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When I say it's boring, I mean it's boring to the extent that it believes everyone in a culture with such values will follow them all the time (unless you're Wick's ultra-speshul ruthless manchildren de jure, the Scorpion) rather than navigating how people break their values and publicly uphold them, etc. I'm not saying no-one can enjoy the game or setting, I'm saying I didn't.
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Nov 30, 2014 04:57
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Has anyone played the Buffy RPG?
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Nov 30, 2014 04:58
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I haven't, but I've read the Fatal and Friends writeup. Based on my reading, you would be well advised to run Buffy in whatever of Fate, GURPS, Primetime Adventures, or DramaSystem suits your group. That or just play MonsterHearts, I guess.
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Nov 30, 2014 05:15
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bowmore posted:Has anyone played the Buffy RPG? Sort of. I was in a game that originally started as a sort of "World of Darkness potpourri" game where everyone was playing different supernaturals. The system worked fine until we literally went past the upper mechanical limits of the game.
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Nov 30, 2014 05:19
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inklesspen posted:I haven't, but I've read the Fatal and Friends writeup. Evil Mastermind posted:Sort of. I was in a game that originally started as a sort of "World of Darkness potpourri" game where everyone was playing different supernaturals.
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Nov 30, 2014 05:21
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bowmore posted:oh wow that sounds interesting in an different way It was without a doubt the worst campaign I or my friends have ever been in. It was like 10 years ago and we still bitch about it. GMNPC and GM'sWifePC the only ones able to do anything, the constant ridiculous escalation (it was supposed to be a "Buffy but you're all WoDites" game; we eventually fought unseelie fae riding dinosaurs), characters who were completely ignored by the GM to the point where the player fell asleep, another player being shut down by the GM because he did a cooler (room-applause generating) thing that showed up the bad guy NPC, numbers so high we couldn't fail rolls even if we tried, getting constantly shown up by the GMNPC, and the two Chosen One PCs not only being the only ones who could win the campaign in a final unskippable cutscene. The last fight was against the embodiment of Set as a giant block-wide serpent. My character (a phoenix-powered martial artist) and his twin brother (demonically powered sorcerer) attacked this thing so hard, spent every metagame point we had, and did so much damage we went in the mouth and DPS'd our way out the other end with a demonic-magic-fire-soul-forged-dual-katana combo, but Set didn't die until the GM'sWifePC just awakened to her True Power, ascended to godhood, smote Set without rolling, and took her daywalker bf (the GMNPC) with her into the heavens. I did not make a word of that up.
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Nov 30, 2014 05:36
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This conversation about L5R strikes me as one of those things where everyone has to amend every critical post with "I'm not saying they're maliciously racist, and it can still be fun" even though no one should have to.bowmore posted:Has anyone played the Buffy RPG? I did, pretty much straight. It was a blast, but definitely a case of the system mastery-types not letting themselves stomp all over everyone else. Which, I mean, you could say about most games. The system is fairly good. I seem to recall you might want to use the Angel book for the core rules, because I think it incorporated some errata that didn't get folded into the original game before it shut down.
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Nov 30, 2014 05:45
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Evil Mastermind posted:It was without a doubt the worst campaign I or my friends have ever been in. It was like 10 years ago and we still bitch about it. GMNPC and GM'sWifePC the only ones able to do anything, the constant ridiculous escalation (it was supposed to be a "Buffy but you're all WoDites" game; we eventually fought unseelie fae riding dinosaurs), characters who were completely ignored by the GM to the point where the player fell asleep, another player being shut down by the GM because he did a cooler (room-applause generating) thing that showed up the bad guy NPC, numbers so high we couldn't fail rolls even if we tried, getting constantly shown up by the GMNPC, and the two Chosen One PCs not only being the only ones who could win the campaign in a final unskippable cutscene. Plague of Hats posted:I did, pretty much straight. It was a blast, but definitely a case of the system mastery-types not letting themselves stomp all over everyone else. Which, I mean, you could say about most games. The system is fairly good. I seem to recall you might want to use the Angel book for the core rules, because I think it incorporated some errata that didn't get folded into the original game before it shut down.
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Nov 30, 2014 05:47
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bowmore posted:Only reason I was wondering is because I found the rule books and I thought it'd be fun to run even if it's terrible. I think they did a fair job trying to balance slayers with everyone else. Not the best, and you may or may not like just how they did it, but pretty functional. (I recall it was mostly by affording "normals" more narrative currency.) (Much like my thoughts on Iron Heroes, this is based on gaming years ago, so I may also just be completely wrong and couldn't talk real details.)
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Nov 30, 2014 05:52
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Night10194 posted:When I say it's boring, I mean it's boring to the extent that it believes everyone in a culture with such values will follow them all the time (unless you're Wick's ultra-speshul ruthless manchildren de jure, the Scorpion) rather than navigating how people break their values and publicly uphold them, etc. I'm not saying no-one can enjoy the game or setting, I'm saying I didn't. That's fair enough! bowmore posted:Only reason I was wondering is because I found the rule books and I thought it'd be fun to run even if it's terrible. It's got that post-90s RPG feel, where the core is around a benefit / drawback system (with the usual complaints around such) that also allows you to basically buy your supernatural type (if any), but has some nods in that less powerful characters get more drama points to spend, and players roll all the dice. It's pretty decent but it hasn't aged too well - its attempts at trying to recapture the show's wit come across as pretty goofy today - but if you have a group still fond of the show it's a fun enough lark.
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Nov 30, 2014 06:03
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The Buffy RPG kicked a lot of rear end. The Drama Point system is still the most effective of those kind of "action points" systems I've seen- their effects are big and useful and so gaining and spending them feels significant. It was also an eye opener for me in just how much it pared down the rules in order to properly match the pace of the TV show and focus on what was important- even compared to something like Star Wars D6 which still wasted time with grenade scatter diagrams and charts showing how long it takes to get to Bespin from Tattooine. And I honestly like the Buffyspeak. It's proof to me that you can write a game in "natural language" and still clearly communicate and explain not just what the rules are but why. (Mike Mearls are you paying attention.) drat shame Eden got screwed by the license and has never really recovered.
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Nov 30, 2014 06:19
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Maxwell Lord posted:drat shame Eden got screwed by the license and has never really recovered. Is that what happened to Eden Studios? I know they pretty much dropped off the face of the earth but I never knew why.
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Nov 30, 2014 06:26
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Didn't Eden do All Flesh Must Be Eaten? I had one of my most fun campaigns ever in that game.
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Nov 30, 2014 06:27
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Evil Mastermind posted:Is that what happened to Eden Studios? I know they pretty much dropped off the face of the earth but I never knew why. It's not the only thing that screwed them over but I do recall hearing that they ended up owing money to Fox at the end of it.
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Nov 30, 2014 06:28
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Night10194 posted:Didn't Eden do All Flesh Must Be Eaten? I had one of my most fun campaigns ever in that game. Yep. I know zombies are basically so overdone everybody's sick of them at this point but I admit I really liked the AFMBE series.
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Nov 30, 2014 06:35
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Kai Tave posted:Yep. I know zombies are basically so overdone everybody's sick of them at this point but I admit I really liked the AFMBE series. The thing is, AFMBE lets you do a lot with zombies. And more importantly, it doesn't stick entirely to the tired 'Oh everyone's an rear end in a top hat and you're all going to snap at each other until you fail and die and haha people are awful' story that every goddamn zombie story has. I had a lot of fun running a Victorian upper class family and their heroic working class governess through a story of horrible wizards and zombie plagues into exile in Russia and eventually back home to England as social mores were overturned by the necessity of fighting the undead hordes and taking their country back.
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Nov 30, 2014 06:42
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I played AFMBE once, as I recall it was pretty fun
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Nov 30, 2014 06:45
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Kai Tave posted:Yep. I know zombies are basically so overdone everybody's sick of them at this point but I admit I really liked the AFMBE series. All Flesh rules because it fully embraces how stupid zombie media is with poo poo like wild west zombies and kung fu zombies and a WW1 zombie thing that involved the RED BARON ZOMBIE. Like, it looked at all the dumbest cliches in the media and said 'yea, this is all good'.
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Nov 30, 2014 06:45
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Libertad! posted:I remember hearing some things that sounded weird even to 15-year-old me. For example, samurai could not eat sushi because fish meat was dead flesh and therefore unclean. To my knowledge real-world samurai weren't required to be strict vegetarians. I'm pretty sure there's a lot of confusion there regarding ideas of spiritual and physical uncleanliness. From my limited understanding of Feudal Japan, Bushi weren't supposed to handle the dead, but 'weren't supposed to' didn't carry much moral weight, and you could get rid of the uncleanliness via a cleansing ritual, whose primary component was a bath. As in, after you've been out killin' dudes all day, you're supposed to take a bath before you visit polite people or the temple or you'll get (spiritual and physical) filth everywhere, brah. Also, both historically and in chambara, samurai did poo poo they weren't supposed to all the time and got away with it constantly, like noblemen everywhere.
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Nov 30, 2014 06:46
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Plus you could actually build all sorts of nasty non-zombie monsters with creative application of its zombie creation system.
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Nov 30, 2014 06:47
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Tatum Girlparts posted:All Flesh rules because it fully embraces how stupid zombie media is with poo poo like wild west zombies and kung fu zombies and a WW1 zombie thing that involved the RED BARON ZOMBIE. Like, it looked at all the dumbest cliches in the media and said 'yea, this is all good'. Don't forget Three Musketeers Zombies, who are primarily vulnerable to daring fencing moves and dramatic stabs to the heart.
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Nov 30, 2014 06:48
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Ratoslov posted:I'm pretty sure there's a lot of confusion there regarding ideas of spiritual and physical uncleanliness. From my limited understanding of Feudal Japan, Bushi weren't supposed to handle the dead, but 'weren't supposed to' didn't carry much moral weight, and you could get rid of the uncleanliness via a cleansing ritual, whose primary component was a bath. As in, after you've been out killin' dudes all day, you're supposed to take a bath before you visit polite people or the temple or you'll get (spiritual and physical) filth everywhere, brah. During the Edo period, social outcasts were recruited into the Tokugawa police to dispose of bodies, but that's also when you had the rigid formalization of bushido and the major decline of the samurai.
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Nov 30, 2014 06:49
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Tatum Girlparts posted:All Flesh rules because it fully embraces how stupid zombie media is with poo poo like wild west zombies and kung fu zombies and a WW1 zombie thing that involved the RED BARON ZOMBIE. Like, it looked at all the dumbest cliches in the media and said 'yea, this is all good'. Night10194 posted:Don't forget Three Musketeers Zombies, who are primarily vulnerable to daring fencing moves and dramatic stabs to the heart. You guys are both forgetting quite possibly the best AFMBE crossover of all, zombie pro-wrestling.
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Nov 30, 2014 07:15
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Still, all that gets at the heart of why AFMBE was good. Because it was about zombies being fun instead of just some grim, grimey mess of boring.
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Nov 30, 2014 07:33
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The actual rules were more or less "generic but effective"- Unisystem wasn't really awesome until it became Cinematic Unisystem- but AMFBE offers up so much fluff support it's ridiculous, and zombie creation is good too. They were actually a little ahead of the curve on the whole zombie craze, the game came out in '99 or 2000 I believe.
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Nov 30, 2014 09:01
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Maxwell Lord posted:It's not the only thing that screwed them over but I do recall hearing that they ended up owing money to Fox at the end of it. Ultimately FOX sat on license approval for books and left Eden hanging, so they had money invested in work but couldn't publish it to make their money back. Eventually couldn't pay the renewal fees, and so they lost both the license and the investment they'd laid out for supplements on the line. It did a lot of damage, and that was followed with the general lassitude of RPG sales in the wake of the initial d20 collapse. Eden Studios never actually went under but just didn't release much for ages, but recently have been doing Conspiracy X and AFMBE kickstarters to revive some of their "lost" game lines.
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Nov 30, 2014 10:21
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Ratoslov posted:Also, both historically and in chambara, samurai did poo poo they weren't supposed to all the time and got away with it constantly, like noblemen everywhere. [Edit: The family names are p. bad, though; mostly puns, nearly all "this would never be a person's name", sometimes just indecipherable poo poo that looks like it got Google Translated to hell and back. Also I was about to put in something about the use of eta and historical context, equivocating it to a hypothetical RPG set in fantastic Western history using the term "friend of the family". Then I thought about every game store I've ever been in, and all the "how are we in the same hobby" gamers I've met, and deleted everything I wrote. Terrible, terrible, terrible.] AmiYumi fucked around with this message at 11:23 on Nov 30, 2014 |
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Nov 30, 2014 10:59
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Maxwell Lord posted:They were actually a little ahead of the curve on the whole zombie craze, the game came out in '99 or 2000 I believe.
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Nov 30, 2014 15:52
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FMguru posted:RPGs do have a certain ability to get ahead of the pop/nerd culture curve. The fusty old wargamers at GDW managed it twice, incredibly enough: Dark Conspiracy pre-dated the X-Files by several years, and Space:1889 was doing steampunk back in 1988. nerds... are trend-setters????
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Nov 30, 2014 16:22
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MartianAgitator posted:Because you're strawmanning? L5R makes up a fantasy world based on mostly Japanese culture but it never ever says, "Hey, this is what Japan was really like!" That is not willfully misrepresenting. What it does is exploit real and perceived visions of East Asian to make something new - the same loving way Conan does with Scandinavia, Rome and the Near East. They are both exploiting the fantastical, cultural and violent images in the common imagination to create a world similar enough to feel familiar, exotic enough to feel fresh and interesting, and different enough to feel like you can actually do crazy, escapist poo poo there and get away with it.
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Nov 30, 2014 16:29
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Captain Foo posted:nerds... are trend-setters????
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Nov 30, 2014 17:24
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Night10194 posted:When I say it's boring, I mean it's boring to the extent that it believes everyone in a culture with such values will follow them all the time (unless you're Wick's ultra-speshul ruthless manchildren de jure, the Scorpion) rather than navigating how people break their values and publicly uphold them, etc. I'm not saying no-one can enjoy the game or setting, I'm saying I didn't. I was in a group where everyone played cardboard cutouts of their respective clans and it was the most boring thing. I could totally see being put off from the whole thing if that was your first/only experience, because you really need a group that is willing to collaborate on having a good story and making rules decisions that will facilitate that. Too bad the book's GM advice seems wholly against that concept in most places (it tends to be the worst kind of adversarial "players aren't allowed to have nice things ever" bullshit you'd expect from Wick).
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Nov 30, 2014 18:57
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Yeah, it was probably mostly just a really bad first experience with the whole thing back in high school.
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Nov 30, 2014 19:01
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Night10194 posted:Yeah, it was probably mostly just a really bad first experience with the whole thing back in high school. nobody needs to hear about your sex life
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Nov 30, 2014 20:39
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MadScientistWorking posted:You just described the exact process that gave us Jar Jar and Wattoo which you know completely upends your argument. Jar Jar is Sambo, the goofy failure of a Step-N-Fetchit caricature, except with every aspect of race stripped from him. There is no way to identify what race of human being Jar Jar is meant to represent by the body on screen, or even that he is meant to - you have to already understand that this is a racist caricature to begin, then you have to believe that this is a racist caricature currently being used for racist purposes or that the act of using it is racist. If you didn't know that it was already racist, why would you assume? If you think it's offensive that George Lucas is taking a vehicle for racism, stripping it of racial qualifiers and just using its pure entertainment qualities to entertain children, well, then, you find that offensive because of something inherent in it. To me, it sounds like the Lord's work, like turning a bomb into a baby rattle. You should also probably know about the Plantation Novel. It's an American genre that flowered during and after the American Civil War. It was an art form that Southerners used to justify and lionize the racist, separatist philosophies of the time. It was most often about a young farm boy who finds strength in the faith of his simple religion and uses it to thwart a vast, aggressive, imperialistic, technologically-advanced North. This is the story of Star Wars. The bottom line is this: Firefly even stole its Civil War apologism from a better series. The second bottom line is this: If using the form of a racist vehicle is itself racist, and thus Jar Jar is racist, then the whole Star Wars original trilogy is racist for using the form of a Plantation Novel. But we can still be friends.
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Dec 1, 2014 00:43
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MartianAgitator posted:Jar Jar is Sambo, the goofy failure of a Step-N-Fetchit caricature, except with every aspect of race stripped from him. There is no way to identify what race of human being Jar Jar is meant to represent by the body on screen, or even that he is meant to - you have to already understand that this is a racist caricature to begin, then you have to believe that this is a racist caricature currently being used for racist purposes or that the act of using it is racist. If you didn't know that it was already racist, why would you assume? If you think it's offensive that George Lucas is taking a vehicle for racism, stripping it of racial qualifiers and just using its pure entertainment qualities to entertain children, well, then, you find that offensive because of something inherent in it. To me, it sounds like the Lord's work, like turning a bomb into a baby rattle. 2/5, too transparent
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Dec 1, 2014 00:47
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Eden surprised the hell out of me a few years back by going "Oh, hey, that game you pre-ordered ages ago and got backburnered because of the Buffy license nonsense? Here it is, your copy's in the mail" Which is how I have a physical copy of the Ghosts of Albion RPG, because nothing screams for an RPG license like "Animated webserial on a now-defunct BBC sub-site."
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Dec 1, 2014 01:10
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The real fun thing to wonder is what recent nerdy things are going to suddenly be pop-culture relevant out of nowhere in a few years. Besides the obvious that "Happy Birthday, Robot" is going to be the top show on FOX in 2021. Edit: Neo-FOX
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Dec 1, 2014 02:27
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Made a December chat thread over here.
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