FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

«‹›49 »

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

The idea that you would still use floating TNs and splitting dice pools... it's amazing to see folks who ignore 20+ years of refinement on a game system, but I guess that's not as important as feels.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2016 15:41

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 16, 2024 08:26

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

As an interesting side note, Steve Jackson Games used to ban adaptations of its games - GURPS being the main topic of note - from being run on online RP chat codebases like MUSHes or MUCKs. They claimed that doing so was making a "video game" based on their works and was thusly a violation of copyright. In Nomine is the sole exception, no doubt trying to follow in the success White Wolf games had online on those venues, and Steve Jackson Games thusly created a license that some people could sign up to apply for permission to make such games. It's still on their site if anybody would ever want to apply these days. It had a few takers, but all those games died out (which, not be be unfair, is a typical fate of such games after several months or years in general).

And no, they still don't want you making a MUX based based off of GURPS, and still make the same claim. :rolleyes:

# ¿ Jan 19, 2016 00:32

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

If for some reason you need more Satyrblade, System Mastery has you covered.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2016 18:29

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

LatwPIAT posted:

A 30 Minutes or Less RPG would interfere with my plans to release 30 Minutes or Less, the Snow Crash sourcebook for Car Wars.

I do believe pizza delivery cars were covered in Autoduel Quarterly Volume 3, Issue 4. :geno:

# ¿ Jan 19, 2016 22:36

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

What it comes down to isn't "who's the worse game writer" (hint, though: it's Fields) and more "whose game would you play?" Brucato's Mage is a bad game but it's potentially a fun game. Fields' Otherverse is a bad game that is also just a bad game.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2016 00:42

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

I would really like to see a robust presentation of GUMSHOE without a defined setting, someday.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2016 02:04

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

As much as it sucks that Nazis co-opted skinhead culture, they totally pulled it off and explaining the history of that is probably beyond the purview of a game about non-denominational angels and demons.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2016 12:40

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

gradenko_2000 posted:

What do you mean by this, ARB? Gumshoe's been used in a lot of settings.

I mean a generalized implementation with advice on its use like Dramasystem gets in Hillfolk. As it is, if you want to use GUMSHOE for your own settings, you have to reverse-engineer it from an existing implementation AFAIK.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2016 13:05

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

I know one of the big changes is that the original was a much more pointed parody of Catholicism. Even though it's treated as the one true religion in the original (all other denominations / faiths are wrong), you have things like Jesus being the boss' son who's only where he is via nepotism. Supposedly a lot of the stereotypes and jokes don't translate well but it's surprisingly hard to find information on it.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2016 16:26

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Cthulhu Dreams posted:

There is a SRD: https://pelgranepress.com/index.php/the-gumshoe-system-reference-document/

It's just a technical manual though

Oh, thanks, I had forgotten about that!

I'm probably not too big into running a GUMSHOE game but I'd love to find a way to borrow its lessons for use in other systems.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 05:46

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Mors Rattus posted:

Superiors 2: Glutton for Punishment

Oh, hey, they got Ramon Perez, the finest artist on the Rifts line. One of gaming's best artists, I think.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2016 00:31

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

That Old Tree posted:

Also, it takes like an hour tops to find out the general armament of real modern tanks and similar stuff. This is one of those persistent problems with """rules light""" systems that nevertheless want to plop huge lists of gun porn in front of you. Tons of authors seem to want to do this but without going to the pretty minimal effort of not being totally wrong at it.

Really the '90s was a time where "storytelling!" and "rules light!" often were just an excuse not to test anything, because pffft what kind of a philistine are you that let yourself be bound by the rules, amirite?

# ¿ Jan 24, 2016 20:00

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

LornMarkus posted:

My apologies if I missed it somewhere already, but are these DX supplements available to buy anywhere? Cause this all sounded great and someday I'm gonna play the poo poo out of this game.

It's extremely hard to find the core rules in physical form but just about everything else is freely available.

Night10194 posted:

This is accurate. Not for all rules light systems, but it's still accurate.

I mean rules heavy systems don't test much either. Effective playtesting is a too-rare thing in RPGs.

Well, it was particularly true of '90s White Wolf, there supplements generally saw no playtesting and even had a few writers who were just pure theorycrafters and didn't even play the games they were writing for. There's a weird combination of wanting rules for everything during that time because there's an acknowledgement that people wanted them but with the attitude of "if you actually need rules for anything, real GMs use their *imagination*".

# ¿ Jan 24, 2016 22:17

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

I don't think there's an official answer, but I roll 1d12-1 when necessary, myself.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2016 22:53

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Doresh posted:

Though even with the "rules light" excuse, I have to wonder why a game about reality-bending wizard dudes requires writeups for several kinds of tanks. What's next? Submarines?

Look, you have to have rules about how you can pwn tanks with your rad magic powers, so you can brag to friends about how your character could totally turn a tank into a flower pot. It's important!

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 01:03

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Fossilized Rappy posted:

Okay, folks, it's poll time.
Option D, GURPS Banestorm: The only GURPS Fourth Edition book on here, mainly because 3E had an assload of books with far more fluff than crunch, while 4E very much flipped that dichotomy and doesn't really have many fluff-heavy genre books and only two real big book settings to speak of. Welcome to a world where the Crusades crashed a generic high fantasy setting, leaving Christian and Muslim kingdoms side by side with elven lands and dwarven empires.

I'll probably be literally the only one who votes for D, but this was always a interesting setting saddled with writing drier than a salt mine, and I want to see if they fixed that.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 23:37

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Granted, option C would go along with upcoming Rifts reviews, since I'm pretty sure it's the book CJ Carella did right after leaving Palladium. (But I'll stick with D because I'm contrary.)

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 23:47

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

theironjef posted:

No just kidding here's an Afterthought episode. It's all pet peeves and listener questions, and an intro that really starts to question the concept of how long an intro is before it's just the actual podcast.

I hate the things I know sometimes, but the Rifts drug rules are a little different than you recall. Basically, Rifts Ultimate Edition doesn't have rules for specific (real) drugs like cocaine or heroin. Instead, when you become an addict, you roll randomly to see how the drug addiction affects you, irregardless of the actual drug. So coke might make you "quiet, laid back, withdrawn" or alcohol might make you have delirious hallucinations. Most of these are penalities, but a few like "argumentative" or "impulsive" are just flat-out bonuses. There are rules for being "totally wasted" which basically makes your character useless, but no rules for how you become "totally wasted". There are also withdrawal rules, which in brief make it practically impossible not to relapse.

Now, in older editions, alcohol had its own chart and drunkenness rules which were slightly better, though you had you roll randomly to see if you were drunk at any given moment and had all the penalties from that (hint: it'll happen a lot). I know a later book had rules for drinking contests, because that's one of the few things the Salloon Gal O.C.C. (I am not making this up) is good at. (Dammit, Rifts.)

If that all wasn't enough, supplements added alien drugs that do have specific rules, usually involving a short-term boost with a long-term penalty, insanity, or a chance to become crippled in some sense. These drugs basically serve as gotcha traps for players who haven't read the drug's writeup, because drugs are evil and Rifts has to go to great lengths to make that clear, even if it means Cyber-Rambo can't go on the next three adventures because some Atlantean drug turned his spine into a question mark.

And then there's juicers, but that's a whole other story to tell. :shobon:

# ¿ Jan 26, 2016 13:02

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Evil Mastermind posted:

Listen, that was an update I had to loving power through to get done. You're lucky I made sure to fix my bbcode mistakes.

It's like GURPS Vehicles but not even having the excuse of being a physics simulation, it's... a... well, like a lot of TORG seems to be just shouting "but you have to earn your fun!"

# ¿ Jan 27, 2016 00:48

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

TORG could be drastically improved by simply removing the chance that Storm Knights can become disconnected. The gizmos thing is awful, the magic is awful, but allowing the PCs to use multiple realm abilities would let them be instantly amazing.

The thing about the gizmos system is it would be an interesting idea if that was like the core of the game, like if you were all playing robots where you had to work out your whole sheet as a diagram, but as a mechanic just to figure out if you can make a lightning gun it's tedious busywork.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2016 06:24

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

AmiYumi posted:

Isn't that whole "Slendergjaum" thing more of an overt reference to Bleach?

Yeah, it always struck me as a reference to Bleach's Hollows and Ichigo's Hollow form.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2016 14:57

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

gradenko_2000 posted:

It's frankly amazing that they shoehorned all that historical revisionism into a game whose title is as straightforward as "Dinosaur Planet". It's John Wick-esque, even.

What's really wrong is that it's a game where intelligent dinosaurs have their land invaded by Confederate slavers and are somehow not the PCs.

Mors Rattus posted:

So, quick question, you do know there's an actual sci fi series out there that stars a band of Nazis as the heroes, who remain Nazis but at one point end up taking in some Jewish members to help fight aliens?

That's a real thing.

When I was talking about making Hitler a secret good guy during Play Dirty 2 I just want to mention that for the record, that was a joke.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 04:26

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Fossilized Rappy posted:

Listening to your podcast and reminiscing about Broncosaurus Rex has made me really wish that someone would do a cowboys and dinosaurs game that didn't have any awkward sapience issues or Confederate apologia. Get someone to sit down, watch Valley of Gwangi, and then write a roleplaying game that replicates the feel of that.

There was a Cadillacs & Dinosaurs game, but it was published by GDW and used the Twilight 2000 system, so YMMV.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 04:37

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Doresh posted:

So humans habe been around for almost a millenium, but gunpowder and probably other sorts of advanced chemicals are tools of the devil? This is yet another medieval fantasy setting eternally stuck in the same vague medieval period, isn't it?

Well, also bear in mind Araterre maintains a lot of its Renaissance-era technology (particularly in regards to sea travel) so it's not a complete wash. And just because they think they got rid of guns doesn't mean they actually did; there are probably still some floating around or secreted away, but using them carries risks.

GURPS Fantasy definitely has some issues with being a somewhat static world, but I suppose being yanked from one planet to another might retard the march of progress for awhile. It's certainly not as bad as many fantasy worlds where technological innovation stagnates for millennia or longer for no readily discernible reason.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 04:32

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Night10194 posted:

Right, Mystara is the cool place the awesome D&D arcade games happened, right?

Nah, that's Sigil. :colbert:

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 06:25

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Zereth posted:

They made a D&D arcade game set in Sigil? Link please.

Nah, I misread, I'm very tried. Tired. Something.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 08:32

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Black August posted:

Nah. D&D ain't never been my bag. It'll forever be That Weird Other Game which I just safari past to gawk at.

Glorantha isn't D&D, it's a hell of a lot weirder.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 21:42

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Doresh posted:

But did D&D ever let you play as Donald Duck?

I wasn't intending "weird" as a pejorative.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 22:25

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

When you play in Forgotten Realms, remember that you're playing in Greenwood's self-insert fiction backyard.

Never forget.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2016 00:01

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Rand Brittain posted:

Yeah, Ravenloft 3e is defined for me by its attitude of "This land is still worth saving. Don't give it up to the night."

From what I read of Ravenloft, it always seemed singularly bleak and hopeless to me. I never got the impression the horrors could be overcome but temporarily.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2016 01:56

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

As rad as using 4e + Ravenloft to approximate Castlevania would be (though you could just run Castlevania and skip the middleman), I feel like associating Ravenloft with Castlevania is a bit disingenuous.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2016 12:48

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Kavak posted:

How important was the exact shape of the cosmology to Eberron and the Forgotten Realms, though? If you used the Planescape model (Which everyone should because Planescape is the best D&D setting and therefore correct ), is there anything you can't fit anymore?

Bear in mind separating the Realms from the Great Wheel was sometime that happened in 3e; when Planescape was being published, Toril was still part of the Great Wheel cosmology and the two settings had a lot of crossover.

So as far as the Realms goes, it's not a big deal. You can find lots of old setting material that presumes Toril and Sigil are part of the same meta-setting.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2016 15:43

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Kurieg posted:

Why did they do that for the german copy? The english versions had cut-outs on the front covers in the shape of the tribal glyphs so you could see the first page of the intro comic underneath.

Probably just practical reasons, the German publisher may not have been working with a printer that had the ability to do die-cut covers, or it may have just been too expensive.

That design is a mistake on either side of the pond, though.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2016 16:23

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Sahud is still... a problem, I take it?

Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Feb 11, 2016

# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 04:40

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

I had forgotten that the Vistani are so special that you can't play one.

:fap:

# ¿ Feb 12, 2016 19:00

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Nessus posted:

I mean, most of it's not necessarily very gameable and the outcomes in the Gehenna book were typically anti-climaxes.

Yeah, I don't think the 10th level disciplines were clearly thought out with the idea in mind that you might actually get in a fight with the Ultimate Vampires, mostly just as golden rings to tease PCs with. I mean, they were originally included in the The Player's Guide. Unless the intent was seriously for players to munch their way to the apex, the fact they were defined at all in that book was fairly nonsensical.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 12:24

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

So, to sum up, the book is "good GMing is exemplified by being needlessly antagonistic and massively passive-aggressive?"

# ¿ Feb 15, 2016 05:51

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Does he actually talk about any games other than D&D and its non-union equivalents, anyway?

# ¿ Feb 15, 2016 06:17

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

Various points:

Trying to devise a D&D game as a roguelike that takes 5+ years isn't game design, it's a lifestyle choice. Holding it up as some kind of platonic ideal is pretty unrealistic for those not planning to dedicate their real lives to their virtual ones.
Even Gygax insisted against 3d6 down-the-line, and it's even worse with games intended to indefinite. Of course, there's always the traditional solution of having your characters fling themselves off of cliffs until the Perfect Adventurer shows up.
How much of a slog must his combats be? Against an AC 0 foe with 45 hp and assuming a four-player party of half fighters, it'll take 15+ rounds to finish a fight unless you're employing spells, which of course you will be, because it makes spellcasters singularly dominant. And that's assuming no party members fall in the meantime, of course.

It's amazing how somebody can run one game for decades without becoming aware of the basic tenets of its design, but I guess faking being an authority on D&D is his biggest "dirty trick".

# ¿ Feb 15, 2016 13:40

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 16, 2024 08:26

Alien Rope Burn: Dec 5, 2004; _{I wanna be a saikyo HERO!}

The obvious solution is to have a wizard who casts fireball describe how they cast the spell. If it sounds legit make them roll to hit, if they fail roll on the scatter table to see how far it deviates.

If their description doesn't sound like bona-fide wizardry, it blows up in their face for max damage!

This "dirty GM" business seems easy, maybe I should write a book?

# ¿ Feb 15, 2016 14:10

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

«‹›49 »