Tabletop RPG Catch All

My RPG shelf has 34 printed books, many with several supplement books, some with over a dozen. Add maybe a dozen PDFs. And I mourn (mourn) each and every book I've let go at some point as a stupid, poor student (Underground! AD&D 2nd edition! D&D red box!). I do not consider myself a collector of any sort, it's just stuff I really love.

We played as new players in an established campaign last night with my wife. It's a custom world and system, conflict resolution uses Tarot cards (I got to play one). The game is to span the entire 20th century, we're as far as 1922 now. Super cool stuff, the game is packed with historical and mythical characters and events - I got to briefly meet Nikola Tesla and shake hands with Howard Carter at the Tutankhamon tomb's opening. I'm not usually into playing as much as GMing, but I really enjoyed this one. My suicidal character got a very satisfying arc out of this one session, despite perishing.

I've been thinking about tabletop RPGs for a couple of weeks (partly on account of this thread). So, I stopped by the Orc's Nest today on the way back from a meeting and scratched the itch by browsing the throwback rulebooks and sourcebooks, and lo and behold, what did I see but a Mouse Guard RPG! Awesome.

I've never dug into the Burning Wheel system, but this is the sort of thing that could make me give it a shot. I'm probably going to cave and buy it this week/weekend.

One problem we had with Mouse Guard was the concept of "helping" in a verbal conflict, i.e. an argument. Now it makes perfect sense to help a companion in combat between your strikes, by flanking, taunting, distracting, things like that. However, in an argument, where each mouse is trying to make a point, the helping actions come across like these constant interruptions while another mouse is talking, and the whole argument feels like you're badgering (no pun intended! :D) your target.

I haven't read the rules, so I can't say if we were playing as we were supposed to.

I'm only familiar with the Burning Wheel through Burning Empires. That is a great system, but it is really very heavy. Not heavy like games used to be - it's all very logical - but there are rules for everything. And it's not rules as in older games, which you can just ignore when you want to, it's rules you have to live by if you want the game to work.

We played some games of BE and had a ton of fun, but it was quite taxing. I did like the boargame like nature of it, where all of the information is shared openly and everyone playes by the same rules, GM included. The best part was the world creation session, in which we created all of the characters, factions and the world itself, together - before deciding which characters are the PCs!

Just got a copy of the Limited Edition Deadlands Reloaded. So pumped to delve into it. I should have never sold all my DL classic books after high school.

And so we're not outdone by the Dresden Files thread. I present to you some pics to oogle:

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Radical Ans wrote:

Deadlands photos

I'm off to read while I wait for the engy update

Those Deadlands books look great, nice to see they kept the license for the lovely Brom artwork. I played the (first?) playing card based edition of Deadlands a bit at University, as well as a bit of Hell on Earth. Very fun, even though the system was a little broken (or we were doing it wrong) - the Western setting is so easy to get into as everyone knows the basics already. Not tried it with the new rules though. Hell on Earth was just great because my GM let me have a stompy robot suit.

That's a very cool book. We only played Deadlands a couple of times, but I liked it. The system felt a bit fiddly, though, I seem to recall poker cards and chips and paper clips on my character sheet.

jlaakso wrote:

That's a very cool book. We only played Deadlands a couple of times, but I liked it. The system felt a bit fiddly, though, I seem to recall poker cards and chips and paper clips on my character sheet.

This particular book is the Savage Worlds edition, so I'm hoping it plays a little smoother than the original.

Rifts is awesome. There are some world books with really fun material like Vampire Kingdoms.

Savage Worlds is a slick little system, though I admit I've only played it once.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Savage Worlds is a slick little system, though I admit I've only played it once.

It has become my go to system for about everything. If I want to recreate a specific feel sometimes I go with a more focused game like Burning Wheel or Spirit of the Century, but for a fall back for almost every genre, Savage Worlds gets the nod.

I have never come across Savage Worlds, which kind of baffles me because I like to think I'm experienced. What makes it so great? I'm these days a big believer in mechanics tailored for the game, but a good system is always interesting.

Oh how I love Savage Worlds, let me count the ways.

1) The game bills itself as Fast, Furious, and Fun...and actually lives up to it. The game plays quick, requires little to no GM prep and lends itself to high action games that I tend to enjoy. While not rules lite by any stretch, the core rulebook is a 6x9 book that weighs in at about 160 pages. DnD, Gurps, or HERO this isn't.

2) Ease of learning. This ties in a bit to the previous note. There are a couple of concepts a group needs to grok before Savage Worlds really clicks, but once you do the game plays very well. In our local game community, if the game isn't DnD, no one but me is going to buy it or read it. Therefore if I want to play something other than DnD, I tend towards games that are easy to explain and teach. SW fits the bill very nicely as opposed to something like Burning Wheel or Shadowrun.

3) Cost. The core book, which is really all you need to play, costs $10. Which means some players I know might actually buy it. Or if nothing else it is cheap enough that I actually have a couple of copies of it.

4) It lets the players be awesome. With bennies (action points/fate points), exploding dice and Wild Die mechanic for PCs and important NPCs, SW allows players to, as Luke Myers of Fear the Boot and the Podgecast says, "be awesome".

5) It does just about everything. Almost any genre or setting I want, I can do in SW. It is geared for a pulp action type game, and that is mostly what I want to run/play so I'm fine with that. You can adapt it to other styles with varying degrees of difficulty, but for anything too far from pulp action I can just go to a dedicated game system. But it falls squarely in my usual comfort zone for RPGs, so I love it.

Thanks! I still read "generic == not worth my time", but I think I'll take a look anyways. There's always the nagging feel of wanting to do a project without a published book, and then you need a system. In the past I've defaulted to White Wolf's old Storyteller, Big Eyes Small Mouth or Dream Pod 9's second edition Silhouette, but those are all kind of... old and broken in one or more ways.

Speaking of pulp, I really want to get a chance to run or play Spirit Of The Century. The book was a great read and I was itching to run a game right after finishing it. Anybody got experience with it, did it work well?

Looking up on Savage Worlds: my problem with a lot of systems these days is the amount of reading and shopping you have to do at character creation. Thus a dislike for all benefit/flaw systems in character creation - I feel like I'm gimping a character unless I'm familiar with and can recall most of the benefits/flaws, which requires that I'm very recently read-up on the system. Same goes for extensive skill lists, although Savage Worlds seems to have a moderate approach there. And I'm jumping systems all the time. What if I'm giving the character a feature I think is purely flavor, but it's actually a feature with a points cost in the bengefit/flaw system? Ancient headaches about "what counts as a friend I need to buy" in Storyteller emerge...

A useful house rule has been that you can just leave those points unused and spend them once you know what you want, during play.

I really like games where either that just isn't involved or it's handled during play. Like in 3:16, flashbacks are used to establish additional detail about a character, while saving their butts during play. 3:16 and The Mountain Witch are both great examples - you pick a name and a single detail and you're ready to go. This doesn't sacrifice any depth, it's just moved to a point when it's relevant and helps building the drama.

This sounds kind of weird considering that I'm currently running and loving Dark Heresy. Maybe that's an exception because my group really digs the 40K world and the various powers reflect the world very well.

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Edit: I've been trying to post this for the past hour, the site just doesn't seem to stay up... anybody else having problems? I think this has been happening more lately.

jlaakso wrote:

Speaking of pulp, I really want to get a chance to run or play Spirit Of The Century. The book was a great read and I was itching to run a game right after finishing it. Anybody got experience with it, did it work well?

I've played a little. Character generation is great fun for the backstory, although the sheer number of options is a problem. In play it is fun and fairly smooth to run.

Yeah, I'm coming from playing old school FASA RPGs and HERO System so the edges/hindrances list from Savage Worlds is tiny compared to what I'm used to, and the titles tend to be descriptive enough that I can glance at the listing in the book and get a rough idea of what they do.

Was listening to The D6 Generation podcast's most recent episode last night, and they had an interview with the head of the 40k RPG department at Fantasy Flight. When talking about design influences for the Deathwatch RPG he name dropped both Mouse Guard and 3:16 Amongst the Stars. That got me pretty excited.

jlaakso wrote:

What if I'm giving the character a feature I think is purely flavor, but it's actually a feature with a points cost in the bengefit/flaw system?

There's no reason that should needs to be accounted for in the system. Just flavor? It's something that comes out in roleplay and has no effect on dice.

In a traditional RPG, which Savage Worlds still is, for sure. You can have plenty of character bits that don't influence the dice one way or the other. Only take the flaw/hindrance whatever if it matters enough to affect the game. This isn't FATE or PDQ or something where everything about your character influences game mechanics.

After playing RPGs, both pencil and paper and computer, for a long time, I'm kind of over strongly classed based systems. Aside from forcing characters into predefined niches, they make it really hard to have a game with less than five people due to needing the set of roles filled. I tried GURPS because of a general love for the attitude going on at SJG and the wonderful genre/setting books for the line. I loved how easy it was to wing encounters with the generic mechanics, but the detail level of GURPS proved too much for my group (and me). Character creation can be insanely complex. I became interested in Savage Worlds as a simpler, but still generic, alternative. The basic Savage Worlds book has the entire character creation summarized in four pages, and the mechanics look just as easy to wing as GURPS. Unfortunately, my group hasn't been able to get together consistently enough to do more than card/board gaming, so I haven't been able to try things in play.

thejustinbot wrote:

Was listening to The D6 Generation podcast's most recent episode last night, and they had an interview with the head of the 40k RPG department at Fantasy Flight. When talking about design influences for the Deathwatch RPG he name dropped both Mouse Guard and 3:16 Amongst the Stars. That got me pretty excited.

Oh, that sounds exciting! I felt that Rogue Trader was kind of a confused product, compared to the very tight Dark Heresy. It was fine, but the roles of Rogue Traders probably should have been more narrowly determined to make the game support them better. I'm hoping that Deathwatch will be a more cohesive book. Still haven't read those introductory adventures, though.

Regarding the edges/flaws - I've grown up with those systems and know many of them throughout, so it's not a familiarity issue. I guess my main problem is with stuff that you should know you need to build an effective wizard/warrior/whatever, but can't possibly tell until you know the system well (Exalted, D&D come to mind) and stuff that you might suppose is not mechanics related (friends, family, contacts), but actually is, and again you may not be able to tell until you've studied the game quite a bit. Maybe this aversion is just a phase, I know it's not a problem for most people.

I just got done reading Remember Tomorrow. It's a really interesting game, one I hope to run soon. It's literary, GM-less cyberpunk for all of us who were left wondering exactly what were the Gibson influences on the 1990s cyberpunk RPG offerings (much as I enjoyed them as a teenager). Light on adventuring and shopping lists, heavy on character arcs and cause and effect.

First proper session of Star Wars Saga Edition last night - in which our intrepid "protocol droid" HK-88 discovers there may be more to his programming than translation and etiquette.

Liking the streamlined d20 model and I always prefer resolving combat with miniatures.

I am disappointed to discover WotC have taken down all the old SWSE content and it is now completely unavailable. Annoying.

Maq wrote:

First proper session of Star Wars Saga Edition last night - in which our intrepid "protocol droid" HK-88 discovers there may be more to his programming than translation and etiquette.

Liking the streamlined d20 model and I always prefer resolving combat with miniatures.

I am disappointed to discover WotC have taken down all the old SWSE content and it is now completely unavailable. Annoying.

Dig through the official forums. I am pretty sure that someone has a backup somewhere.

I will also dig around with my contacts inside WotC to see if they have them archived somewhere online that the public can access.

I love Rifts, have a lot of books, used to gm back when I was in college, now my rpg group only one other person likes Rifts, so no playing Rifts:( We have an alternating Pathfinder and Aberrant(d20 superheroes). I preordered Dresden Files both books beginning of June, I should be getting those today.

I've played a loved (at the time) Rifts but don't think I could go back to that kind of Class crazy system. There weren't really a lot of character optimization choices. Just pick your race and class and go. Also, unless you were a spell caster, leveling was REALLY anti-climatic.

I've done the old school deadlands (before it got converted to Savage World rules) and I enjoyed it but damn, did battles take forever to resolve. Also, fast characters pretty much owned everything. Now I'm curious about Savage Worlds because I've wanted to run a SteamPunk style campaign for a while that is Skill/Talent Tree based instead of class based and was considering jury-rigging up my own system (A combo of World of Darkness and L5R) but if Savage worlds would be better, that would be awesome.

Speaking of which, as a player, probably my favorite system to play (or at least the system in which my favorite campaign/character occured) was Legend of the 5 Rings (L5R). Samurai and Shugenja, oni and goblins, lots of roleplay as well as deadly roll-play and all with d10s!

I've been trying to pull the trigger on the Iron Kingdoms d20 but I'm kinda sick of D20. I love the fluff though.

I'm playing in a weekly online game of the World Tree rpg. Class-less, character creation is pretty open ended, its not level based. It has its own background and races, if you ever wanted to try something where not only can you play non-humans, you can't play a human, this might be it. Combat is a bit complicated, tends to eat up a lot of time in a session, but over all its pretty good.

jlaakso wrote:

I just got done reading Remember Tomorrow. It's a really interesting game, one I hope to run soon. It's literary, GM-less cyberpunk for all of us who were left wondering exactly what were the Gibson influences on the 1990s cyberpunk RPG offerings (much as I enjoyed them as a teenager). Light on adventuring and shopping lists, heavy on character arcs and cause and effect.

Thanks for this, I had read about it but didn't think it would be much different from the other clones. And I do like me some Cyberpunk. Will check it out.