quote:

Fria Ligen's licensed Alien RPG does an amazing job of mechanically translating the tension and overall atmosphere of the franchise into RPG format.

LatwPIAT posted:

You're correct on that. It's mostly tables, because charts are good at representing overall patterns in information for a surface-level understanding and, say, quickly telling which bar graph is higher and which are very small compare to the other bars, but bad for reading out precise information.

That said, RPGs should use more tables and charts, because visual representations of information can greatly help understanding.

hyphz posted:

They try, but it has to be done very carefully to avoid replacing the status quo with one that is dependent on supers.

Like, if a super can end world hunger, that sounds good at the first step but then you have to ask how Powerman can not be a dictator when a continent starves if he just flies away, or how anyone can argue that genetic differences are insignificent when it's his unique mutations that put him in that position. Doubly so if it's an Incredibles type setting where being a super is hereditory.

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

well, sort of. a significant portion of Invincible is still about honorable G-men doing what must be done to defend the planet. there are some late-run twists that add a little bit of a wrinkle but even then it's a comic with an awkward attitude towards government -- it's like at some point they realized "oh it's kind of weird if this hero specifically defined by his willingness to violently resist imperialism is comfortable having a working relationship with the loving CIA" but weren't willing to go any further than "huh, this one creepy-looking director is morally compromised on an individual level"

e: to tie it back to the original conversation, what i'm saying is that a change in scope doesn't actually make up for a lack of imagination or for over-restrictive editorial oversight, and Invincible, if anything, is proof of that

Andrast posted:

i like it when the superhero punches the supervillain

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

so few players seem willing to read books and learn rules through study that i'm sympathetic to anyone who doesn't bother making their books function as tutorials

not making your books function as reference documents is just a disservice to everyone, though

potatocubed posted:

Coolness Averted posted:

My Heart game imploded tonight. I'll post a more in depth post mortem of the Heart specific stuff in The Spire Thread tomorrow, now that it's at least not gonna be me triple posting in a dead thread.
I figured I'd talk more about the general game and group stuff in the chat thread too. The campaign was already kinda shaky, as I've mentioned before Heart really wasn't the kind of game my group wanted. I wanted to run it, it was another player's jam, but two others really wanted a d&d type game where they don't do as much narrative wise, and a final player who had only played d&d-style games and a Spire campaign I ran liked the idea of success with complications and shared narratives, but wasn't as into a game where the PCs have it so hardscrabble.

The players lost a fight that was optional, against an avatar of unreality known as an angel and as I transitioned to waking up to the consequences I couldn't get anyone to contribute or add story stuff and visuals, which has been a constant problem when not on rails with them. At that point a player suggested we take a 10 minute break, so we did, and that player spent the break laying out that he had crunched the math and just in general felt disheartened, since he felt mathematically more likely to fail rolls than succeed, and that "Everything is just a slow inevitable march towards failure, so it's hard to stay engaged."
The game imploded but like the group is fine, we just spent the remaining time in the session talking about what was and wasn't working and decided I'd run a game of Scum and Villainy for them instead since it supports:
A. Limited Prep
B. Episodic play/flexibility about who shows up to play
C. Shared narrative elements,
D. Degrees of success/complications
E. Low Crunch
Blades was suggested, but I opted for Scum and Villainy as an alternative, since a friend in our group has been running an absolutely amazing and high effort Blades game that it's really intimidating to try and follow. I'm a little bummed the game ended on that note, but I also absolutely prefer a player stepping up to say when stuff isn't working for them. Especially since the one who stepped up was one of the only ones consistently pushing the story forward. What's funny is a player specifically mentioned that it felt like the game was on rails that he couldn't gauge, while I felt the game had a sputtering problem specifically because there were no rails, and things would meander until I started pushing in a direction or saying "Ok so here's the 3 options I'd suggest if you don't have something you'd like to do/a way to explain moving towards that goal."

CitizenKeen posted:

I've been noodling about porting Icon to supers, and how would you do really tactical supers, and I've been struggling to think about how to handle mobility - really tactical games don't usually afford the mobility common in comic books. I had the idea last night in a fever dream to handle it like stages in a fighting game, and your post just made it click. Thank you, this is awesome.

Zorak of Michigan posted:

Hero system is a beautiful attempt at a rules-as-physics engine superhero game. It's also often a proof that people don't enjoy playing such games.

Infinitum posted:

dwarf74 posted:

I think that's handled fairly gracefully by various 'flanking' rules - you don't need to know what direction your fight man is facing to know they can't face two things 180° apart.

For unit-scale wargaming, yeah, it makes a lot more sense. For any kind of individual combat, though, like what you see in nearly any rpg, you've got to embrace the ambiguity.

Jack B Nimble posted:

Hey all, does anyone else recall the Firaxis dev team saying they workshopped their original XCOM as a.board game and made sure that was good before they started building the actual PC game? I swear that was a talking point back when the game was new. Anyway, has anything ever come out about the specifics of it's rules? AFAIK the actual XCOM board game is an abstraction of the strategic layer?

Doctor Zaius posted:

I'd argue that Law-Chaos is coherent, but only in the context of the old Moorcock one-axis stuff. Of course, it was in service of 'lawful civilization is the only bastion of goodness against the chaotic hordes of the Other' but it was coherent.

Chakan posted:

XCOM 2 does a good job of working through both of those issues, pods feel more fluid and you don’t conga line around like in 1 (because you usually start stealted) & most mission types have degrees of success or secondary objectives that often pay out as good or better than the primary reward depending on your campaign status.

Colonel Cool posted:

Warhammer 40k: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters is the best x-com ripoff I've seen made so far and something interesting I thought it did is when you trigger an enemy pod while not already in combat it refreshes all your squad's action points to full. It really helps fight against the incentive to slowly creep your squad across the map a half move at a time so you don't get caught out in the open with no moves left.

And on a similar note, when finishing combat it also refreshes your action points to full and reloads your weapons. Which is just nice from a saving time doing busywork standpoint.

trapstar posted:

Always thought it would be fun to try and make Homelander in GURPS

Doctor Zaius posted:

My take on this is more 'why use a very crunchy combat system for a game where combat is a fail state'. Like yeah you could probably tweak the 4e numbers to the point where combat's sufficiently rocket-tag-y for that sort of OSR play but it's still a very combat mechanic heavy system for a mode of play that frankly isn't interested in combat.

mellonbread posted:

Hell yeah.



Like two peas in a pod.

Coming at it from the opposite angle, I have also encountered people who viewed any attempt to redirect them toward better games as gatekeeping. They didn't want to play some rinky dink indie product, they wanted to play The World's Most Popular Role Playing Game. Anyone recommending anything else was trying to exclude them from the big leagues.

mellonbread posted:

I'm reminded of the Fat Han build from the old X Wing game. You can get an extra success if you correctly guess how many successes you roll. So you always guess zero, guaranteeing at least one success.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I've been playing Pathfinder Kingmaker lately



on a slightly more serious note, going through one of the first long dungeons in the game is a little revelatory in terms of design: there's something like a dozen fights against three or four giant centipedes or giant spiders. And these fights are not particularly difficult when you've got a Barbarian, a Tower Shield Specialist Fighter, and another Fighter - just smack them in the face and move on, but I can't help but think that if the party was a little more caster-heavy, that it would be that much more inconvenient to deal with.

like, roll up to the dungeon with a Witch, a Druid, a Wizard, and maybe a Cleric, in anticipation of "wow these guys are going to be powerhouses later in the game", and you're going to have a crew that doesn't have nearly as much attack bonus, not nearly as much damage-per-hit, not nearly as much AC, and not nearly as much HP (though healing is an option). You may well need to spend spell slots just to deal with a "trash fight", and that's already with Pathfinder giving casters cantrips that can serve as default attack spells (i.e., you wouldn't have such things in D&D 3e).

but we don't like to do this in a tabletop game, because having to break out the initiative order, the mat, and the dice, for a three-round combat that could result in a single hit against a player, a dozen times in one night, that doesn't advance the plot at all, might be regarded as bad gameplay, and with good reason, and so the DM is incentivized, out of practicality, to make fewer combats, but with each individual combat either being that much more difficult, and/or always being relevant to advancing the adventure

except if the combats are few and far between, then that increases the effective power level of a caster, because they get to blow their spell slots on important fights all the time. So we then approach it from the other end, where we consider implementing limits on how often the party can rest, so that we can string a dozen combats together to drain the party's resources, even if the diegetic narrative would suggest that it should be totally possible for the party to rest between such encounters

it's almost like there's a fundamental incompatibility, where if we don't play the game the way it's supposed to, it's going to strain the capability of the design, which then forces us to implement even more houserules upon houserules to try and make up for it

I'm sure these thoughts aren't particularly novel, but it's kinda cool seeing them be made latent

Hypnobeard posted:

Could just use MoS on the roll to allow the player to "buy" stunts after the fact--either directly translate the usual penalty for, say, a called shot into a required MoS or just set up tiers. MoS 2? You get x. MoS 4? You get x and y. MoS 6? X, y, and z. Etc.