Saturday!
With the exception of diceless RPGs (remember that time you played a game using the Amber system? Remember how you never played a second game using the Amber system?), combat is probably what makes or breaks most RPGs.
People either loved or hated 3rd Edition D&D because the combat was so intricate. People either loved or hated 4th Edition D&D because the combat was so much like World of Warcraft:Tabletop Edition. While it’s very important to give a monologue, the monologue actually has to culminate in a buttkicking for it to truly matter. Whether it be a physical beatdown, social beatdown, or psychic beatdown, the point to setting them up is the knocking them down.
The Hero System is one of those systems that attempts to make a fight look like a fight would look like in a kid’s daydream about a superhero movie. The “turn” takes 12 seconds and that’s broken down into little one second increments and it’s your speed that determines how often you get to move in a turn. (The average person has a speed of 2. That means they would act twice in a turn (on rounds 6 and 12).) The problem is that speedsters have speeds of, say, 6. This means that they move about six times.in a turn while average folks move twice… which means that speedsters have about 3 times as much fun as everyone else in the zero-sum utopia that is combat.
This is something that I’d not much thought about until I started playing a speedster in our little local game at gamenight.
And so now I’m trying to figure out what would be the best way to hobble myself (within the confines of the game) to make the game more fun for everybody else, keep the game fun for me, and restore balance to the force.
Any GMs out there with stories from their tables?
So… what are you playing?
(Photo is “The Game” taken by Mo Riza, used under a creative commons license.)
I think the best work right now is being done in games that break from the D&D tradition and don’t focus the bulk of their rules on combat.
One of my favorite systems is the one developed for the Smallville RPG–though it’s a superhero game, the focus is on dramatic interpersonal conflict rather than superpowers combat–It’s designed to be a game where one person can play Clark Kent, but another could play Lois Lane or Lex Luthor.
Right now, I’m prepping a Wonder Woman adventure to run at my local games day, looking at Arrow & the Flash and figuring out what a Wonder Woman starring CW show would look like.Report
THAC0 foreverReport
I’m in the final phases of preparing a campaign using Adventurer Conqueror King. It’s a retro-clone based on BECMI D&D (which was a simplified system that ran in parallel with AD&D.
The whole thing is set up to take a party of aspiring 1st level murder hobos and the ones that survive end up being able to claim land as a lord (or become a crime lord, depending on the class).
The thing I love about it is that all of the systems have been designed to interlock. The mass combat system can be scaled up from individual creatures, even the large scale construction rules are derivable from the crafting skills PCs and NPCs can take. And yet it does this without making things too complicated.
Add to the fact that the lead author has written posts on how many Hit Points Julius Caesar had, and that he considers the field of Law & Economics an inspiration for his game design, and the whole system is basically me-bait.Report
I’ve heard good things about ACK. I’m not always one for retro-clones, but I get pretty excited about any RPG system where you can go from squire to king, and not just 1st-level squire to 30th level squire.
Can you talk about the sorts of appeal it might have (or turn-offs it might have) for folks without old-school tastes?Report
@alan-scott
Bear in mind my experiences are from reading, not playing so far:
For one thing, its deadly. Unlike modern editions where being reduced to 0 HP is basically a nuisance (unless the entire party is KOed), in ACKS being dropped to 0 HP can mean crippling injuries and lengthy periods of bed rest, assuming you don’t die outright. And magic healing items are rare and expensive.
Also encounters are set randomly meaning a party can run into something that is just out of their league (this especially happens in wilderness encounters which are large, and not balanced for player level at all). Players used to later editions don’t consider running or parley as options when presented with a monster encounter, but if you attack everything you see in ACKS you will die quickly.
Then there’s the domain rules themselves. If you don’t want to build a kingdom or a crime syndicate (and do the bookkeeping that requires) then ACKS is not the right system for you.
But the big upside relative to modern systems is that its sandbox, limited-balancing approach to challenge means that rewards (monetary, items and XP) in ACKS are earned, rather than being bestowed by the adventure. Your level 14 character got that way by being awesome, not because the adventure writer wanted you to reach level 14 by this point in the story.
Also, the domain system makes high level characters feel more powerful in ACKS than in other systems. High level Pathfinder character can kill bigger monsters, but they don’t really affect the rest of the world very much. A high level ACKS character can reclaim the wilderness, start wars and change the way the game world works. They can be powerful in the way Alexander the Great was powerful instead of being powerful the way Superman is powerful. Because, as strong a punch as Supes has, he doesn’t really change the world the way Alexander the Great did.Report
I have a comment stuck in moderation (due to a link I suspect). If it could be moved out, and this post subsequently deleted, that would be most appreciated.Report
Dude, I’m looking for it and I can’t find it. But I’m also sick and feverish.Report
I couldn’t find anything from Zac blocked. There were a number of comments from well-known commenter (Damon, Barry) that had gone straight to spam, so I released those.Report
Damn, I must have closed the tab before it finished posting.Report
Man, I’m sorry to hear that. I’m just getting over a miserable fever myself. it has been a terrible winter for illness all over.Report
I have been sick THREE TIMES since Halloween.
I think I may be old.Report
I was sick much of January and February, climaxing in a bad enough infection that I needed antibiotics. Which cleared everything up, and I felt great all of March. I thought I was done with that crap for the year, and then I was sick again all last week.
I asked my doctor whether to be worried that I was so susceptible, and she said, no, there’s just a ton of stuff going around. And it’s true that pretty much everyone at work has been out more than once, and we didn’t do a Seder this year because there weren’t enough healthy people to put one on.Report
FATE. 🙂
Social, Mental, Physical combat — all run the same way. You take damage, as it fills up you can remove/mitigate it by taking consequences (minor, critical, severe, etc). Minor consequences are things like “being winded” (physical), or “embarrassed” (social) or “confused” (mental). They’ll go away as soon as a fight/encounter is over.
The more severe the consequence, the longer it lasts. Some last until the end of a gaming session. Others can last for many sessions, becoming basically a part of who your character is. Permanent (or close to it) physical disabilities, crippling phobias, stains on your name that will never fade…
When you play, it’s all very simple and straightforward — but it is absolutely fantastic to run an diplomatic or social encounter between two people who are literally getting into a battle of wits.
And if you lose — if you can’t (or chose not to) take any more consequences and have no more capacity to absorb punishment, you’re ‘taken out’. What that means depends — you might determine it, or the GM might. Anything from fleeing the scene, to comatose, to dead.Report
Dude, we’ve got a Fate game set in Vornheim! The DM intended to create a really dark universe for us but, for some reason, the game ended up being slapstick comedy. (My character has two powers: minor power being healing spells, major power being “hears voices” (my condition was “don’t let the voice be Baphomet or whatever. It doesn’t have to be the forced of good, necessarily, but don’t let it be the voices of evil” and the DM shrugged).)
We also have a Dresden game set in the Fate Universe that’s pretty cool… sigh.
But the guy involved with both of those is on hiatus until the summertime.Report
I don’t think fate does a very good job of handling dark, gritty environments. Fate probably gives a player more control over the outcome of a scenario than any other rpg that’s not diceless. I converted a 3e D&D Ravenloft game to Fate, and it instantly went from Dracula to Indiana Jones.
If you’re looking for something story-focused and easy-to-use, Dungeon World is a great system. But by default it only supports characters who match D&D archetypes.Report
If you think FATE doesn’t handle dark and gritty, I can only conclude: You are doing FATE wrong.
FATE is a storytelling. If your story ain’t dark and gritty, it’s because your GM and your players didn’t want it to be that way. (Stock FATE settings or variations — like Spirit of the Century aren’t necessarily dark, though).
But seriously — the whole FATE system is designed to create storytelling — both from players and the GM. Your GM and your players construct the world in tandem.
If it’s Indiana Jones, that’s what they built together. (Unless you were playing a specific FATE variant, of course).Report
So…I can finally dork out about what I’ve been working on in my spare time for the past few months.
A couple years ago I discovered a game/setting called Eclipse Phase, which pretty much hits all of my nerd sweet spots: transhumanism, hard sci-fi, conspiracies and Lovecraftian horror. I’ve never actually played a pen & paper roleplaying game before, but recently I managed to shanghai five of my friends into letting me run a campaign for them that will kick off in June, and so I’ve read through all seven sourcebooks to teach myself the setting and rules, put together a three-chapter introductory campaign along with a series of “touchpoint” campaigns (basically, detailed plot threads they can pursue depending on where they choose to go at the intro campaign’s conclusion), created a bunch of custom equipment to add to the game’s relatively meager gear list, built about a dozen named NPCs and worked up many pages of notes.
I’m really excited about this, in case it isn’t obvious.Report
Also, if anyone’s interested, about 90% of the game’s source material (including the core rulebook) is available free of charge from the game’s creator, via the Creative Commons license: https://robboyle.wordpress.com/eclipse-phase-pdfs/Report
Have you looked at the RPG based off Stross Laundry novels?
It’s Call of Cthulu (same D100 system, in fact) meets IT-based spy thriller, with a side of math.
If you like the idea of fighting Lovecraftian horrors using an iPhone, and then having to justify your actions to three different managers (the Laundry runs on Matrix’d management) and then argue with procurement to get a new iPhone, it’s for you. 🙂Report