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It's completely possible to have a functional mass battle system, but you need to either have the PCs controlling a unit each in unit vs. unit combat in which case the in-fiction size of "a unit" can be whatever you like (from a swarm of hundreds of trash mobs to a single PC and anything inbetween), be so abstracted (i.e. reduced to a single skill check) that the in-fiction size of "a unit" is flat out not a question the game ever stops to ask, or zoom in on the PCs and have their actions in normal combat influence or determine the outcome of a mass battle.
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Jan 8, 2019 10:07
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Evil Mastermind posted:e: I can't link my review of it because my work internet thinks the F&F archive is "adult" It's got FATAL and probably some other terrible garbage from the early days of F&F so it does in fact count as adult. 
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Jan 8, 2019 21:32
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#1, #2 and #4 are mostly inherently incompatible. The latter two especially rule out 4E and Fragged Empire which would otherwise be your best bet for #1 and #3. You could try Panic at the Dojo?
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Jan 18, 2019 21:35
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Subjunctive posted:I figured being listed here meant something, but I could be wrong It doesn't use the exact system but it uses the general design principles and GM principles, and is considered a PbtA game both by Harper and Baker.
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Jan 31, 2019 23:08
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:If I were going to disparagingly compare a rules-light system to D20 it would probably be FATE, which can model anything! But whatever it models will always play like FATE. As much as generic systems suck, Fate is at least 100% upfront about what type of stuff works well with the way Fate plays.
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Jan 31, 2019 23:56
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Gort posted:I've often thought that if you want to swiftly identify if a game is lovely or not, head straight to the healing rules. I've been calling this the Fighter Litmus Test for a few years now, and it generally holds true in my experience: if the game has a fighter-equivalent (a character class or set of options whose core gimmick is just engaging directly with the core resolution system instead of bypassing it with a limited-availability subsystem, whether that's "roll d20 to do HP damage" or something different), then if that fighter-equivalent is not both cool/engaging to play and mechanically powerful, the game is most likely badly designed. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Feb 8, 2019 |
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Feb 8, 2019 17:55
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ProfessorCirno posted:Nearly all of these motherfuckers now giving mealy mouthed apologies and claiming they didn't know are full of poo poo. They knew from the start. They were just ok with other people paying the price, right until the backlash grew strong enough that it could trail to them. Like that Magpie poo poo? I don't trust that for a second. He knew what he was defending. It's frankly hilarious how fast these people who spent nearly seven years helping Zak abuse people are disowning him now that they sense the wind has changed.
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Feb 12, 2019 09:15
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hyphz posted:It’s much better to say “I levelled up by killing the evil sorcerer” then “I levelled up by failing to kill the evil sorcerer so that princess got murdered”. Why? Go ahead and unroll why you think that.
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Feb 14, 2019 16:51
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Glazius posted:No, that can't be. This is the Chuubo's example quest, after all: Yeah, it's not Chuubo, but I've 100% seen multiple games doing XP that way. The annoying thing is I can't for the life of me remember which ones. I was convinced this was Lady Blackbird keys, but keys just give you a flat 1 XP per key you hit, and also aren't presented in that specific format. e; vv that was it! Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 13:52 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 21, 2019 13:02
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Fumaofthelake posted:Bully Pulpit says Fiasco is designed to be played in a few hours with no preparation, but does that assume you already know the rules? Is it really that easy to dip in to a game if you've never cracked the book before starting? It's assuming you've read the rulebook at least once. The rules are easy to explain. That said, for your first ever game, I would suggest giving each player 3 dice (instead of 4; add a spare die if you need to make it even for the act split) unless you're playing with actors, writers, or people who do improv.
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Feb 22, 2019 22:51
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8one6 posted:I haven't had a chance to play/run it yet but the new Alternity seems to be ok. Genesys is a bad system and I really would not recommend it to anyone. It's an especially bad system for Star Wars. It's pretty hard to answer the wider question since there aren't a ton of sci-fi games if you're looking for "pure" sci-fi instead of cyberpunk or mechs. Scum & Villainy is a decent hack of Blades in the Dark, if you want to play Firefly/Serenity. Eclipse Phase will probably be good once 2e hits. It has a cool setting but the 1e mechanics are not good. I liked Tachyon Squadron, a Fate Core game where you play the space International Brigades flying space fighters against space Nazis. It has good dogfighting rules. There's also Ashen Stars, a Gumshoe game where you're adventuring mercenary space cops investigating space crimes.
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Feb 25, 2019 12:14
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CitizenKeen posted:I think Genesys is great. I think FFG is easily the best interpretation of Star Wars in an RPG to date I think you're nuts. FFGSW does literally everything Star Wars incredibly badly because it is an incredibly crunchy high-lethality system (never mind the badly-implemented tiered resolution and custom dice designed to make FFG a pile of free money). Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Feb 26, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2019 16:34
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It is incredibly easy to get knocked down by a couple of blaster shots, which makes it "high lethality," not the fact that characters are dying irrevocably. e; pretend I used "rocket tag combat" instead if you like that term better, I use the two interchangeably. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Feb 26, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2019 17:50
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Admiral Joeslop posted:I agree completely with that, HP should never 100% represent actual meat space, especially in games like DnD where permanent injuries or something like a broken arm doesn't really have official support. Okay, but you seem to think it works like that in Star Wars: Admiral Joeslop posted:This is probably just my failing memory; I can't think of a time in the movies or other shows where, once someone is actually shot, they aren't incapacitated temporarily, immediately dead, or dying with death imminent. This doesn't apply to Force users, like Kylo pounding his bowcaster wound to focus his anger. When Luke, Leia and friends are being shot at by Stormtroopers, that's because the films want a scene where our daring heroes do daring things and then succeed despite adversity. Having the heroes shrug off blaster hits like they're nothing would hurt the stakes that have been established for this fictional universe ("people die when they are shot with a blaster rifle, therefore characters must respect the threat of being shot"), so the bad guys miss, because the author has decided the heroes aren't dying in this scene. RPGs do not have a single author who has full control over the narrative, and what actually happens in a scene is (generally) shaped by dice rolls (random chance). When Bob, Jane and friends are being shot at by Stormtroopers in a Star Wars RPG, it's because the table wants to recreate the same kind of tone as the films: daring heroes doing daring things and then succeeding despite adversity. When blaster bolts are made lethal in the fiction, that's because you're playing a Star Wars RPG and Star Wars says blaster bolts are lethal, not because you want the players to be afraid that their characters will be hit by a single attack (that would make them camp out in cover for the entire fight, which is emphatically not the tone set by the Star Wars films). The fact that this is an RPG and not a film means: 1) you can't just have everyone miss 99% of their attacks while making the 1% of remaining attacks one-shot characters, because missing is not fun and neither are small chances of dying from a single dice roll 2) the things that happen in the fiction ("the heroes charge down a bridge while 20 Stormtroopers fire at them") can be completely divorced from the things that happen mechanically When the heroes charge down a bridge while 20 Stormtroopers fire at them in a Star Wars RPG, here is what is happening: - mechanically, a number of those Stormtroopers' attacks are hitting. The characters are taking damage, and that damage is depleting their HP pools. - narratively those Stormtroopers' attacks are all missing because per the fiction established by the Star Wars films, being hit by a blaster bolt would cause a character to be seriously injured. When a hero gets hit by a blaster shot and gets knocked out in a Star Wars RPG, here is what is happening: - mechanically, their HP pool has been depleted and they are KOed. - narratively, a single Stormtrooper has finally managed to land a shot, and the character is now seriously injured because that is what being hit by a blaster bolt does. If you write a Star Wars RPG where players have to live in fear of their characters being hit once and then going down, where it isn't possible for characters to run around in the open doing daring action stuff while being shot at by Stormtroopers (while the game does not become mechanically un-engaging because everyone is missing all the time), you have written a bad Star Wars RPG. If you write a Star Wars RPG where players have to worry about picking a dozen talents with ridiculously niche applications and choosing from 20 minutely-different models of blaster rifle instead of weapons having no real mechanical significance and instead being whatever fits the character archetype or the scene, you have written a bad Star Wars RPG. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Feb 26, 2019 |
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Feb 26, 2019 19:21
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BattleMaster posted:No net successes is a failure though The distinction happens here because you can fail a roll with "advantages" in Genesys, which are supposed to toss you a narrative or mechanical bone despite failing, but it's also possible to just plain fail a roll with no fancy symbols to move the plot forward.
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Feb 26, 2019 20:08
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Hostile V posted:A Ton of Wombats, the game about playing uplifted Australian wildlife locked in pitch mecha combat against the forces of Space Britain and the Controlled Nations in The Emu War II: Electric Boogaloo. Okay but why does this not exist as an actual game yet?
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Feb 27, 2019 08:14
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Just use Fate, "proactive, competent, dramatic" is literally perfect for the kind of pulp action that Star Wars is about. It even has good dogfighting rules in Tachyon Squadron.
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Feb 27, 2019 09:20
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PerniciousKnid posted:The terrain is a big problem. Everyone in a grounded campaign has a ready inventory of dozens of familiar locations. If you're getting outranged by arbalists in a tavern, the fighter knows intuitively that he can (e.g.) duck behind the bar and start chucking improvised weapons as a distraction. In space combat, you're always in the same room, surrounded by vacuum, so what are you really expecting players to come up with besides "I roll to do my job"? There's an extra order of difficulty to contrive some twist for players to interact with. There's plenty of ways that planes (and by extension spaceships that behave like planes in space) can avoid getting shot even while flying in a totally clear sky (or a completely empty patch of space). The issue is trying to do spaceship combat that just boils down to "the spaceships roll to hit" instead of actually writing dogfighting rules. See Warbirds and Tachyon Squadron for examples of how you can have spaceship combat that's interesting and moderately tactical even when there's no grid map or terrain involved (though caveat, both are mostly concerned with individually-piloted fighters, the Fate Space Toolkit is supposed to have rules for multi-crew ships eventually).
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Feb 28, 2019 21:02
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I'm reading Cavaliers of Mars and I have to admit that about 10 pages into the rules section, this seems like pretty much the perfect system for running 7th Sea in. The only thing I'm not a fan of is that you roll to not get taken out at the end of every round as soon as you've taken a single point of Strain, which is going to be very frustrating the moment you roll a 1 at the end of the first turn.
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Mar 1, 2019 19:59
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Mystic Mongol posted:Deadlands was set during the.... 15th? year of the Civil War, and it had a sidebar in the core rulebook about African American characters. Basically it said that after the war had gone on for so long, the south had ended slavery and allowed black soldiers to serve as equals on the battlefield to help it fill the ranks. After years of this, everyone treated blacks as equals. It also said this was kind of idealistic and dumb, but slavery and racism was horrible and unfun so in their game it was all mostly over, shut up, go fight zombies. Deadlands is a bad example because there's a difference between "you can be a lady knight even if the middle ages were lovely" and Confederate apologia (intentional or not).
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Mar 4, 2019 18:27
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Darwinism posted:"Everything is poo poo and you are mercilessly shat upon," is the weirdest thing to have as your escapist fantasy and that is including LitRPG People enjoy seeing characters suffer adversity and eventually triumph despite it, and especially like underdog stories.
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Mar 9, 2019 20:38
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Don't forget Donaldson's Gap Cycle books. 
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Mar 10, 2019 10:52
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Historically, swords were pretty much always sidearms people switched to once they were too close for spears.
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Mar 15, 2019 18:19
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Liquid Communism posted:Because there are a bunch of 'for verisimilitude' poo poo attached The funniest thing here is that if you wanted to be verisimilitudinous, guns shouldn't have most of those drawbacks but should still target touch AC. This would make armour obsolete, much like firearms did in real life for a long time!
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Mar 18, 2019 07:52
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Gort posted:Just make everyone magic. "Guy who can't do magic when everyone else can" isn't a niche we really need to be protecting. It's a boring cop-out when characters who aren't "magic" (in the bullshit arbitrary meaning of that word that D&D uses) should be equally capable of performing superhuman feats as some dude "casting spells," instead of bowing to the dumb groggy "but non-magical people have to suck!" logic. e; and I'd much rather play someone who is just superhumanly trained with a weapon than a dude who casts a bunch of self-buffs every morning so they can fight good, because arbitrary bullshit D&D reasons demand that only spellcasters can have agency. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Mar 18, 2019 |
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Mar 18, 2019 19:22
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Evil Mastermind posted:At this point, all D&D has to do to succeed forever is just be the same thing. That's it. D&D is the old comfy sweater of RPGs. The old grease-stained, poo poo-smelling hoodie full of holes, which has been puked on a couple of times.
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Mar 24, 2019 21:01
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My last SotDL game had Drudge as well-intentioned pragmatist intent on keeping the throne and building a better empire, but fully aware that he needed to let his people get a measure of revenge if he wanted to be able to keep them together, and if that meant a few tens of thousands of humans being murdered or dying in the chaos, no sleep would be lost. For what it's worth, the game repeatedly calls the orcs' uprising justified and the empire a lovely place. Any interpretation where he's some flavour of good guy instead of a generic evil savage is canon, IMO, especially since he's way more interesting this way. My PC was an apostate orc priest of Grimnir tasked by Drudge himself to find a way of curing the corruption inflicted on them. It was a cool oneshot. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Apr 2, 2019 |
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Apr 2, 2019 00:09
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Gort posted:Anyone aware of a good RPG with a life path system for character generation? REIGN.
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Apr 3, 2019 12:47
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Xiahou Dun posted:You’re the best. Thank you! Jurassic Central Park is actually a SA contest game from 2012. Not sure if Ulta is still around, but if you have archives, you can find the entry post here and an index of all submissions here.
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Apr 19, 2019 08:08
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Covok posted:What happened to Eclipse Phase 2nd edition? They're still working on it, it's just taken longer than they initially estimated.
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Apr 27, 2019 09:24
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Eclipse Phase 2e is Eclipse Phase 1e but slightly streamlined and with less action economy shenanigans, so if you were expecting it to suddenly be a PbtA game, that's not going to happen. It is, however, a less bad system than the first edition.
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Apr 27, 2019 22:05
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The ideal Alien/The Thing/etc. RPG would be rules-light, built for one-shots, and include the ability to randomly generate the premise as well as plot twist events that occur throughout the course of the game. So basically Dread with d66 tables and a plot twist mechanic of some kind. Since this is very different from what the ideal Aliens RPG would be, on top of the Mutant Y0 system being neither rules-light nor built for one-shots, I'm not convinced this new game will be any good if it doesn't limit itself to one of the three films. (Well, Alien 3 is just A Very British Alien so something that does Alien would work just fine for that. Aliens is really the problem here. ) Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Apr 28, 2019 |
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Apr 28, 2019 00:34
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Covok posted:Also, they're just describing Fiasco. No, I'm describing Dread with something vaguely like Fiasco's tables to randomise the setup and twists, which is why I specifically mentioned Dread. "Rules-light" does not mean "purely improv with no rules for adjudicating PC action at all." Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 11:30 on Apr 28, 2019 |
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Apr 28, 2019 11:25
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Covok posted:I just linked a series of videos detailing a single continous plot in the Alien universe that occured over 100 comic issues. What people want out of an Alien RPG is not weird comic book Earth Wars stuff, it's an RPG for playing tabletop Alien or Aliens. The problem is that Alien and Aliens are two very different games.
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Apr 29, 2019 18:37
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I'd love to know why China loves FATE, or if it's just that other RPGs were banned there for a while and FATE just ended up capturing the market.
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May 18, 2019 00:55
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Order vs. Chaos is equally ambiguous, the only good alignment system is individualism vs. communitarianism.
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May 19, 2019 01:42
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inklesspen posted:https://www.cubicle7games.com/cubicle-7-announces-the-one-ring-second-edition/ No, because TOR is one of the best games ever. I do wonder what they'll change mechanically, though, since there isn't really anything I'd change in the first edition.
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May 21, 2019 05:57
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Warthur posted:Re: The One Ring 2nd Edition - I note that they've shifted the timeline a bit from "5 years after the end of The Hobbit" to "25 years after", which I guess means we'll see less rehashes of 1st edition adventures and more stuff exploring things closer to the kickoff of the War of the Ring. It's a pretty clear desire to bank on what the general public remembers about LotR rather than on its faithfulness to Tolkien's oeuvre, which is a little worrying, but I guess I trust C7 enough not to cock it up. Given that all the supplements are planned to be compatible with TOR 2e, the mechanical changes will probably not be very extensive.
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May 21, 2019 16:52
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I've you've only seen Nausicaa, this your regular reminder to go read the manga too. It's a much more complex and satisfying story.
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May 22, 2019 00:52
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I'm the Imoen who goes from happy-go-lucky to scarred and cynical.
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May 23, 2019 18:58
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