|
The actual question is "do you want any given sorta cyberpunk game" or "do you want a Shadowrun game?" Because a Shadowrun game sorta implies at least a decent enough level of crunch. The general idea tends to be spending time doing the legwork in advance, setting up the run, putting together the plan, acting OUT the plan, and then riding on the edge of your seat when things inevitably go wrong and you have to makeshift everything. There are sorta standard given roles (the face, the decker, the muscle, that sorta thing) alongside a general premise of improving and upgrading your character as you go. Like, yeah, you can totally do a cyberpunk rules lite game - I just dunno if I'd call it Shadowrun.
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 03:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 3, 2024 19:03 |
|
TheLovablePlutonis posted:Enough! Steampunk > Cyberpunk. This is terrorism.
|
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 03:57
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:The actual question is "do you want any given sorta cyberpunk game" or "do you want a Shadowrun game?" Yeah, you can absolutely do Action Movie in the gritty future. I'm just not sure I'd call it cyberpunk unless you have some systems that hit the major themes, though. You could do cyberpunk without Shadowrun levels of crunch though. Maybe PbtA could do it, but you'd need to be kinda heavy on subsystems.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 03:58
|
|
|
Galaga Galaxian posted:And that requires a huge, complicated/detailed ruleset why? Alien Rope Burn posted:Focusing on technicalities in cyberpunk is a natural thing to do - if there's all this technology, it's the way of our people (that is, nerds) to give everything a name, classify it, package it, and put a price tag on it. But it may be missing the forest for the trees. This.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 03:58
|
|
|
Error 404 posted:This. Wrong.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:00
|
|
|
I don't think we disagree, but I just think equipment lists don't really underline that theme. They can, but they weren't really designed for it. It'd be interesting to see a cyberpunk game that, say, punished you for sticking with an old piece of equipment. Maybe those penalties vary on where technology goes - if say there's an advancement in optics, maybe you have a penalty on your guns skill if you don't have the Immagram-30 Laser Cock attached to your gun yet. Or it might be interesting to have a random tech table that generates new advancements you tack onto an equipment list. Those are bad ideas, but you can probably see where I'm going with it. But you can focus on other things, too. Cyberpunk isn't just one thing. fool_of_sound posted:Basically, unless you can somehow force players to constantly hunger for new, better, and more equipment, your game isn't quite hitting the cyberpunk relationship with technology. It's an arms race on a personal level, and falling behind mean a life in the gutter. Does this make D&D the most cyberpunk game of all, then?
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:04
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:I don't think we disagree, but I just think equipment lists don't really underline that theme. They can, but they weren't really designed for it. It'd be interesting to see a cyberpunk game that, say, punished you for sticking with an old piece of equipment. Maybe those penalties vary on where technology goes - if say there's an advancement in optics, maybe you have a penalty on your guns skill if you don't have the Immagram-30 Laser Cock attached to your gun yet. Or it might be interesting to have a random tech table that generates new advancements you tack onto an equipment list. Those are bad ideas, but you can probably see where I'm going with it. Yeah, I agree here, and I posted something to this effect further up. Alien Rope Burn posted:But you can focus on other things, too. Cyberpunk isn't just one thing. If it ain't about inquality (at least in part), it ain't -punk. It's just gritty sci-fi. Alien Rope Burn posted:Does this make D&D the most cyberpunk game of all, then? Dungeonpunk.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:06
|
|
Error 404 posted:This. Actually, rules-light gaming is the consequence of apathy and a retreat from political engagement, and it makes you develop halitosis and hepatitis A
|
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:06
|
|
|
Steampunk: Epic sirs and madams with top hats throwing gears around. Cyberpunk: Some retarded robot bullhockey.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:06
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:
My favorite part of
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:09
|
|
|
Gravy Train Robber posted:My favorite part of That actually brings up an interesting point: Blade Runner is still partially about inequality created by technology, just not in terms of mechanical technology. It's about artificial humans intentionally created to be fundamentally unequal, both in positive and negative ways, and their struggles with their identities partially because of that.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:14
|
|
|
TheLovablePlutonis posted:Steampunk: Epic sirs and madams with top hats throwing gears around. Everyone knows Dieselpunk is the best kind of Punk
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:15
|
|
|
drrockso20 posted:Everyone knows Dieselpunk is the best kind of Punk 
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:15
|
|
|
Gravy Train Robber posted:My favorite part of
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:20
|
|
|
How to run a Shadowrun or Shadowrun-inspired game: 1. Pick your favourite edition of DnD, or a game similar enough to DnD or does what you want in terms of fantasy dungeon crawling. 2. Replace all mentions of "sword" with "cybersword", "bow" with "rifle" and so on. 3. Rename "gold pieces" to "gigacreds". Keep going in this vein, reskinning everything as appropriate. 4. Remember to enforce the gear treadmill. The party needs those +4 weapons hidden in the dark depths if they're to have any hope of defeating the dark knight army. Oops, I misspoke. I meant, the party needs that new shipment of cyberrifles and cyberswords if they're to have any hope of getting past the Aztechnology security! You are now playing Shadowrun. Spells require no changes. If any of your players ask "But what about hacking?" take their character sheet, cross off "thieves tools" or "Disable Device" or whatever, and instead write "hacking". You are now accurately playing Shadowrun. I mean this post entirely unironically. It would probably be more fun than playing any edition of Shadowrun.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:29
|
|
|
SHADOWRUN PEOPLE JUST USE THE SYSTEM FROM THE PC GAMES
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:33
|
|
|
Goddamnit it just came to me that I could have made my first post a Boo Bienis joke
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:35
|
|
|
fool_of_sound posted:Yeah, you can absolutely do Action Movie in the gritty future. I'm just not sure I'd call it cyberpunk unless you have some systems that hit the major themes, though. You could do cyberpunk without Shadowrun levels of crunch though. Maybe PbtA could do it, but you'd need to be kinda heavy on subsystems. Which bounces back to my question: do they want a cyberpunk game, or specifically a Shadowrun game? Like yes, Shadowrun totally could go with some massive trimmers to it's crunch. Having a list of a dozen light pistols that are all almost identical with one or two clear "best ones" is entirely needless. But by the same token, seeing your credits go up after a run and eyeing that new bit of 'ware you wanna buy IS very Shadowrun. Shadowrun doesn't need to be super heavy crunch, but going full rules lite won't give you Shadowrun.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:36
|
|
|
Ghost in the Shell, rules-light, never took off, because that gently caress Gary kept asking whether his character could do things and annoying the DM, and kept rolling for things. Eventually, they merged his character with a newborn AI and then moved on to GREASEGAL RPG.
|
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:42
|
|
|
fool_of_sound posted:Dungeonpunk. Wasn't this explicitly cited as an inspiration for D&D 3rd's art? I seem to remember that. Although, if you're actually interested in the punk side of dungeons Torchbearer is your jam. The intro to the book literally says "you've got no job and no future in this shithole town. Maybe some questionably-legal breaking and entering is the solution."
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 04:43
|
|
|
bewilderment posted:How to run a Shadowrun or Shadowrun-inspired game: This but instead you rename spells to computer programs for hacking and you add in psionics and call it magic
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 05:57
|
|
|
So I just watched Cannibal Holocaust for the first time. Normally watching a movie gets me thinking about ways to game. So here is a game based on Cannibal Holocaust Phase 1: Be white. Phase 2: Hurt an animal for real. Phase 3: Smugly point out that you have just proven that white people really are the worst.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 05:59
|
|
|
Being white is like being a wizard in D&D. You objectively suck but the rules keep favoring you.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 07:50
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 10:42
|
|
Gravy Train Robber posted:Being white is like being a wizard in D&D. You objectively suck but the rules keep favoring you. I didn't know you were a wizard.
|
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 10:44
|
|
|
fool_of_sound posted:Dungeonpunk. I always liked the sidebar back in the now-ancient GURPS Fantasy where it discusses crossing fantasy with cyberpunk, and instead of the literal crossover like Shadowrun would do, it instead discussed the idea of taking a lot of the cyberpunk themes and translating them into your standard fantasy setting. So you might have powerful mages guilds that run everything, having sidelined the nobility, and engaging in shadow wars with magically-enhanced (and dehumanized) special ops warriors while the peasantry flounders. Kind of surprised nobody's really picked upon that kind of thing in the past 25 years or so, though I guess Eberron had elements of that kind of thing.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 12:43
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:I always liked the sidebar back in the now-ancient GURPS Fantasy where it discusses crossing fantasy with cyberpunk, and instead of the literal crossover like Shadowrun would do, it instead discussed the idea of taking a lot of the cyberpunk themes and translating them into your standard fantasy setting. So you might have powerful mages guilds that run everything, having sidelined the nobility, and engaging in shadow wars with magically-enhanced (and dehumanized) special ops warriors while the peasantry flounders. Kind of surprised nobody's really picked upon that kind of thing in the past 25 years or so, though I guess Eberron had elements of that kind of thing. Instead of Street Sams, alchemically hyped Juicers everywhere. Hell, the Dragonblood Juicer from Rift's Juicer Uprising could see play. Stuff from the Ripper's worldbook too. Could work.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 13:23
|
|
|
bewilderment posted:How to run a Shadowrun or Shadowrun-inspired game: I have a long-standing but untested theory this would also work well with Apocalypse World. The good old "Weird"->"Wired" trick. It might even improve the game in a few ways: I suspect people will be much more likely to use the move Open your mind to the psychic maelstrom (and therefore giving the MC ideas) if it was renamed Look for more information on ShadowGoogle.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 17:50
|
|
|
i love opening my mind to the psychic maelstrom, i don't get why people would ever avoid it
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 17:52
|
|
|
bewilderment posted:How to run a Shadowrun or Shadowrun-inspired game: What I'm getting from this is that True20 really was capable of capturing multiple genres and was cool and good.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 17:54
|
|
|
6-: goatsed again
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 17:55
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:What I'm getting from this is that True20 really was capable of capturing multiple genres and was cool and good. Tales of the Caliphate Nights was the best thing about true 20
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 18:02
|
|
|
So is there any particular reason people who enjoy rules lite games seem to consistently come from the position that crunch heavy games are inherently bad and lesser?
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 18:47
|
|
|
Terrible Opinions posted:So is there any particular reason people who enjoy rules lite games seem to consistently come from the position that crunch heavy games are inherently bad and lesser? We don't, some of us are just tired of charops and rulebooks that outweigh dictionaries.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 18:55
|
|
|
Terrible Opinions posted:So is there any particular reason people who enjoy rules lite games seem to consistently come from the position that crunch heavy games are inherently bad and lesser? Nuance is hard. Seriously though, there are structural disadvantages to rules heavy games, such as having to have session 0s and more likely to need your own copy of the book per player, but from a purely mechanical/design standpoint the main hurdle to crunchy games is that while crunch doesn't automatically bad, it might usually mean bad because it's that much harder to pull off.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 18:55
|
|
|
Terrible Opinions posted:So is there any particular reason people who enjoy rules lite games seem to consistently come from the position that crunch heavy games are inherently bad and lesser? If I had to guess I'd say, as someone who enjoys good crunchy games, that it has to do with the fact that a lot of crunch heavy RPGs are disappointingly badly made when you get under the hood. After the dozenth crunch-heavy RPG where it turns out that, for example, probabilities are all over the place because the designer just wanted to go with what "felt right" and the big elaborate list of powers/guns/feats/etc is 90% trash for idiots, I don't think it's a stretch to imagine the allure of digging into yet another big pile of (badly formatted and organized) rules wearing thin.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 18:59
|
|
Terrible Opinions posted:So is there any particular reason people who enjoy rules lite games seem to consistently come from the position that crunch heavy games are inherently bad and lesser? I wish I had the happyelf post about indie game design handy, but a lot of indie designers pushed heavily for rules-light microgames over the last decade at least, even if their personal designs (like Burning Wheel) contradicted that. Combined with the same follow-the-leader phenomenon which made Fate the new GURPS and ApocWorld the new D20 in terms of spinoff games, and the issue that designing a rules-light microgame entails much less effort on the part of the designer, and you have a landscape where there are several major structural reasons to disdain games with rules.
|
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 19:08
|
|
|
Effectronica posted:I wish I had the happyelf post about indie game design handy, but a lot of indie designers pushed heavily for rules-light microgames over the last decade at least, even if their personal designs (like Burning Wheel) contradicted that. I don't think Luke Crane's ever pushed for rules-light microgames: he's always enjoyed games with a lot of rules and complex subsystems. He sort of gets lumped in with the rest of the indie RPG crowd simply because they're all indie, even though to my knowledge Luke's designs have never been informed by the Forge where most of the design we think of as indie or storygames got started. That's not to say that Luke Crane as a designer exist completely isolated in his own bubble as a designer: guy's apparently friends with Adam Koebel, one of the designers of Dungeon World, and Adam is also crazy about Burning Wheel. Also, it bears mentioning that Torchbearer, which does turn the Burning Wheel engine if not exactly into a rules-light microgame but at least a rules-lighter and more keenly focused game, is much more his friend Thor's creation than his, even though he was involved in it. Also, Burning Wheel is great. e: as is Torchbearer
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 19:25
|
|
|
I'd love to know how indie elfgame makers have the ability to 'push' for anything heavily. The reason there's no new D20 type poo poo is because we've spent the past decades getting loaded to the gills with D20 everything. Google a word and D20 after it and you will probably find a game in some form for it. D20 had success because it was functionally the only option for a while, and now we see a surge in other things because guys like Evil Hat do poo poo like FATE Accelerated to offer other rulesets in the free and easy to work with menu.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 19:26
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 3, 2024 19:03 |
|
|
Terrible Opinions posted:So is there any particular reason people who enjoy rules lite games seem to consistently come from the position that crunch heavy games are inherently bad and lesser?
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2015 19:27
|
|
