Topico do Chat de Outubro: Mes das Bruxas!

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FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Just have them call themselves "The Foundation" - maybe use the Arabic word for it.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2014 16:39

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 05:31

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Dark Conspiracy was weird one; it was GDW's attempt to do a grim nineties supernatural sort of game, and coming from designers working on Twilight 2000 and Traveller. It was kind of cyberpunk where a supernatural event starts causing all of humanity's fears to start manifesting, but the issue is that their interpretation of "humanity's fears" is "really shlocky horror".

DC was a rare example of the aging wargamers at GDW being ahead of the curve - it came out in 1991, several years before X-Files or the first Delta Green material for Call of Cthulhu, yet it was full of UFOs and greys and alien-human hybrids and secret tech from Area 51 and stuff like that. It also did horrors-in-the-modern-world at the same time Vampire: the Masquerade came out (albeit with the crucial difference that you played standard adventurer-PCs, not the monster bad guys). Even the name caught the cultural zeitgeist - 1991 was also the year of Oliver Stone's JFK, and government conspiracy theories were all the rage for the first half of the 1990s.

Unfortunately, it used their in-house system, descended from Twilight:2000 second edition and used in the Traveller: The New Era game, and that system was a load of crunch-heavy crap (I'd group it in with clunky contemporary systems like Torg and Kult, or maybe a less-elegant version of Shadowrun). The setting had some good elements (the future was essentially Robocop's), with a heavy dose of Deadlands' Reckoners (as it predated DL, it was probably an influence on it) but the whole thing added up to not much as has been pointed out. It's pretty much what you'd expect from a bunch of wargamers trying to build a cyberpunk horror setting. At least there were a lots of stats for guns and explosion templates and grenade scatter diagrams.

A strange mix of forward- and backward-looking (it was doing the Grim 90s before the 90s had even really gotten going). It kind of flopped when it was released (blown away by V:tM and couple of years later the Magic/CCG boom) and the fact it keeps getting updated and re-released by different publishers is genuinely baffling to me.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 07:48

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

Does anyone know what inspired this system? It makes sense for military sims but younger gamers don't want to play 50 year old spacers who have been shipping fake palm trees to the Zhodani for 20 years. My theory was that the people at GDW came up with the system after watching Alien, since it's practically working stiffs in space, but it came out in 1979, two years after Traveller. I'm doubtful it's Star Trek. Most of the Enterprise crew were in their 30's, Doohan and DeForest Kelley were in their 40's, and they were on their first 5 year mission.

EDIT: Star Wars came out in 1977, the same year, so I doubt it inspired a great deal in the main book.

GDW got going in the early 1970s, and was founded by a bunch of guys who had just gotten out of the army, so it made perfect sense that their RPG was about guys who had just gotten out of the army trying to figure out what to do next in their lives with the skills they had learned. At least Traveller gave your chararacters a backstory, compared to D&D having your character materialize in front of a dungeon with 2d6x10 GP worth of equipment and "LVL 1" stamped on their foreheads.

The actual system was descended from En Garde!, their 1975 proto-RPG about playing a gentleman duelist in Musketeer-era France, which is still awesome and worth playing (and in print!) to this day.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 07:57

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

unseenlibrarian posted:

All they really need is a creepy space nazi apologist game and they'd be set.

FFG already publishes a whole series of those (Dark Heresy/Only War/Deathwatch/etc.).

# ¿ Oct 8, 2014 16:30

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Yep. The problem with Jedi in RPGs is the same as wizards in D&D (worse, really, because at least D&D wizards aren't also flashing whirling close combat ninjas). Jedi tend to overwhelm all other members of an adventuring party because in the canonical universe they have all kinds of encounter- and scenario-breaking powers. So either you play a party of Jedi, a Jedi whose powers are nerfed into something like Counselor Troi's, or a party with no Jedi if you don't just want to sit around and watch the Jedi character solve all the problems with his Jedi spell list.

Of course, Star Wars without Jedi misses the point of most of the movies, and you end up with Traveller-but-with-Hutts-and-Wookies.

# ¿ Oct 8, 2014 22:30

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Error 404 posted:

Karen Traviss

Luuke

# ¿ Oct 8, 2014 22:32

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

18 Character Limit posted:

FFG...rulebooks...better edited.

# ¿ Oct 8, 2014 22:45

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

ProfessorCirno posted:

Luke traveled with Han just fine without either overshadowing the other.

Only when Luke had like one level in Jedi Noob prestige class. Once he learned more than a single Jedi trick, Luke was off on his own solo adventure away from Han and Chewie and Leia. Kenobi also disappeared from the story early on. Vader dominated every scene he was in, except for when he was bending the knee to a more powerful Jedi.

Mixed groups of non-scrub Jedi and non-Jedi doing things in the original trilogy are real hard to come by, and for a very good reason.

# ¿ Oct 8, 2014 23:47

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

MalcolmSheppard posted:

Troupe play is the answer. Ars Magica shows the way, as it so often does. Everybody makes a strong Jedi. Everybody makes an expert or niche character of some kind, and then you grab a bunch of clone-grogs and play Tartovsky cartoons.

Ding ding ding.

Yep, that works. So does some kind of storytelling system where players can take the spotlight and determine the scene by playing drama beads or something. It's just a standard RPG presentation of a mixed party of Jedi and non-Jedi ends up like a worse version of 3.X casters vs. non-casters. Even George Lucas understood that he had the separate the Jedi and non-Jedi stuff in his movies.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2014 00:01

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Zurui posted:

Yeah, but it's also Traveller where I don't have to explain the context or races or anything to people - everyone is familiar with the source material to a certain extent and (especially with EotE) it's a really solid foundation for pulpy, rogueish adventures. The Jedi may or may not still exist and they may or may not be incredibly powerful, but you've got a cargo hold full of contraband and a date with an bounty hunter if you don't get it where it's supposed to be on time - assuming you can avoid any entanglements.

Basically, EotE is for people who are like "gently caress that Jedi bullshit, I wanna play Han & Chewie."

Yeah, that works too. It's Traveller but you don't have to explain about the Vargr and the Aslan and the Zhodani and the difference between the Third and Fourth Frontier War. IIRC, a fair number of 1980s Traveller games I played were pretty much someone's homebrewed knockoff of the Star Wars universe anyway.

Which reminds of the old Middle Earth Role Playing Game from ICE, which concentrated on letting people play standard D&D fantasy adventures in dungeons/wilderness/cities, but in a world-setting that everyone is familiar with. Lots of people knock MERP for not promoting a particularly Tolkien-esque style of play, but that was never its intention - it was meant for doing the same kind of stuff you'd do in Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms, but with actual Balrogs and Warg Riders and the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood and Lake-Town and Nazgul and Ents and Uruk-Hai instead of their serial-numbers-filed-off stand-ins.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2014 00:08

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

"Battle Meditation" first showed up in Timothy Zahn's HEIRS TO THE EMPIRE, the first ever EU novel, as the explanation for why the Imperial Fleet fell apart once the Emperor was killed (and why the Empire splintered, and why it took five years before someone was able to put enough of the pieces together to be a threat to The New Republic).

e: Durrr, need to refresh before posting

# ¿ Oct 9, 2014 18:26

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Zurui posted:

It occurred to me this morning that Edge of the Empire isn't "Traveller with Wookies." It's "Firefly with Aliens.*"

Since Firefly is basically "Traveller without aliens", I think we've basically just proved some sort of geek transitive property.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2014 17:24

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

fosborb posted:

yeah it's probably time for a Paranoia World.

There has already been an official Paranoia playset for Fiasco.

http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/news/2012/06/15/a-very-special-paranoia-fiasco/

# ¿ Oct 14, 2014 22:43

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

OTOH, the more bits and bobs and gizmos a game comes with, the harder it is to pirate as a PDF.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2014 15:02

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Brave New World was pretty much the apex of every single terrible 1990s RPG trend. Hardcoded setting class/factions. A core book that just barely has enough rules and setting info to start playing. Wonky dice system. Metaplot. Supplement treadmill. Iconic NPC characters driving the narrative and doing all the important things. Tons of fanfic-level fiction. Having to buy a new $25 book every month for two years before the GM was allowed to understand what was really going on in the setting that he was supposedly running. When the Big Secret is revealed it's actually a bait-and-switch for the entire setting. It's all there.

I keep waiting for someone to write it up for FATAL & Friends, because it's seriously some of the most headshaking garbage ever produced as a full-line professionally published RPG. There was much to hate about D&D3E/D20/OGL but I'll always appreciate the way it shifted the entire industry away from the godawful metaplot/supplement model that WW pioneered.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2014 23:16

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

One other 90s thing about BNW: the books themselves were padded like an underwritten term paper. Big typeface, lots of whitespace, page borders, generous margins, bad line art (full page), lots of space-filling in-character narration and fiction, and so on.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2014 02:30

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 05:31

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Wild West games have been around since the literal dawn of the RPG hobby yet not a single one had ever had any kind of success (for the usual reason that straight historical games fail - realistically deadly combat with no easy healing, and not a lot for characters to do). Deadlands was the first (and only) successful western game because they added a poo poo-ton of zombies and werewolves and vampires and Lovecraft and steampunk gadgets and evil Injun spirits (and healing magic) to the mix. Unfortunately they added all the metaplot and railroading and god-NPCs and everything else 1990s to the mix as well, and you get the current mess.

If it had just been a semi-generic Weird Western with a whole bunch of possible things to drop into the game, I think it would have aged a lot better. But no everything exists all at once, and in a particular order, and the whole setting becomes this huge continuity swamp unless you start hacking things away - at which point 1) is it even Deadlands any more, 2) you players might have a different idea as to what the game world is compared to yours unless you print up a document with all the differences ahead of time and oh boy yay homework! and 3) there's nothing like throwing away a whole bunch of material that you paid for.

I think All Flesh Must Be Eaten did it right: a generic Zombie Game core, giving the GM a bunch of different kinds of zombies and ways to run a zombie apocalypse, and the supplements just adding more settings and options.

I'll always have kind of a soft spot for DL because Pinnacle didn't let a single IP exploitation opportunity pass them by. GURPS version? Call of Cthulhu crossover? Miniatures game? CCG? Disk Wars adaptation?!? I think they even had a line of Button Men playsets. Plus comics, fiction collections, branded poker card decks and everything else. I'm going to assume the lack of computer game or animated series or TV or move adaptation wasn't because of a lack of trying. I'll also always kind of hate it because it has the worst kind of neo-Confederate apologism baked into its core and in my experience if you bring that up to a real Deadlands fan, you're all but guaranteed to get an earful about the real causes of the Civil War (hint: turns out it wasn't about slavery!). Plus, the whole noble savage/witch doctor treatment of Native Americans (although that's par for the course for the genre and gaming in general).

# ¿ Oct 31, 2014 12:53

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