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utilitycaster · 7 months

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I've been seeing complaints that Spenser was 'trying too hard to kill the cast' this episode, which I have to say I wildly disagree with, but I will admit to be a little confused why the players sometimes took one or even two marks after rolling a six. Or I guess I'm not confused so much as I wonder if the mechanics for injury, success, failure, etc could be too vague atm? Candela doesn't really have anything like CR rating or DC which it doesn't NEED, but I guess could create some grey area?

Good question! Here's the secret: all TTRPGs I'd consider worth my time have a huge swathe of gray area, D&D very much included (indeed, I find a lot of the more baseless criticisms of D&D, especially from Game Based Heavily On D&D But Different fans (derogatory) to come from people mad at that gray area) and as long as the players and GM have agreed on it, it's fine. With that said I admit that paying attention to individual rolls is not what I am inclined, personally, to do, but if this is about Sean rolling a six and taking two body...that is because he was going to take four body off the bat and reduced it with a good roll that the GM permitted him. (It also might be about Marion taking in the rift, which was similarly stated beforehand to cost him a Bleed scar no matter what he rolled, the roll reflecting how successful he was.) Now, we can talk about the implications of taking four body seemingly out of nowhere, but do recall that is coming off an earlier 1 roll in his interaction with Duncan.

CR ratings generally are a poor understanding of difficulty, and the thing about DCs is you can set them arbitrarily high (or for that matter, secretly low). Like...to use D&D, you cannot make a persuasion check for someone who dislikes you to give you all their belongings and run away forever. The DM is going to set the persuasion check at 50 and it is going to be unreachable by any means. Even a nat 20 will give you a result of "they think you're joking and laugh it off instead of run after you with a sword." If you jump off a sufficiently high cliff in D&D and roll a nat 20 to land, you still might take enough damage to die during your three-point landing. And so on.

So: while we don't have all the rules of Candela Obscura, it is valid from my knowledge of the Forged in the Dark engine, which Illuminated Worlds was heavily influenced by, for Spenser to say "this action is unbelievably dangerous and there is no possible way you are escaping unscathed, and a full success means that you live to tell the tale with only a gunshot wound or bleed damage rather than outright death." That's the other thing: completely valid for the GM to come in planning to kill the players. That's the premise of EXU Calamity. I would assume the table discussed that this was going to be a much darker and more dangerous game than Chapter 1 and everyone shares those expectations, and is prepared to possibly lose these characters. Which is, frankly, another thing that comes up specifically in actual play: what the table knows and expects and is prepared to accept is often something much harsher than the audience is prepared to accept. I mentioned being irritated at the presumptive nature of a lot of safety tool discussion (and am feeling very validated by Spenser's tweet about how he handled the letters to Sean) but like...when the CR or D20 or Candela tables prepare for their games, they have talked about expectations of tone and whether the GM will be trying to gently usher new players to victory, flat out gunning for a potential TPK, or somewhere in between.

This was a long, pre-full dose of caffeine way to say that one of the biggest rules of GM-ing is that the GM sets the tone of which the danger and difficulty of the world is part, and also that, based on everything about how this chapter has been presented, if someone accuses Spenser of being very hard on the party my answer is "...yeah, no shit, did you fail to realize that from the tone and text of literally every trailer and interview?"

#answered #Anonymous #candela obscura #i don't necessarily think the people making this complaint are No Combat D&D People. but also. they give off that air.#that But TTRPGs Are Supposed To Be About How Cool My PC Is and it's like. you can do that at your table #some of us want to experience catharsis through fiction though hope this helps

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pawseds · 2 months

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I convinced our Delta Green game master to have a play-by-post (basically text roleplay) section in our game's server and uhhhhh maybe I've been having too much fun with it. Writing is faster than drawing comics, what can I say?

(Long ramble about writing stories below hehe oops)

While we're here! A bit about writing: I like writing! I've written for loger than I've drawn for (because school). I think I'm better at writing than drawing for that reason (I'm more confident at least). I've written short stories. I've written short stories about TTRPG things. I've also written a ~100k word novel by hand for 2 years. While writing it, I had 'writing class' (technically AS/A level Ennglish Language classes). It was the only class I had confidence in and high expectations for.

With those 2 combined, I burnt out pretty quick LOL. Specifically, I had a big perfectionism issue because of the high expectations I had from my teacher and especially myself -- it was the one thing I knew excelled at in school, so I better do it well! After I was done with the novel and A levels, I was supposed to edit the novel. It's been years and I haven't done it yet, and I wouldn't write non-assignment stories (except 2) until now. Writing became more nerverwracking than it was fun, so why would I?

To get back to the PBP thing: I've been in a campaign that was fully PBP. With my mindset being the way it is, hey! This is just one big writing exercise, so I ran along with that and had fun with it. I saw how some players would make their own PBP and essentially monologue/have a scene only with their PC. That was cool to see.

And now, my current Delta Green campaign (tagged 'Helvetia'). Hrothgar (guy in drawing) and his kids were ported over from a previous D&D campaign (the fully PBP one!), so the crew had a very well defined background already. Of course I get tons of drawing ideas for them, except I don't have the time to draw them all (compsci hard). But since the server has a PBP section, I had like 2 weeks to kill between session 0 and 1, and I was bursting with ideas... I made a lot of solo PBPs that were essentially short stories.

It didn't quite hit me until some time ago, but the PBPs actually made me enjoy writing again -- enjoy it a lot more, in fact! I think the format of Discord threads and messages removed most perfectionism tendencies I had. I just had to fire the story away, message by message. It didn't have to be amazing, and it was fun! (Also I really don't know how to shut up with them LOL)

I'll definitely be cleaning these PBPs up and posting them here as stories. Some of them are just silly, fun, slice-of-life character sketches. (These were the stories I wrote after my novel... and yes, they were about my other set of Delta Green characters LMAO) (and I've posted them here under pawsedswrite btw!) But some I see as legitamite short stories that I would edit more heavily and present as a short story. They were the kinds I could see myself writing on a document rather than on Discord.

Well, I lied. 'I would edit' is false. I have already edited one, because I spent like 5-6h writing this one PBP (oops) instead of writing the draft for my short story class/elective (oops 2). I joked to my two friends saying that I could just submit it as my assignment. Apparently, they both really liked it and said the dialogued slapped. So I did!

I procrastinated like hell on it though, because I was very nervous to go back into the PBP with an axe to edit it. Being in a writing class where nearly everyone else has been formally studying writing for some years kinda puts some pressure on ya!

Like the last assignment (which I'll post here after editing), I had a lot of worries. But the feedback and grade I got from my last assignment, the peer review I got from the current one, and also the support from those two friends (shoutout @katastrofish <3) made me feel more confident in myself. And also the fact that I had a lot of fun editing the PBP!

Uhhh this ramble was way longer than expected LMFAO if you've made it this far, damn, thanks for reading! If you also write or have similar experiences, feel free to share em. And have a good day!

(bonus POV editing)

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socialprawn · 6 months

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OUGH. That design for the tremere is kind of mid but tbh it just. Looks like a design from a modern game. I think part of what makes the original vtmb the way it is is because it is so much a product of its time. It was based on lore and books from revised edition vtm (1998) so it was already a bit lagging in terms of aesthetic and ideologies, and it has that intense 90s/2000s feeling to it. I also read an interview with the composer Rik Schaffer and he said that he couldn’t have made that soundtrack at any other point in his life. I’m sure whatever he’s doing for the sequel will be different but amazing, but again, it’s been 20 years, you know? It’s all different.

I just wanted to weigh in and say that it’s unrealistic for people to think a game from the 2020s is ever going to feel the same, I guess. These people who are like ugh they should just SCRAP IT are wild to me. That’s so much work and care and time put into a project that would go to waste! We don’t know what it will be like in the end. It’s set in a different place and time, and I don’t know if they’re keeping it in revised’s lore and setting overall or if this is fifth edition vtm, but either way- some people who liked vtmb are going to hate it. And that’s okay tbh! as someone who loves both vtm as a ttrpg and vtmb, I’m just hopeful that it’ll be fun.

In my head I'm mostly thinking... VTMB1 exists so I can just enjoy it over and over again. If something exists that will make other ppls happy then who am I to say anything :V

However, as a very loyal VTMB fan, I feel like I can criticize the long awaited sequel by the fact that is not living up to its counterpart. I feel like the aesthetics & roleplay elements of VTMB can be relevant to this day and the game itself is a cult classic, so VTMB2 feels like it's trying to convert into mainstream, which feels disappointing to ME. But again, I don't know the vibes of VTM outside of VTMB to really know how WoD culture is like, and I don't know much about v5, which is why I decided to step down. I got my own vamp story anyways, I'm playing barbie just fine 😂

Also I read that Rik is not doing the soundtrack anymore, I hope that's not true dawg :V I have full faith in him. Admittedly the soundtrack of the announcement was too 'imagine dragons', which surprises me. From my perspective, VTMB felt like an exploration of the underground, which still exists today, which is why everything has taken me off-guard. I suppose if I were director I would have taken VTMB elder PC on a different approach 🤓

Dese my 2 cents. I don't want VTMB2 to be cancelled there's so much hard work put in the game that it's just a shame to think like that. Some people feel they didn't get what they wanted, that's finee. Others enjoy it, super cool. If the game is good I'll be more than happy about it for real 🌞

#if you follow my art you know where my aesthetics lie 😂 i could go on but why bother in the enddd #besides we cant pretend that it would be correct if the new game followed vtmb1 to a tea #we only forgive its shittiness on some societal aspects because its an old ass game but yeah :V #we on da same page anon 👼

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alch13 · 10 months

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Decided to start documenting TTRPG stuff

I didn't really have a reason for this Tumblr, but i decided to just start typing some things about my campaigns. Planning, inspiration and the process i use. I don't know if it will be useful or interesting but for now i'll stick with it.

For today: I decided to finish a dungeon I started work on yesterday for my main Pathfinder campaign i am running: The Heroes of Might and Magic (7 i think now, it changes each time a new player or character joins the party). First i needed a theme, and i already had one picked out. The party shall be assaulting an undead warcamp, manned by Markonian (a country) and undead soldiers. So my basic enemy selection was done.

After this i ofcourse needed a map. While i do often make my own maps, using either Dungeon Scrawl for less effort maps (good program btw, it's free on any browser) or using Dungeon Painter Studio on steam. DPS is as great program and makes super cool looking maps, but i really didn't feel like making a map this time so i decided on an even better option: plagiarism. I simply used a map of the internet. While i do not suggest this for public games where money is made by playing it, such as Dimension 20 or Arcane Arcade, for your random fun hangout session with some friends most people would not have a problem using a dungeon from the internet. Just make sure to start that you, infact, did not make this amazing looking map.

Map, check. Theme , check. Now for enemies. As i play Pathfinder 2e i use https://maxiride.github.io/pf2e-encounters/#/ the website linked here for my creature selection. It shows basically all Pathfinder enemies and their challange rating and lastly also links to their monster sheets. It's really easy to search for specific types of enemies, so i simply looked at the selection of undead monsters and got to work. First of all, the Banshee immediatly stuck out to me. It's a very recognizable monster, so a fight would be very interesting. Besides that, it had a very good Challange rating of 17, meaning a group of 5 level 12 characters would still have trouble with it (Very good). Besides that, i threw in a few Leng Ghouls, a Lich, a Demi-lich and a few miscelanious undead and i had my selection of baddies.

Some tips i suppose. Make sure to have an interesting combat idea in mind. If you have a plain room with nothing of interest, the party and their enemies will not be able to actually use the environment at all. This results in stale combat most the time. Therefor, spice it up! Add a few tables to flip or pillars to hide behind. Maybe have the enemies be reinforced halfway throughout the fight or call for backup. Just something to have the party re-evaluate their situation. If they're doing that, then it's already a way better combat then if you didn't add this fluff.

Now ofcourse: treasure. Level 12 characters can have very powerful stuff. So if they defeat this boss they require equally powerful rewards. Therefore, a PC will strengthen their bond with their god of choice (Generis) and gain more powers. Secondly, a lot of gold. And thirdly, a whole lot of magic items. The last two there are a few charts you can look at for what level magic items and how much gold to grant them. OR you can wing it, like I do :)

Now that'll be all for now, I really must get back to actually designing this dungeon. Have a good one.

#ttrpg #tabletop #homebrew #ttrpg community

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lunchboxart · 3 years

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how easy/fun is PTU to run or play just using the rules as written because i skipped a bunch of steps and i'm actively ignoring at least half the rules to make my pokemon mystery dungeon campaign work (with roll20 doing the-majority-to-all of the math) and I feel the core rules are a lot to think about, to say the least. Controlling multiple pokemon as well as a trainer with like 30 edges and feats, and damage in combat being based on flat addition/subtraction. I guess what i'm asking is, do you think it's a fun and worthwhile game for players who usually play (and feel comfortable with) dnd 5e?

I honestly don't blame you for skipping a bunch of the rules. I think Pokemon Tabletop Adventures 3 is supposed to be a little more suited to playing a mystery dungeons type game but I have never looked into that module. PTU should be workable for it though probably? Anyway, though to start answering your question, with how popular dnd 5e is, people tend to forget that it is a pretty rules heavy and fairly difficult game to get into especially if you're trying to figure it out on your own. Unlike dnd though PTU is nearly impossible to do the maths by yourself you like absolutely have to have something on roll20 set up to make the game tolerable. As cool of a concept a pokemon TTRPG is there is a reason why the official pokemon tabletop game is a card game because you're right! It is fairly difficult to keep track of with the fact that you do essentially have 7+ characters to keep track of as a player, you are absolutely expected to multiclass as a trainer at least 2 or 3 times and pokemon have a lot more stuff going on with them than the official video games do with how they also get tabletop abilities to utilize (although a lot of stuff they get are based on the video games?). As a GM, you multiply 7+ with how many PCs there are to keep track of. For NPCs you usually don't have to ever fully stat out them as a PC would be and with that you can get away with making some stuff up as with any TTRPG.

Long story short, as much fun as I'm having playing with my friends (and I can't wait to draw out more in depth things to share here) I actually wouldn't exactly reccommend playing PTU? The creators of the game sort of don't like their own game anymore either, which is why they are overhauling it to create a new game that they've been developing for quite some time called Pokemon Odyssey (PMO). I can't say anything about PMO or PTA, but as for PTU if you're willing to put in the work for it you can do things like be a trainer that rides a charizard into battle weilding an Aegislash, as well as give a farfetch'd a gun soooo you gotta weigh the pros and cons on that haha.

There is a discord for all of these games too and I think if you don't have discord there are some forums on their website.

#great! question! haha #also if anybody playing ptu info dump to me anytime lol #i basically always wanna hear about peoples pokemon ocs though ptu or not #the lark chirps #ptu #pokemon tabletop united #pokemon tabletop

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c-is-for-circinate · 4 years

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OH okay I know why I’ve been annoyed and upset with some of the Cinderbrush Discourse (aside from the absurd not-queer-enough bullshit, because fuck that, but whatever).

The Cinderbrush one-shot was a bunch of D&D players attacking a Powered by the Apocalypse game like it was a D&D game with different dice. And I really liked it, more than I’ve liked any PbtA game I’ve ever watched/listened to before, because I fundamentally do not enjoy PbtA as a system, at least as a spectator.

One of the biggest, most cornerstone differences between D&D (and several other old-school ttrpg-style games--World of Darkness comes to mind) and the Powered by the Apocalypse system is how much knowledge you have going into the game. In D&D you may make things up and figure things out as you go, and that is part of the fun, but there’s this idea that there are fundamental truths about this universe and the DM is at least going to pretend to know what they are; that you know the fundamental truths of your character, or at least who they are right now and have been in the past; and these hard truths are going to be revealed and bang up against each other in hopefully-interesting ways as you go. The softer, more collaborative style of PbtA (in my experience) is very much the opposite: the players and GM know a few key things, but they are deliberately trying to leave gaps and let the story fill them in as they go along.

It seems, on the surface, like D&D must be a much more deterministic game, then, and PbtA way more free-form, and that’s cool. Except in my experience, it actually seems to be the opposite.

D&D is full of firm truths: the DM’s word, your character’s stats and abilities, and the rolls of the dice. Actions have target numbers, and you either pass or you fail. There are strict rules for what passing and failing looks like, and luck plays a massive part in determining what happens next. Try to use your Blood Hunter powers when you’re low on health and roll too high? You’re passed out, you’re dead, doesn’t matter what you want or the other players want or the DM wants or anyone. That’s how the rules work and that’s how it goes.

And it sucks sometimes, but it’s also my absolute favorite thing about D&D. Nobody, not even really the DM, can control the story. Nobody can plan the story, not really--doesn’t matter how much cool loot or information you put in the abandoned temple, if the PC’s roll too low to find any of it, miss every single hint for the next leg of your planned journey, and head west to visit their sister, then that’s what happens. Sure a DM can work around and manipulate situations like that, but a good DM listens to the dice. The story in D&D is the narrative you tell afterwards about the semi-random events that happened to you; the story you tell to make sense of the things you saw and went through and did, whether they were the things you hoped to do or not.

Dice rolls in Apocalypse-based systems are so much more malleable. You roll a 10, that’s good--how good is it? Or, even more important, how bad is a 4? How hard are the GM’s hard moves? How much space do the players and the GM have to discuss and decide the impact of every single roll they make? It’s not a system built for pitting your cleverness against the rules of the universe and turning them back around to trick the world and the DM into letting you bring out that blueberry cupcake at the very last second. It’s not a system for being subject to the whims of an uncaring universe, or for coping with that fact.

PbtA is designed to facilitate a group of friends collaboratively building a story together, on purpose. The dice are nudging factors rather than hard rules. You can win on a 7. You can die on a 9. The players (including the GM), not luck or the rules table or the in-game laws of the universe, decide what conditions apply, what effects occur when things to right or wrong. The blank spaces on the maps and in the backstories and the past get filled in as you go along based on what you all want in the present. I like tabletop rpgs because they twist both fictional and real choices, fate, and randomness in ways I don’t find stories doing anywhere else. PbtA leans so much more heavily on the choices than on the randomness.

There’s a lot that’s cool about that! There’s a lot that’s neat about collaborative story-crafting, and I think if I were to approach most PbtA games I’ve encountered as complete works of crafted fiction, turned from actual-play podcasts or video streams into edited purposeful stories, I’d love what they created. I think I’d enjoy playing PbtA games, specifically as a player, with friends I trusted to have fun writing stories with me. But I have a hard time imagining having fun as a GM, and I don’t like listening to them played nearly as much as I enjoy the ups, downs, shock, and dice rolls of D&D.

I really liked the Cinderbrush one-shot, mostly. The places where it most fell short for me were, I think, the places where the gap between a D&D rules-based story and a PbtA choice-based story showed up most--because the PbtA rules (seemed to) let me and the players down instead of forcing them to make the story more interesting. There were no mechanics for pushing any of the characters who’d fallen into their Darkest Selves to really deal with and explore that in full. There were no mechanics for pushing or forcing a lot of things, because the game isn’t supposed to be pushed or forced at all, it’s supposed to be chosen--but stories are better when characters are forced and pushed. And for me, at least, I way preferred watching Matt taking the control that was willingly given to him to impose circumstances and necessities on his players, as opposed to the wishy-washiness of how the PbtA rules are “meant” to play out.

#cinderbrush one-shot #monsterhearts #fuck it that's going in the tag

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mechanicalinertia · 4 years

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Content-Free Erpdert 2020-Oh-One: The Roles We Must Play in the Great Game

Okay. Let’s talk about my Bubblegum Crisis 2069 RPG. This isn’t a postmortem, though it feels like one. Think of it as laying out the prospects for the project’s necromantic revival. Think of me as Frankenstein, looking for a good ol’ bolt of lightning to give his hacked-together corpse-man life.

So:

1. The original reason I stalled out on the RPG was Megatokyo. Basically I liked The Sprawl’s citybookish supplement November Metric, specifically Benjamin Kouppi’s mini-citybooks for Brussels, Lagos, and Miami, so much that I figured the least I could do was highlight different parts of Megatokyo - how GENOM’s vision of the model megacity clashes with the reality of daily life, the street finding its own uses for things, the usual cyberpunk stuff - in a similar manner. Only then I realized I really, really wanted to avoid Orientalist stereotypes, and then I realized that really, really restricted what I could actually do in the various districts - or would a district-based approach really work? Why not just layer down the fundamental concepts, the aesthetics of Megatokyo? Probably because I didn’t know what the specifics of a cyberpunk megacity would be, realistically, and I didn’t want to just imitate CP2020′s Night City book - I wanted to create anchors for the players to tie their campaigns to. Something freeform, yet concrete, and yet I just couldn’t gin up the creative juices to write it in a satisfactory way. Well, alright, I thought, I’ll just move on. I’d written plenty of lore already, right, so there was nothing wrong with moving on.

But I’m not very good at moving on. See, it was at that point that, in light of all of BGC2069′s inspirations, I started to rethink the first half of the game - namely, its mechanics.

2. I made it very clear from the start that what I was doing was a hack of the RTAL rules for CP2020 and the BGC RPG. Kick out all the unnecessary stats from Fuzion - just scrub Fuzion from the record entirely. Use the pared-down gameplay from Hunter-Seeker, but ignore the godawful setting from that same hack - it reeked too much of Neuropolitan, which in turn reeked too much of Snow Crash, and that wasn’t the sense of the lore I was going for. And for the most part, I think the basics succeed in imitating CP2020 gameplay and combat without too many extra moving parts.

Oh, but when I started bolting moving parts on, that was when things got complicated. There’s no doubt I cast my net too goddamn wide, trying to alter the flawed systems of the original 2020 in the style of various fan-supplements from the internet of days long past. One of the few people who looked my abomination over said that he didn’t like the way lore and mechanics were blended together in those sections - too confusing, he said. And yeah, I was trying to twist CP2020′s looser ends and make them my own. But I overdid it. Gun-printing? Cybernetics and humanity loss? Hacking? All these things are Cyberpunk staples, yes, but I a) made them too damn complex (and in the case of the hacking’s vision of the ‘Noosphere’, potentially inaccurate), and b) they’re not Bubblegum Crisis staples.

By this I mean that original BGC eschews cybernetic augmentations (except for the bizarre and hyper-pulpy AD Police Files OVA, whose canonicity is dubious at best), elaborate hacking, and unhardsuited combat in its action scenes, or really a lot of excessive gun-porn, and it does just fine. So if I had to do it all over again - and something tells me I ought to - I would minimize these elements. Streamline the whole project. Focus on BGC’s strengths.

3. Well, what are those strengths? Anime-Superheroic-Cyberpunk is a great genre cocktail, but where do those mental Venn diagrams align? Well, in the Knight Sabers. Normal(ish) people in a cyberpunk future (not professional black-trenchcoat operatives in the least) with melodramatic problems solved by the application of high-flying, high-tech mecha-violence. That’s the bottled lightning that is Bubblegum Crisis, and as much as I hate to admit it, that’s what people want to play in this particular universe. If people want to play a different kind of cyberpunk campaign - one where hardsuited combat against Boomers with a pinch of anime-esque melodrama isn’t the norm - they’re gonna play Shadowrun or CPRed or The Sprawl or The Veil or Interface Zero (ech) or even Eclipse Phase if they’re desperate. So if we take ‘play as the Knight Sabers or a similar team’ as our modus operandi - well, what does that tell us?

4. Well, again, that ‘bareskin’ combat should be minimalized, cybernetics largely ignored, and hacking simplified for heat-of-the-moment electronic warfare (hacking a Boomer on the fly, not cracking a massively complex corporate mainframe). It doesn’t preclude using Interlock-ish rules (Stat-Skill-D10 vs. Target Number) per se - it doesn’t mandate a simpler system like BESM or OVA or something similarly rules-light. I’d argue that, because mecha-porn is so fundamental to BGC as its own thing, that if anything the game needs a slightly crunchier rules system just to build those mecha.

5. Or does it? Don’t get me wrong, I’m very proud of the mutation I cobbled together of Mekton Zeta Plus. However, I’m not as proud of the hardsuit-construction system I made based off of that system. It more feels like something the GM would use to make hardsuits for the players, not letting the players build their own suits.

Furthermore, I was sort of kicking the can down the road by giving GM’s such an extensive toolkit. It would be more desirable on the players’ end, I think, to just give them a monster-manual full of pre-built Boomers and maybe a few larger mecha, so the only mecha-building the GM or players are doing is their hardsuits / Motoslaves at the beginning of the campaign, then maybe a monster-of-the-week supermech like the DD once or twice. Likewise, I hadn’t bothered to actually make the rebooted versions of the Sabers and other characters to interact with PC’s, or for the players to inhabit, or hell, just to serve as inspiration for their own superheroes. So. Gotta do that.

6. I keep itching for some sort of roleplaying ‘training wheels’, some sort of system to encourage, if not directly reward, players to play around with inhabiting their characters. Like, if you had people who were interested in ‘hard’ roleplaying in their TTRPG, but didn’t really know how to do it. I keep thinking about the ‘clocks’ in The Sprawl, how they determine a sense of danger and urgency and generally are designed to keep the players moving forward through the beats of the story. I think that’s really cool, but at the same time it’s a very PBTA-tastic system - would it work for the ‘bareskin’ side of the game where the characters don’t have much more than a pistol and their wits to uncover what they must do once they get into hardsuits? One could make two very different games, here. The ‘Bareskin’ game, which is all about feelings and plots and story beats, and the ‘Hardsuit’ game, which is much more classic bang-bang-punch-punch stuff.

It’s not as intuitive, though, to design those sorts of things. And then I wonder if I’m taking the game too far away from it’s CP2020 roots, trying to make the game be something it isn’t. I’ve got this great grab bag of inspirations, but to make a BGC game truly itself - that’s hard. Because I’m not sure what trends I should be chasing, here.

7. But I’m getting myself muddled, here. I need a plan of action.

So:

A. Modularize the game. Core Rulebook largely ignores gun-printing, complex (deep) hacking, cybernetics, etc, and eschews them in favor of getting the players in their character’s shoes and hardsuits at a reasonable clip. I can put the complex stuff in its own pseudo-expansion and play around with it as necessary. Likewise, Mekton Infinity is great for complexity and granularity, but players are more gonna be coming from something more like Lancer than Mekton Zeta. So they’re gonna want some pre-built inspiration even if the endgame is to have players build their own suits.

B. Build the ‘sourcebook’. Focus a little less on the lore, focus more on where lore and mechanics intersect, namely in things. NPC’s to hang out with, mecha to battle.

C. While I’m at it it probably couldn’t hurt to make the general rules of heavier mecha combat more granular. Car chases and dogfights and things like that, alongside the more infantry-scale of hardsuit combat. Help people play the game with just some crude printed miniatures and nothing else.

D. Write the GM’s advice thing, see if that helps nail down what kind of game BGC is supposed to be. You know, what makes a BGC game unique, what should draw the players in, contrast it with other mecha-cyberpunk-anime-superhero games.

E. Then, I think, whether or not the game needs to segregate ‘bareskin’ and ‘hardsuit’ gameplay - and subsequently whether or not I need to add more rules like that - will become much clearer.

Whoo. That was a lot of text. We’ll see if anything comes of it, I guess.

#bubblegum crisis #rpg #ttrpg #rpg design #wall of text #rant

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