Tabletop RPG Catch All

Maq wrote:
Poppinfresh wrote:

Out of curiosity, has anyone else played Paranoia? I'll admit that the games can be uneven, where some sessions are great and some just don't gel, but when things get rolling it can be a lot of fun. We just played again last spring, and while it wasn't a great session, it was still fairly entertaining.

I ran a short adventure as a mid-campaign break a while ago for our regular group. It's really great fun especially with the right group. Of course they didn't make it past the briefing but many laughs were had.
Not a great system for a protracted campaign but fantastic for a 2-session breather.

The best Paranoia game I ever played was a ready made module named "The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues". I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's great just to read through!

oilypenguin wrote:
MikeSands wrote:

The Mouse Guard rpg is great!

Can you guys humor me and describe the experience, please? I'm intrigued by the game and have heard nothing but good things.

Sure.

It captures a few things right out of the comics:
1. The mice need to work together to deal with the big, nasty world.
2. There's a focus on social webs - who their families are, who taught them, and so on, which gives you an angle on the comics' focus on politics and conspiracy.

The rules tie really well into the things that the mouse guard do in the comics, and you have a set of skills that capture these normal tasks.

Resolution runs as either a fairly straight roll, or using a detailed conflict system that can cover important things (fights, journeys, debates etc) with more tactical actions and focus.

One thing I particularly like is that if you miss a roll, your mouse doesn't fail at what you were trying to do. The GM has the choice of either giving you a condition (i.e. that doing it made you tired, or you got hurt, or you got angry) or - and this is the cool one - add a twist to the story. So, you do your thin fine, but another complication arises.

This ties into the GM advice, which is really good and provides you really solid guidance on building missions each session. There's loads of ideas, and a very good structure for setting up what they have to do and what obstacles they'll face on the way. The ability to add story twists when a roll is missed means that the missions seem to develop quite organically. GMing the game is really easy and fun, mainly because of this.

Another neat bit is the concept of the GM turn and player turn - each session the GM sets out a mission, and they go do it, but when that mission is dealt with, the players get to set some scenes to do their own thing (or use the time to recover from the mission).

Also, the book is lovely and fully colour illustrated by David Petersen. He also fleshed out a lot of extra details about the world for the game.

I really love the game, but there's one con - the rules are pretty complex. Then again, I've been playing generally lighter rules systems for a few years, so my opinion my be biased by that. I'm pretty sure it's way less complex than D&D

PaxAddict wrote:

oh, yeah. I'm definitely looking forward to that. I also need to read through Runepunk. Without a nook, though, that'll prove to be difficult. Or at least will hurt my eyes.

Also, don't expect the nook review too soon, as it will be at least a month or two before I can afford it.

In the absence of an e-reader I've found holding a laptop like a book w/ the screen on the left, rotating the PDF clockwise 90 degrees, and making it full screen provides a pretty good reading experience. I use the mouse buttons (which are right where my right hand is) for turning pages forward and back.

oilypenguin wrote:
MikeSands wrote:

The Mouse Guard rpg is great!

Can you guys humor me and describe the experience, please? I'm intrigued by the game and have heard nothing but good things.

The Chatty DM has, over on Critical Hits been starting up a Mouseguard campaign and has been blogging about it.

Part 1 - Character Generation
Part 2 - The lost patrol
Part 3 - The unarmed hero
Part 4 - The players turn

GM turn / Player turn is interesting, but be sure to explain it to your players before you start so they really understand what it means.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

GM turn / Player turn is interesting, but be sure to explain it to your players before you start so they really understand what it means.

Yeah, I have to say that I really don't understand the way that it works. (note, I am just going off of the descriptions given by ChattyDM, I don't have the books.)

Hmm. Interesting idea, with the laptop. I could see it working with smaller laptops, but mine's just too bulky to pull off. I desperately need a nook.

mudbunny wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

GM turn / Player turn is interesting, but be sure to explain it to your players before you start so they really understand what it means.

Yeah, I have to say that I really don't understand the way that it works. (note, I am just going off of the descriptions given by ChattyDM, I don't have the books.)

There's a few things going on with it, probably why it seems a bit odd.

The GM turn is your traditional mission, where the GM tells you what to do and you go do it. Everything here is pretty much just normal mission-based gaming. During the GM turn players may choose to activate the negative side of your traits to earn extra checks which are able to be used in the player turn.

In the player turn, the players guide what happens. Everyone takes a turn, so if your mouse wants to track down a mysterious figure you saw earlier, you can do that. Or you could deal with any conditions that the mission left you (or another mouse) with. Plus, if you earned extra checks in the GM turn, that gives you more actions now.

It's really just a formalised version of the GM saying "Ok, the mission is over, you go back to town and rest up". But the structure makes it a little more interesting, in my opinion. The need for earned checks to divvy up your (significant) actions also means that there's sometimes a bit of a trade off about what you do - do I get myself healed up, or go find my friend the blacksmith to buy a new sword, for example.

Part of that structure though is specific things that mark when each side's turn has ended.

Posthuman Studios announces 3 new Electronic Eclipse Phase releases on 28th July

NPC File 1: Prime
An electronic exclusive, NPC File 1: Prime presents over thirty original NPCs and some additional variants with a description and full stats; ready for use as opposition or player characters. Two files are included: One with all the NPCs in a typical layout format, and a second with half-page character sheets for each NPC. NPC File 1: Prime will be $5 and is Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) licensed.

Sunward: The Inner System
Eight days before its debut at Gen Con (yes, there will be a Sunward ... well, many Sunwards ... at Gen Con!), you'll be able to get your hands on the electronic version of Sunward! Sunward details the inner part of the solar system:
* Can you take the heat? Find out on Mercury, the Vulcanoids, or dive into the sun's corona with the Solarians
* A new star is rising on Venus, join in the intrigue as the Morningstar Constellation maneuvers for influence.
* Return to the cradle of transhumanity and explore the blasted, but not quite abandoned, ruins of Earth.
* Keepers of many of our cultural traditions, the Lunar-Lagrange Alliance stands watch over our shattered homeworld.
* A red storm is rising on Mars as the traditional masters of the red planet face an upswell of Barsoomian patriotism.
* The silent masters of the inner system, the Planetary Consortium, reach out to touch all with a velvet glove.
* Plus new Morphs, gear, and sample characters.
Sunward will be a 192 page PDF (with layers, a hyperlinked Table of Contents, a hyperlinked index, and internal hyperlinks) and will sell for $10. Sunward is Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) licensed.

Sunward Hack Pack
The Sunward Hack Pack includes the Sunward PDF and the following:

* Sunward Cover art and chapter-opening artwork as 150DPI images.
* Print-friendlier version of the Inner System Map, and Adobe Illustrator files for the original and modified map.

All you need to make your own contribution to the Inner System—Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) licensed!

I will definitely be picking up Sunward for $10 and sharing it via Dropbox. Same as I've been doing with the Eclipse Phase core book here

Eclipse Phase seems like a really interesting game. Esp for someone like me who's into hard sci-fi. I read the intro fiction bit and was hooked instantly. The fact that it's licensed under the Creative Commons license is cool as hell too.

I'm really into what Eclipse Phase is all about, but it seems like a bit of an effort to get into. I guess I'm too used to these newfangled games with their sub-50 page counts. It took me forever (well, eight months) to read Rogue Trader, and I was very enthusiastic about that.

Oops. I did indeed pick up Eclipse Phase's Sunward on Weds, but haven't really had the time to read it yet.

Just uploaded it to my Dropbox. Link is here

So I finally managed to get my hands on the Dresden Files RPG. The production qualities of the book are amazing, as is the writing of the books. The side-conversations between Harry, William and Bob are amazing and really, really add a lot of flavour to the books.

Unfortunately, the whole FATE system is quite foreign to me, coming from D&D.

Maq wrote:

I'm looking for suggestions for something to GM for my group. We're rotating GMing duties and I've offered to take next. Here's the brief:

I'm a pretty inexperienced GM.
Something with a Cyberpunk vibe has been requested (but is not required).
The group generally goes for an even mix of RP and combat.
We like some structure to the rule systems. Stuff like Wushu and Don't Rest Your Head isn't a firm favourite.

We started out on Shadowrun but I'm not a massive fan of the rules and I know I couldn't match our previous Shadowrun GM's chops so that may be out. I'm thinking of giving Feng Shui a go as I've got a good idea for a campaign hook.

Any ideas?

I have heard nothing but good things about Mouse Guard

I'm looking for suggestions for something to GM for my group. We're rotating GMing duties and I've offered to take next. Here's the brief:

I'm a pretty inexperienced GM.
Something with a Cyberpunk vibe has been requested (but is not required).
The group generally goes for an even mix of RP and combat.
We like some structure to the rule systems. Stuff like Wushu and Don't Rest Your Head isn't a firm favourite.
Conversely, we're not after a rule-heavy behemoth. Something that gives the players some structure but still manages to keep action snappy would be good.

We started out on Shadowrun but I'm not a massive fan of the rules and I know I couldn't match our previous Shadowrun GM's chops so that may be out. I'm thinking of giving Feng Shui a go as I've got a good idea for a campaign hook.

Any ideas?

eta: Looking back over the thread, Savage Worlds appears popular, although I've never come across it before.

Maq wrote:

I'm looking for suggestions for something to GM for my group. We're rotating GMing duties and I've offered to take next. Here's the brief:

I'm a pretty inexperienced GM.
Something with a Cyberpunk vibe has been requested (but is not required).
The group generally goes for an even mix of RP and combat.

I picked up the PDF for Remember Tomorrow a while back and it might be what you're looking for.

Trachalio wrote:

I picked up the PDF for Remember Tomorrow a while back and it might be what you're looking for.

TBH that looks like the kind of Wushu style unstructured storytelling thing I tend to avoid.

Maq wrote:
Trachalio wrote:

I picked up the PDF for Remember Tomorrow a while back and it might be what you're looking for.

TBH that looks like the kind of Wushu style unstructured storytelling thing I tend to avoid.

Noted

What about Paranoia then? I've always thought it sounded fun.

I've run Paranoia for them before. It doesn't really lend itself to a long campaign arc unless you play it "Straight" mode. Best played over no more than 3 sessions. Although a creepy straight mode Paranoia campaign is definitely an idea.

At the moment I'm thinking of doing Feng Shui and mucking with the future setting a little.

A few RPG blogs I read have referenced Feng Shui a few times. What's it like to play?

Wouldn't have the foggiest. I figure I'll give it a go and let you know =)

Sounds good to me

btw, there's a big ass list of cyberpunk-ish RPGs over on Geek Do:

http://rpggeek.com/rpggenre/164/scie...

Sorting it by core rules gave me 6 pages of results

I played some Feng Shui way back when it was new. Fun, but kind of incoherent. I suspect that a determined GM could force it all to make sense, but the vanilla setup is pretty crazy. What I remember of the future setting, it was the one that hung together least.

Shock: is a good SF game and works well for cyberpunk stuff, it has zero-prep needed as you make up the details for the story as you go. It defaults to one session per story, but you can keep the notes and return to the same world and characters if you want.

I don't think Remember Tomorrow is much like Wushu, really. That's not how I read the reviews of it I've seen, anyway. Wushu is more a "generic system that doesn't do much" whereas Remember Tomorrow seems more like it structures certain elements and leaves the rest to the group. But that's all based on what I've read about it rather so may be totally wrong.

Feng Shui is all kinds of kick-ass! The world is kind of wonky, but you're free to ignore parts of it. You gotta be into action movies and especially Hong Kong action movies for it to work properly tough.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of HK action movies and know the genre pretty well. If I went with Feng Shui I was planning to refactor the future setting into something more to my liking. I might grab Remember Tomorrow to help seed that setting as I quite like the style it's the GMless thing I'm not excited about. Shadowrun could also crossover quite nicely as a future setting - The Gibsonesque Ghosts in the Matrix thing plays well with demons, spirits, and magic.

I wouldn't worry too much about GM-less-ness in particular. It works well with a no-prep setup. Of course, some people can freeze up a bit when they're asked to set a scene or whatever... so maybe your caution is warranted if your group might react that way.

Oh yeah, you should also check out GHOST/ECHO, a free 2 page mini game. Despite the shortness, I found that it made for a rocking one shot (and had the legs for a longer run). It's the freaky, Matrix end of cyberpunk, but that might suit you.

Maq wrote:

I might grab Remember Tomorrow to help seed that setting as I quite like the style it's the GMless thing I'm not excited about. Shadowrun could also crossover quite nicely as a future setting - The Gibsonesque Ghosts in the Matrix thing plays well with demons, spirits, and magic.

That could be interesting: using one RPG to kickstart the setting for a different RPG

That reminds me of a post on John Harpers blog. Someone ran a game of Agon, but instead of the GM controlling the pantheon of gods, they had a group of people playing In a Wicked Age and their in-game choices affected the Agon players

Tonight we play our first game of 3:16.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Tonight we play our first game of 3:16.

Really interested to hear about anything you have to say about that. I'm thinking of starting one soon.