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

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SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

FWIW I'm following your megadungeon post, I just don't have anything meaningful to contribute to it.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2021 01:04

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 23:10

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

I'll have to come back to it once our new game starts. I've had kind of interesting characters in the past but none really worth storytelling about, besides one half-remembered Supers Revised character I'd be partially reconstructing in the process of telling.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2021 18:37

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

One of my biggest TTRPG design peeves (other than hating post-decision randomness ) is that GMing as a role is overloaded and that it should be broken down into components and divded among the group. There's no real reason that rules adjudication and world design should be done for the same person, for example. Rotating GMs being the standard would also be fantastic.

Some games do this. Band of Blades in particular comes to mind, having relatively recently played it, for segmenting out all of the "player-faction" stuff into individual roles for individual players to take up (instead of the GM tracking Absolutely Everything about the Legion the players are a part of, one handles time, world map movement, missions, and part of intelligence; one handles the actual makeup of squads & keeps all the playbooks between missions since characters are shared, and tracks morale; one tracks supplies, personnel, and materiel & their use; one optionally tracks casualties, mission details & results, and handles Legion backstory-building; one optionally tracks the Legion's intelligence network which isn't really a GM role but is the main "players receive world information" method).

It works poorly in practice, as does most of Band of Blades.
I'm sure other games do the shared-GM-load division better without going fully GMless, but I sure keep on not finding ones that do it well.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2021 05:17

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Jimbozig posted:

Could you tell me more about what BoB does poorly in practice, or point to a write-up about it? It was doing a lot of stuff I've also being thinking about, and clearly has a lot of similar influences to some of my games, so I'm very curious to know.

It's been a hot minute since I've played, and my memory isn't the best, but I thankfully have my book in front of me. IGRC's writeup is probably going to be a much better summary than mine. Late at night so I' may not be very coherent. For me:

Band of Blades almost, but not quite, requires troupe play - combined with a very high lethality Blades hack. That's a two-parter to break down separately, but let's start with the lethality actually. Standard Blades has level of harm based off your position & effect (higher effect from the enemy to you results in higher standard harm, 1/2/3 and then 4 is death from 3 compounding). Band of Blades has this in addition to EXTRA harm suffered for a difference in threat! Standard Legionnaires are threat 1, Specialists (the "main characters") are threat 2, but even elites (sort-of minibosses, but more common) are threat 2 right out the gate. If a Soldier or Rookie wants to attack a Thorn, the least harm they can suffer on consequences is level 3! (Harm = threat, +1 for the 1-tier difference in threat). There's a layer on top of this from Corruption, a completely separate track to regular stress that attacks give, that degrades a PC quickly and is incurable without a specific campaign start! (For bonus points, one of the three Chosen you work under kills people with corruption on sight, including you!) This isn't the only Blades system that it breaks over its knee, but since BoB is entirely a combat game it's very front and center.
Listing this as a separate bullet point for emphasis - Band of Blades does not understand FitD design and has made pointless changes throughout. IGRC illustrates this very well with the position/effect system being overcomplicated and doing away with its whole purpose. Edit because this one is important: It also did the same thing the Heart playtest did with Spire's system, in that it has a mechanic for limiting your characters' actions with consequences that can be overcome by playing your character to their narrative "strengths" (stress in FitD, resistances in Resistance System), and then gating the ability to actually use them behind absurdly high barriers - you have to choose the ability to reduce stress even partially, and it takes up a full campaign action where you only get one or two between missions total! Healing harm - again, not even healing all harm for everyone - is another full campaign action!
So characters die very, very quickly, especially ones that aren't "the main characters". Each player gets one "specialist" out of five types, and considering that every type has an important niche and is required for some mission or another, they're pretty valuable. Injuries will take them out of action for potentially a very long time. You also don't want all-Specialist groups to prevent the entire group from suffering death cascade. What this means is that you rotate a thirty-member pool of recruits that players are expected to share & pass around while keeping consistent characterization/personalities, while also swapping out what specialists are actually present on the mission & either forcing people to play their specialist or having multiple people play each "main character" too. Troupe play with shared characters is somewhere up there at the top of "things I never want to see in an RPG" and it leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.
The GM delegation roles. They delegate out some GM responsibilities... barely. The Commander's only actual choice (rather than bookkeeping) is what mission the whole group wants to do... which is OOC going to require group consent, rendering the Commander's choices meaningless. Same with the Marshal and "choosing who goes into battle" - it's not like you can twist someone's arm and say "yes you MUST play your Scout this mission I am ordering you", it's a group consent thing. All of them are group consent things! It delegates out a "final decision" to the appointed person but actually USING that will rapidly breed resentment in a group if you keep overriding the will of the group to force your own ideas. The two optional ones (Lorekeeper and Spymaster) have a little more latitude in that the game doesn't rely on their systems & you can't force any other players to do something by doing them, but they're still both full-group-participation-and-counsel roles.
Small-star: Consequently all the things that would fall to the GM fall to them anyway and the load is not lightened at all.
Remember how Blades in the Dark is designed around minimizing the weight of combat and planning in favor of flexible approaches? Yeah, uh, Band of Blades is 90% combat, 8% bookkeeping, and about 2% at-camp roleplay. I called it "fantasy XCOM" the last few times I've discussed it and I completely stand by that stance, because that's all the roleplay you're going to get out of the system - "hey cool there's this character, let's keep them alive, oops they're dead move on". The mission setups don't really allow for it by laser focusing on fights, all five player roles are entirely combat-centric in their moves/items/abilities, so on and so forth. There's a couple of missions that aren't combat centric, but that knowledge isn't player facing until you're underway. It's minimizing roleplaying for a "tactical game" on a mapless, gridless, narrative system. This is even more driven by the gameplay loop trying to force itself into a single session for a complete mission and the complete downtime run, but breaking them up destroys gameplay flow.
Speaking of "mission setups"? Band of Blades is packaged with one campaign with predefined missions and locations. And that's it. The entire system outside of the Blades SRD is tailor-built to run this one, single campaign with little flexibility for any other use case, even another "fantasy military" campaign. There's one page of lip service given to changing away from the Aldermark campaign (and the advice there happens to directly contradict the main game's design). You play it once and you don't get to play it again because you've already seen near everything.

There's probably more I could think of if I talk to my old group again, but as I'm no longer part of that community (complicated story) that's a little difficult. It has good ideas, and some of the Divine stuff is really cool to harness for another game, but it was a soul-grinding game to actually try and play for several sessions and one of only two games I can honestly say I came away from worse every day I played it than I started (and the other was a d100 homebrew long lost to time).

I promise I actually like RPGs, by the way. Just not this one.

SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Jan 5, 2021

# ¿ Jan 5, 2021 06:36

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

CitizenKeen posted:

I can't speak to BoB, because "bleak story about mercenaries running away from a dark god" is not a campaign RPG that I want to play. However, "troupe play with shared characters" can be awesome if done right. The one-two punch of Spectaculars and Legacy: Life Among the Ruins did it so well I've been folding it into pretty much everything I've run since.

I don't think Legacy is an example of that at all, though. If I'm playing my Riders with the "last old world officer left standing" Elder as my character for the age, nobody else is going to come in and play that Elder. There's room for incidental characters to be used and/or reused, but they're explicitly disposable and lightly statted, and it's just as easy to roll a new and separate character if desired. BoB forces a fixed pool of characters to draw from, and RAW puts that pool of characters fully communal with no individual ownership of the Specialist you create.

Lemon-Lime posted:

This is extremely not the case. BoB is very good at doing the exactly one thing it wants to do, which is replicating the early Black Company/Malaz 7th Army feeling from Black Company/MBotF. It's not a generic "Blades in the Dark but you're mercenaries" hack, it's a hack for playing one specific military campaign with a very specific fictional positioning and an understanding of the game's theme that everyone at the table needs to share for the game to work. 90% of the stuff you bring up (Corruption, high lethality, recruits being a shared pool of initially-nameless characters, campaign roles being given out to players, the existence of Scale and Threat as two different axes) exist specifically to drive that fiction. It's not designed to, and will not, work for anything else, but it also makes it very clear that it's not interested in even trying to work for anything else.

These are valid points, but I'd also contend that just embodying the one specific aim is not the end goal of RPGs. A game can be a perfect recreation of the exact subgenre and source material that it's drawing from... but if that game is actively unpleasant to play, regardless of what its themes are, then how much does that "accuracy" actually matter?

# ¿ Jan 5, 2021 15:09

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Xiahou Dun posted:

Am I wildly misreading you? I'm totally down with everyone having their preferences but this seems like someone ordering a vindaloo and complaining it's spicy. Well, yeah, it's vindaloo. And?

"Fantasy XCOM RPG" is something I'm interested in, though less "troupe play" and more "roll a new character if yours dies, otherwise keep a running cast" because the latter allows for running stories much better. "Force a fantasy tactical combat game into an intentionally loose narrative framework & break fundamental mechanics to get where you want to go" is not, and that's all that Band of Blades is. Some really good setting writing and ideas shoved into the absolute wrong framework for its goals. It could have been done well in a system that actually supported combat-heavy play.

See also: literally any high-budget 5e hack, from the opposite direction.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2021 16:58

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Lemon-Lime posted:

You keep calling it a tactical combat game when it isn't.

Fights in BoB are just a type of narrative obstacle, one you'll see more often than you would in BitD because of the thematic nature of the game, but they work the same. They're not trying to be tactical combat.

What term would you prefer for "combat-centric game explicitly framing every mission through the lens of combat as obstacles, requiring successful use of positioning and tactics to improve position & effect of combat actions to win" as a descriptor? The intensification of harm by double dipping on P/E and Threat makes P/E (the parts you can mitigate as a risk) far more important to keep favorable to the players so the GM can't immediately wreck your character into "unable to contribute" territory, without even touching any other mechanics.

This isn't Monster of the Week or something where all the moves may as well take place on a flat plane because none really affect them meaningfully, BoB relies on P/E for every roll as much as or more so than Blades itself.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2021 18:11

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

I guess I'm completely incapable of communicating my thoughts so I'll just shut up about the game already.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2021 00:41

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Jimbozig posted:

But even if that wasn't true, if you're being so stingy with downtime actions that all people can do is recover, then you might as well not have downtime rules and just put in plain recovery rules instead.

Just expanding on this real quick with the actual mechanics, no opinions included.

At high morale, you get two campaign actions between missions; at medium, one; at low, none. You can spend one supply to get an extra campaign action. (Supply is limited, from mission rewards only, and you can only carry 3 + number of Supply Carts forward with you, low single digits. Without spoiling listed missions, you get 1-3 Supply on dedicated Supply missions.)
Legion morale is not actually listed as a number breakdown in the book, anywhere but it's on the playsheet for the Marshal. Gauge from 1-10. 1-3 is Low, 4-7 is Medium, 8-10 is High. Drop below 1 and you lose a soldier to desertion each time, drop below 15 soldiers and instantly lose. Couple things increase or decrease it but are campaign-tied, also -1 per death.

Five types of campaign action. You can only do each once per campaign phase (between missions). Spend an additional supply to boost a campaign action.

Acquire assets. This is just the Blades move with a predefined list of what you can get, no changes. Boost to upgrade result, multiple times available. Can be done for multiple different assets, as one action each.
Liberty. Every character clears up to 3 stress, increase Legion morale by 2. Boost to clear all stress + extra 2 morale.
Long term project. Also the exact same as Blades, same boost as acquire.
Recruit. Get up to 5 Rookies for your squads, capped at 6 squads of 5. Boost to get 2 Soldiers ("experienced" rank and file playbook) and 3 Rookies instead.
Rest. Every character marks one tick in a harm row. Boost for two ticks. Quartermaster has an extra very, very limited resource to get an extra tick in there somewhere. The game once again doesn't actually tell you how many ticks there are in the book and only puts it on the sheets; ticks equal to harm level to clear a row.

Every resistance roll in FitD is 6-1d6 stress suffered, the more intense harm mechanics have been discussed. There is no quartermaster move to remove corruption/blight.

Draw your own conclusions, I guess.

e: fixed some mixed terminology

SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Jan 6, 2021

# ¿ Jan 6, 2021 06:15

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Yawgmoth posted:

I hate those too, however the latter can be easily fixed by just providing the houserule. It's honestly so weird to me when people don't offer up the change they made that (allegedly) fixes the game; don't you want to be The Dude Who Fixed Everything?

I'd rather be The Dude Who Sold a Working Product in the First Place, personally.
But yeah, I share the house rules when needed.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2021 16:00

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

This a cat thread now? Got 14 I work with, take your pick.

As far as book organizing, I barely use physical books but alphabetical is how it usually goes for me, too. Gotta get a new book case still.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2021 15:47

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Xiahou Dun posted:

Pics or it didn't happen.

Also : http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_01_15/

Excellent short story.

I work with a shelter, which is where the number comes in at. I probably have a picture for all 14 (a couple try really hard to hide constantly) but that's a couple thousand pictures to sort through.

And yes, I pick favorites, sorry; Jasper is a delightful boy.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2021 16:28

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Just not a Humane Society. I have a personal grudge.
This shelter is a local, independent one, which makes me feel a lot better about working with them. No-kill, too. My room is mostly older cats that a kill shelter would have had put down by now (three from a neglect situation that have just barely started coming around almost 9 years later, one unadoptable for a combination of behavioral and neurological problems, a "rehabilitated" feral still terrified of people... you get the idea). Only a couple are under 7 and all but one have been long-term or lifelong residents. I don't know if or when any of them will get to go home, but I keep coming in and working with them anyway. If we can find them somewhere, great; if not, then we give them the best life we can here.
It's a cause I find worthwhile, at least. Work with a no-kill shelter if you can. I know the existence of kill shelters is both an unfortunate reality and a deeply unfortunate necessity under current circumstances, but I can't in good faith support one or encourage doing so. (Humane Society are bastards above and beyond that though.)

# ¿ Jan 8, 2021 16:56

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Interrupting is perfectly fine. I only have experience with Legacy off this list, and I've been a fan of every release the game has gotten. Engine of Life and Endgame add fantastic family playbooks and new mechanics to the core game (I don't remember the character playbooks well), the alt settings are fairly standalone in playbooks and fluff but are put together well.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2021 18:21

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

I managed all of a session or two of Legacy, mostly setting building and some early play, never an age turning. The group decided to switch games by majority vote, no plot threads tied up at all.
...to Band of Blades. Opinions already given.
I'd like to revisit Legacy but I'm in no place mentally to GM it any time soon (or much of any other system for that matter) and nobody else wants to GM it, so eternal limbo.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2021 19:17

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

So I'm actually curious. How many of us are in ongoing (or imminent) games & what are they?
Personally in delay limbo for a switch from Eclipse Phase to CPRED, plus an Over the Edge game that's starting soon.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2021 06:40

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

mellonbread posted:

Running: Delta Green, my own OSR homebrew system
Playing: Rogue Trader, CP2020, Esoteric Enterprises

Five games at once, I wish I had that kind of time freedom (and that many people to play with). What's the homebrew based off of?

# ¿ Jan 9, 2021 07:13

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

My view on Beam Saber was really, really soured by the early versions (that barely if at all worked as a game) - hopefully by now it's been made more usable.
I get the issues with Lancer, though. It's a game I'd very much like to try, but between the lack of ability to find a group (offsite drama, not pulling it in here) to play with & the heavy tactics emphasis going directly against my normal mode of GMing, it's hovering in the background. Did get the hardcover print version, though, and it's gorgeous.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2021 16:42

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Josef bugman posted:

One of the biggest things I think can make or break a setting is the artwork. It doesn't even have to be "good" it just needs to be eye catching.

I have never played Lancer but I think one of the reasons it is so fun is because of a strong understanding of it's world and the themes it is going for married with great art and art direction.

Tom's artistic background and the fantastic artists he got on board went a long way on the visual aspect, and Tom & Miguel are serious as hell about the positions Lancer takes on its own setting IRL too. You're right on the money - it's a project with conviction behind it and a lot of talent that sets the scene for newcomers, both in building the world and in demonstrating snapshots of those themes.

One of the few Kickstarters I've ever backed (Hard Wired Island & Deniable Assets are the other two) and I'm very glad that wasn't a miss. Then again, Lancer had the advantage going into crowdfunding that they had actually basically finished the game already and had mass public testing, so you knew you were getting something good. (Really hoping Deniable Assets doesn't end up being a miss, I've taken up my usual position of "cool, I'm excited for it, I'm going to completely black out all news and discussion until it releases" and haven't kept up at all.)

# ¿ Jan 9, 2021 18:12

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

UnCO3 posted:

There's a big, affordable charity bundle on itch right now for a suicide prevention charity: Solo, But Not Alone. $10 minimum for 87 solo games.

sorry, what

Unironically: I haven't heard of a single thing on this list, does anyone have experiences with any of it?

# ¿ Jan 10, 2021 18:33

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

A sea shanty game. Well, that one's going directly to some friends with an obsession. Good find (I think? Haven't read it myself).

# ¿ Jan 14, 2021 06:47

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Leraika posted:

there's Hard Wired Island too.

HWI isn't trying to be Shadowrun though.

Off the top of my head there's Karma in the Dark too, though it may have been renamed. Someone was also working on a Genesys version. There will likely be a CPRED hack.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 16:39

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

They're Shadowrun projects made on an even lower budget with even less professional work. Consider what Catalyst manages to pull off already. What do you think? No, they're not good, pretty much as a rule. The Blades hacks miss the mark pretty hard and the Genesys one was never finished as far as I know.

Genesys can work pretty well if you like Genesys, but that's just gluing together existing content from Beanstalk and Terrinoth. I have yet to find an "original" Shadowrun copycat that's not worse than 5e. (Most of them are better than 6e by virtue of actually functioning as games, but that's stepping over a buried bar with how low it's set.) The unfortunate answer is "just give up on the fantasy aspects and your pool of good games instantly widens".

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 16:58

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

I maintain that there is at least one system that could make cyberpunk and fantasy crossover work with an actually compelling magic system & pretty even gameplay balance between roles, while leaving plenty of room to encourage a better style of game/campaign structure through optional mechanics.
GURPS
That aside, and on that thought: not Shadowrun, but I'd really like to see a Red Markets cyberpunk conversion. Already very suited to it. (Yes, my F&F is still on hold, combo of waiting for the old thread to actually get all its posts including mine saved & attempting to navigate ongoing IRL issues that are interfering. I'll continue eventually.)

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 17:07

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Tulip posted:

Just have all your vampires wear mirrorshades and all the mages duct tape cellphones to their heads and WOD is now a credible cyberpunk. Throw in the word "neon" a few times per session and I think it's pretty much complete.

To echo the Shadowrun thread at you:

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 18:14

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Shadowrun hasn't been punk for multiple editions at least, so I can't say that's a terribly high bar. I don't have familiarity with every game line of NWoD, my interest lies entirely in Demon and Promethean, but the big three really don't strike me as anywhere close to it either. Maybe Vampire, though old Vamp seemed to lean into it more than new.

e: that's not totally fair, 5th had a side chapter of optional rules in one supplement to kinda sorta incentivize not just playing a group of sellouts, so the bar isn't underground yet

SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Jan 20, 2021

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 18:28

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

aldantefax posted:

I think the last Shadowrun I played/ran was 3e. Is that too far away from the original cyberpunk...ing? That was the start of the Wizkids era.

The depth of my familiarity with Shadowrun rapidly drops off from 3rd and earlier, 4th was current when I was originally considering getting into it and common advice was to not go back from there. By 4th the authors had already given up any pretense of goals or motivations beyond "get rich for the sake of getting rich, never deal with a dragon but the infinitely more dangerous corps are exactly who you should sell out to and work for because they'll make you rich, gently caress everything else". 5th only dug deeper besides that single optional chapter, and 6th... nobody knows because nobody has read it.

Tulip posted:

As a fellow "Demon and Promethean are the best WOD," the distance between Demon as written and pretty legit cyberpunk feels pretty small to me.

Werewolf I think it kind of depends on how you want to play it, if the focus is on being Spirit Cops then not very much but if you're using your outsider supernatural powers to gently caress up The Man I think you might have something.

I'd definitely call Werewolf closest of the big 3 for the latter bit, Demon crosses a lot of the same territory but never quite tripped over into the category for me. It's a fuzzy mental line. Very good game whether it fits or not though.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 18:43

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

aldantefax posted:

Thread ideas:

- a thread for new thread ideas
- a thread for tabletop games oath posting for content creators, GMs, and so on (since a lotta people were making resolution posts about wanting to run more games this year)
- a thread to index and highlight other threads
- a thread to talk about designing a bunch of wizard schools to use for setting mining
- tg jokes thread
- maps thread (battle maps, world maps, star maps, whatever)
- resources and software reviews thread
- vtt thread (on how to make vtt better / worse, funky API tools, and so on)
- debate team thread series: limited run threads which are about debating one specific tradgames topic like “I think experience points are good/bad!” and people can sign up for forming up interesting arguments and counterpoints without getting so worked up people get probated
- a “quick question, quick answer” thread

Aren't 1, 3, and to a lesser extent 5 and 10 just this thread? Not saying not to do it.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 19:28

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Zeerust posted:

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...

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

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 20:28

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Zeerust posted:

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.

Sigmata isn't his only game or his worst one.

That sounds like a potentially quite good pitch.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 21:57

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Halloween Jack posted:

I'm not sure what's necessary to put the -punk back in Shadowrun besides having the PCs do missions for a cause instead of just a packet of cash.

I don't know if Cryptomancer is good or bad; I can't read it or even read about it without going blind from sheer boredom.

I've noticed a trend of games that are "X plus classic D&D tropes," and why would you ever. I don't even like classic D&D tropes when I play D&D.

Reclaimer, the canceled kickstarter game that's supposed to come back when the plagiarized art is replaced, is the one that really rubs me the wrong way. It doubles down on Sigmata's issues, hard. The core concept of the game is that Earth's biosphere is collapsing, so the wealthy are building arks to escape into space, which will (e: nominally at least, it makes zero sense in or out of setting not to) bring normal people along and (e: definitely will) let humanity survive, but with said normal people still under the thumb of the rich. In other words... Pretty much today.

The designated morally correct choice and the explicit goal of a Reclaimer campaign is to sabotage the arks, stop them from ever launching, and ensure the extinction of humanity in the process (there is a lot of lip service paid to "we're reclaiming and fixing things!" but there is also acknowledgment that the Embarkers have wrecked things beyond no return). Because, paraphrased, "they could have fixed the world and chose to leave instead". It's couched in morality language and flimsy justifications, but it's a very thin cover over some abhorrent value judgments being pushed. Combined with Sigmata's already-published "you just have to coalition build with right-wing extremists and people who want your demographic wiped out to fight dictatorships! this is normal and good!" you can see where this is going.

I'm actually not aware of any issues with Cryptomancer besides people who had a hard time wrapping their head around it for one reason or another.

E: I'll come back to the Shadowrun question when I'm home and can draft up a better response (if I leave this undone for more than 48 hours yell at me again to loop around to it).

SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Jan 20, 2021

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 23:32

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

KingKalamari posted:

Does the game ever give a justification for why that's a better choice than, say, beating up the rich and taking the arks for yourselves? Without getting too deep into real life class politics that just seems like a much in-game goal.

So, I'm currently engaging in Internet archeology, because Reclaimer has been scrubbed off the Internet in the aftermath of the Kickstarter canceling; it doesn't even come up in a search, just discussion around it (though I do have the archived Kickstarter itself). I was able to recover a snippet from one of my old posts that was part of Walker's pre-Kickstarter material, but I'm still working on actually tracking down where it originated from. The tldr is "finishing and launching arks run against reclamation, which it's too late for anyway".

Hostile V posted:

It's not entirely that the biosphere is hosed so ecofascism is the moral good. Like yeah the earth is hosed up but the real problem is the fact that the melting ice caps have released a prehistoric super-bug that acts as a nerve agent and gleefully thrives in the changed biosphere and the presence of the super-bug has the elite rich folks scrambling to get the gently caress off of Earth. So, like, it's not just "let's fix earth", there just needs to be this other stupid threat where murdering all of the people trying to avoid dying to it still doesn't loving fix anything because it requires either terraforming earth or figuring out a cure but I'm pretty sure that the world is just post-apocalyptic supercities on stacked levels to avoid the rising waters so good luck with the antiviral infrastructure. It comes off far more as "well, let's all just loving kill each other out of spite".

Honestly I had completely forgotten the dumb bullshit virus part. Yeah, all that's left of humanity is 40k-hive-city-esque ziggurats and arks suspended over the few habitable parts of Earth and a bunch of oil platforms in the completely melted Arctic that get fought over.

edit to fix dead image

SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Jan 21, 2021

# ¿ Jan 21, 2021 00:08

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Halloween Jack posted:

I'm not sure what's necessary to put the -punk back in Shadowrun besides having the PCs do missions for a cause instead of just a packet of cash.

I return as promised.

It takes a ground-up rework at this point. Shadowrun's gameplay loop of "gear porn chasing gear porn" inherently incentivizes for-profit running against all else, because you don't keep going without feeding your gear porn. The system itself is flawed as poo poo on account of 6 editions of creep too. What I would suggest is taking a lot of hints from Spire: The City Must Fall, particularly its "Things to Know" page that establishes some of the structural concepts of the game. I'm not going to copy it out straight, but paraphrasing them into core concepts to carry over:

This is an unkind world that has marginalized you and pushed you into action; your fellows need freedom, and that means risking your life for them and for yourself. Even (and especially) where they won't or can't.
Burning down the powers that be isn't the end solution; there's always someone higher up the chain who can smack you right back down if you push too hard. Instead of destruction, subvert the systems of oppression and turn them to liberation. Don't shed blood for the sake of shedding blood - it's unavoidable, but it's a very important line to draw and not to cross unless you have to.
"Subversive resistance against the man" isn't a cushy career you retire from in your sixties with a severance package. It's going to kill you, sooner or later, and you don't get out of the game. So you put 100% into it and make your mark before you burn out.

I could probably muster a very long rant on how cyberpunk as a genre has failed to live up to its best examples or to carry its themes forward as they become increasingly relevant. That's boring as poo poo, so I'll cut it way down instead. What Shadowrun treats as cyberpunk is "corporations own everything and company towns are back and... that's about it". This isn't even just the system, I (shamefully) have some of the tie-in novels and it never digs an inch deeper than that. Shadowrun utilizes competing corporate fiefdoms as backing matter for "you can get hired by whoever against whoever!" with about as much nuance as Warhammer uses its own setting to justify "any army can fight anyone" and with little paid beyond that. Injustice just exists as flavor to a job or background details that don't come up in practice. The social alienation of the individual in future-society is handwaved away and instead pinned to abstract spiritual destruction as some inherent destruction of humanity through alteration. Hell, even runners' own alienation from their fellow man is cast aside entirely as a theme. Corporate authority gets treated as a fact of life that can't be fought back against. None of this can stick around as-written and still do the job.

(edit because somehow 8.5k characters wasn't enough for me to remember to actually say this:
do not gloss over the systems of capital and technology responsible for the state of shadowrun's world, or any cyberpunk world
Ignoring any form of political theory in favor of "wow! cool future!" is how we got here. Examine those themes in play. Bring in ways to subvert the tools that create them. Not everything has to be nihilistic, or should be nihilistic! Let your players lead success stories, even if they're fleeting or flawed. This is not D&D standard "turn your brain off and chop orcs" - playing a cyberpunk game means you're opting directly into a genre that requires you to give a poo poo about the themes surrounding and pervading actual play. It's a safe environment to examine, deconstruct, and reconstruct tropes & real-word parallels collaboratively and experiment with something better.)

Yeah, I'm going to say "look at Spire" again because Spire is the only bloody RPG I've seen actually do revolutionary praxis remotely right. (I'm told Misspent Youth does it too but I'm not especially familiar.) Bring in aspects of Red Markets, too, especially in the economic aspect if you want to preserve Shadowrun's work-for-pay system; instead of runners living high on the illegal life, drive home that they're part of the permanent underclass of the extraterritorial web, and much like the powers that be treat their workers as tools to perform whatever work they can't automate away, they treat runners as tools to make problems go away, not some trusted allies to be lavishly rewarded. You're a runner, you (probably) don't have a SIN, anything you do is illegal and under-the-table; corps are going to bait you in with just enough you can't resist and just little enough you can't earn your way out of desperation for good. I'm by no means arguing for cutting out "running for corps" entirely, but it's a balancing act that a theoretical rework would have to do. Sell your soul to fund your efforts to fight the bastards you're selling to. The work that makes changes in the world won't pay out in cash.

On that note, make runners' community important; PCs aren't lone murderhobos with no worldly attachments, they're people existing in the same streets and neighborhoods as the thousands, even millions, in the repressed underclass that keeps the luxury world of the wealthy and powerful running. They came from somewhere, they share their lives with others, they have the range of the human experience. These people matter. Some of them are friends, even allies; some of them are the poor bastards that sold out on the other side of a firefight, no different from you but scraping their way to survive under the authorities you're out to subvert or push back. It's not some faceless clone goon there on the floor that quietly disappeared from the narrative when it stopped being their initiative pass; that's Ted, your old army buddy you still go drinking with down at Jarrety's, bleeding out from the hole you put in him and crying for his daughter at home. Or maybe you didn't. Maybe you couldn't pull the trigger on him, you couldn't leave her without a dad, and you had to take a harder path. Who are you willing to betray or hurt for the cause? Where do you draw the line?

The importance of the community isn't just in individual people, it's in the broader effects too. What are you going to fight to change? Putting a stop to the string of "urban renewal sites" booting your friends and coworkers to the street to clear land for luxury towers and labor sites? Build up a voice of resistance to go against the propaganda machine? Take a callous criminal kingpin out of the picture and guide a "better" successor to the throne? Rescue the downtrodden taken as lab rats for corporate experimentation? Every action you take has ramifications on your community and those need to show. Bring them back around in play. Show the ramifications playing out down the line. Let the players try and push the pendulum back when they've gone too far. The characters won't last forever, they're going to die in the line of duty, but they will make a difference that outlasts them.

Building on that last example bit: holy poo poo essence is a terrible system, and CP2020/RED Humanity isn't much better, but "mechanically describing a character's alienation from themselves and from society" is a system with value when implemented properly. (Another place I think Red Markets actually handles it well - it's still kinda poor terminology, but it works out in practice, not least because it's divided. edit 2: Unknown Armies! How did I not think of Unknown Armies as a well-done example.) The issue with "Joe Gunbunny wants a cybereye with a smartlink in it so he can shoot his Ares Alpha better" that causes dissociation from himself isn't "oh no, his new eye isn't natural, BOOM CUT THE ESSENCE". (I mean, it can be metaphysically, but it's a waste of a valuable theme.) How is Joe Gunbunny handling his everyday life when every new person he glances at gets a crosshair and targeting data on their face - a reminder at every turn that he's sold a bit of his body to become more of a machine to kill? How's Elijah the vehicle tech going to feel when every time he goes to work on a car at the service stop, he slots a chip and someone else's muscle memory overrides his own, watching his hands work outside of his control? You get the idea; one of the themes at the core of cyberpunk is treating people as things, and "humanity"/alienation/whatever is a perfect place to leverage that. This isn't TOTALLY related to the broader "how to make Shadowrun punk" question but it does reinforce the structural causes of the issues the average working-class person faces while also partially solving SR/CP2020's weird ableist streak (without RED's "medical cyberware" that introduces a mountain of mechanical issues).

Where a lot of this ends up going is "remember the human elements". A side effect of Shadowrun's intense focus on Gear Guns Combat Wow Flashy Stuff is that it promptly stops giving a poo poo about people as... well, anything but an obstacle to Wow Flashy Combat or a lever to get to it with. Turn that around and you're already on a good track. I know there's a shitload of "but magic", "but the matrix (that's just computer magic)" and all that that, frankly, I despise in Shadowrun and am deeply unqualified to comment on. I don't have a solution for putting handwavey magic in your punk game. That's your call. My concerns lie in having players actually do things for the world around them and not just as some get-rich-quick scheme that happens to cater to adrenaline junkies real well.
I used to be better at writing these sorts of things. I'm not really any more, and keeping everything straight in my head as I write has gotten harder over time. If any of this is unclear or needs expanding on I am here to do so.

tl;dr go buy Spire, read and internalize Spire's GM section, and apply it to punk themes. for advanced methods, actually build a system around the result. (I have the remnants of a couple tries at that lying around. I'm not very good at practical game design.)

SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Jan 21, 2021

# ¿ Jan 21, 2021 03:38

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

drrockso20 posted:

I figure most modern Cyberpunk stuff either ignores or only pays lip service to the genre's deeper original themes because A) it doesn't really contribute anything actually fun to play or watch and B) it's gotten too uncomfortably real to really be worth exploring deeply anymore without becoming a depressing mess that no sane person would actually enjoy

This is why despite liking Red Markets a ton I probably won't be playing it any time soon - hits way too close to home. I get the appeal of "super-mercs doing PAYDAY with elves and trolls", I just think it's a disservice to the genre to have two games focused around that (granted, one without the elves and trolls) as about 100% of the public face of cyberpunk TTRPGs, and similarly media focused around that at the front of a lot of other poo poo.

aldantefax posted:

I feel as though the items about moving away from "humanity" and to "cyber-humanity" along with the dissociation of the self is what GURPS Transhuman Space and other transhumanist fiction tends to have in spades, though often in a more optimistic lens (not as a strict requirement, just as part of genre convention).

One could also argue that other games commoditize people into character sheets full of mostly combat related stats and practical skills, but maybe that's a bit too meta of a discussion ad nauseam? In any case, that was a pretty good critique of Shadowrun. I hadn't realized it was nearly as much of a hot mess after 3e and only remember Essence as a "character limitation" rather than as something from the mechanics that influences the narrative (though iirc SR3 did have notes about what happens with excessive essence loss).

I think that's actually a useful meta discussion and is something I had been thinking about at work today.
As far as Essence goes, yes, as of 5e Essence is explicitly a measure of you being less-than-human that has overtly-visible repercussions on a character through... whatever means. (A lot to be done with that with non-metaphysical stuff, but Shadowrun definitely leans on the magic side of it too.)

# ¿ Jan 21, 2021 04:17

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Absurd Alhazred posted:

This is really good. You should start a blog so more people get exposed to your thoughts.

I don't have as much substantial to say as I'd like to believe. Wouldn't turn out well. But thank you. Might attempt to get back to game design now that I'm actually medicated, but hopes aren't high there. Already had enough crater from a lack of ideas to bring to the table.

My big issue is GM-side translating all of this into concrete things to do. Even my examples were adventure hooks I'm familiar with rather than some off-the-cuff "this is praxis" thing.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2021 06:40

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Halloween Jack posted:

This has been awhile but I didn't want to just reply with

Not only is the gameplay loop of "gear porn chasing gear porn" a hamster wheel, the degree of gear porn is unsustainable. First, I don't think a ruleset with statblocks for dozens of nearly identical pistols is compatible with good design. Second, we all know that the purpose of gear porn in most games is to sell sourcebooks. Which is a Faustian bargain, because the power creep eventually makes the game inaccessible, requiring a reboot and fracturing the fandom. That said, people play Shadowrun because they want a certain amount of that. I prefer a setup closer to Fragged Empire, where a Pistol has a standard statblock and your Special Cool Pistol is defined by the mods you add to it. Apocalypse World does this in a simpler way with gear tags.

This reminds me of a heated debate that was had about tabletop games based on video games. Let's face it, a lot of games can be "fixed" by making them into narrative, rules-light, scenario-bound games. There are so many such games now that they blur together in my memory like fantasy heartbreakers. But of course, if someone wants to play Shadowrun then they probably want plenty of gear options and somewhat complex combat rules, among other things. And while I love PBTA, have played several versions of it, and still have notes for my own hack of it, I'm always a bit nonplussed when I see a new game coming out and it's PBTA/FITD. I get more excited about truly original rulesets like Hollowpoint even if they're not what I want for a given purpose.

Good news, and I'll be referencing this a bit: Cyberpunk RED does what you're after. (It does it *too much* for my taste, especially given the lack of mods, but it does do it. We won't ask the question of where the "Light Pistol" is to go with "Medium, Heavy, and Very Heavy" pistols.) Stripped back a fair bit from even core 2020, quite accessible. Still a lot of Stuff^TM if you want to have gear to latch into, but lighter than something like Shadowrun and covered most of its bases out of the gate. As a Media, I actually found it kind of hard to gear-porn at all because there just... wasn't a ton more gear I need right now (early on in the game) that I don't either already start with or is a sidegrade-y upgrade from what I have. I did package creation, though, along with our Rockergirl; the other three did full-detail creation and were able to gear-porn more, and our Solo has already figured out how to break the system over her sub-5-foot-tall spine with a cyberware combination.
In general I don't mind gear porn that serves a purpose, and I'll defend "multiple examples of pistols or whatever" as a design choice - as we come around to later in this whole post, it's another way of grounding into the setting. When you read the older Cyberpunk books and start looking at "who's making what" you can get pretty quick characterizations of corporations, and average people's interests & lifestyles. Especially Chromebook 2, which is unrepentant gear-porn for days that mostly doesn't even matter to players but does a shitload of setting building in the process. It does, however, undermine the actual playability of a system to fill it with that, and the game loop it incentivizes undercuts themes.

quote:

That said, I didn't really make the connection to Spire until I finally sat down and started reading sections from Heart. Shadowrun would probably benefit from having playbooks, based on the archetypes that have been prominently featured in every edition. It's not like it's actually a classless game, or that there's anything you'd want to do that doesn't fit into one of the archetypes. (By contrast, CP2020's Roles seem sketchy and with little or no mechanical support for actually playing a rock star, journalist, or capitalist.)

Well-made playbooks also sew the PCs into the setting, and Shadowrun should really lean more on its setting. Sure, it's often dismissed as silly. But again, using CP2020 for comparison, I've never seen people effortposting about how much Arasaka or Night City or Johnny Silverhand meant to their games, as opposed to the rep that Aztechnology, the Renraku Arcology, and Dodger have among Shadowrun fans.

(Edit: Most of the cyberpunk games I've seen in recent years are very setting-lite or create-your-own, so the only other game I could compare it to would be Eclipse Phase.)

If the Street Samurai washed out of the Red Samurai, the Decker stole his cutting-edge deck from Mitsuhama, the Smuggler has contacts in the Sioux Nation, the Gang Member drifted away from the Universal Brotherhood before things got bad, etc. it sews them into the setting. Instead of being a freelance criminal, who has no friends, living alone in a lovely apartment, with a million bucks worth of military equipment. You could also give people a game-mechanical incentive to play a detective or gangbanger or rocker or something else that nobody plays because they don't cast spells or have a million bucks of military equipment drilled into their carcass.

Hey, guess what else our group are vets of and just finished up a campaign of? Eclipse Phase is goddamn awful to learn the setting for. Remember all that "establish the world for the average person" that I like talking about? PHS never did it. Ever. They wrote a space habitat book (okay, a third of a book) and dedicated the entire thing to environmental systems and security without ever touching on how people live! Eclipse Phase is a radically alien setting to the average person who's going to come into it. Even a touchstone like Altered Carbon (daily reminder gently caress RKM) is still leagues away from the free body-hopping post-scarcity environment Eclipse Phase concerns itself with, especially 2e which strips out all the support for normal Inner System play in the name of "streamlining". God forbid your new player plays an uplift. Yes, hello, I played an uplift. Turns out hands are nice actually.

As far as playbooks: 100%. Outside a few edge cases very few people are crossing the streams. You don't make a decker spirit summoner, you probably don't make a street sam decker (you could, but good luck with the millions of nuyen), you're probably not going to be the face of the party down at sub-1 essence for a tech role... Adepts are basically the "crossing the streams" point for Shadowrun, and even those almost all fit in archetypes. Burnout adepts, combat adept of whatever flavor, decker adept, social adept, you got 90% covered. (Alas, my parkour adept only ever saw one session and the creepshow GM ensured there was never a second.) Tying the roles to a stronger personal identity would do a lot to strengthen role identity, much vaunted niche protection included, and setting ties. Samurai, Face, Decker, Rigger, Mage, Shaman, Adept, Technomancer, you got a set there with adjustments made as suitable, plenty to still prevent character overlap.

CPRED does a fair bit to make role abilities actually useful. I say a fair bit because it's still limited to some degree, but so far we had a great little "rockergirl fresh off the show establishing our session start throws an impromptu encore as a distraction for our stealth duo" moment backed up by the Charismatic Impact mechanics. Credibility has me as something that's probably an info nexus though I haven't seen how the actual publishing part works. Fixer hasn't gotten to do a ton role ability-tied yet, partly on account of getting his leg blown off in the first "real" combat we got in, nor has our Tech with Maker. And of course the Solo ability just... does combat stuff. All passive bonuses you shift around.

quote:

And I have to single out the Zenith beats/abilities for special praise, because they suggest an arc for the PCs and an end to the gameplay loop. Even if, in Shadowrun, that ending might well be retiring comfortably or dropping dead after an epic bender, rather than nuking Lofwyr or sealing the Horrors in another dimension.

Yes! This is something my Red Markets F&F will eventually get to and dedicate a post to - its concept of Mr. JOLS, the campaign-ending "big job you've been building up to" followed by the characters actually retiring (or dropping dead, staying out in the field till it kills them, whatever their choices were - the point is to build towards Mr. JOLS and have a definite closure to the game that fulfills what you've been growing towards). In the context of a more community-oriented cyberpunk game that may well be your "big strike" against the oppressors; you've chipped away at the chains that bind you, you've pushed back and maybe even undone some of the harm they've caused, and now you go for broke to get your community out from under the corporate thumb. It may not last forever - you may just have one little neighborhood-scale F-State, maybe only for a few years - but you get to make your ending or die trying. In a more individually-oriented game, the traditional "make a big score and retire off that" works perfectly well too; as established I'm just jaded on that one.

quote:

Regarding the running of the game, Shadowrun has always indulged a couple cliches that really cut against its premise: Mr. Johnson is going to gently caress you over as part of some convoluted scheme, and the corp you're running against is going to hunt you to the ends of the earth. Both of which cut against the whole idea of "deniable assets." Individual Johnsons and executives may indeed do that poo poo, but by definition they're salarymen operating out of their depth and with limited resources, not guys who can sicc a dragon on you. I really like your idea of emphasizing that everything off-the-rack with a corporate logo on it is going to be buggy and adequate at best, and you need to make connections to get good gear.

Looking in Red Markets and cannot for the life of me actually find it, but pretty sure RM is one of the ones that says it - I've adopted a policy from some games that the Johnson will not gently caress you. As a GM, the rewards from characters doing work is one of the strongest carrots that you have to draw the players into "best practices" territory. So don't throw that carrot out the window. Things can go wrongs, complications can come through all over, but you will get the pay that was promised at the beginning if you're willing to go through what's getting asked of you. Genre-fitting all the time? Maybe not. But it makes games run smoothly.

quote:

This ties back into the gear porn problem; Shadowrun's cyberware is absurdly detailed and I played a lot of games where we spent more time making characters than playing them, mostly because of the loving shopping. (You also touch on an old joke in the fandom--do old people with knee and hip replacements lose Essence?)

I think 'ware (the distinction between cyber- and bio- should be dumped) needs to be systemic. Instead of buying individual cybereyes and cyberears and picking out options, you're getting the Maria Mercurial Sensory Suite with the option to flip a couple tags around. Likewise for the several pieces of ware that improve your reflexes and the dozen or so that give some combination of strength, armor, and a melee weapon. The irony is that in most editions, most cybered up PCs will spend more than half their money on one or two pieces of really expensive gear, then get out a calculator to compute the Essence and monetary cost of their alphaware cybereyes with a given set of options. It's loving dire.

CPRED fixes the "lose essence for medical care" issue... clumsily. "Medical cyberware" doesn't ding you for Humanity but it also doesn't do anything that the natural limb doesn't.
Problem: neither does a basic cyberlimb/cybereye/whatever. Except the latter costs you Humanity. A lot of it in some cases. And no, you can't upgrade medical cyberware RAW.

It does at least kind of do the "suite" thing in that everything is a base cybernetic with slots to insert "modifications" into. Really awkward way to do it. One of the points I'm least a fan of.

quote:

First, magic is obviously a shortcut to throw in "fun" stuff that stretches plausibility. Would pollution and illegal animal testing actually produce an army of flesh-eating monsters in the sewers? Probably not, but magic makes ghouls and devil rats.

I think what makes magick worthwhile in Shadowrun is that it's somewhat orthogonal to the way things are "supposed" to go in a cyberpunk dystopia. Magickal talent is inborn and can't be copied or reproduced. Magickal goods can't be churned out of a factory. In a megacorporate world, magick is still a folk art.

In any kind of cyberpunk story where the protagonist is supposed to be fighting the Man, you have to answer the question of why the Man doesn't just have more hired guns, more hired elite hackers, and so on. Anyone can be born a mage, and while many do take a safe corporate paycheck, that's not an option for everyone. (It reminds me of when I did an F&F of Godlike, where super powers are created by pure, irrational belief--such as panicky reactions to deadly danger. Trying to commit genocide creates a small army of people with super powers who hate you!)

Magick also has a value that's hard to quantify, since magickal resources won't keep pace with the expansion of corporate infrastructure. Magick is a big vulnerability and can cause people in power to go for all kinds of harebrained schemes, because it's easier to put a dollar value on physical or Matrix security than on preventing astral espionage.

I think this is a pretty good summary of magic's purpose in the game, and on review, I actually think this makes Shadowrun magic better than I thought overall; it's poorly implemented, but you're right, the divergence from "acceptable society" makes for good character hooks and conflicts to play on. Good writeup throughout, and something to think on for sure.

My responses may be a bit fragmentary, I've been out of it on "deep thinking" for a while for IRL reasons, but you've raised a lot of good points of discussion.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2021 03:29

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Halloween Jack posted:

I should give RED a chance. I've been dubious because the Witcher tabletop game seems to have some basic issues. But like I said, I haven't really given it a chance.

Don't get me wrong. It has issues. Glaring ones, imo, but not outright game breakers.

quote:

I've always bounced off of "post-scarcity" transhuman body-swapping cyberpunk for a host of reasons. EP I also found hard to get into and imagine people's daily lives.

Yup, that's why we bounced off it and ended up changing games. Doing social play is hard when you don't put any bloody hint of social dynamics besides fantastic-racism into your game across two editions! (Of course, now that we're done with EP, we're using RED for well outside of what it's intended for... but at least there's grounding.)

quote:

Have you played Shadowrun: Dragonfall? You get to defend the Berlin F-State.

I have. I prefer Hong Kong, but I did like the insight into the F-State (and the examination of its failures through Monika's actions' lens).

# ¿ Jan 27, 2021 05:35

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Xiahou Dun posted:

Yeah at this point I don't even need receipts and will just go with it.

I don't like unsubstantiated rumors, so I'll let RKM speak for himself. Better to have receipts than to go off word of mouth and potentially get wrong information.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2021 06:49

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Evil Mastermind posted:

"The GM cannot screw the players out of payments" is explicitly stated in Blades in the Dark; the idea being that given how many other things will be coming at the PCs from every direction that they shouldn't be worried about doing a bunch of work for nothing.

Yes! That's the one. For some reason I mentally skipped over it entirely while searching for that excerpt.

CitizenKeen posted:

I put about 11,000 words into a cyberpunk Resistance game before realizing that wasn't a game I was going to run in the near future. I think there's a ton of low-hanging fruit for a good game there, and I don't think adding magic would be at all difficult. Resistance is fundamentally about badasses who are in over their head who are probably going to die, but hopefully they fulfill their mission first. I think a cyberpunk Resistance game would essentially play iteself.

Also, if you're into cyberpunk, I read a playtest draft of Ascendancy and it's a good project to follow. It uses a d6 variant that I'm not fond of but the writing and ideas are rock solid.

Yeah, I did a bit of tinkering with Resistance as well. I ended up stepping away from it because I didn't like the feel the mechanics lend themselves to what I was doing well (it's my one issue with Spire, the resistance and fallout systems in particular have a bad feeling to them entirely separate from the normal high lethality), but someone approaching it from a different angle may have a better time of it. Especially someone with a better imagination for the abstract and weird advances/fallout examples.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2021 16:50

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 23:10

SkyeAuroline: Nov 12, 2020

Halloween Jack posted:

Imagine how desperate and determined you'd be to conquer the world if the alternative was eating British cuisine for the rest of your life.

Okay, I know it's a cheap shot, but keep in mind that the things that come to mind for most people for "British cuisine" are working class food. You know, the people who historically couldn't afford much in the way of spices/etc as part of their staple diet until recently, long after the rise of the colonial empire, and had to make do with what they could afford or grow/raise themselves? (e: also, the whole "multiple world wars forcing rationing and creative use of what's at hand" didn't help either) Yeah, those people. I get it, it's bland compared to other cuisine, but "haha british food bad" is just repackaged "haha we've got it better than poor people".
Sorry. Hits a nerve. (I'm not British.)

SkyeAuroline fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Jan 27, 2021

# ¿ Jan 27, 2021 19:44

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

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