So I'm preparing to run a Genesys campaign for some friends. We're currently in session 0 territory, currently just over Discord text chat. We won't really be getting anywhere close to starting until the end of July due to scheduling. But we're brain storming character ideas and I'm sharing some of the world lore so they can figure out what they want to do. I gave them a survey I made in Google Forms (something my buddy GMing the Genesys game I'm in did that I liked) to gauge what type of game they're looking to play. Basic stuff like where do you want the narrative agency to lie (GM or players) or do you want guided or sandboxed exploration. Stuff like that.
However, one of the things that came up from the survey is that the players are wanting combat to be dangerous, which I admit is going to be very interesting for me. As a GM, I like to think that I try to challenge my PCs, because heroes are at their best when they overcome adversity. But, I also recognize that as a GM I am my PCs biggest fan and that I want to see them kick ass. I don't see the GM PC relationship as adversarial, but as cooperative as we all tell a story together. Even if I'm trying to make my combat dangerous, I don't think that will change, I'm still going to want to see my PCs triumph, but I've gotta make sure to bloody their noses a bit along the way. That along with the fact that I haven't GM'd a Genesys game before (though I have plenty of experience with the system with both having played Edge of the Empire and playing in our current Genesys game that's been going a couple of years now), it's going to take me a bit to get into the right spot. I don't doubt that I will have issues with balancing combats, either making them too easy or too hard.
But, while thinking about that kind of thing, I realized that a combat being dangerous doesn't necessarily mean dangerous only to the PCs. Combat can have severe narrative consequences that can hurt the PCs efforts, even if they get through it relatively unharmed. So things like time restraints or having to protect NPCs or other objectives can make a combat feel harrowing and make it have high stakes.
But, ultimately, I'm looking forward to the challenge since I've never been explicitly asked to up the difficulty level. I'm looking into other GM houserules to make combat more lethal, but haven't decided if I'd use any yet.
One nice thing about Genesys is the crit system allows for longer term repercussions from combat and other stresses that games like D&D don't model. Start stacking those crits and see what happens when the first player loses an arm or something.
We just had that happen in the other game I'm in. Gnomish alchemist lost an arm just recently. My tanky minotaur is sitting at 3 crits, but also has Durable 3 now, so a flat roll next time he's crit.
The players opted for a more intrigue based game rather than more traditional adventuring stuff. So I have the option to Game of Thrones them at times, which should keep them on their toes.
I wonder if there is a homebrew crit table for mental stresses. Like if you get too many you become paranoid and stuff like that.
I'd imagine someone has played with that idea. I'm imagining it being useful for, like, supernatural horror campaigns. Wondering what kinds of stresses could be applied that could be "healed" like crits are. Most crits in Genesys are temporary and can be treated, while only the most severe can apply a permanent effect (lowered attribute or missing limb).
I've read through several editions of Shadowrun rules over the last 20 years (but please understand that Shadowrun has so much rules that "read through" means that I only retained like half the information at best), and my main takeaway is "why the hell does this have so many rules?!"
My feeling is that the Shadowrun designers - and, I mean, it's been many different teams over multiple decades, but they seem to have the same core guiding principle - try very hard to be as simulationist as possible, down to minutia that I consider to be utterly irrelevant. When I was reading the 5E rules, I ran across a section on "Memory Tests". This makes sense in a game that centers data and intelligence and tries to simulate the real world, but I just... that was the point at which I realized that I, personally, have no desire to ever play a ruleset where you have to roll dice to see if your character remembers something.
Isn’t this like a basic Lore or other similar check in DND, though? Like, yeah, there are rules for treading water in Shadowrun, but rolling to see if a PC remembers something is a pretty staple roll in a lot of games (even rules-lite ones). The standard generic GM rule of “only roll if there are potential consequences” applies here, too.
I've read through several editions of Shadowrun rules over the last 20 years (but please understand that Shadowrun has so much rules that "read through" means that I only retained like half the information at best), and my main takeaway is "why the hell does this have so many rules?!"
My feeling is that the Shadowrun designers - and, I mean, it's been many different teams over multiple decades, but they seem to have the same core guiding principle - try very hard to be as simulationist as possible, down to minutia that I consider to be utterly irrelevant. When I was reading the 5E rules, I ran across a section on "Memory Tests". This makes sense in a game that centers data and intelligence and tries to simulate the real world, but I just... that was the point at which I realized that I, personally, have no desire to ever play a ruleset where you have to roll dice to see if your character remembers something.
Isn’t this like a basic Lore or other similar check in DND, though? Like, yeah, there are rules for treading water in Shadowrun, but rolling to see if a PC remembers something is a pretty staple roll in a lot of games (even rules-lite ones). The standard generic GM rule of “only roll if there are potential consequences” applies here, too.
If a player remembered specific details, would you make them roll to put them into use because it would be unrealistic for their PC to remember?
No?
Then don't make them roll when they don't remember either, because you didn't mean remembering to be a challenge so you shouldn't treat it as one.
I've read through several editions of Shadowrun rules over the last 20 years (but please understand that Shadowrun has so much rules that "read through" means that I only retained like half the information at best), and my main takeaway is "why the hell does this have so many rules?!"
My feeling is that the Shadowrun designers - and, I mean, it's been many different teams over multiple decades, but they seem to have the same core guiding principle - try very hard to be as simulationist as possible, down to minutia that I consider to be utterly irrelevant. When I was reading the 5E rules, I ran across a section on "Memory Tests". This makes sense in a game that centers data and intelligence and tries to simulate the real world, but I just... that was the point at which I realized that I, personally, have no desire to ever play a ruleset where you have to roll dice to see if your character remembers something.
Isn’t this like a basic Lore or other similar check in DND, though? Like, yeah, there are rules for treading water in Shadowrun, but rolling to see if a PC remembers something is a pretty staple roll in a lot of games (even rules-lite ones). The standard generic GM rule of “only roll if there are potential consequences” applies here, too.
If a player remembered specific details, would you make them roll to put them into use because it would be unrealistic for their PC to remember?
No?
Then don't make them roll when they don't remember either, because you didn't mean remembering to be a challenge so you shouldn't treat it as one.
I think calling them "memory rolls" is dumb, but I think the intent of the roll is that it checks whether your character already knows this thing about the world. Because there are things that, yes, our characters should 100% absolutely know, and if the player asks if X is true the GM should just answer them truthfully (or at least "to the best of your knowledge") but there's also stuff that characters maybe know, maybe don't, and that's when Knowledge rolls are interesting.
I've read through several editions of Shadowrun rules over the last 20 years (but please understand that Shadowrun has so much rules that "read through" means that I only retained like half the information at best), and my main takeaway is "why the hell does this have so many rules?!"
My feeling is that the Shadowrun designers - and, I mean, it's been many different teams over multiple decades, but they seem to have the same core guiding principle - try very hard to be as simulationist as possible, down to minutia that I consider to be utterly irrelevant. When I was reading the 5E rules, I ran across a section on "Memory Tests". This makes sense in a game that centers data and intelligence and tries to simulate the real world, but I just... that was the point at which I realized that I, personally, have no desire to ever play a ruleset where you have to roll dice to see if your character remembers something.
Isn’t this like a basic Lore or other similar check in DND, though? Like, yeah, there are rules for treading water in Shadowrun, but rolling to see if a PC remembers something is a pretty staple roll in a lot of games (even rules-lite ones). The standard generic GM rule of “only roll if there are potential consequences” applies here, too.
If a player remembered specific details, would you make them roll to put them into use because it would be unrealistic for their PC to remember?
No?
Then don't make them roll when they don't remember either, because you didn't mean remembering to be a challenge so you shouldn't treat it as one.
I think calling them "memory rolls" is dumb, but I think the intent of the roll is that it checks whether your character already knows this thing about the world. Because there are things that, yes, our characters should 100% absolutely know, and if the player asks if X is true the GM should just answer them truthfully (or at least "to the best of your knowledge") but there's also stuff that characters maybe know, maybe don't, and that's when Knowledge rolls are interesting.
No, they're not lore rolls. They're "do you remember what's in the bomb defusal manual you read three hours ago" rolls. But, to be fair to Shadowrun 5E, they do set them up to model those situations where it's supposed to be a challenge for a PC to remember extremely specific things, though I can easily see them being misused.
I've read through several editions of Shadowrun rules over the last 20 years (but please understand that Shadowrun has so much rules that "read through" means that I only retained like half the information at best), and my main takeaway is "why the hell does this have so many rules?!"
My feeling is that the Shadowrun designers - and, I mean, it's been many different teams over multiple decades, but they seem to have the same core guiding principle - try very hard to be as simulationist as possible, down to minutia that I consider to be utterly irrelevant. When I was reading the 5E rules, I ran across a section on "Memory Tests". This makes sense in a game that centers data and intelligence and tries to simulate the real world, but I just... that was the point at which I realized that I, personally, have no desire to ever play a ruleset where you have to roll dice to see if your character remembers something.
Isn’t this like a basic Lore or other similar check in DND, though? Like, yeah, there are rules for treading water in Shadowrun, but rolling to see if a PC remembers something is a pretty staple roll in a lot of games (even rules-lite ones). The standard generic GM rule of “only roll if there are potential consequences” applies here, too.
If a player remembered specific details, would you make them roll to put them into use because it would be unrealistic for their PC to remember?
No?
Then don't make them roll when they don't remember either, because you didn't mean remembering to be a challenge so you shouldn't treat it as one.
I think calling them "memory rolls" is dumb, but I think the intent of the roll is that it checks whether your character already knows this thing about the world. Because there are things that, yes, our characters should 100% absolutely know, and if the player asks if X is true the GM should just answer them truthfully (or at least "to the best of your knowledge") but there's also stuff that characters maybe know, maybe don't, and that's when Knowledge rolls are interesting.
No, they're not lore rolls. They're "do you remember what's in the bomb defusal manual you read three hours ago" rolls. But, to be fair to Shadowrun 5E, they do set them up to model those situations where it's supposed to be a challenge for a PC to remember extremely specific things, though I can easily see them being misused.
Now I realize that my confusion was around not remembering that concept or any mention of it showing up in... D&D, because I read "5E" and just assumed you were making a comparison between Shadowrun and D&D.
So, nevermind. That is indeed very dumb -- carry on.
I've read through several editions of Shadowrun rules over the last 20 years (but please understand that Shadowrun has so much rules that "read through" means that I only retained like half the information at best), and my main takeaway is "why the hell does this have so many rules?!"
My feeling is that the Shadowrun designers - and, I mean, it's been many different teams over multiple decades, but they seem to have the same core guiding principle - try very hard to be as simulationist as possible, down to minutia that I consider to be utterly irrelevant. When I was reading the 5E rules, I ran across a section on "Memory Tests". This makes sense in a game that centers data and intelligence and tries to simulate the real world, but I just... that was the point at which I realized that I, personally, have no desire to ever play a ruleset where you have to roll dice to see if your character remembers something.
Isn’t this like a basic Lore or other similar check in DND, though? Like, yeah, there are rules for treading water in Shadowrun, but rolling to see if a PC remembers something is a pretty staple roll in a lot of games (even rules-lite ones). The standard generic GM rule of “only roll if there are potential consequences” applies here, too.
This is a fair call-out. There is certainly a parallel between "do you remember the bomb defusal manual you read three hours ago?" and "did you study bomb defusal during the studies represented by your `Knowledge: Explosives`/`Lore: Gunpowder`/whatever skill?", and I definitely didn't recognize the parallel until you just pointed it out.
I think that there is a major difference, which Glazius touches on: Lore/Knowledge/etc skills tend to be reactive (I mean, not counting the proactive decision of "I want my character to know about X" that you make at character creation/advancement). You come to a situation in the world (which you didn't specifically foresee and plan for), you check if you have a general Knowledge skill that applies (or bullshit the GM until they relent and allow you to use `Knowledge: Swimming` on your `repair the submarine` check), and you roll to see if your general grab-bag of learning on the subject happened to include this specific thing.
A memory test, as presented in Shadowrun 5e, seems to be a proactive thing. Or, at least, partially a proactive thing. I'm looking at the rules now, and I'm not seeing anything that explicitly says that you need to "prepare" a memory in order to be able to remember it later, it just says "if a character needs to recall information make a Logic + Willpower Test", which I feel is open to interpretation. Like, I dunno, if we're at the evil CEO's office getting chewed out and I don't say anything at all, can I later say "Well when we were at the evil CEO's office, I surely was looking around and would have noticed the whiteboard with the org chart on it, I'm gonna roll to see if I remember it"? Or would the GM say "Naw dude, you needed to explicitly tell me you were looking at the org chart in order to remember it now"? Probably varies from group to group.
The rules DO go on to say:
If a character actively tries to memorize information, make a Logic + Willpower Test at the time of memorization. Each hit adds a dice to the Recall Test later on
and for me this is just a flat-out, hard "no". I appreciate that there are folks who want to simulate as many elements of physical reality in as high a granularity as possible, but that is not me. This rule means that you need to proactively prepare to remember something for a future, anticipated memory test. This makes the situation dramatically more complicated than "Oh, that's a frog? I roll Knowledge: Animals to see if I know whether it's poisonous or not". I do not want to keep track of my physical inventory, my cyberdeck's software inventory, my cybereye's integrated memory inventory (can't record blackmail material on the evil CEO if I captured the entire meet with Mr. Johnson on video, and haven't had time to free up space!), and now my brain-memory inventory.
Again, this is nitpicking, and hyper-focusing on one small and specific rule that by itself is not, like, abhorrent. For me, this rule was more like the straw that made me realize the camel's back is broken. It's not that Shadowrun 5e has this one specific rule, it's that Shadowrun 5e is a game that thinks that rules like this are meaningful and useful and should be included in the core rulebook, and it made me realize that I do not agree. This is not an indictment of Shadowrun, to be explicit, and I'm glad that granular and crunchy games are out there for people who want them.
You can also just ignore memory tests. I've never had a GM enforce them.
That's kinda the thing with Shadowrun is that nobody's really ever played the same system when they say they've played Shadowrun, because everyone handwaves something, and it's not always the same thing.
Again, what the Matrix actually is and what it looks like and how you interact with it, and what the Astral Plane actually is and what it looks like and how you interact with it, are so poorly explained in the book(s) that I've had 3 different GM's with entirely different interpretations. And that's just the fluff! They don't agree with the mechanics, either! Everyone seems to run decking differently, and grenades, and a hundred other things. Some GM's ignore most if not all modifiers!
And while I do think that solidly belongs in the "Cons" column for Shadowrun, it's also kinda baked into the whole, "Whoa this shit looks complicated as fuck" reaction. It is complicated as fuck, so don't try swallowing that elephant. Decide how you're going to run it, how strictly you want to stick to which rules, talk to your players while they're doing chargen, come to an agreement on what the game is going to be, and go have fun.
Also, you don't have to play it, there's other cyberpunk games that are much simpler while still giving the gear porn that Shadowrun offers. I've played the Savage Worlds version of Interface Zero and it was a fucking blast. Simple fucking ruleset (Savage Worlds), plus pages and pages of gear to choose from. There is a massive table full of cars and trucks and drones and VTOL's and tanks and shit, it's great.
Yeah, for sure, this is even true for a system that is much simpler than Shadowrun, like D&D - no one ever remembers the rare or situational rules, folks dislike some rules/sub-systems enough to exclude them even when staying otherwise-faithful, etc etc etc.
It's just, you know, if I'm slicing off (for example) the memory tests because they're goofy, the initiative system because it's too tedious, the damage system because it's too punishing, the hacking/astral projection systems because they're impossible to run, the [blah blah blah], then I might as well just start with a game that doesn't have those things to begin with.
Which, of course, is the point you make in the last paragraph!
Like I said, the rule itself was less a Single Point of Contention and more like an indicator of design philosophy. It suggested to me that I would probably not be interested in a lot of the other rules and design decisions they made.
Man I'm sorry to have taken up so much thread space on this silly topic, I'm done blabbing about it.
Also, the initiative system is kinda awesome and I love it a lot. It seems goofy and difficult but it's pretty simple. I like the tug of war between defensive options and extra turns. Adds interesting strategies.
Well, I'll say this about Shadowrun: I kept up with the metaplot pretty well until the end of 4th Edition, but after that I completely lost track of it and I'm kinda bummed about it. I'd love to read a well-curated walkthrough of the major events, but I haven't found one of those yet.
My "favorite" part about making a test to memorize material in advance is because you're rolling d6s and counting success on 5 or 6, you get an effective bonus of 1/9 your LOG+WIL when trying to bring to mind something you prepped. Which is, like, 1 success, or maybe sometimes 2.
Shadowrun (and, sadly, I'm pretty much talking about Shadowrun in general) is absolutely more about making sure there is a rule at the uncertainty points in a process than it is about making sure that rule actually has any kind of benefits.
I love the very broadest strokes of the Shadowrun concept. I’ll be surprised if I ever play it though. Think I’ll make my own Shadowrun with weekend because that’s just what I do.
I’m thinking:
1. A character can have as many cybernetic prosthetics as they like without it affecting the game mechanics.
2. A character can have as many cybernetic augments as they can afford, with the caveat that you’ve got to get them fitted by a Megacorp and only they can maintain it. The catch is you’ve got to do something for the megacorp to even have the right to buy your gun arm. Augments do not reduce magic potential.
3. Players make two characters each, a runner and a shadow (support). Now you don’t have to bring the hacker to the field, that simple. You could even give the supports the preparation phase and the runners do the mission around what they’ve managed to survey/research/acquire for them.
4. Borrow the Blades flashback mechanic and use it to bounce between the runners and their shadows effect on the mission at hand.
5. Magic is alive, casting always has a consequence, but not much limit. Casting spells is solving one problem then running from the fallout. Training narrows the scope of your magic, giving some ways to dodge consequence, but literally anyone can try it in a pinch.
If you advance enough you might be able to get an augment from someone other than a megacorp, but I think the through-line of the game would be “How much should I sell-out to a megacorp to have the power to fight against them?”
Thinking also throwing in a bunch of Altered Carbon and an alternative to cybernetics which is binding daemons to your soul, perhaps as an allegory to radicalisation? Maybe another megacorp does that to keep it simple.
I'm hoping my friends and I play it again sometime soon, but I think we're burned out on 5E, and we're completely unwilling to play 6E, so I'm gonna see about running an Interface Zero game sometime that's been Shadowrun'd.
The 2e system is basically the same, but...more of it, backwards compatible. 3e was the same system with major updates. The 4e/5e/6e editions attracted the most contention as they were huge overhauls.
I've read through several editions of Shadowrun rules over the last 20 years (but please understand that Shadowrun has so much rules that "read through" means that I only retained like half the information at best), and my main takeaway is "why the hell does this have so many rules?!"
My feeling is that the Shadowrun designers - and, I mean, it's been many different teams over multiple decades, but they seem to have the same core guiding principle - try very hard to be as simulationist as possible, down to minutia that I consider to be utterly irrelevant. When I was reading the 5E rules, I ran across a section on "Memory Tests". This makes sense in a game that centers data and intelligence and tries to simulate the real world, but I just... that was the point at which I realized that I, personally, have no desire to ever play a ruleset where you have to roll dice to see if your character remembers something.
Isn’t this like a basic Lore or other similar check in DND, though? Like, yeah, there are rules for treading water in Shadowrun, but rolling to see if a PC remembers something is a pretty staple roll in a lot of games (even rules-lite ones). The standard generic GM rule of “only roll if there are potential consequences” applies here, too.
If a player remembered specific details, would you make them roll to put them into use because it would be unrealistic for their PC to remember?
No?
Then don't make them roll when they don't remember either, because you didn't mean remembering to be a challenge so you shouldn't treat it as one.
I think calling them "memory rolls" is dumb, but I think the intent of the roll is that it checks whether your character already knows this thing about the world. Because there are things that, yes, our characters should 100% absolutely know, and if the player asks if X is true the GM should just answer them truthfully (or at least "to the best of your knowledge") but there's also stuff that characters maybe know, maybe don't, and that's when Knowledge rolls are interesting.
No, they're not lore rolls. They're "do you remember what's in the bomb defusal manual you read three hours ago" rolls. But, to be fair to Shadowrun 5E, they do set them up to model those situations where it's supposed to be a challenge for a PC to remember extremely specific things, though I can easily see them being misused.
I assure you, no one ever uses it for situations like that. But Shadowrun ALSO has great (as in, not-so-great) things like Elven Roofies (Laes), so Memory checks would be appropriate after a drug or simsense-induced memory wipe. Lots of things can fuck with your memory without even touching upon Magic. Like, just alcohol.
One of the reasons that I like the way Knowledge skills are done in SR6 (one of the good bits) is that you just tag that Knowledge skill on top of another existing roll. So using a Perception test + your Security Knowledge skill as a tag will allow you to scan the defenses for weaknesses. You can easily have lore checks be Memory checks tagged with a specific Knowledge skill. It's a small elegant mechanic in a sea of inelegant and crunchy unnecessary complexity.
SR 1st edition had fucking Staging rules (which is a gradient of how many successes it takes to stage up or down the degree of success), and it was a horrible mechanic.
SR 1 is definitely not compatible with SR 2 if you take Staging into account. SR2 also did away with Turn To Goo and some of the more egregious things (which were thrown back into the game in later editions *rolls eyes*).
I've read through several editions of Shadowrun rules over the last 20 years (but please understand that Shadowrun has so much rules that "read through" means that I only retained like half the information at best), and my main takeaway is "why the hell does this have so many rules?!"
My feeling is that the Shadowrun designers - and, I mean, it's been many different teams over multiple decades, but they seem to have the same core guiding principle - try very hard to be as simulationist as possible, down to minutia that I consider to be utterly irrelevant. When I was reading the 5E rules, I ran across a section on "Memory Tests". This makes sense in a game that centers data and intelligence and tries to simulate the real world, but I just... that was the point at which I realized that I, personally, have no desire to ever play a ruleset where you have to roll dice to see if your character remembers something.
Isn’t this like a basic Lore or other similar check in DND, though? Like, yeah, there are rules for treading water in Shadowrun, but rolling to see if a PC remembers something is a pretty staple roll in a lot of games (even rules-lite ones). The standard generic GM rule of “only roll if there are potential consequences” applies here, too.
If a player remembered specific details, would you make them roll to put them into use because it would be unrealistic for their PC to remember?
No?
Then don't make them roll when they don't remember either, because you didn't mean remembering to be a challenge so you shouldn't treat it as one.
I think calling them "memory rolls" is dumb, but I think the intent of the roll is that it checks whether your character already knows this thing about the world. Because there are things that, yes, our characters should 100% absolutely know, and if the player asks if X is true the GM should just answer them truthfully (or at least "to the best of your knowledge") but there's also stuff that characters maybe know, maybe don't, and that's when Knowledge rolls are interesting.
No, they're not lore rolls. They're "do you remember what's in the bomb defusal manual you read three hours ago" rolls. But, to be fair to Shadowrun 5E, they do set them up to model those situations where it's supposed to be a challenge for a PC to remember extremely specific things, though I can easily see them being misused.
I assure you, no one ever uses it for situations like that. But Shadowrun ALSO has great (as in, not-so-great) things like Elven Roofies (Laes), so Memory checks would be appropriate after a drug or simsense-induced memory wipe. Lots of things can fuck with your memory without even touching upon Magic. Like, just alcohol.
One of the reasons that I like the way Knowledge skills are done in SR6 (one of the good bits) is that you just tag that Knowledge skill on top of another existing roll. So using a Perception test + your Security Knowledge skill as a tag will allow you to scan the defenses for weaknesses. You can easily have lore checks be Memory checks tagged with a specific Knowledge skill. It's a small elegant mechanic in a sea of inelegant and crunchy unnecessary complexity.
SR 1st edition had fucking Staging rules (which is a gradient of how many successes it takes to stage up or down the degree of success), and it was a horrible mechanic.
SR 1 is definitely not compatible with SR 2 if you take Staging into account. SR2 also did away with Turn To Goo and some of the more egregious things (which were thrown back into the game in later editions *rolls eyes*).
Still remember a friend who played a SR1 character where they stacked up a ridiculous amount of dice on light pistol rolls. They were easy to resist and stage down but if he throws more dice than you've got body then you're in for a bad time friendo because they were just as easy to stage up.
In case this is a double-post my apologies, I tried to post this twice, but I don't see my post in this thread or my posting history at all.
Edit: weird, I don't get a notification that my post is too long or anything, but it just refuses to save and erases the whole post.
This session was also the wrap-up for last session, where our heroes retrieved a missing actor from Tijuana. The actor had been transformed by magic drugs
(aka parasyte Spider Goddess eggs) into his ideal self (the hero he always played in the movies). With help from a magic knife (reward for their mission),
they managed to free him. (Note: one of my players on discovering he owned a magic knife with an apparently intangible blade that caused no harm, immediately
tried to stab himself and various other people and creatures repeatedly with the knife. This knife would be one-hit kill if it hit somebody's heart,
but luckily he only tried hands, arms etc.)
The cured cowboy taught the PCs to shoot and fight better (because combat in D100 Call of Cthulhu takes ages otherwise) and returned to the movie.
On set the heroes immediately learned that now the lead actress was missing. One player would be later, so they had a little downtime play for an hour
or two, so we could work on backstory before going for the main mission of this session. The magic knife turned out to be ancient Egyptian in origin,
used to sacrifice animal's souls to the gods. Our "heroes" immediately tried to sacrifice a chicken to a god to see what would happen (my players are so the
worst or best people to play Call of Cthulhu). They also learn that the mummy of Akenaten has been recently bought by a wealthy person.
The fourth player arrived and on towards the main mission: convincing actress Alice Ferguson (roughly based on Mary Pickford) to stop badmouthing the
movie's director and retrieve actress Jane Ward (not based on anybody). Jane turned out to be have joined Alice for a weekend at a welness spa (which
was code for plastic surgery institution). Leaving most of their weapons behind, the team needed to use charm and intelligence to figure out what
was happening at the hospital. Alice was willing to talk to the investigators (though they didn't seem to notice that she never actually said a word and
all communication went through her assistant). Jane refused to speak to them, so they tried to go to her room. (as an injoke for myself all patients and
doctors at the hospital were named after characters in more or less famous horror movies, games or books. So we have a Phantom of the Opera, a missing
Dr. David Trent (who has just died in House on Haunted Hill), an unfortunate private from Johnny Got His Gun etc. My players aren't movie buffs and
all injokes were noted down as serious leads or red herrings. With some poking at the end, they did figure out the Phantom of the Opera.)
Jane also isn't in the Director's Office. One player played their hand too openly (mentioning the magic knife to the Institute's director who
immediately flees when the player's back is turned and he puts the hospital under magic lockdown).
In the cellar they find misshapen beings (failed patients).
Ray shoots the first one in reflex (poor guy), the second he figures out that it's not hostile and retreats. The third can talk and clues them into
a bit of the plot and begs to be killed. Ray obliges. The fourth failed patient freaks him out sufficiently that he just leaves. The fifth is relatively
normal and Ray releases him in return for information where to find the Director. Noping out on even visiting the remaining failed patients (there were
8 doors), the group enters the final door at the end of the corridor, leading to a temple (3 temples in 3 sessions. One might suspect a theme).
The Director runs, the 3 cultists attacks as well as the big boss of this session: The Failed God, a massive blob of flesh with one massive arm and
a face floating in its mass. The cultists are relatively easily dispatched (one is knocked out fortunately, which allows me some info dumps later
if they play their cards right). They manage to focus fire on the Failed God enough to kill it. One of them ties up the remaining cultist,
the others run into the backroom to find Jane, but instead find the Director, with a knife in his back: a similar magic knife as they possess.
Jane is found nearby, who quickly focuses them on their mission (returning her to the movie) instead of worrying about doctor's with magic knives
in their backs and other things that an innocent like girl would never be involved in. Really! Trust her!
The investigators leave with Jane and the tied-up cultist, leaving the Director's living but soulless husk behind as well as the failed experiments.
(Mission reward: attribute boosts for 2 players, magic item for a third. Fourth just gets skill points, but enough to make it feel like he;s
not missing out.)
Epilogue: the players get a chance to investigate the cultist and some themes and subtext of this game now just becomes text:
- WWI has undermined belief in the current gods (maybe more, but certainly for the people involved in this setting so far).
- Enough belief can turn anything into a god and Hollywood allows to raise people (or with special effects maybe even other things (see next session))
into gods.
- Being a good requires perfection though (or at least imperfections that are not as simple).
- The Director and his staff were trying to create a new god, first with the Failed God (powerful, but not inspiring), then with Alice (inspiring,
but for her eternal beauty she paid with her voice and with the new media of talkies, she couldn't inspire enough faith to transcend to godhood) and
then planning for Jane to become their new god. (There is more here, but Ray, stealing everything in sight, has the Director's notes so any things
they've missed, they will get next time).
- The Stars are right to create a new god, but the window is rapidly closing and there can only be 1 god.
(Alice kinda was forgotten about pretty soon as our investigators were laser-focused on retrieving Jane back on set. They never even noticed that
she never spoke to them or that they were rapidly losing Sanity Points every time they angered her and she looked at them. Yeah, that's a normal
person....) We'll see if this bites them in the back.
Session 5 (adventure 4 + epilogue of my Call of Cthulhu mini-campaign)
Pre-Mission: one of the investigators got a magic item as a reward for their last mission. It was intended to be a magic mask that could impersonate
anybody, but the last mission and epilogue, would require not much social interactions, so it was changed to a little clay statue of a bird. (The investigator
was missing his stolen canary, Tweety, so now he had a living clay bird called Two-ty. I'm not ashamed to say that it took me less than a second to determine
that name when he said the name of his missing pet.)
Adventure "The Case of the Unseen Voice"
With my investigators back at the movie, only one person was missing: Diego, the sound engineer of the movie. A brilliant engineer anno 1929, he had arguments with
everybody on the movie when he started to make changes to the script and he got awfully insulted when others refused to follow his changes, taking all the sound
recordings of the movie with him.
The team went to his house, finding his script with changes and a single page with the word "Alele" and many variant spellings of it. Travelling to the Mojave desert,
they found out that Diego had moved his self-built highly advanced equipment to caves to get less disturbing sound when working on it. Que a map of "The Colossal Cave
" text adventure, spiced up with Rat Things and Ghouls and a couple of dead bodies to keep things interesting. They never figured out Alele's backstory, but it's
basically an evil spirit that (name meaning "Echo") that lures innocents into the caves and leaves them to die there. So a lot of Willpower saves required from our
team whenever they hear a faint sound. They luck out in their exploration, missing all the Ghouls and have only fight with a group of Rat-Things before running
into the make-shift labs. They notice that there are three tapes: one with the sound of the movie, one with a soft changting unknown text (too soft for two of the four
investigators to even hear) and a third tape that also seems to be just the sound of the movie.
Two corridors further, they found Diego, but did not get into combat with him or his spiritual master. They got a bit of a backstory dump here as they questioned him.
Alele was a spirit trying to use an old ritual (the same a few others were also trying) to become a new god, but they were only a disembodied voice, so
they needed a body; a character Diego was trying to write into the movie (the ritual requires basically something non-human appearing to a large group of humans, but
speaking to them with a voice. It only works for once though, so whatever being is first, wins.) Arthur tricked Diego into drinking some drugged wine (drugs and wine stolen from Dr. Hartman's office in the last session by Ray).
The team returned quickly home, not facing either Ghouls or Alele themselves and delivering all tapes and Diego on set. (Which opened the shot for my planned ending
for this mission). The team was rewarded their 10,000 dollars reward and also some free movie tickets. A few days later they visit the movie and they notice
that a certain cartoon mouse speaks and all people in the audience for a short moment belief in his existence. That night a black*&white cartoon sketch of a mouse visits
them in their dream, thanking them for this opportunity to ascend (with a small comment that that damned rabbit nearly got to ascend if he hadn't murdered him).
My players were smart enough to get what they had actually done. But he still needed them to do one thing: stopping the living planet (The New Sun, a result of Akenaten
's ritual thousnds of years ago) that was hurling towards Earth.
Adventure 5 and epilogue "The New Sun"
Originally it was intended that they would get an object at the end of each mission that would assemble together into a weapon that would combine with
Dr. Hubble's telescope to shoot down the living planet, but alas, my investigators were not investigating enough. So plan B: Assassins of the new Sun had tried
to kill the other candidate New Gods ascending or Old Gods trying to revive/boost themselves with the ritual. In Mammon's temple (now reachable via one of the
first Academy Awards, they found a giant body of Mammon, speared with a godslaying weapon. The death causing a financial depressing, but Mammon had more than one
body and his High Priest approached the investigators to use the access to the Soul of the World from his temple.
Inside the Soul of the World, the team meets the Mouse again and he offers them weapons to kill the soul of the New Soul, turning the creature about to crash into
Earth into boring rock again that would obey the laws of physics and just pass the world. The weapons were the weapons of the newly created Buck Rogers (explosive
bullet pistols and rocket-belts) though a few of the team decided to keep their preferred weapons.
The team were very lucky with their damage roles (an average of 17 on a d20), so they went quickly through the New Sun's HP (I thought 100HP should have been enough
but 200 would have been better). Oh well, we got a happy enough ending. The Black Rose as a movie flopped, but our investigators received their pay. The Mouse
quickly grew in power, but the investigators never approached him again. Mammon recovered from his serious injuries, though it cost a lot of people a lot of
money.
So overall: all the investigators were high STR, low INT type of characters, so a lot of planned content was never touched, but I'm happy that we got to the Rise of
the Mouse which was basically the point of the whole campaign. Also by mixing real history with complete nonsense, the players were kept guessing what
was real or not.
We weren't able to do a regular RP session due to scheduling, but most of the group got together for a side game. Basically, we're going to try and do, like, improv games to practice our own RP and thinking on the fly.
So our GM just came in with a premise, and we ran with it, made up some characters and started. The premise was like one of those movies where a group of teens is trying to make it to a big rock show, BUT it turns out the band that's playing is using their music to perform some kind of supernatural ritual to end the world. Set in the late 80s with a soundtrack of 80s metal music.
So our group of young heroes is heading to the concert of the hit metal band, sKUMbags, after discovering that their music carries subliminal sound waves. Their recent tour appears to be forming the shape of a serpent and the last show, in Boston, will finish the form. Based on our group brainstorming (working with the GM to expand the premise), if they finish their last show on this tour, the ritual will be completed and will cause mass hysteria and increased aggression, causing chaos and the downfall of humanity. The antagonists include a group of die hard fans, who have already succumbed to the music's brainwashing, and the band's manager who is a literal demon in the form of traditional 80s business man.
We're going to finish this one off next time we're down a player for our regular game. It was a lot of fun just flying by the seat of our pants.
I've read through several editions of Shadowrun rules over the last 20 years (but please understand that Shadowrun has so much rules that "read through" means that I only retained like half the information at best), and my main takeaway is "why the hell does this have so many rules?!"
My feeling is that the Shadowrun designers - and, I mean, it's been many different teams over multiple decades, but they seem to have the same core guiding principle - try very hard to be as simulationist as possible, down to minutia that I consider to be utterly irrelevant. When I was reading the 5E rules, I ran across a section on "Memory Tests". This makes sense in a game that centers data and intelligence and tries to simulate the real world, but I just... that was the point at which I realized that I, personally, have no desire to ever play a ruleset where you have to roll dice to see if your character remembers something.
Isn’t this like a basic Lore or other similar check in DND, though? Like, yeah, there are rules for treading water in Shadowrun, but rolling to see if a PC remembers something is a pretty staple roll in a lot of games (even rules-lite ones). The standard generic GM rule of “only roll if there are potential consequences” applies here, too.
If a player remembered specific details, would you make them roll to put them into use because it would be unrealistic for their PC to remember?
No?
Then don't make them roll when they don't remember either, because you didn't mean remembering to be a challenge so you shouldn't treat it as one.
I think calling them "memory rolls" is dumb, but I think the intent of the roll is that it checks whether your character already knows this thing about the world. Because there are things that, yes, our characters should 100% absolutely know, and if the player asks if X is true the GM should just answer them truthfully (or at least "to the best of your knowledge") but there's also stuff that characters maybe know, maybe don't, and that's when Knowledge rolls are interesting.
No, they're not lore rolls. They're "do you remember what's in the bomb defusal manual you read three hours ago" rolls. But, to be fair to Shadowrun 5E, they do set them up to model those situations where it's supposed to be a challenge for a PC to remember extremely specific things, though I can easily see them being misused.
I assure you, no one ever uses it for situations like that. But Shadowrun ALSO has great (as in, not-so-great) things like Elven Roofies (Laes), so Memory checks would be appropriate after a drug or simsense-induced memory wipe. Lots of things can fuck with your memory without even touching upon Magic. Like, just alcohol.
One of the reasons that I like the way Knowledge skills are done in SR6 (one of the good bits) is that you just tag that Knowledge skill on top of another existing roll. So using a Perception test + your Security Knowledge skill as a tag will allow you to scan the defenses for weaknesses. You can easily have lore checks be Memory checks tagged with a specific Knowledge skill. It's a small elegant mechanic in a sea of inelegant and crunchy unnecessary complexity.
SR 1st edition had fucking Staging rules (which is a gradient of how many successes it takes to stage up or down the degree of success), and it was a horrible mechanic.
SR 1 is definitely not compatible with SR 2 if you take Staging into account. SR2 also did away with Turn To Goo and some of the more egregious things (which were thrown back into the game in later editions *rolls eyes*).
Still remember a friend who played a SR1 character where they stacked up a ridiculous amount of dice on light pistol rolls. They were easy to resist and stage down but if he throws more dice than you've got body then you're in for a bad time friendo because they were just as easy to stage up.
OTOH, armor gave automatic successes in damage resistance tests, so it evened out. Overall, I found staging interesting, but just time consuming for not alot of gain.
We're going to try out Icon, the RPG still in play test by Abaddon, creator of Kill Six Billion Demons and Lancer.
I'm happy to be able to play a character again after DMing our last two RPG games (one oneshot and one 5-episode campaign), though it will be a while before we will get around to actually play.
Icon's play rules seem interesting so far: you have both an in-combat and an out-combat character sheet (I'm going for a Mighty Sealer (Mighty is basically intimidation/forceful/protective attitude out-combat, Sealer is a monk/cleric type class, using healing and debuffs). Combat is JRPG inspired and works on a square grid.
I already chose a character personality gimmick (that I will very surely regret 5 minutes into play) in that my character doesn't understand personal pronouns at all and is very interested to meet these I, You, He and She who have all genererated such conflicting reports.
Steam/Origin: davydizzy
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VanguardBut now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Looking for recommendations for sci fi RPGs
Specifically looking for something to run an exploration based game around
I don’t want Starfinder or anything attached to existing IP
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
I have heard good things about Mothership, and how it's a bit similar to Alien. At one point our group almost switched from Alien to Mothership.
I've played Alien and while the ruleset is...okay, I'm a slut for expedient, well indexed rulebooks, and the Alien rulebook has so much fluff and fancy imagery between every subset of rules that I ran outside and howled and my family never saw me again.
I have heard good things about Mothership, and how it's a bit similar to Alien. At one point our group almost switched from Alien to Mothership.
I've played Alien and while the ruleset is...okay, I'm a slut for expedient, well indexed rulebooks, and the Alien rulebook has so much fluff and fancy imagery between every subset of rules that I ran outside and howled and my family never saw me again.
Nobody ever saw me again.
Some say I'm still out there.
Half the reason I bought the book was because of the insanely detailed lore, but yeah, it is a bit tricky to hone in on the rule stuff.
Also funny how it details a ton of random other alien threats but doesn't mention the Yautja. :P
There's also a really cool bit on the Xeno's supposed homeworld, which sounds terrifying. Multiple queens and an empress on top of that, and who knows what kind of unseen horrific evolutions.
I do want to say, friend of mine decided, in our Alien campaign, to play a mechanic named Meaty Petey. So I decided to name my character Sweetie Petey.
I was an ex-corp who basically was trying to make amends for all the horrible shit I've wrought. Or at least, that was what the crew understood.
The twist is that I was a clone of Carter Burke (Paul Reiser's character in Aliens), that I didn't know this, and that I was only told that my long-lost "Uncle Carter" died while trying to colonize on LV-426 when there was a nuclear explosion. Reactor must have malfunctioned or something.
Except I dug through the archives one day and found out that my "Uncle Carter" died because marines nuked the facility. So now I want revenge against the company.
GM and I had a lot of fun with how I kept helping the crew, but holding back this secret, while both the GM and I knew that my character was also heavily misled on his quest for justice.
webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
You could run a sci-fi game using the Genesys rules. Its a framework system that you tweak based on the setting your playing in. Originally it was used for the Star Wars rpg from fantasy flight.
Specifically looking for something to run an exploration based game around
I don’t want Starfinder or anything attached to existing IP
Uncharted Worlds is a PbtA game of interstellar adventure with an interesting pick-and-mix background system. It's not particularly wired to support actually charting worlds in the way that, say, The Perilous Wilds supports charting dungeons and wilderness for Dungeon World - it's more about playing a power game as a small player and rogue trader. If "exploration" just means "going new places and seeing what's there", it should do you fine.
I'm looking forward to Cy_Borg, the cyberpunk offshoot of Mörk Borg, becoming generally available (apparently only the Kickstarter folks have it now).
I get the impression that there is off-world stuff, but that the PCs will never see it because they'll die from climate change or some scumbag's gun first.
I might just change over from Starfinder to that for my home campaign.
Specifically looking for something to run an exploration based game around
I don’t want Starfinder or anything attached to existing IP
Traveler is very much about exploration. It's a little old-school system-wise but legitimately worth picking up just for the character creation, which is really its own little game in and of itself.
Specifically looking for something to run an exploration based game around
I don’t want Starfinder or anything attached to existing IP
Stars Without Number. It's an OSR game with heavy Traveler influences.
Mothership is probably a bad fit for an exploration focus. You might also like some of the Golgotha stuff on DriveThru, but systems-wise it's not amazing. Many good ideas at the adventure level, however.
One of the big things is that this appears to be more of a splat book that offers lots of rules rewrites and additions, rather than requiring you to toss your old books away.
Read today that Pirate Borg is releasing their final edit .pdf on September 19, International Talk Like a Pirate Day (Arr), but the physical versions aren't coming out until November or so. Annoying, but I can just print out the player-facing stuff like character classes and gear.
Interesting that C7 is making another 40K RPG, and not one compatible with Wrath and Glory. I suppose they didn't invent WAG, but they did fix it after Ulysses Speile made a mess of it.
As gorgeous as the Dark Heresy/Fantasy Flight RPG books were, I wasn't super impressed by the d100 system mechanics, so I'm wondering how close they're going to hew there.
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I'd imagine someone has played with that idea. I'm imagining it being useful for, like, supernatural horror campaigns. Wondering what kinds of stresses could be applied that could be "healed" like crits are. Most crits in Genesys are temporary and can be treated, while only the most severe can apply a permanent effect (lowered attribute or missing limb).
If a player remembered specific details, would you make them roll to put them into use because it would be unrealistic for their PC to remember?
No?
Then don't make them roll when they don't remember either, because you didn't mean remembering to be a challenge so you shouldn't treat it as one.
I think calling them "memory rolls" is dumb, but I think the intent of the roll is that it checks whether your character already knows this thing about the world. Because there are things that, yes, our characters should 100% absolutely know, and if the player asks if X is true the GM should just answer them truthfully (or at least "to the best of your knowledge") but there's also stuff that characters maybe know, maybe don't, and that's when Knowledge rolls are interesting.
No, they're not lore rolls. They're "do you remember what's in the bomb defusal manual you read three hours ago" rolls. But, to be fair to Shadowrun 5E, they do set them up to model those situations where it's supposed to be a challenge for a PC to remember extremely specific things, though I can easily see them being misused.
Now I realize that my confusion was around not remembering that concept or any mention of it showing up in... D&D, because I read "5E" and just assumed you were making a comparison between Shadowrun and D&D.
So, nevermind. That is indeed very dumb -- carry on.
I think that there is a major difference, which Glazius touches on: Lore/Knowledge/etc skills tend to be reactive (I mean, not counting the proactive decision of "I want my character to know about X" that you make at character creation/advancement). You come to a situation in the world (which you didn't specifically foresee and plan for), you check if you have a general Knowledge skill that applies (or bullshit the GM until they relent and allow you to use `Knowledge: Swimming` on your `repair the submarine` check), and you roll to see if your general grab-bag of learning on the subject happened to include this specific thing.
A memory test, as presented in Shadowrun 5e, seems to be a proactive thing. Or, at least, partially a proactive thing. I'm looking at the rules now, and I'm not seeing anything that explicitly says that you need to "prepare" a memory in order to be able to remember it later, it just says "if a character needs to recall information make a Logic + Willpower Test", which I feel is open to interpretation. Like, I dunno, if we're at the evil CEO's office getting chewed out and I don't say anything at all, can I later say "Well when we were at the evil CEO's office, I surely was looking around and would have noticed the whiteboard with the org chart on it, I'm gonna roll to see if I remember it"? Or would the GM say "Naw dude, you needed to explicitly tell me you were looking at the org chart in order to remember it now"? Probably varies from group to group.
The rules DO go on to say: and for me this is just a flat-out, hard "no". I appreciate that there are folks who want to simulate as many elements of physical reality in as high a granularity as possible, but that is not me. This rule means that you need to proactively prepare to remember something for a future, anticipated memory test. This makes the situation dramatically more complicated than "Oh, that's a frog? I roll Knowledge: Animals to see if I know whether it's poisonous or not". I do not want to keep track of my physical inventory, my cyberdeck's software inventory, my cybereye's integrated memory inventory (can't record blackmail material on the evil CEO if I captured the entire meet with Mr. Johnson on video, and haven't had time to free up space!), and now my brain-memory inventory.
Again, this is nitpicking, and hyper-focusing on one small and specific rule that by itself is not, like, abhorrent. For me, this rule was more like the straw that made me realize the camel's back is broken. It's not that Shadowrun 5e has this one specific rule, it's that Shadowrun 5e is a game that thinks that rules like this are meaningful and useful and should be included in the core rulebook, and it made me realize that I do not agree. This is not an indictment of Shadowrun, to be explicit, and I'm glad that granular and crunchy games are out there for people who want them.
That's kinda the thing with Shadowrun is that nobody's really ever played the same system when they say they've played Shadowrun, because everyone handwaves something, and it's not always the same thing.
Again, what the Matrix actually is and what it looks like and how you interact with it, and what the Astral Plane actually is and what it looks like and how you interact with it, are so poorly explained in the book(s) that I've had 3 different GM's with entirely different interpretations. And that's just the fluff! They don't agree with the mechanics, either! Everyone seems to run decking differently, and grenades, and a hundred other things. Some GM's ignore most if not all modifiers!
And while I do think that solidly belongs in the "Cons" column for Shadowrun, it's also kinda baked into the whole, "Whoa this shit looks complicated as fuck" reaction. It is complicated as fuck, so don't try swallowing that elephant. Decide how you're going to run it, how strictly you want to stick to which rules, talk to your players while they're doing chargen, come to an agreement on what the game is going to be, and go have fun.
Also, you don't have to play it, there's other cyberpunk games that are much simpler while still giving the gear porn that Shadowrun offers. I've played the Savage Worlds version of Interface Zero and it was a fucking blast. Simple fucking ruleset (Savage Worlds), plus pages and pages of gear to choose from. There is a massive table full of cars and trucks and drones and VTOL's and tanks and shit, it's great.
It's just, you know, if I'm slicing off (for example) the memory tests because they're goofy, the initiative system because it's too tedious, the damage system because it's too punishing, the hacking/astral projection systems because they're impossible to run, the [blah blah blah], then I might as well just start with a game that doesn't have those things to begin with.
Which, of course, is the point you make in the last paragraph!
Like I said, the rule itself was less a Single Point of Contention and more like an indicator of design philosophy. It suggested to me that I would probably not be interested in a lot of the other rules and design decisions they made.
Man I'm sorry to have taken up so much thread space on this silly topic, I'm done blabbing about it.
Ever.
Also, the initiative system is kinda awesome and I love it a lot. It seems goofy and difficult but it's pretty simple. I like the tug of war between defensive options and extra turns. Adds interesting strategies.
Shadowrun (and, sadly, I'm pretty much talking about Shadowrun in general) is absolutely more about making sure there is a rule at the uncertainty points in a process than it is about making sure that rule actually has any kind of benefits.
I’m thinking:
1. A character can have as many cybernetic prosthetics as they like without it affecting the game mechanics.
2. A character can have as many cybernetic augments as they can afford, with the caveat that you’ve got to get them fitted by a Megacorp and only they can maintain it. The catch is you’ve got to do something for the megacorp to even have the right to buy your gun arm. Augments do not reduce magic potential.
3. Players make two characters each, a runner and a shadow (support). Now you don’t have to bring the hacker to the field, that simple. You could even give the supports the preparation phase and the runners do the mission around what they’ve managed to survey/research/acquire for them.
4. Borrow the Blades flashback mechanic and use it to bounce between the runners and their shadows effect on the mission at hand.
5. Magic is alive, casting always has a consequence, but not much limit. Casting spells is solving one problem then running from the fallout. Training narrows the scope of your magic, giving some ways to dodge consequence, but literally anyone can try it in a pinch.
If you advance enough you might be able to get an augment from someone other than a megacorp, but I think the through-line of the game would be “How much should I sell-out to a megacorp to have the power to fight against them?”
Thinking also throwing in a bunch of Altered Carbon and an alternative to cybernetics which is binding daemons to your soul, perhaps as an allegory to radicalisation? Maybe another megacorp does that to keep it simple.
Ten page rough document cuz who’s playing it?
The 2e system is basically the same, but...more of it, backwards compatible. 3e was the same system with major updates. The 4e/5e/6e editions attracted the most contention as they were huge overhauls.
One of the reasons that I like the way Knowledge skills are done in SR6 (one of the good bits) is that you just tag that Knowledge skill on top of another existing roll. So using a Perception test + your Security Knowledge skill as a tag will allow you to scan the defenses for weaknesses. You can easily have lore checks be Memory checks tagged with a specific Knowledge skill. It's a small elegant mechanic in a sea of inelegant and crunchy unnecessary complexity.
SR 1st edition had fucking Staging rules (which is a gradient of how many successes it takes to stage up or down the degree of success), and it was a horrible mechanic.
SR 1 is definitely not compatible with SR 2 if you take Staging into account. SR2 also did away with Turn To Goo and some of the more egregious things (which were thrown back into the game in later editions *rolls eyes*).
Still remember a friend who played a SR1 character where they stacked up a ridiculous amount of dice on light pistol rolls. They were easy to resist and stage down but if he throws more dice than you've got body then you're in for a bad time friendo because they were just as easy to stage up.
Edit: weird, I don't get a notification that my post is too long or anything, but it just refuses to save and erases the whole post.
(aka parasyte Spider Goddess eggs) into his ideal self (the hero he always played in the movies). With help from a magic knife (reward for their mission),
they managed to free him. (Note: one of my players on discovering he owned a magic knife with an apparently intangible blade that caused no harm, immediately
tried to stab himself and various other people and creatures repeatedly with the knife. This knife would be one-hit kill if it hit somebody's heart,
but luckily he only tried hands, arms etc.)
The cured cowboy taught the PCs to shoot and fight better (because combat in D100 Call of Cthulhu takes ages otherwise) and returned to the movie.
On set the heroes immediately learned that now the lead actress was missing. One player would be later, so they had a little downtime play for an hour
or two, so we could work on backstory before going for the main mission of this session. The magic knife turned out to be ancient Egyptian in origin,
used to sacrifice animal's souls to the gods. Our "heroes" immediately tried to sacrifice a chicken to a god to see what would happen (my players are so the
worst or best people to play Call of Cthulhu). They also learn that the mummy of Akenaten has been recently bought by a wealthy person.
The fourth player arrived and on towards the main mission: convincing actress Alice Ferguson (roughly based on Mary Pickford) to stop badmouthing the
movie's director and retrieve actress Jane Ward (not based on anybody). Jane turned out to be have joined Alice for a weekend at a welness spa (which
was code for plastic surgery institution). Leaving most of their weapons behind, the team needed to use charm and intelligence to figure out what
was happening at the hospital. Alice was willing to talk to the investigators (though they didn't seem to notice that she never actually said a word and
all communication went through her assistant). Jane refused to speak to them, so they tried to go to her room. (as an injoke for myself all patients and
doctors at the hospital were named after characters in more or less famous horror movies, games or books. So we have a Phantom of the Opera, a missing
Dr. David Trent (who has just died in House on Haunted Hill), an unfortunate private from Johnny Got His Gun etc. My players aren't movie buffs and
all injokes were noted down as serious leads or red herrings. With some poking at the end, they did figure out the Phantom of the Opera.)
Jane also isn't in the Director's Office. One player played their hand too openly (mentioning the magic knife to the Institute's director who
immediately flees when the player's back is turned and he puts the hospital under magic lockdown).
In the cellar they find misshapen beings (failed patients).
Ray shoots the first one in reflex (poor guy), the second he figures out that it's not hostile and retreats. The third can talk and clues them into
a bit of the plot and begs to be killed. Ray obliges. The fourth failed patient freaks him out sufficiently that he just leaves. The fifth is relatively
normal and Ray releases him in return for information where to find the Director. Noping out on even visiting the remaining failed patients (there were
8 doors), the group enters the final door at the end of the corridor, leading to a temple (3 temples in 3 sessions. One might suspect a theme).
The Director runs, the 3 cultists attacks as well as the big boss of this session: The Failed God, a massive blob of flesh with one massive arm and
a face floating in its mass. The cultists are relatively easily dispatched (one is knocked out fortunately, which allows me some info dumps later
if they play their cards right). They manage to focus fire on the Failed God enough to kill it. One of them ties up the remaining cultist,
the others run into the backroom to find Jane, but instead find the Director, with a knife in his back: a similar magic knife as they possess.
Jane is found nearby, who quickly focuses them on their mission (returning her to the movie) instead of worrying about doctor's with magic knives
in their backs and other things that an innocent like girl would never be involved in. Really! Trust her!
The investigators leave with Jane and the tied-up cultist, leaving the Director's living but soulless husk behind as well as the failed experiments.
(Mission reward: attribute boosts for 2 players, magic item for a third. Fourth just gets skill points, but enough to make it feel like he;s
not missing out.)
Epilogue: the players get a chance to investigate the cultist and some themes and subtext of this game now just becomes text:
- WWI has undermined belief in the current gods (maybe more, but certainly for the people involved in this setting so far).
- Enough belief can turn anything into a god and Hollywood allows to raise people (or with special effects maybe even other things (see next session))
into gods.
- Being a good requires perfection though (or at least imperfections that are not as simple).
- The Director and his staff were trying to create a new god, first with the Failed God (powerful, but not inspiring), then with Alice (inspiring,
but for her eternal beauty she paid with her voice and with the new media of talkies, she couldn't inspire enough faith to transcend to godhood) and
then planning for Jane to become their new god. (There is more here, but Ray, stealing everything in sight, has the Director's notes so any things
they've missed, they will get next time).
- The Stars are right to create a new god, but the window is rapidly closing and there can only be 1 god.
(Alice kinda was forgotten about pretty soon as our investigators were laser-focused on retrieving Jane back on set. They never even noticed that
she never spoke to them or that they were rapidly losing Sanity Points every time they angered her and she looked at them. Yeah, that's a normal
person....) We'll see if this bites them in the back.
I don’t mind Wrath and Glory, but I want to see the Calixis Sector get some much needed love
Pre-Mission: one of the investigators got a magic item as a reward for their last mission. It was intended to be a magic mask that could impersonate
anybody, but the last mission and epilogue, would require not much social interactions, so it was changed to a little clay statue of a bird. (The investigator
was missing his stolen canary, Tweety, so now he had a living clay bird called Two-ty. I'm not ashamed to say that it took me less than a second to determine
that name when he said the name of his missing pet.)
Adventure "The Case of the Unseen Voice"
With my investigators back at the movie, only one person was missing: Diego, the sound engineer of the movie. A brilliant engineer anno 1929, he had arguments with
everybody on the movie when he started to make changes to the script and he got awfully insulted when others refused to follow his changes, taking all the sound
recordings of the movie with him.
The team went to his house, finding his script with changes and a single page with the word "Alele" and many variant spellings of it. Travelling to the Mojave desert,
they found out that Diego had moved his self-built highly advanced equipment to caves to get less disturbing sound when working on it. Que a map of "The Colossal Cave
" text adventure, spiced up with Rat Things and Ghouls and a couple of dead bodies to keep things interesting. They never figured out Alele's backstory, but it's
basically an evil spirit that (name meaning "Echo") that lures innocents into the caves and leaves them to die there. So a lot of Willpower saves required from our
team whenever they hear a faint sound. They luck out in their exploration, missing all the Ghouls and have only fight with a group of Rat-Things before running
into the make-shift labs. They notice that there are three tapes: one with the sound of the movie, one with a soft changting unknown text (too soft for two of the four
investigators to even hear) and a third tape that also seems to be just the sound of the movie.
Two corridors further, they found Diego, but did not get into combat with him or his spiritual master. They got a bit of a backstory dump here as they questioned him.
Alele was a spirit trying to use an old ritual (the same a few others were also trying) to become a new god, but they were only a disembodied voice, so
they needed a body; a character Diego was trying to write into the movie (the ritual requires basically something non-human appearing to a large group of humans, but
speaking to them with a voice. It only works for once though, so whatever being is first, wins.) Arthur tricked Diego into drinking some drugged wine (drugs and wine stolen from Dr. Hartman's office in the last session by Ray).
The team returned quickly home, not facing either Ghouls or Alele themselves and delivering all tapes and Diego on set. (Which opened the shot for my planned ending
for this mission). The team was rewarded their 10,000 dollars reward and also some free movie tickets. A few days later they visit the movie and they notice
that a certain cartoon mouse speaks and all people in the audience for a short moment belief in his existence. That night a black*&white cartoon sketch of a mouse visits
them in their dream, thanking them for this opportunity to ascend (with a small comment that that damned rabbit nearly got to ascend if he hadn't murdered him).
My players were smart enough to get what they had actually done. But he still needed them to do one thing: stopping the living planet (The New Sun, a result of Akenaten
's ritual thousnds of years ago) that was hurling towards Earth.
Adventure 5 and epilogue "The New Sun"
Originally it was intended that they would get an object at the end of each mission that would assemble together into a weapon that would combine with
Dr. Hubble's telescope to shoot down the living planet, but alas, my investigators were not investigating enough. So plan B: Assassins of the new Sun had tried
to kill the other candidate New Gods ascending or Old Gods trying to revive/boost themselves with the ritual. In Mammon's temple (now reachable via one of the
first Academy Awards, they found a giant body of Mammon, speared with a godslaying weapon. The death causing a financial depressing, but Mammon had more than one
body and his High Priest approached the investigators to use the access to the Soul of the World from his temple.
Inside the Soul of the World, the team meets the Mouse again and he offers them weapons to kill the soul of the New Soul, turning the creature about to crash into
Earth into boring rock again that would obey the laws of physics and just pass the world. The weapons were the weapons of the newly created Buck Rogers (explosive
bullet pistols and rocket-belts) though a few of the team decided to keep their preferred weapons.
The team were very lucky with their damage roles (an average of 17 on a d20), so they went quickly through the New Sun's HP (I thought 100HP should have been enough
but 200 would have been better). Oh well, we got a happy enough ending. The Black Rose as a movie flopped, but our investigators received their pay. The Mouse
quickly grew in power, but the investigators never approached him again. Mammon recovered from his serious injuries, though it cost a lot of people a lot of
money.
So overall: all the investigators were high STR, low INT type of characters, so a lot of planned content was never touched, but I'm happy that we got to the Rise of
the Mouse which was basically the point of the whole campaign. Also by mixing real history with complete nonsense, the players were kept guessing what
was real or not.
So our GM just came in with a premise, and we ran with it, made up some characters and started. The premise was like one of those movies where a group of teens is trying to make it to a big rock show, BUT it turns out the band that's playing is using their music to perform some kind of supernatural ritual to end the world. Set in the late 80s with a soundtrack of 80s metal music.
So our group of young heroes is heading to the concert of the hit metal band, sKUMbags, after discovering that their music carries subliminal sound waves. Their recent tour appears to be forming the shape of a serpent and the last show, in Boston, will finish the form. Based on our group brainstorming (working with the GM to expand the premise), if they finish their last show on this tour, the ritual will be completed and will cause mass hysteria and increased aggression, causing chaos and the downfall of humanity. The antagonists include a group of die hard fans, who have already succumbed to the music's brainwashing, and the band's manager who is a literal demon in the form of traditional 80s business man.
We're going to finish this one off next time we're down a player for our regular game. It was a lot of fun just flying by the seat of our pants.
OTOH, armor gave automatic successes in damage resistance tests, so it evened out. Overall, I found staging interesting, but just time consuming for not alot of gain.
I'm happy to be able to play a character again after DMing our last two RPG games (one oneshot and one 5-episode campaign), though it will be a while before we will get around to actually play.
Icon's play rules seem interesting so far: you have both an in-combat and an out-combat character sheet (I'm going for a Mighty Sealer (Mighty is basically intimidation/forceful/protective attitude out-combat, Sealer is a monk/cleric type class, using healing and debuffs). Combat is JRPG inspired and works on a square grid.
I already chose a character personality gimmick (that I will very surely regret 5 minutes into play) in that my character doesn't understand personal pronouns at all and is very interested to meet these I, You, He and She who have all genererated such conflicting reports.
Specifically looking for something to run an exploration based game around
I don’t want Starfinder or anything attached to existing IP
I was going to suggest Alien until I read the last part, it has a really good ruleset.
I've played Alien and while the ruleset is...okay, I'm a slut for expedient, well indexed rulebooks, and the Alien rulebook has so much fluff and fancy imagery between every subset of rules that I ran outside and howled and my family never saw me again.
Nobody ever saw me again.
Some say I'm still out there.
Half the reason I bought the book was because of the insanely detailed lore, but yeah, it is a bit tricky to hone in on the rule stuff.
Also funny how it details a ton of random other alien threats but doesn't mention the Yautja. :P
There's also a really cool bit on the Xeno's supposed homeworld, which sounds terrifying. Multiple queens and an empress on top of that, and who knows what kind of unseen horrific evolutions.
I was an ex-corp who basically was trying to make amends for all the horrible shit I've wrought. Or at least, that was what the crew understood.
The twist is that I was a clone of Carter Burke (Paul Reiser's character in Aliens), that I didn't know this, and that I was only told that my long-lost "Uncle Carter" died while trying to colonize on LV-426 when there was a nuclear explosion. Reactor must have malfunctioned or something.
Except I dug through the archives one day and found out that my "Uncle Carter" died because marines nuked the facility. So now I want revenge against the company.
GM and I had a lot of fun with how I kept helping the crew, but holding back this secret, while both the GM and I knew that my character was also heavily misled on his quest for justice.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
Uncharted Worlds is a PbtA game of interstellar adventure with an interesting pick-and-mix background system. It's not particularly wired to support actually charting worlds in the way that, say, The Perilous Wilds supports charting dungeons and wilderness for Dungeon World - it's more about playing a power game as a small player and rogue trader. If "exploration" just means "going new places and seeing what's there", it should do you fine.
I get the impression that there is off-world stuff, but that the PCs will never see it because they'll die from climate change or some scumbag's gun first.
I might just change over from Starfinder to that for my home campaign.
Traveler is very much about exploration. It's a little old-school system-wise but legitimately worth picking up just for the character creation, which is really its own little game in and of itself.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Stars Without Number. It's an OSR game with heavy Traveler influences.
Mothership is probably a bad fit for an exploration focus. You might also like some of the Golgotha stuff on DriveThru, but systems-wise it's not amazing. Many good ideas at the adventure level, however.
One of the big things is that this appears to be more of a splat book that offers lots of rules rewrites and additions, rather than requiring you to toss your old books away.
Interesting that C7 is making another 40K RPG, and not one compatible with Wrath and Glory. I suppose they didn't invent WAG, but they did fix it after Ulysses Speile made a mess of it.
As gorgeous as the Dark Heresy/Fantasy Flight RPG books were, I wasn't super impressed by the d100 system mechanics, so I'm wondering how close they're going to hew there.