Strike! The game of Tactical Combat and Heedless Adventure

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Strike! The game of Tactical Combat and Heedless Adventure

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Are there any AP's of Strike! out there? All I get on Youtube for "Strike! RPG" are people getting blown up in Iraq.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2019 18:02

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 13:40

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Moriatti posted:

There is Trouble in Hogstown though I have not personally run it.

Naw I mean like, video or audio of people playing the game.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2019 18:15

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Anyone run D&D modules/adventures in Strike? They seem portable enough to bring over to other systems, and the tactical combat seems a good fit for crunchy dungeon crawling n stuff.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2019 18:25

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Some people in a Discord server I hang out in are interested in a TTRPG campaign, and I�ve started to get the GMing itch again cause I�m insane. We seem to have coalesced on Strike! for the system, and I find it very attractive as a combat system, but I have no idea what to do for the rest of the game (i.e. story, exploration, other non-combat stuff). I mostly have PbtA experience, so I tend to rely on �play to find out� and similar techniques to keep the story going. How well does Strike! play with that? Will I have to abandon that PbtA-influenced GMing style? I also have very light combat-specific GMing experience, especially with anything like D&D. Will it be a difficult adjustment?

# ¿ Apr 18, 2021 22:57

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Yeah, I�ll probably do a session 0.5 with an excuse combat encounter to let people get a feel for what they want, following a session 0 where we talk about the characters and the setting+world based on them. Would be a good spot to gradually let people choose feats or whatever.

Good to know that outside of combat it resembles PbtA closely enough for me to be comfortable with it! I�ll still probably skip out on rolls for actions that don�t cry out for them just because I like to keep the story moving along, but the rest sounds good to me. I really like the Skill system, I think that helps a lot in making unique, stand-out characters.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2021 01:06

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

So I know that in Dungeon World the GM is basically called upon to set up a single starting situation and after that session to write a few fronts and then decide almost nothing else ahead of time. Is that still doable with Strike, or does it expect up-front work (designing encounters and dungeons, coming up with geography, etc.)? It seems like it supports �just make it up as you go along� since it�s mostly about combat, but being grid-based implies a measure of pre-made combat design.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2021 15:39

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Good to know! That implies that I know what encounters will be coming, and am expecting the players to make the necessary choices leading up to those encounters. That, or to make encounters generic enough to slot in whatever enemy/faction gets tagged.

I�ll take a look at the encounter rules ~~and think about how much I need to railroad the party towards an encounter ().~~ Actually, that shouldn�t be necessary. I�ll focus on generic scenarios.

Gort posted:

Yeah, you can pre-prepare level-appropriate encounters though and reskin on the fly. You can prep, say, a fight against two defenders and two snipers, and that'll be mechanically satisfying whether it's orcs or space zombies the party actually ends up encountering.

What happens if the players instead decide to antagonize a group that doesn�t mechanically fit into the scenario you prepped for the game? e.g. you have a scenario for a group of orcs and the party decides to pick a fight with the pope?

Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Apr 19, 2021

# ¿ Apr 19, 2021 16:23

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

What if I didn�t prep an orc warlock

Really, I should just make a Deck of Encounters at that point. Wouldn�t be hard to just pre-make a bunch of them and pull out the one I need. Or, I can just say gently caress it, it�s not combat and you�re doing skill rolls instead and we�ll fight later.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2021 16:46

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

I�m sure you can GM fiat �oh no the monster tripped teehee� if the battle is too hard or something.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2021 03:45

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

ShineDog posted:

Something I think is worthwhile is making sure to do a scene where you establish the broad strokes of the players next moves at the end of the previous session. Strike lends itself to big raids and dungeon runs and like, multi part missions pretty well, so you can establish that the players want to raid King Bastards, or burn down the Pie Palace, or sneak aboard the skycarrier, or whatever.

That gives you time to prep and sets up an expectation of what you are doing without it being "this week you're going to do this because I said so" - I think in any kind of prep heavy game there's a line to be walked with prep vs railroading, and getting the players buy in on the next prepared early should sidestep a lot of the issues on that front. Strike supports wild twists and turns, but it's also a tactical game with some crunch, and it's a lot easier to meld those things together if you establish the framework up front to get the players and GM on the same page.

The bolded is interesting - it kinda reminds me of Blades in the Dark�s gameplay loop, where you have a Score, some Downtime, then a Prep phase where the group figures out what they want to do next. It sounds like you could do the same for Strike, where you start the session off with combat, then move to an exploration/social/etc. phase, then once it becomes clear what the next combat encounter is the team breaks for the day and the GM builds a combat session and determines the situation after the encounter.

Is that a reasonable thing to do, I wonder?

# ¿ Apr 20, 2021 15:48

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 13:40

Pollyanna: Mar 5, 2005; Milk's on them.

Kind of a rhetorical/academic question here, but in the GM chapter, it says this:

quote:

For planning a given session, it can help to think of three really cool things you want to include. You could pick fights, Team Conflicts, chases, or just plain cool scenes.

Tonight, I want to see a fight with an assassin on top of the bridge connecting the Petronas Towers, a motorcycle chase through Kuala Lumpur traffic, and an ambush in the alley by Nur and her goons.

[...]

The odds of the session actually going exactly the way I just imagined it are slim, but I can probably work in some variation on each of these scenes with a bit of re-skinning to reflect the players� choices and the Twists that happened. With those three scenes ready to go, I�m confident we�re going to have a great night.

Doesn't this presuppose that the players are going to make particular choices that lead to said scenes? For example, if you have a motorcycle chase scene prepared and you're aiming to have it tonight, and the party comes together and says "we're being hunted down by a secret government organization, we should lay low and focus on subterfuge/social engineering" and don't hit the road as a result, then the scene goes unused without some prodding by the GM. Would it be acceptable to place obstacles and Twists that point the players towards getting in their vehicles?

# ¿ May 6, 2021 17:23

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Strike! The game of Tactical Combat and Heedless Adventure