlights were the opening scene, a mad dash to escape the boss's gang (set to Midori's Yukiko-san), a scene where everyone had a heart to heart while camping in a forest (set to Marillion's Go!), a wild three way chase between us, mobsters, and Nevada Highway Patrolmen (set to The Allman Brothers Band's Jessica), and the bloody climax in a penthouse suite of the Luxor which ended in my character dying from a shotgun wound and the Protagonist lighting the mob boss's son on fire after dousing him in some strong alcohol from the minibar (set to Outkast's B.O.B.). Not quite what any of us were expecting going in, but we all had an amazing time and had lots of fun. One of my friends thought that Obstacles might be a little too hard and fast as a rule, but that was the only thing close to a complaint. I cannot wait to try playing it again!
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May 12, 2013 09:11
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Free Cog, Thank you so much for putting all your mixes up on 8tracks! (for those not in the know: at the end of Ribbon Drive, I suggest that people upload their mixes to 8tracks and tag them under the genre "ribbon drive." over time I'm hoping that there will amass a library of mixes that people have used in their games, that others can use too.) That session recap definitely sounds more high-octane than the typical game of Ribbon Drive. It sounds like a lot of fun.
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May 12, 2013 10:25
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I saw no mention of it in the last few pages, so check this out! Always/Never/Now, which was kickstarted a while back, is available for loving free on drivethru! http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/114457/Always-Never-Now It's based on Lady Blackbird; it's huge (100 pages long); it's a fast-paced, action-movie cyberpunk adventure with premade characters that spans the entire globe, from Argentina to Vietnam; it's got a cyberpunk version of this guy! What's not to like!
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May 14, 2013 23:30
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Ribbon Drive is particularly amazing if you came of age in the era before the iPod Shuffle and made a mixtape or CD for a girl/boy in high school. That's kind of the marker for where its meaning changes/seems to trail off. The Indie RPG Awards are getting ready to get started - the list of nominated games/supplements is currently being populated for 2012 - contact RPG encyclopedic superstar John Kim if you can think of a game that needs to be added. 2012 Indie RPG Awards nominee list. Click on "register" to submit more games/supplements.
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May 14, 2013 23:44
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Regarding Fiasco, Do I need to be some kind of improv genius to play this game well? It looks like so much fun but I'm a little terrified that I'd blank if prompted to come up with scenes and actions and so on.
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May 15, 2013 02:54
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Radio Talmudist posted:Regarding Fiasco, If you're feeling uncomfortable at first, just choose to Resolve all the time, let the other players frame the scene and you can hop in once the framework is there. A couple games in, you'll get the feel for it.
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May 15, 2013 03:26
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Radio Talmudist posted:Regarding Fiasco, I don't really think you need to be any real kind of amazing. The setup process means that even if you're completely stuck for ideas, you can just say "the scene is me and a character I have a relationship with, in [place], talking about what we're going to do about [ambition]." The rest usually falls out from there.
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May 15, 2013 03:50
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Yeah, I feel like my first game didn't go well, and the second one was alright, but I feel like I learned enough that a third would be much better. Some lessons I learned: Really figure out what the motivations are before you start the first scene. If not, your plot will meander pointlessly. Metagame the gently caress out of it. You know what the other players desires are. If they are trying to get rich quick and you have a bag of money you need for something else, do something to let them in on it. You're not playing to make your character win, you're playing to make an interesting story. That only happens if conflict happens, which can only happen if the other guy knows you have what they want that you don't want them to have. Don't cockblock the other player's motivations. This is an improv rule more or less though. Don't be afraid to have scenes with just your character with other players playing 'NPCs'. Movies have supporting characters and bit parts. Not every scene needs to be about conflict between two PCs. It can be two PCs negotiating to get backup against two other PCs later. It can be dealing with the other guy's mooks, etc. Next time you watch a Fiasco-esque movie, pay attention. I watched Kiss Kiss Bang Bang recently and so many things fell into place, as well as how brilliantly Fiasco could capture that movie.
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May 15, 2013 03:55
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I've played Fiasco twice, both times with a different group of people who had never played Fiasco before, hadn't played GM-less RPGs before, and in some cases had never roleplayed before. It was a blast both times. I think experience and close attention to the reams of advice in the Fiasco main book & companion would undoubtedly help make for much more dramatic, stylish and memorable fiascos, while early games of it tend towards the gonzo, but it's pretty much a fun engine as far as I'm concerned.
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May 15, 2013 04:26
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Agree with the above post. I think my problem is that I dislike gonzo. I appear to be in the minority about this. I don't like Paranoia either for that reason.
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May 15, 2013 04:34
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