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Jimbozig posted:Played munchkin 3 times last weekend. Had never played before. Each game took about half an hour. I can see that if they took hours they'd lose their charm, but they didn't. How long are you guys taking to take your turns? It doesn't seem possible to screw somebody THAT many turns in a row while still leaving them in a position to screw you back. It's different with more players. Most of the time I've seen Munchkin played it's with 4-8 players. It's one of those math dilemmas where each player ramps up the possibility of the endgame dragging out exponentially. The brilliance of Munchkin is that accurately simulates the flow of D&D. It starts out a bit sluggish and dull, and then as you gain levels, gets exciting and interesting for awhile, then as you approach the top-tier levels, everything starts to get sluggish and overcomplicated and miserable. Evil Mastermind posted:Yeah, but who has time to play a whole game of Arkham Horror? I've done it a lot!... but it requires that you get good at the game and have your team working in tandem closely to prioritize crises and resolve them. The real key is to just play with the base game and one mini-expansion or two and tell the rest of the irritating busywork expansions (I'm looking at you, Kingsport) to get lost. That being said, I'm mostly done with Arkham Horror because of its ridiculous 80s-era overdesign.
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Oct 3, 2014 19:48
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On a totally different note, I'm reading through Designers & Dragons: the 80s, and it mentions an unnamed freelancer who apparently introduced Kevin Siembieda to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic, and wrote an early draft of the game which was rejected by Siembieda (to be completely rewritten by Erick Wujcik in the final month before release). Anybody have any idea who that freelancer may have been?
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Oct 3, 2014 20:23
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:Barack Hussein Obama. That is the lamest Obama conspiracy theory I've heard this week.
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Oct 3, 2014 22:04
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Have we really gotten this far with "how deadly should a teacup be?" without a "well, what's important to your game"? I'm seeing pages of comments discussing whether or not to add paprika or cinnamon without actually discussing what's being cooked. If it's important to the game, it should be represented in the system, if not, then not. Twilight 2000 is probably right to discount martial mugs, since it's True Military Tales of the Post-Apocalypse; Feng Shui shouldn't care what you're using to murder with as long as it's part of your gimmick. Do what's right for the game. There's no one true Way of the Teacup.
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Oct 6, 2014 01:42
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Bucnasti posted:As I recall, it was less Shadowrun and more X-Files with a tiny bit of 90's style cyberpunk. I might be getting it confused with another game but I think a lot of it was based on the Weekly World News type of tabloids. Bat Boys infesting the sewers and such. 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". So you're up against vampires, werewolves, greys, etc., and other stereotypical monsters. There's a big grim evil Gigeresque force behind it all but tonally it never really worked for me. When the force of pure evil is like "How will I gently caress with humanity? I know- look out I just released a big furry yeti!"... it comes across as an example of how trying to explain something can make it sillier. Also, because it's based off of Twilight 2000, you advance your character by taking "terms", which means the ideal maximization is to be like forty years of age, where you're old enough to dredge up the most skills you can gather but not so old your attributes start falling. So a lot of players end up playing Midlife Crisis Monster Hunters. It also has some pretty grindy combat rules that can sometimes use terms like "square root" and expansive gun lists and generally what happens when a military system is used as a blanket house system for horror. It's an interesting novelty of seeing GDW try to change with the times, and I don't know how much the 2nd edition changed things up, but it struck me as a forced and clumsy effort. It also uses the term "Darktek" with a straight face. Oh, the 90s. 
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Oct 7, 2014 04:50
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FMguru posted: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. Yeah, it makes more sense to compare Dark Conspiracy to Ravenloft thematically (which came the year before), with the idea of one arch-evil giving rise to all sorts of pulp monsters, just in a near-future setting. But where Ravenloft had at least the push towards a unified gothic theme, Dark Conspiracy literally tries to cover any horror genre under the rainbow (the writer said as much), so one week you might face alien invaders with rayguns, the next week you might face a spooky ghost, the week after that might be an eeevil rock star dark elf. Of course, unlike games like Ravenloft, you have a huge list of guns and explosives, so the means of taking on monsters generally boils down to "shoot them".
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Oct 7, 2014 15:10
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Jedi are what distinguish Star Wars, yeah. Without the Well, that and wookies. 
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Oct 8, 2014 22:00
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ProfessorCirno posted:Like there's literally no reason any of those powers have to be explicitly better then anything other classes get. Lando ain't a jedi and he handles himself quite nicely in the third movie's space fight (and in fact is General Calrissian and is calling the shots). Hell, the EU had ridiculous non-Jedi characters like Kir Kanos, who mows down elite stormtroopers with the barest of effort, shoots down a starfighter with a blaster, and kills a Sith Lord in melee combat. Granted, Crimson Empire is so-awful-it's-good, but Star Wars isn't exactly high lit either. Ultimately, whether or not Jedi are more powerful in-setting should be irrelevant, since it's a game and you can balance the different types of characters by choice. Even if they were stronger in-setting, the needs of the game override the needs of the setting. For years I got to see WEG tell people who wanted to play a Jedi that they basically had to be a novice or a drunk, and that wasn't very fun for would-be Jedi! Jedi players who whine about not having greater power levels obviously lack the proper mindset of humility to be a Jedi, anyway; seems like a path to the Dark Side if I ever heard one.
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Oct 9, 2014 17:10
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I admit not knowing much about the folks involved other than James Wallis, who everything I've read by him is pretty dry, but I guess he did Adventures of Baron Munchausen which was more of a literal storygame than an RPG per se. It's kind of weird, though; Paranoia just doesn't strike me as the sort of game that needs an edition every five years or so.
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Oct 14, 2014 15:32
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I like reference cards a lot. Being able to pass the Emotion Matrix around in Tenra Bansho Zero is pretty drat helpful, for example. A game doesn't have to be mechanically complex to have helpful props - what else is a Playbook, really? Dread is an immensely simple game that relies on a singular prop. Marvel Heroic is far from a mechanically rigorous game, but manipulating Plot Points is complicated enough that it really helped my players to have a handout describing their various applications, and it frequently uses dice as both implements and props. Recently I invested in a poker chip set and it has a wide array of applications in "light" games - Hillfolk, for example, practically requires them. Nearly any game can benefit from well-implemented props. Even TWERPS came with a hexgrid and chits.
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Oct 16, 2014 14:51
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Galaga Galaxian posted:(Edit) also that means YOU can't sell your own game as a PDF, losing you customers. And if you do sell it as a PDF, you've done the pirates work for em, unless you leave out print&play versions of your props, in which case, what's the point? Never underestimate the work ethic of internet pirates. Honestly, not having a game get pirated at all should be a worrisome issue, because it almost always just means nobody cares to.
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Oct 16, 2014 16:13
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The solution is not to have wild animals in your home, like cats or children. 
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Oct 16, 2014 19:04
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It's mostly being picked on in the Kickstarter thread.
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Oct 24, 2014 20:15
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ErichZahn posted:The Lost Causer poo poo in PEG games is ridiculous. They actually made it worse in DL:R and HOE:R How could they possibly make it worse than "villain goes back in time, retroactively undoes PC victories, bad things happen anyway?"
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Oct 31, 2014 01:10
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FMguru posted: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. Shane Lacy Hensley was involved with trying to get an MMO off the ground with an unknown publisher that closed - since Hensley worked on City of Villains, Paragon Studios seems like a likely suspect. There was also a recent attempt to get a Deadlands TV series going with Xbox Entertainment Studios, but the near-closure of that seems to have spelled the death of that notion, too. I never got into Deadlands even though I liked the idea, because the tone was all over the place and it never could decide if it was serious or silly, the system was fiddly and had too many elements to juggle (dice, cards, three different ways to take damage, etc.), it required too much of a financial investment (like, if you wanted kung fu, you needed to buy a boxed set, miracles were their own supplement, shamanism was its own supplement, etc). I actually got into it through the Doomtown CCG, which I think actually got the tone and feel of the game better than the actual game it was based on, with a wry, self-aware quality to writing that the core game was missing. It was also amusing to see all the elements of the core game jammed into a single town, with mad scientists and fallen angels battling over a china shop. FMguru posted: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. It's probably the better way to present a game design-wise, but there's solid marketing reasons the 90s supplement drip feed worked the way it did, too. It would have been more consumer-friendly, but I'm not sure Deadlands would have been the success it was if books had been optional. (I mean, they really weren't- entire sections of the game were closed off to you unless you had the appropriate books.) Not saying it was a great or honest idea, but these are the sort of dumb tricks that have historically kept game lines alive.
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Oct 31, 2014 13:50
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