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Nuns with Guns posted:It's one of the transition points in a long line of multi-game line metaplot prefab adventures starting with the Deadlands setting. Specifically, the post apocalyptic game that comes after it. It acts as the lead in to the third game line which is more post apocalyptic magicowboys but on an alien planet. The adventure ends with you being forced to kill a PC, or else the world is doomed and also you're stuck on a spaceship full of demons for all time. The adventure gloats about how this is what being a real good RPG is all about To add insult to injury Lost Planet, the third gameline, was a wet fart on arrival and went nowhere.
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Feb 25, 2017 03:56
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gradenko_2000 posted:Metaplot is bad in the sense that Onyxia always dies in the same way, and hell, the players are always expected to kill Onyxia (or if not, someone from the metaplot will!) Metaplot sucks for a few different reasons, several of which intersect in the same place. It sucks because, as gradenko more or less says, it puts things on rails in a hobby where the principal selling point is You Can Do Anything. The corollary to this is that when a designer decides to incorporate a metaplot into his game it means that he's going to be thinking in terms of designing things like adventures and plot hooks in an on-rails fashion, which means that the quality of things like published adventures suffer as a result. Taken even further an adherence to metaplot can even affect non-adventure portions of an ongoing RPG line. If Vampire Clan Nosfradamus gets mass-exsanguinated in the metaplot-adventure Night of 10,000 Fangs and then the next iteration of the core rulebook follows suit by replacing the Nosfradamus clan with something else you now have metaplot encroaching upon the rest of the game in a way that's bound to rub people wrong because maybe not everyone gives a poo poo about it or wants to play Night of 10,000 Fangs but now this entire chunk of player-facing material has been paved over for the sake of the designer's ongoing narrative. Metaplot can also encourage designers to treat things like they're penning some kind of Republic serial and need to dangle cliffhangers and to-be-continueds in front of people by revealing and explaining things on a drip-feed. Probably the prime example of this is Pinnacle Entertainment back in the pre-Savage Worlds days, they did this sort of poo poo all the time. Every sourcebook and every adventure had at least one section that was essentially "So what's the deal with [X]? Welllllllllll...we can't tell you NOW, but trust us when we say it's reeeeaaaallllllll important, but if you buy the NEXT book in our line we might just give you the answer, wink-wink."
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Feb 26, 2017 06:26
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Rockopolis posted:Does metaplot have to be consistent or maintain canonicity? Is that part of the definition of metaplot? In general, yes. Metaplot in an RPG as most people typically use it means that there's one true canon storyline winding its way through an RPG, with things like major pivotal events and NPC activities set in stone even before things have gotten to those points yet so you wind up with situations like "Bob the evil vampire wizard teleports away to safety, no you can't kill him, no you can't kill him even THEN, he has a super-special teleport amulet that also makes him invincible to all your players' abilities and LOOK HE HAS TO ESCAPE BECAUSE THE NEXT PART OF THE PLOT REQUIRES IT ALL RIGHT, gently caress." So yeah, by definition metaplot is going to be railroady the same way that a novel is, it's someone else attempting to tell a story using a tabletop roleplaying gameline as a medium.
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Feb 28, 2017 00:59
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I'm okay with players existing in a world where there are some things so big they can't knock them over. That's not to say that metaplot never sins but I'm not sure I'm 100% on board with the alternative some of you have suggested. Eh, I'd say this isn't really a metaplot thing precisely. "A game where your weedy 1920's investigator can't singlehandedly beat up Cthulhu and save the world forever" isn't really something I'd ascribe to metaplot so much as genre, tone, shared expectations about what sort of game everyone wants, that sort of thing. Metaplot also isn't always a matter of not being able to knock things over, it can encroach on games in other ways like "this player-facing option got obliterated off the face of the earth because someone did a thing, so now it no longer exists and is instead replaced by this other option in the Revised edition." Or it can wind up retroactively making things super stupid like how the big metaplot reveal in 7th Sea had something to do with ancient aliens out of nowhere, or The Truth behind SLA Industries literally turning out to be "it's all in the mind of an autistic child."
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Feb 28, 2017 01:23
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gradenko_2000 posted:Also, mechanically speaking is it one of those games where you need hexgrids and miniatures and foam terrain and you have to track heatsinks and line-of-sight and poo poo? Because that's probably not my thing. It is all of those things you just said.
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Mar 1, 2017 08:08
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gradenko_2000 posted:drat, really? I thought it was like this d6-driven system. Oh well. Well wait, are you talking about Battletech which is the tabletop minis game or Mechwarrior which is the tabletop RPG? Because the minis game is everything you said, but idk about Mechwarrior as I've never actually played it.
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Mar 1, 2017 10:53
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triple sulk posted:Figured I'd pop in here to see if anyone's been following the Final Fantasy TCG at all? It basically already seems to be dead in the US because of how utterly poor Square Enix's handling of product distribution has been. Horrifically boring-to-bad card art aside, the basic mechanics seemed pretty decent. I'm shocked to hear that Square-Enix would bungle managing a game like that.
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Mar 6, 2017 07:04
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long-rear end nips Diane posted:My problem with stuff like that is that it's literally not any different than saying Grumsch has a crew and they like to pillage. It's just a totally unnecessary game term. It's only unnecessary if you don't actually tie it into the game in any sense. If there are mechanical levers that can influence and be influenced by affiliations, allegiances, and (to shamelessly steal terminology from Exalted) intimacies then it might actually be useful to note that Grumsch's War-Band is explicitly aligned with Grumsch and not, for example, something more ideological that runs deeper than that.
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Mar 11, 2017 10:45
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Serf posted:After seeing the new King Kong movie I want to run an Agents of Monarch game. Not sure about what system I would use though. Last Stand: the Early Years
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Mar 12, 2017 04:51
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I just feel like I have to be clear that there is no penetration given Wildfire's history, because otherwise it'd be presumed. You make one Nazi rape-machine...
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Mar 13, 2017 11:44
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Gold Rush Games' Sengoku always used to come up in discussions of "games like L5R but not," but I've never played it myself so I couldn't tell you how good it is.
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Mar 17, 2017 23:11
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davmillar posted:Also, I still haven't managed to play an RPG yet, but I did see the movie Mazes and Monsters. Does that count for anything? Now watch Stranger Things and you'll have seen everything most people know about RPGs in 2017.
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Mar 21, 2017 08:28
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https://twitter.com/a_man_in_black/status/843760929682538496
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Mar 21, 2017 20:32
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GURPS Goblins. No, really. It's not exactly what you think when you say "here's a game about playing goblins" though.
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Apr 5, 2017 19:30
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paradoxGentleman posted:My FLGS has a manual for something called the Cypher system. It says on the back cover that it can handle a great many genres and types of games. It's bad, actually.
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Apr 6, 2017 01:23
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Countblanc posted:You could easily make a game with minimal randomness by using some of the various combat resolutions you see in board games like Kemet or, perhaps more obviously, Gloomhaven. The latter in particular would give both the depth and breadth of 4e-esque combat while keeping randomness to "I deal 6 (or 2) damage instead of 4 damage this turn" once every 4-5 turns. Gloomhaven dodges the human adjudicator issue by having monsters fight with a rudimentary AI deck unique to that monster type, but you could definitely just have monsters act as simpler GM-controlled characters. I mean my personal anecdotal experience is that a lot of RPG tables still tend to have some quarterbacking going on, especially if you have players that are more wishy-washy about stuff so someone else at the table takes it upon themselves to be Lead Tactician and do things like tell people "okay Bob, on your turn if you attack that orc over there using your Lightning Beard spell then we'll be able to deal with these guys, Steve can you heal Dave?" My other anecdotal experience is more in agreement with you, but the thing about making meaty tactical games is that many RPG groups seem to be comprised of people trying to get three or four different sorts of game out of the same game, if that makes sense. Joe likes crunchy tactics while Bob just wants to hang out and drink beer and occasionally hit people with his axe while Steve is super-invested in the story and exploration stuff, and consequently a lot of RPGs at least give the impression of being malleable and flexible enough to accommodate everyone all together even when it's pretty clear in cases where they're better supported in one aspect than others (D&D). Making an RPG in the vein of Gloomhaven, which for the record I think is a pretty well-designed game, runs the risk of encountering the D&D 4E Effect where when you lay all your cards on the table and are explicitly up-front about what sort of game it is and design towards that goal with a focus that the people who aren't into that side of things bounce off of it for reasons both genuine and perceived ("combat in 4E takes longer than I'd like to resolve" on one end and "it's literally impossible to roleplay" on the other). This sort of thing is the norm when it comes to boardgames and video games but it seems to rub a lot of people the wrong way when it comes to RPGs.
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Apr 13, 2017 00:40
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Impermanent posted:in my opinion the idea that 4 people who want to play 4 different games should all nonetheless play 1 game that barely meets everyone's criteria is not only wrong, but is perhaps the central thing holding back rpg design, period. And we would all be better off if Joe played Strike or Panic at the Dojo, Steve played a * world hack, and Bob just hung out and maybe played a casual board game or something lightweight. We don't ask people who like basketball to play games where you dribble a soccerball before hitting it with a hockey stick at a croquet goal because all of their friends like those other games. I mean I don't disagree at all, it's just that a whole bunch of people (I mean for certain values of "a whole bunch") have made a lot of hay out of being various shades of angry about RPGs that try to break out of what I would call the "traditional RPG" mold. Even 4E which was still about as traditional as RPGs get in a lot of ways, with the same time-tested XP-and-leveling gameplay loop and rolling d20s for everything to go dungeon crawl adventuring with your party, got a lot of pushback for various reasons which largely seemed centered around how gamified they made it in pursuit of achieving a specific playstyle and feel. The good news is that these days with the prevalence and comparative ease of self-publishing and crowdfunding, indie designers can much more easily afford to create the game they want aimed at specific sorts of interested players without necessarily bankrupting themselves in the process. The downside of course is that it's not necessarily any easier to get people to play these games as opposed to even more D&D.
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Apr 13, 2017 02:15
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It's kind of weird that I've never really had a problem getting people into boardgames to try other boardgames at least once without any moaning or complaining about how they just want to play Settlers of Catan again thanks. I dunno if it's the fact that a boardgame only lasts a couple-few hours at most while the assumption is you'll be locked into an RPG campaign forever or if it's just a (sub)cultural difference surrounding the two hobbies or what but I've rarely had a time where I brought a new game to boardgame night and was met with dug-in heels.
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Apr 13, 2017 05:19
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Board games last hours, tabletop RPGs last months. While that's true, and I even bring that point up, the fact is that there's more to it given that people can and will play D&D for years and sometimes even decades without end, the same game over and over even in different campaigns or with different groups, while I'm fairly certain that barring the occasional chit-and-hex wargame if you told most boardgamers that they'd have to play the same game without any variation for the same length of time they'd absolutely hate it. Even beyond the general playtime scale difference between the two, the RPG side of tradgaming seems a lot less eager on average to try new games as opposed to sticking with a single game or very small pool of games.
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Apr 13, 2017 05:55
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Cartoon Violence posted:So, according to the thread rules this is a place where I can ask a question like this. This thread is as good as any, go for it.
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Apr 15, 2017 19:51
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Cartoon Violence posted:Alrighty, I'll happily use this thread since it seems casual. I mean if you feel like sharing the whole thing then setting up a dropbox would be the way to go, if anybody downloads it and gets overwhelmed then hey, that's on them. You can make effortposts too if you want though. This thread or the game design thread are fine for soliciting feedback, either one, and to be honest this thread isn't high traffic enough that you're in any danger of drowning discussions out or anything.
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Apr 16, 2017 04:33
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slap me and kiss me posted:Speaking of sharing, I've just finished and posted rev 004 of my post-apocalyptic fantasy game, featuring kung-fu grip, and a brand new character creation system. Heads up but the link that says it's for the player guide just gives you the GM packet instead.
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Apr 17, 2017 23:31
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Covok posted:Is Strike! still SA's darling or has it gone the way of 13th Age? If the later, how so? I mean people still play and talk about both so this seems like a weird question.
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Apr 18, 2017 20:26
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Covok posted:13th Age kind of went from the "everything is perfect, successor to 4e's legacy" to "It's an okay game with flaws and I have trouble working myself up to play it" when it comes to general mood. Curious if Strike! is still the former. People saying that 13th Age was a "4E successor" were frankly pretty off-base as it isn't even a little bit similar to 4E imo so if anybody approached it thinking "well I liked 4E, clearly I'll enjoy this" and got unenthused for it that could very well be a reason why. I don't really read the 13th Age thread so maybe it's full of people suffering from elfgame malaise but I remember hearing that it had some recent and/or upcoming releases that fans of the game seemed pretty excited about like a Glorantha 13th Age thing.
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Apr 18, 2017 20:35
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I don't really feel like Strike! scratches the 4E itch for me in all the ways I'd like it scratched but I would absolutely consider it to be a vastly superior "pretty quick-playing game with grid combat rules" to Savage Worlds which I played a shitload of back with my last tabletop gaming group and which I came to find incredibly unsatisfying both due to characters all feeling quite samey and the actual tactical combat portion of things being fairly shallow as well.
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Apr 18, 2017 20:50
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starkebn posted:Sounds pretty close to the mark for Rey, no matter how you fluff the backstory. She's like, 16-18 and kicks arse at everything. But if you give her a dick then she's basically Luke Skywalker, backwoods farmboy from Planet Sticksville who goes on to discover that his dad was actually Kickass Pilot McSpaceknight, rescues a princess from a space fortress, then turns around and blows up said space fortress with his incredible starfighter piloting skills (and maybe his innate space magic because he's Just That Special) which he learned shooting space varmints, and nobody felt compelled to write a dozen clickbait articles about how Luke Skywalker is the original Mary Sue.
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Apr 19, 2017 01:01
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starkebn posted:Maybe Luke is too, but it's also a matter of degrees. All Luke really manages to do is fly an X-Wing (which I agree should be beyond a farm boy) and trust the force to pull the trigger at the right time. Guess what, Star Wars sucks and the writing is bad to horrible for almost the entire seven films I've seen. I'm not defending Luke -or- Rey, but I don't think Rey is worse because she's a female it's because she's plainly a loving Mary Sue to a degree above. She's not a degree above in Star Wars terms is the point. She fits right in line with what's expected of a Star Wars protagonist but for some weird reason everybody decided to make a way bigger deal about it than it deserved. e; and are still making a bigger deal about it than it deserves apparently.
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Apr 19, 2017 01:11
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Countblanc posted:needing to buy 3 core sets lol. 2 is like, """"understandable""" but 3 is outrageous Wait seriously? What the gently caress FFG
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Apr 20, 2017 04:16
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S.J. posted:With 7 factions in the core set this does not surprise me at all, after talking to some locals who playtested. Hmmmmmmm nah, I'm gonna stick with my gut reaction that FFG probably could have found a way to not try and milk three coreset purchases out of completionists and competitive players. They've been doing this sort of "oops you really need to buy two cores" with all their LCG stuff like Android and Arkham Horror so I guess this is the next logical step.
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Apr 20, 2017 04:25
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S.J. posted:I didn't say that's not what was going on, but okay. There's just a lot of cards for each faction. And most of their competitive LCGs have needed 3 core sets, I think Star Wars was the only exception. Maybe Conquest didn't? I'm simply saying that "there's seven factions" isn't really an ironclad reason why it was literally physically impossible for them to actually put a full set of the core set's cards in the core set. The FFG thread is full of people offering excuses ranging from "well it's still cheaper than a CCG habit" to "FFG wants ~card diversity~ in the core set" none of which are incompatible with not making people buy multiple sets, generating a bunch of redundant waste in the process. It's pretty transparently a money grab.
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Apr 20, 2017 04:41
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S.J. posted:On the immediate side of things, LCGs don't tend to have real competitive scenes until the end of the first full cycle, at the very least, because deck diversity is so drat awful, so if you want 3 core sets, you don't need to buy them all at the same time. I'm not sure "you can spread out your being milked for cash in exchange for a handful of cards and a bunch of redundant poo poo you can't even give away" really makes it better tbh. long-rear end nips Diane posted:If I'm gonna buy 3 cores I hope the spread is like GoT, where you only ended up with extra neutral cards and didn't end up with a bunch of doubles for the houses. Netrunner was insanely bad, the third core got you, what, a dozen cards? Maybe less? It was more than a dozen, but there was also tons of leftover stuff that you had no real reason to keep because having 6 copies of Sure Gamble or Ichi 1.0 is completely pointless in a game where the most you can have in any deck is 3, where anyone else who owns a core set will already have 3 of them themselves so giving them away is equally pointless, and of course there's no secondary market because why would there be one? It also didn't help that a lot of the stuff that got shortchanged in the Android core was the stuff that once you knew even a little bit about the game you knew that you wanted as many copies of as possible like Desperado, Aesop's Pawnshop, Astroscript Pilot Program, Yog.0, Datasucker, etc.
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Apr 20, 2017 05:25
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:sounds like the only rational response to a business model like that is not to buy in at all In theory LCGs are a step up from CCGs in that there's no random distribution and no crazy secondary market shenanigans, you buy a pack and you know what it has, and in fairness the expansions don't generally do the same "gotta buy more than one to have a true complete set" model, but FFG is fond of experimenting with ways to get more money out of people with minimal benefit to the consumer (such as packaging the Emperor Palpatine upgrade card along with upgrades to a lackluster ship for the X-Wing minis game in a $100 box set along with an enormo spaceship for a mode of play that isn't that good and virtually nobody does).
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Apr 20, 2017 05:36
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Fantasy Flight Games isn't a struggling artist trying to live their dream on Patreon. If they want my money for something then they can offer me goods and services that aren't a naked cash-grab like other publishers manage to pull off, they aren't being forced to sell as many LCG core sets as they can in order to save the rec center from being turned into a shopping mall. e; like my objection is less the actual dollar value because I'm perfectly happy to drop $90+ on a tabletop game, it's the fact that for that $90 you spend you get the same thing three times along with a bunch of garbage that doesn't even have value as something to give away, and I'm reasonably confident that if they wanted to they could find some way to cut down on the pointless redundant waste that ensues from their model. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Apr 20, 2017 |
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Apr 20, 2017 06:04
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S.J. posted:I'm not really sure where that analogy came from, just because FFG is doing well for themselves doesn't mean there's something wrong with being okay at the extra cash expense to support them Because there's already an avenue in place for supporting game publishers you like, it's called "buying their products," there's no need to rationalize a lovely business model by going "well but I do want to support them." You can be fine with supporting a game company and also fine with calling them out for egregious money-grabs that don't benefit the consumer in the slightest which is Fantasy Flight's sometimes MO (not all the time, but sometimes). It's like, I think Bulletstorm is a good, perhaps critically underrated game. I unabashedly recommend it to people interested in a fun FPS where Steve Blum says "gently caress" a lot. I'd love to see a sequel made someday. I'm not going to pay Gearbox and Randy Pitchford $60 for the Bulletstorm Remaster when it's a lazy and feature-poor remaster of an older game being sold at brand new AAA game prices after they removed the original version from sale (with a Duke Nukem DLC add-on that no one asked for), even though Pitchford has come right out and said that sales of the remaster will influence how likely a sequel is in the future because gently caress all of that.
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Apr 20, 2017 06:21
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Well this is my first exposure to one of their LCGs which will at some point require three cores as opposed to "merely" two, which apparently they've done before but is new to me. Android and Arkham Horror are the card games of theirs which I'm familiar with and those both require two sets to max out on everything, so when I see that a new and upcoming LCG of theirs which I'm guessing is going to be very hotly anticipated given that it's a reboot of one of the hobby's grand old dames and that one of the things they lead off with is "competitive players may have to buy three core sets to get the max number of everything" what I took away from that is that FFG took a look at the previous models of getting people to buy multiple core sets for an LCG and said "yeah but we can take this even further."
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Apr 20, 2017 06:31
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gradenko_2000 posted:https://twitter.com/RaySonne/status/856305943964901376 If you dare to brave the depths of the comics subforum you can probably get a better answer but to start with be aware that Marvel That Makes Billion Dollar Movies and Marvel That Makes Comics That Sell Like 100,000 copies are sort of in a D&D/Magic: the Gathering kind of relationship where one is vastly more important than the other and the lesser one is basically left to do whatever dumb poo poo they want to because nobody really cares. That said some dude named Nick Spencer apparently pitched Marvel editorial a bold, visionary storyline that could be summed up as "what if all this time Captain America was actually a Nazi?????? And, like, the Allies only won WWII because the used the cosmic cube to cheat reality into what we THINK is the true timeline but then it gets undone because something something anyway Captain America is totally a Nazi now, and maybe always has been" and because this is comics instead of his body being immediately fired out of a cannon into the sun he was told "so when can you start?"
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Apr 24, 2017 06:17
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Barudak posted:Two great things to point out thanks to this storyline. So is Nick Spencer an alt-righter or?
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Apr 24, 2017 07:35
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Nah he's not, he's just an idiot. I mean that's not really a no.
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Apr 24, 2017 08:14
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The Saddest Robot posted:SHIELD had a cosmic cube which they were loving around with. It exploded and took on the form of a sentient young girl named Kubik. They decide to use Kubik to mentally control captured villains in a pleasantville style town in an attempt to rehabilitate them by giving them false memories of "normal' lives. poo poo goes south as it always does with the villains eventually remembering who they were and revolting. Heroes go in to deal with the mess and during this Kubik restores Captain America's youth (he had lost his super soldier serum and had become an old man). Shield director gets a lot of heat for all this. Winter Soldier absconds with Kubik. oh well when you put it like that
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Apr 24, 2017 09:56
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they were about to do to him.
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gradenko_2000 posted:Don't take this as me disagreeing with your overall point, but I think that WOTC's revised stance on the GSL was at least a little bit understandable as a reaction to what happened with the OGL wherein people basically ran off with their own game whole-hog. Most people that tried to make 4E-compatible content sucked at it.
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May 3, 2017 08:37
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