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The art form is in a Golden Age, the market is in a Dark Age like it is for everything else. How many not-Shadowrun games are out there? I skimmed Lowlife 2090 recently and wasn't impressed. There's a free Forged in the Dark homebrew called Runners in the Shadows, and a free Sprawl homebrew called Shadowrun in The Sprawl. I'm sure there's a spate of Cyberpunk D&D games out there, but most aren't obvious homages to Shadowrun.
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Jan 20, 2021 14:45
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I haven't seen a satisfactory attempt to do cyberpunk within a D&D variant ruleset. I wish I had, because then it would be fairly easy to patch in magic rules from some other D&D variant.
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Jan 20, 2021 17:01
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I think the biggest changes from edition to edition were 3rd to 4th, which eliminated the Pools mechanic and overhauled how the Matrix worked, bringing AR into the setting. From what I remember, the changes from 2nd to 3rd were mostly balance changes. Knowledge skills became a separate category (because no player is going to spend skill points on Elven Wine Connoisseurship when those points can go to Pistols), weapon skills were broken up, and Wired Reflexes no longer let you take your actions all at once. I've heard that 5th was a grognard edition that brought cyberdecks back, but I don't know.
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Jan 20, 2021 18:41
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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.SkyeAuroline posted:Sigmata isn't his only game or his worst one. 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.
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Jan 20, 2021 23:02
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It's hilarious the way he embraces nihilism and defeat while being so incredibly mad at Twitter tankies that he wrote it into his games.
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Jan 21, 2021 01:52
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SkyeAuroline posted:fantastic effortpost on fixing Shadowrun  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. 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. 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. 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. quote: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 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. quote: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. 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. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Jan 26, 2021 |
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Jan 26, 2021 23:17
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Leperflesh posted:One of the very early Palladium properties was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game. The After the Bomb supplement provided an avenue into, basically, animal-people-with-laser-guns and that was clearly incorporated straight into RIFTS from the get-go.
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Jan 26, 2021 23:21
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Blockhouse posted:just realized that The Expanse being a home game that turned into a multimedia franchise means it's the Slayers of the 21st century.
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Jan 27, 2021 00:52
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Can't you also eat the savanna oysters to increase fertility?SkyeAuroline posted: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 StuffTM 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. quote: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. quote: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! quote: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. quote: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. quote: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.
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Jan 27, 2021 05:29
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Kavak posted:Why is this a thing? Is there something in British culture that creates a stumbling block for accepting trans people?
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Jan 27, 2021 14:52
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Splicer posted:If you want to see where firefly came from watch alien resurrection
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Jan 27, 2021 17:39
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thetoughestbean posted:It’s loving wild to me that the UK somehow colonized like half of the world.
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Jan 27, 2021 19:38
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I thought it was the other way around and all the good British food comes from its oppressed people. I don't believe that Boris Johnson subsists on anything but beer, toad-in-the-hole, spotted dick, and various meat and bread dishes that are all called "pudding."
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Jan 27, 2021 19:50
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France isn't a cold and unimportant little island where, barring imperialism, they would all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes.
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Jan 27, 2021 20:21
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90s Cringe Rock posted:butty Yeah, France was still punishing Haiti for the crime of freeing themselves from slavery until 2010 Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Jan 27, 2021 |
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Jan 27, 2021 20:55
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Do not copypaste the grognards.txt post about running paid games at a "public eatery," do not copypaste the grognards.txt post about running paid games at a "public eatery,"
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Jan 31, 2021 16:49
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I want a TG music thread so that a) I can post my old CRPG dungeoncrawling playlists and b) I can mock the terribly corny power metal that will be posted.
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Feb 1, 2021 15:56
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Psh, that's barely a 0.25 on the Manowar Scale.
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Feb 1, 2021 21:03
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Returns is okay, story wise. Dragonfall is awesome. With Hong Kong, I still haven't got past the JRPG Mode, but it's supposed to be very good.
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Feb 14, 2021 17:50
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Whybird posted:I'm super confused by what you mean by this, all the mechanics in Hong Kong are practically identical to in Dragonfall.
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Feb 15, 2021 04:45
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EverettLO posted:I've been thinking lately on nineties RPGs and wanted to get some feedback from people. I'm mainly thinking if there is any real throughlines to the decade from an RPG standpoint be it mechanically, thematically, or from an industry perspective. I'm trying to look at it from the perspective of massive, overarching trends. 1. I don't think player factions were an innovation leading to splatbooks; splatbooks themselves were the innovation. Vampire's Clans and Disciplines were essentially the replacement for D&D's character classes to give the game some structure. And then you have Rifts, which had tons of splatbooks while defining characters by classes. 2. Metaplot, metaplot, metaplot. Metaplot is really what made the player factions of 90s games more interesting and tied into the setting than D&D classes. 3. For point-buy, it depends on how you define it. Many 90s games gave you a pool of points to spend on each category of character traits, as opposed to e.g. Champions comprehensive point-buy. 4. Mechanically the biggest change was dice pools. drat near everything used a dice pool, though they didn't all use it the same way. Shadowrun had you roll your Skill as a pool of exploding d6s against a target number, White Wolf used a Stat+Skill pool of d10s counting successes over a target number, West End had you roll a pool of d6s and add up the result against a target number, and I forget how LUG's system worked exactly. Another big thing was character traits being rated 1-5 or 1-6, usually adding the Stat and Skill together. This may sound strange or insignificant, but I noticed that even games that didn't use a dice pool, like Unisystem, had Stats and Skills rated 1-6 and added together. I would say that the move toward unified mechanics was an ongoing process during the 80s. Games that still had different subsystems with different dice mechanics for everything were dinosaurs and D&D heartbreakers. A major change from the 80s was eliminating table lookup from basic task resolution. A a lot of 80s games moved away from a bunch of different charts and tables and used a single Master Chart instead (e.g. Chill, Gamma World 3rd Ed., Star Frontiers). Nineties games relegated tables to equipment lists, random-roll tables and very specific cases. I think Torg/Masterbook was the last gasp of the Master Action Chart in new games. Total agreement on the trend in non-dice resolution. You're absolutely right that White Wolf ruled the 90s and was the single biggest influence; it's not for nothing that Shannon Appelcline used an ankh for the symbol of his 90s volume of Designers & Dragons. Another major outcome of this was that 5. LARP became a big deal. Okay Kate needs me to prep dinner I'll be back later Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Feb 19, 2021 |
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Feb 19, 2021 00:00
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Haystack posted:The historical throughline for player factions, as I understand it, is Runequest cults --> Ars Magica Houses --> Vampire Clans Edit: For comparison, I don't consider AD&D's druid circles and thieves' guilds meaningful factions. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Feb 19, 2021 |
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Feb 19, 2021 16:52
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EverettLO posted:I think I'm just using a more limited definition of splatbook. I was thinking of splatbooks as specifically related to directly character relevant groups/divisions/options. For instance, I would consider the brick colored D&D class books to be splatbooks, but Rifts worldbooks or Mystara Gazetteers not to be. If we widen the lens to worldbooks then that trend seems to have really got started in the late 1980s with Forgotten Realms and others. Either way, the concept really got supercharged by Vampire. quote:There we go. Bullseye. This was exactly the kind of major innovation I knew I was missing from my list. Again, a major innovation probably pushed to the forefront by White Wolf but definitely the most popular resolution system for RPGs made in the nineties. Example: In Dream Pod 9's Silhouette system, you roll your Skill as a dice pool, taking the highest, and adding your Attribute as a flat bonus to the total. For Jovian Chronicles, they recommended flipping the role of Attributes and Skills so that Attributes would be more important. It doesn't take a lot of number crunching to figure out that once you have 2d in your pool, a flat +1 is better than another die! quote:I would actually agree that the trend toward 'mature' themes seems to have been driven more by the European markets. The aforementioned SLA Industries was Scottish, Kult was Swedish and the whole grimdark aesthetic was pushed by Warhammer and Mutant Chronicles. It definitely had a strong presence in America, though.
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Feb 19, 2021 17:31
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Masterbook was one of the first RPG books I bought, and I have no idea why WEG dropped D6 in favour of the system that would become Torg. It sucks, and it's especially bad for the kind of multigenre game that Torg was trying to be.Xerophyte posted:Mutant Chronicles is one I have a hard time divorcing from my own nerd opinions. It was absolutely reviled by hobby veterans here. Target Games took the '84 and '89 Mutant RPGs and dropped the relatively down to earth post apocalyptic setting to make an entirely different sci-fi game, with an entirely different 40k aesthetic, while still keeping the Mutant name. Their existing Mutant player base loathed it with a passion no D&D edition war will ever approach. Kult drives me nuts. I think I grasp what it was trying to do, but it's the archetypal "But what am I supposed to do with this?" game. I have no idea what a Kult PC party or a Kult campaign is supposed to look like beyond "Lots of edgy Clive Barker stuff." The new Divinity Lost edition has not really fixed this. It compares unfavourably with Unknown Armies, which also seems very unwieldy because of its themes and the fact that every PC is a lunatic. But it has modules and clear guidance on how to actually run a campaign. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Feb 19, 2021 |
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Feb 19, 2021 19:45
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Nuns with Guns posted:It's missing the best one though: djfooboo posted:Is there a Mothership RPG thread? Zine Quest 3 has me so pumped to start some one-shots.
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Feb 23, 2021 15:24
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Staking an ancient racist vampire sounds like the worst #iHunt contract ever.
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Feb 23, 2021 17:12
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Plutonis posted:It doesn't help with the impression outsiders have of this forum as being full of spiteful indie designers who hate the biggest market share owner.
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Mar 1, 2021 18:43
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Richard Garriott wasn't a big deal when he started, I'm going to sell my computer role-playing games on floppy disks in sandwich bags, just like him.
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Mar 1, 2021 20:35
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Plutonis posted:It's all very easy to blame others for your own misfortunes, but why not look at yourself first?
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Mar 1, 2021 20:53
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Boba Pearl posted:Is anyone willing to do a PBP FATE game? I've always had a hard time understanding it, and I'd love to pick someone's brain on how it's actually supposed to work.
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Mar 4, 2021 18:39
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I think Fate is one of those games that got showered with praise for the innovation of being A Game That Isn't D20, Please Anything But More D20 Garbage I'm Begging You in 2003. Aspects felt like a godsend at a time when most games were statting up traits like "I'm a merman" with a bunch of fussy fiddly little rules. Breathes water, takes less damage from this, takes more damage from that, if you're out of water for more than X hours you take Y penalty until my organs are shutting down from sheer boredom just typing this send help
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Mar 4, 2021 18:51
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Yeah, I think you're right. Fate was derived from FUDGE, after all. But it presented itself as a universal multi-genre toolkit, in ways that earlier rules-lite freeform games did not. This culminated in Strands of Fate, which is very weird because it basically tried to be D20/GURPS/Hero for rules-lightish games. Lots of fiddly create-your-own-stuff subsystems bolted onto Fate. So you got all the slippery free-for-all bullshit of Fate paired with all the fussy fiddly bullshit of a universal toolkit system. It's basically been supplanted by games like Dresden Files and Atomic Robo. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Mar 4, 2021 |
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Mar 4, 2021 19:16
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I got really tired of sentence-long Aspects, in much the same way that I'm now tired of PBTA games aping AW's writing style whether it suits their game or not. Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Poser Art
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Mar 4, 2021 20:14
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DalaranJ posted:Sigh, looks like we’re going to have to “Seek and Destroy the Dark Forces”. Here we go again!
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Mar 4, 2021 20:55
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Day?
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Mar 8, 2021 04:18
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That Old Tree posted:Hey why was it that World of Darkness won out over Nightlife!? Huh, there's only one abandoned F&F of Nightlife; I should do it.
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Mar 16, 2021 18:42
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Weird question: Is there a RPG where each player controls a squad instead of a single character?
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Mar 28, 2021 01:58
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Xiahou Dun posted:As someone who deeply, fervently does not care about playing in WWII, I now really want a squad-level WWII hack of Reign. That sounds tight as hell.
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Mar 28, 2021 05:22
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A big problem I find with superhero games is that the "superhero genre" includes pretty much everything. So people making superhero games often get sidetracked into making a universal engine. The big example is Champions becoming the Hero System. The problem is that universal engines don't do genre emulation well, at least not without being a "toolkit" game with lots of "optional plugins" to fiddle with. As a result, they make a supers game where Captain America is just flat-out not as good as some third-string character like Wonder Man, since the rules don't account for things besides raw power level. So to actually answer the question, succinctly, you gotta be able to run an action scene with the Avengers or JLA where every character matters and contributes to the scene. If Batman immediately gets red-misted by some glorified goon, it's not a good system for running superhero games! Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 22:27
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Was that intentional? Like, my understanding is that the system was designed to foster Silver Age style drama where everything in Peter Parker's life is hosed up.
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Apr 6, 2021 23:36
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