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All I wanted to do was continue turning into a seagull and then landing on ships to turn back into a Russian peasant hero with a magic sword, goddamnit, while going around with a drunken Irish marksman who never missed a shot (Seriously, he never missed a single attack all campaign), a froofy spanish fencer, and a Fate Witch. That's all we wanted. But no, horrible demon monsters and the Inquisition basically being right about everything and german shadow ninjas who are 'cooler' than you and eggghhhh.
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Dec 5, 2014 14:50
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I like the big dumb alien stuff, but would never spring it as a surprise. You need people to be okay with that poo poo.
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Dec 5, 2014 15:14
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Night10194 posted:I was in a campaign that was pretty awesome right up until the GM bought all the books, excited, and decided he would follow the goddamn metaplot to the letter and killed the game right quick by doing it. potatocubed posted:I really enjoyed reading the metaplot, but I played it and it remained entirely irrelevant the whole time. This is every metaplot in every game. gently caress metaplots, I want a game book not a novel.
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Dec 5, 2014 15:24
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Best metaplot is 40kRPG metaplot, which is really just a bunch of story hooks "Hey there's this star that does Things, maybe you could check it out???"
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Dec 5, 2014 15:28
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In the (slight) defense of the 7S/L5R RPGs, they are adaptations of a property with a built-in ongoing storyline (their respective CCGs). Complaining that it's hard to run L5R because there's a constant stream of new developments and setting-changing revelations attached to it is a little like complaining that Star Wars has wizard-knights with laser swords in it. It's part of the package.
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Dec 5, 2014 15:31
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There just seems to be a point where certain AEG settings (Legend of the Five Rings, 7th Sea, Shadowforce Archer) forgot their mission statement of providing a genre experience and instead started meandering into other genres without much rhyme or reason other than "gotcha!".
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Dec 5, 2014 15:35
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I think it's more like complaining that Star Wars RPGs sucked in the 2000s because there was a new book or comic or animated series being released all the drat time and it was difficult to keep up with the canon.
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Dec 5, 2014 15:36
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FMguru posted:In the (slight) defense of the 7S/L5R RPGs, they are adaptations of a property with a built-in ongoing storyline (their respective CCGs). Complaining that it's hard to run L5R because there's a constant stream of new developments and setting-changing revelations attached to it is a little like complaining that Star Wars has wizard-knights with laser swords in it. It's part of the package. Yeah, isn't 7th Sea just a step below L5R in terms of being hit by the CCG plot train? Zurui posted:I think it's more like complaining that Star Wars RPGs sucked in the 2000s because there was a new book or comic or animated series being released all the drat time and it was difficult to keep up with the canon. That's always been an issue since the WEG days. Anytime a big book or comic series came out they had to make a splat book. This is why you got necessary books like The Truce at Bakura.
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Dec 5, 2014 15:40
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At least L5R 4e tries it's best to be timeline neutral, especially at the beginning of the line: it details stuff from certain time periods in the CCG but then usually gave you a sidebar on how to use it in another time period, etc. One of the things I really appreciate about the line.
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Dec 5, 2014 15:42
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Alien Rope Burn posted:There just seems to be a point where certain AEG settings (Legend of the Five Rings, 7th Sea, Shadowforce Archer) forgot their mission statement of providing a genre experience and instead started meandering into other genres without much rhyme or reason other than "gotcha!". What was the "gotcha" on Shadowforce Archer?
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Dec 5, 2014 15:42
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Actually, 7th Sea's stupid alien bullshit is almost entirely unrelated to the card games; the entire card game metaplot was released in a single book. The rest of it was just, well, 7th Sea.
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Dec 5, 2014 15:47
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Forums Terrorist posted:Best metaplot is 40kRPG metaplot, which is really just a bunch of story hooks Warhammer isn't the best example right now, seeing as how 40K's background is moribund, and Fantasy is going through something as radical as any other metaplot change. You have to eventually change stuff, otherwise you end up with stuck situation where there's bunches of stuff that should be happening, but it's always 30 seconds to midnight. As much as a I liked Eberron, it seems like this is something affecting it, and may be one of the reason why I don't think we're seeing it survive the transition into D&D Next. rkajdi fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Dec 5, 2014 |
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Dec 5, 2014 15:49
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Yeah, isn't 7th Sea just a step below L5R in terms of being hit by the CCG plot train? They're meant to simulate playing in the world of 7S/L5R - worlds that by original design have most of the important things constantly being handled by super-NPCs. Some people want to play in a world where the most they can hope to accomplish is fetching a Diet Coke for Hida O-Ushi or make a brief walk-on appearance at the Battle of Beiden Pass, and the L5R RPG is for them.
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Dec 5, 2014 15:52
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KirbyJ posted:At least L5R 4e tries it's best to be timeline neutral, especially at the beginning of the line: it details stuff from certain time periods in the CCG but then usually gave you a sidebar on how to use it in another time period, etc. One of the things I really appreciate about the line. Currently my L5R game is set in the "who gives a drat" era, with emperor Not Personally Relevant. ETA: FMguru posted:Some people want to play in a world where the most they can hope to accomplish is fetching a Diet Coke for Hida O-Ushi or make a brief walk-on appearance at the Battle of Beiden Pass, and the L5R RPG is for them. Yawgmoth fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Dec 5, 2014 |
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Dec 5, 2014 15:56
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Yawgmoth posted:Currently my L5R game is set in the "who gives a drat" era, with emperor Not Personally Relevant. EDIT: Yeah, if I wanted the "play scrubs who barely scrape by" approach, there's better games for that, like Warhammer. Yet there's this vocal group that feels like that's what *every* game needs to be. I was flipping through old gaming mags recently and was just baffled by all the advertising for the d20 Star Wars RPG: just huge shots of crowds of stormtroopers or ewoks or w/e, and an arrow pointing all "YOU CAN PLAY THIS FACELESS MOOK". Who does that appeal to? AmiYumi fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Dec 5, 2014 |
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Dec 5, 2014 16:09
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Yeah, isn't 7th Sea just a step below L5R in terms of being hit by the CCG plot train? Not exactly. That's not to say 7th Sea didn't have the CCG pushing the line forward, but having the RPG come first let them actually plan things out to be consistent, as opposed to Legend of the Five Rings, which has always had the CCG moving ahead of the RPG and leading the direction of the line, often leaving the RPG scrambling to make sense of the CCG's oft-incoherent plotlines. Evil Mastermind posted:What was the "gotcha" on Shadowforce Archer? My memory's fuzzy on this, I can look up the details later; if memory serves, the head of Shadowforce Archer turned out to be the world's first psychic and his murderer turned out to be one of the first experiments in psychic research who was his chief agent who founded one of the key villain organizations and as also the most powerfulest psychic in the world or something. There was also something about Archer's inner circle being centered around protecting the world from threats involving "The Fringe" which was like a mashup of occultism and The Matrix where you could get weird luck effects if you were mixed up with it. And it had stuff like a evil cabal of Russian ghost wizards. I'm probably getting it wrong somewhere but that's about how weird it got, which was pretty drat weird for a setting ostensibly about espionage action. FMguru posted:Yep. They were originally CCG properties, which means they were designed to have dramatic reveals and everything-you-know-is-wrongs and signature characters doing important, world-changing things on a regular basis from the very beginning. They're not the usual RPG setting-worlds, which tend to be static sandboxes with a thousand possible plot hooks casually waiting for the players to engage them. 7th Sea was an RPG first, actually, but the CCG followed very soon after.
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Dec 5, 2014 16:19
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AmiYumi posted:Always the best way to run L5R. Hell, we would always just mash up the various eras on the basis of "what do people want to play?" Sometimes the answer comes up "a gaijin diplomat, a Daidoji Harrier, a shadow-branded Scorpion, and a Firefly clan bushi", and who even cares if that makes sense?
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Dec 5, 2014 16:48
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Yawgmoth posted:It's totally ridiculous and very fun, but I'm sure there's a whole pack of sperglords out there who would howl endlessly about it because we aren't playing exactly to the stereotypes as written. [Edit:] Same game had lesser CC weirdness, where a character who started out trying make a "good cop" magistrate ended up playing an opium-addicted, shadow-branded, bitter shell of a man who was the only player to survive the campaign with his original character. Those tables were as wonky as they were fun. AmiYumi fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Dec 5, 2014 |
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Dec 5, 2014 18:09
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AmiYumi posted:I just don't get it, especially because L5R character creation (at least back when we were playing) seems designed to make completely insane characters.
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Dec 5, 2014 19:12
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What's worse is that the original heritage tables aren't really balanced from clan to clan; I remember the Phoenix tables being particularly punishing. I don't know how they measure up in L5R 4e, tho. Having just done a writeup of Play Dirty, they strike me as one of the most Play Dirtiest bits in the game, where you charge players XP for what usually ends up being an even gamble (which the usual result being neutral), but with the possibility of ending up with some terrible, character-changing flaw like finding out you're a ronin at the end of cgen. I ended up giving out table rolls for free in past, that's about the only way to justify them, but they still could be pretty terrible if you're unlucky.
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Dec 5, 2014 19:57
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Yeah they way we did it was that you got one roll for free, then you could either keep it, drop it and not roll again, or drop it and roll again but you have to keep the second. I think I was the only person who actually managed to roll something worth keeping.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:04
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Yawgmoth posted:This is every metaplot in every game. gently caress metaplots, I want a game book not a novel. Feng Shui's original metaplot is how you do it. Some poo poo went down, the 'old' heroes are all dead with your PCs expected to probably step in and become the main drivers of stuff, everyone's at a stalemate, and then the sourcebooks are just describing where specific factions and guys are at that exact point in time (or generally) and providing plot hooks instead of 'moving' things.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:16
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Sorry for going back this far but I generally change Deadlands to replace the Confederacy to a United Republic of Texas and the Rio Grande. Basically move back when ghost rocks started popping up and as a result the break away factions in Mexican Federalist War were much more successful. It creates another nation that can be antagonistic against the Union without being nearly as overtly evil as the Confederacy. Nathan Bedford Forrest is then the main bad guy in the messed up Reconstruction era South.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:17
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I just gave them out for free (Inheritance rolls too, whatever those were called), minimum 1, maximum 3, decide how many you want before you start rolling (and make your rolls after you come up with a concept but before assigning skills, because we learned what those tables did to concepts). When they came up weird I gave players the option to invert their dice, reassign their rolls, whatever; all-in-all they were fun enough we tried copying them for other games, to limited success. I also had the "friendly kansen" thing come up, in one of the first games of L5R I ran. In my case, it was a Ronin - descended from the Lion, I think? - with no knowledge of spirit-ey stuff at all. So when she started getting helpful advice from the spirit of her Grandfather...long story short, that character quickly bulked up into a combat monster, eventually realizing she had the Shadowlands Taint when her eyes exploded into green flame. Thanks, char-gen!
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Dec 5, 2014 20:23
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Night10194 posted:Feng Shui's original metaplot is how you do it. Some poo poo went down, the 'old' heroes are all dead with your PCs expected to probably step in and become the main drivers of stuff, everyone's at a stalemate, and then the sourcebooks are just describing where specific factions and guys are at that exact point in time (or generally) and providing plot hooks instead of 'moving' things. A lot of games have done this sort of "here's a history, every game starts right at this point here, go" thing and it's pretty much superior to actual metaplots in every respect but the publisher's ability to churn out sourcebooks advancing the metaplot while teasing more metaplot. Feng Shui, Eberron, even Exalted, much dogged as it is here, did this for the most part which was kind of surprising when you consider it first came out during the oWoD days when WW writers never met a metaplot they didn't like. Metaplots seem to be one of those "90's RPGs" things (give or take) and as RPGs have gone forward they've mostly fallen out of favor. The only big-for-elfgame-values-of-big games I can think of that really revel in a metaplot anymore are Forgotten Realms and Shadowrun.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:24
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I'm kind of curious, actually--for those games that have established settings, at what points does the setting go from "establishing setting details" to "establishing a dumb metaplot"? Like, for the Legend of Five Rings thing, I'd imagine you'd need at least some setting details about clans and emperors and such, and for weirder settings like Shadowrun you'd probably need even more pre-existing detail, but is there some point where the detail just collapses into an obvious metaplot, or does it very from (good) writer to (bad) writer?
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Dec 5, 2014 20:26
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Night10194 posted:Feng Shui's original metaplot is how you do it. Some poo poo went down, the 'old' heroes are all dead with your PCs expected to probably step in and become the main drivers of stuff, everyone's at a stalemate, and then the sourcebooks are just describing where specific factions and guys are at that exact point in time (or generally) and providing plot hooks instead of 'moving' things.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:29
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Davin Valkri posted:I'm kind of curious, actually--for those games that have established settings, at what points does the setting go from "establishing setting details" to "establishing a dumb metaplot"? Like, for the Legend of Five Rings thing, I'd imagine you'd need at least some setting details about clans and emperors and such, and for weirder settings like Shadowrun you'd probably need even more pre-existing detail, but is there some point where the detail just collapses into an obvious metaplot, or does it very from (good) writer to (bad) writer? What generally does it is movement. Specifically, movement done primarily by NPCs. Like, it's setting details if you have the history of the setting up to 'start'. Say you've got something where the Dragon Emperor is a super cool guy but he's old and sick and the conflict is around the Empire falling apart a little while he's ill and people fearing he may die. That's setting info. If the very next book to come out is all about how Sir Clovis the Bold saved the Dragon Emperor and Old Man Withers the wizard was behind it all along, please buy our next book to find out who his SHADOWY MASTER might be, that's metaplot.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:35
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Kai Tave posted:Metaplots seem to be one of those "90's RPGs" things (give or take) and as RPGs have gone forward they've mostly fallen out of favor. The only big-for-elfgame-values-of-big games I can think of that really revel in a metaplot anymore are Forgotten Realms and Shadowrun. Legend of the Five Rings still has the metaplot running due to the CCG, it's just downplayed in 4th edition. It's still present, though; for example, Second City and a few other supplements advance the timeline from where it was in the corebook. For the most part, though, we generally have a lot less of the rolling supplement lines than we used to anyway, the idea of buying a largely incomplete game that would be fleshed out through a nine-book series on the Heartguilds of the Bloodstates has fallen by the wayside.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:39
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Davin Valkri posted:I'm kind of curious, actually--for those games that have established settings, at what points does the setting go from "establishing setting details" to "establishing a dumb metaplot"? Like, for the Legend of Five Rings thing, I'd imagine you'd need at least some setting details about clans and emperors and such, and for weirder settings like Shadowrun you'd probably need even more pre-existing detail, but is there some point where the detail just collapses into an obvious metaplot, or does it very from (good) writer to (bad) writer? Metaplot means that there's an ongoing story that's been planned out and advancing regardless of whatever any player-characters or GMs might do, often with a bunch of secrets and twists that are doled out piecemeal over the course of sourcebooks and supplements. In other words there's an official canon that the RPG is going to follow, which can have knock-on effects for later sourcebooks. If I'm playing a game where the corebook has players being a part of a secret organization that's all about protecting the world from mysterious magical threats, let's say, and then three sourcebooks down the line it turns out that secret organization was an EVIL CONSPIRACY ALL ALONG OH NO, then suddenly the emphasis on the game line shifts to being on the run from your secretly evil former bosses and being forced underground, that's metaplot. If big, climactic, pivotal points in an adventure are stuck behind invisible barriers so the players can look but not touch as NPCs duke it out so the writers can guarantee an outcome so as to tie into future supplements, that's metaplot. Metaplot doesn't have to be full of bait-and-switch dickery and lovely adventures necessarily, though if often is. Shadowrun has a metaplot that's generally inoffensive in that regard though it's still full of "hey didn't this detail used to be here, oh right that got changed in the Event of Whenever. Also a magic comet swung by and now there are catgirls and people with four arms okay byeeeee." By contrast, Eberron fleshed out an entire setting in detail, but beyond a single two year jump to incorporate stuff from 4E D&D into the setting there's no train of ongoing events, no canonical "and then this happened next," no campaign secrets that Keith Baker doles out with an eyedropper. Eberron is designed to start everyone at the same point in time and turn them loose on the setting, making it their own.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:40
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Somebody mentioned Feng Shui, and I have to ask how people feel about the new version coming out? It moves forward the setting about 19 years and has a lot of things happen in that time, but ultimately ends up in the same place as the first thing did, with all factions at a stalemate and waiting for the pcs to come in and be the force of change. Is that considered metaplot?
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Dec 5, 2014 21:43
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I really liked the faction they killed off, and I think what they did sorta ruined the faction they had doing the killing, so I'm not all that on board to be honest.
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Dec 5, 2014 21:48
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Not really. Metaplot is literally that - a plot that takes place in the setting at the "meta" level, not the game level, but in the fiction of the supplements itself. For example, in Legend of the Five Rings you have the Scorpion Clan who attempts a coup in Otosan Uchi and then are declared ronin by Way of the Wolf. Generally, if you have a supplement with a status quo that hinges on events from another supplement, you've probably got a metaplot. Planescape has a villain get killed off in Hellbound, return in The Great Modron March, and then advance his plan further in Dead Gods. If you just have Hellbound and Dead Gods, it doesn't make much sense, but the three together form a story. Edition changes often see what you're referring to, which is more of what's usually called a setting update.
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Dec 5, 2014 22:00
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Yeah, to clarify, it's not metaplot so much as it's just a setting update in a direction I didn't personally like.
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Dec 5, 2014 22:02
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AmiYumi posted:Yeah, if I wanted the "play scrubs who barely scrape by" approach, there's better games for that, like Warhammer. Yet there's this vocal group that feels like that's what *every* game needs to be. I was flipping through old gaming mags recently and was just baffled by all the advertising for the d20 Star Wars RPG: just huge shots of crowds of stormtroopers or ewoks or w/e, and an arrow pointing all "YOU CAN PLAY THIS FACELESS MOOK". Who does that appeal to?  The people like me who lost interest in Knights of the Old Republic when they revealed you had to be a human/near-human race and had to be a faithful servant of the Rebellion or the Empire. Even Star Wars Galaxies had plenty of stuff to do for people like me who just like generic science fiction and would rather be a Rodian Smuggler going about his business than someone picking sides in the standard conflict. What IS the best system for playing expendable awful losers? Warhammer? ... Hol? Cthulhu? Haha. But I also like random rolling so pretty much I am awful I do like the suggestion I first read here a few years ago though, "everyone rolls a random set of stats and anyone can pick any of the sets," since that is the best compromise between maximizing fun randomness and minimizing awful randomness.
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Dec 7, 2014 01:04
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So you want to be some random loser in a sci-fi universe/game and you love random tables?  Then I would recommend Midlife Crisis: In Spaceships, aka 
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Dec 7, 2014 01:13
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Yeah I was gonna say, unironically you want Traveller. Get the Mongoose version since T5 seems to be honestly kind of not very good but MongTrav has tons and tons of random rolling poo poo and you are explicitly a bunch of random (usually military) retirees that don't even own your ship, trading and smuggling and stuff like that.
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Dec 7, 2014 02:00
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Agreed. Traveller is literally "a bunch of dudes rattling around a thousand year old interstellar empire, trying to make a living", and Mongoose is probably the best available option for that right now (unless you're already on board with GURPS, in which case get the GURPS version).
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Dec 7, 2014 02:22
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It...it makes so much sense when presented to me like that. I even played the PC version and loved character creation so much that it probably single-handedly kept me interested days longer than it should have. Welp, time to find a gaming group.
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Dec 7, 2014 02:46
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Has anyone looked at Outbreak: Deep Space yet? We just got it in the store, and at first glance it looks like they're trying to be the Dead Space RPG. Just in time for, uh, Christmas!
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Dec 7, 2014 02:54
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