Trad Games Chat: squabbled over drafts, forked, and disbanded

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Trad Games Chat: squabbled over drafts, forked, and disbanded

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

Are there any good sources for urban / sci-fi combat maps?

# ¿ Jan 3, 2021 19:39

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 12:39

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

I'm currently running a Godbound game in the Dark Sun setting, which is on a kind of hiatus at the moment while we're playing other stuff. While I have more than a couple of reservations with the D&D core part of the system, it's a lot of fun letting my players run slipshod over the setting and throw ridiculous enemies at them.

I'm playing in a Pendragon and LANCER game. The GM for both is the same person, LANCER was set up to cover me while I'm recovering from Godbound burnout, but I think it might be the most fun I've had with a system since the last 4e campaign I played in. It has the exact balance of narrative play and crunchy combat that I want from a game. Pendragon is a lot of fun to play, too, but it's mechanically and narratively just one long railroad.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2021 08:47

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

paradoxGentleman posted:

I am intrigued by the possibility of change. Stasis is the only true death.

In more down-to-earth news, I'm rereading K6BD and it has made me wonder if anyone has tried Broken Worlds? Is it any good? I got it years ago but I never tried it.

I've run a couple of one-shots and we enjoyed it! the rules are more combat-focused than Apocalypse World, to the point where it's more of a theatre-of-the-mind tactical game with PbtA-style narrative resolution. The playbooks are all distinct and fun, and you can spend your advancement developing K6BD's crazy martial art styles.

I think the only 'criticism' of it I could muster is that it relies a lot on the players knowing a fair amount about K6BD, but I don't see how a game based on it could avoid that problem.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2021 15:08

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

Mr. Maltose posted:

NWoD is more punk than Shadowrun has been for an extremely long time, though?

Funnily enough, I think I've still got a notebook somewhere filled with setting / mechanical notes for a cyberpunk homebrew NWoD game. I've been thinking about digging it up for a while...

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 20:27

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

SkyeAuroline posted:

Do it.
Just don't channel Chad Walker in the process.

I had to look that guy up, and I've only heard shadowed rumours of how bad Sigmata is.

My setting was a fictionalised Cold War Europe, using a still-separated Berlin as a hub of espionage and spycraft. The idea was basically having PCs be partisans, intelligence agents or mercenaries. The main additions in the homebrew were mostly lists of bionic augments, partly inspired by the Promethean splat Saturnine Nights, but I feel like I could actually do something more with it now I've got some more design experience under my belt.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 21:21

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

Coolness Averted posted:

That sounds a little like a card based RPG one of Zak's victims worked on before they were doxxed and harassed into quitting the industry and internet. Heavily inspired by monster hunter and megaman games with the base/original game being a sort of sci-fi ruined earth and one of the stretchgoals that was achieved was a viking/Ragnarok flavored reskin.

Oh man, Last Stand. A friend ran it for my group as a one-shot, it was tremendously fun. I get kind of upset when I think about the amount of talent that's been harassed out of the RPG community by OSR dipshits.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I do keep hearing people repping Old School Essentials lately, which I assume is a fairly recent release, and I've been out of the OSR loop for a while. How does it compare to stalwarts like, say, Labyrinth Lord or Swords & Wizardry?

I've only read Labyrinth Lord, so I would have trouble directly comparing, but I found OSE's core focus is accessibility, clarity, and modularity, which it has in spades. It boils down BX to a clear, concise ruleset that I found tremendously easy to run for a game. They've released an Advanced ruleset which folds in elements of AD&D within the framework, like having Class and Race be separate options, as well as classes that came out in later editions (i.e. Knight, Bard, Druid etc.) I would definitely treat it as a go-to for running old-school dungeon diving games, with Scarlet Heroes as a backup for one/two PC games.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2021 08:48

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

My group is about 25-30 years into the GPC, though we're on a long hiatus while our GM runs a weekly LANCER game. A session of Pendragon is usually a full year of gameplay, unless Big Things are happening. A year usually involves a single adventure or historical battle, then moves into estate management, where you'll be constructing extensions to your holdings and trying to have as many kids as possible to inherit your Glory.

The actual system plays pretty smoothly, it's just d20 roll under, with the interesting wrinkle that you can raise skills over 20, making it impossible to fail uncontested / un-penalised actions, and increasing your critical hit range (a crit is normally rolling your skill rating exactly, over 20 you start getting bonuses to your roll that make critting easier). It does a good job of directing the style of play and drama that Pendragon is based around, but there isn't a huge amount of depth to it, so our sessions would mostly devolve into It's Always Sunny in Logres.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2021 08:34

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

I ran A Wizard for my group over Roll20 during last year's lockdown, and IMO with the right attitude going in it's perfectly playable and fun in a "ha ha we're so hosed" kind of way. I used Old School Essentials and had my three players each make two party members, so the instant death elements of the module wouldn't completely knock a player out of the game. Even saying that, only 1 party member actually died, and the party managed to get the best 'ending' to the module without any handholding.

Obviously, personal mileage varies massively with these types of things, but speaking as someone who isn't an OSR superfan, it gave us a fun afternoon's distraction.

# ¿ May 25, 2021 07:28

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

As flawed as Godbound may be, me and my group have gotten a lot of mileage out of it in our Dark Sun campaign. The system and advancement mechanics require PCs to be proactive forces for change, but those changes themselves create new problems within the world, creating hooks for future sessions, and this works really well in a setting like Dark Sun where you have entrenched, reactionary forces whose control you have to break to make the world a better place.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2021 19:50

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

potatocubed posted:

Can we please find something else to talk about than the piss adventure?

For example: I'm assuming that I'm not the only one here with a List of games that I want to get to the table sooner or later. (Still haven't managed to convince a group to play Nobilis, boooo.) What's on yours?

Whenever I finally finish running my Godbound game, I'm really jonesing to offer to run Mutant Chronicles for my group, the 2d20 implementation seems interesting.

Other than that, my to-run list includes Pathfinder 2e, Tenra Bansho Zero, and one of the Fragged games (I have Fragged Empire from a bundle, but IIRC there's more recent / polished iterations of the same engine?).

The Full Sicko Mode answer would be having a complete enough version of my own game to run, but work-related burnout cascading into severe executive dysfunction and brain fog has kind of put that on the backburner for now...

# ¿ Dec 19, 2021 22:55

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

If Dungeon World is on the table, I would definitely recommend Fellowship. With the expansions (Inverse Fellowship et al.) it facilitates a lot of different fantasy campaign narratives, on top of actually being an excellent PbtA game.

I didn't hear much about it - possibly because it appeared during the PbtA glut - but personally, I've had fun with Broken Worlds, which is another fantasy PbtA based on Kill Six Billion Demons and written by its author.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2022 19:39

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

My Lovely Horse posted:

Does any system immediately spring to mind that actively facilitates this sort of setup?

It only does an extremely specific type of game, but Pendragon is good for this. The game is paced so that each session is a year, where the PCs go out and have a single Adventure. This helps keep sessions self-contained and allows some variation in the group on a session-by-session basis. Also, XP disparity isn't much of an issue, since most advancement is automatic by year, so the less-frequent players can just decide how they developed their stats over the sessions they missed.

I was part of a Pendragon game that had a player that would drop in every few weeks, and it worked absolutely fine.

Alternatively, a lot of the Japanese systems I've seen tend to have a big focus on single-session story arcs and more 'complete' characters, but they also don't tend to do long campaign arcs the way D&D-descended games do. It depends a lot on what you want out of your game.

# ¿ May 15, 2022 07:53

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

Games I've played/run, excluding one-shots:

13th Age
Blades in the Dark
D&D 4 & 5
Degenesis: Rebirth
Emissary
Godbound
LANCER
Legends of the Wulin
Marvel Heroic Roleplaying
Pendragon
Star Wars Saga Edition
Vampire: The Masquerade
WFRP 2E

Out of all of these, my recommendation for crunchy advancement-oriented games would probably be LANCER and Legends of the Wulin. D&D 4 is hard to recommend solely because running it without the online / digital resources is a real pain. WFRP 2E is a classic, it's a solid no-frills workhorse system attached to an awesome Career mechanic.

I've never seen anyone talk about Emissary, I got a copy out of a Kickstarter a few years ago. It's kind of Exalted in Space But Also Dune. The system is a little confused about what it wants to be, but I ran a short campaign with it and it works fine in practice.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2022 07:42

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

Covermeinsunshine posted:

Can you tell me more about this because this sounds great

The basic concept is that the PCs are Emissaries, agents and enforcers of the Emperor of the known universe, a tripartite being formed from a human who has mutated into a planet-consuming superorganism, a moon-sized supercomputer that can predict the future, and a piece of alien super-technology called the Universal Emissary. Emissaries have supernatural powers granted by implants derived from the U.E., which are controlled and cultivated through their Ideals, expressed as a Sympathy resource. Emissaries that lose control develop Apathy, which eventually causes their implants to take over their body and transform them into Gigeresque monsters. There's also the ~~Bene Gesserit~~ Witches of Cetebos, an all-female sect of psychics that practice genetic engineering and oppose the alien technology of the Emissaries.

The basic system is 2d10 + Stat + Skill, with doubles giving automatic successes (on evens) or failures (on odds). This is where some of the problems start to come in - it's a workhorse system that isn't really built for the kind of bombastic science-fantasy action the setting promises. The Skill list is absolutely deranged: there are two skills for remembering things, then one blanket Skill for having psychic powers. There's also a strong death spiral inherent in the system, as wound penalties reduce your stats, including the derived ones that you use to avoid or soak damage. It kind of has the Exalted / Eclipse Phase problem where your stat allocation at creation is so generous that your character concept will be completely filled at the start; you want to be Joe Shootmans? Great, you can start with maxed-out Dexterity and Firearms, then all your XP will go into superpowers or basket-weaving.

There's a couple of things the game does to fill these gaps, the first of which is your Emissary abilities. You can spend Sympathy for rerolls, boost your stats, and negate incoming damage. There's additional powers you can unlock through your Ideals that let you do cool stuff like raise the dead, grant sentience to inanimate objects, or hate someone so much you know where they are anywhere within the universe. Unfortunately, the balance is completely off between the different Ideals, especially since some of them let you break the action economy. Also, advancing your Sympathy pool is done via XP expenditure, which is silly because it's such a no-brainer. Also the game does the infuriating thing of punishing PCs if they roleplay wrong; if you betray an Ideal, you have to make a Corruption roll, which can eventually lead to the aforementioned body-horror thing and losing control of your character.

The other interesting facet is Traits. When you buy a certain number of ranks in an Attribute's associated Skill, you get to select passive bonuses, which extend from being ambidextrous to being able to hold your breath for as long as you have remaining Sympathy. It adds a bit of flavour to characters and incentivises raising Skills that might otherwise not be useful to you.

The PC Races are kind of fun, as well, since they're all shades of trans/posthuman. The closest thing you get to a 'baseline' human are heavy worlders, space-born humans and genetic supermen, with the rest getting weirder from there. There's human-descended lizardfolk and bug people, and also a race of sentient machines with their own rules for things like equipment.

The worldbuilding and setting are really interesting, the art is good, and the system is... Fine, IMO, it just has the wrong priorities. It's granular where it could be breezy, and it glazes over some of the most interesting parts. The combat wants to both be simulationist and drama-oriented - there's a laundry list of equipment with granular ranges and the like, then there's a whole mass combat mechanic which covers the broad strokes of you obliterating droves of minor enemies (sort of like Godbound and its Fray die.)

If people are really interested, I could do a Fatal & Friends when my schedule calms down a little.

Zeerust fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Aug 22, 2022

# ¿ Aug 22, 2022 21:35

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 12:39

Zeerust: May 1, 2008; They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.

Covok posted:

For the last two weeks, I have worked on a retroclone of my favorite superhero game of all time. I did so with a goal: to perserve the game for future generations and make it easy for someone to make games like it in the future. The game will be forever in licensing hell and its engine is stuck behind copyright. I rewrote the entire game to get around copyright and ready it for the creative commons.

Once I publish it, you won't have to do what I did to make your own game. You can copy the entire document and just edit it to make your own game. There will be no worry about copyright. Game mechanics can't be copyrighted to begin with but rewritting an entire game is a time consuming process and this removes it entirely.

I hope this will lead to people making things for the game again and help it see a resurgence.

Below is a draft. I need to review it before releasing this SRD free on itch and Drivethrurpg for errors and sucu.

You can see Magnificent Heroic Roleplaying below:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/16VEl9VKhv_kigq5T7GJihc5iPQu6rhhIDB6pKGCCy4M/edit?usp=drivesdk

Edit: I put it on https://covok.itch.io/magnificent and https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/473564/magnificent-heroic-roleplaying-system-reference-document-mhr-srd

So, the license is active now. Feel free to make derivative works of this old, out of print superhero game.

Holy moly! MHR is one of my favourite games of all time, and this is an amazing work of curation and preservation. Thank you for doing this.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2024 23:17

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