As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/

[Roleplaying Games] New Year, New Dungeons, Same Ol' Bane

16667697172100

Posts

  • DevoutlyApatheticDevoutlyApathetic Registered User regular
    edited December 2016
    So, could someone spell out the outline of FFG's Star Wars system? Both in terms of what to buy and how it works?

    A core book and some dice. Age of Rebellion/Edge of the Empire/Force and Destiny are the core books. It uses funny dice that produce symbols (sometimes multiple) that work on one of three different axis. Dice pools are built based on your ability, training and circumstance then opposed by foes or narrative circumstance.

    You have success/failure, which is obvious.
    You have advantage/threat, which isn't what you were aiming for but is good/bad results.
    You have Triumph/Despair, which are success/failure PLUS something incredibly good/bad also happens.

    There are box sets for each of those three sublines that might give you a limited starting place and do come with dice IIRC. There's also a smartphone app from FFG and numerous web apps. The three lines focus on different things (War/Firefly/Jedi respectively) and different sorts of stories but can be made to work together fairly easily.

    DevoutlyApathetic on
    Nod. Get treat. PSN: Quippish
  • OptimusZedOptimusZed Registered User regular
    So, could someone spell out the outline of FFG's Star Wars system? Both in terms of what to buy and how it works?

    It uses proprietary narrative dice to allow for a sort of crossover of succes vs failure, good things vs bad things and, most potently, Triumph vs Despair. Every roll has the potential to produce an outcome that can change a scene or make something cool happen, but you've got to be on your toes as both a player and a GM to make sure it doesn't just dissolve into one or two really common, pre-defined options.

    Combat is very quick and brutal, and there's a fairly bright line between people who can hang in a fight and people who can't. We had characters mowing down whole platoons of stormtroopers and surviving heavy blaster fire for turns on end, and another that got punked first turn by a droid and spent the rest of the fight bleeding out.

    Characters are divided into what are essentially classes that map to Star Wars archetypes; Smuggler, Soldier, Tech, Guardian, etc. Each archetype gets 3 or 6 (depending on if their expansion has dropped yet) talent trees they can navigate down using XP to get thematic abilities.

    Getting started is really just a matter of picking up the main book and some dice. There are three "lines" of the game; Edge of the Empire for Han & Chewie fringer types, Age of Rebellion for military rebels and Force & Destiny for Jedi and other Force users. Everything you need to play is in any given one of those books, except the dice. Which will run you another $10-15 depending on where you get them.

    We're reading Rifts. You should too. You know you want to. Now With Ninjas!

    They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    So, could someone spell out the outline of FFG's Star Wars system? Both in terms of what to buy and how it works?

    There are three core books, each of which is focused around a different facet of Star Wars.

    Edge of the Empire is the "I wanna be Han Solo" book. Everyone is living on the fridges of galactic society: you're bounty hunters or colonists or smugglers or mercenaries, etc. Every character has Obligation, which is basically something that follows you around and shows up every once in a while to complicate things. You could owe a debt to a Hutt, or you could be on the run from a trumped-up criminal charge, or maybe you're trying to save up money for your family living back home.

    Age of Rebellion is the "I wanna join the Rebellion" book. Player characters are part of the Rebellion and the campaigns are focused on fighting the Empire. Now, that doesn't mean everyone are soldiers. You have spies and hackers and diplomats so there are all kinds of missions you can run other than just "shoot stuff to win fight." Player characters in AoR have Duty, which is a specific focus that character has that is their personal drive in how best to defeat the Empire. Duty is cool because it can be used to introduce complications into missions, where players have an option to pursue their individual goal, even if it's not an official objective.

    Force and Destiny is the "I wanna be a Jedi" book. All player characters made using this book are Force users, but a starting player from F&D is not going to be a Jedi. Think Luke Skywalker at the start of A New Hope, maybe. The mechanic that players use in F&D is Morality, which basically measure how attuned a player is to the light or dark side of the Force. It's a lot more granular than Duty or Obligation.


    The core books are all stand-alone but they all use the same rule system and are fully compatible. A starting character from any one of the core books will be on par with a starting character from another core book. The books have advice on how to combine characters from the different books, so it's a matter of determining what sort of game you want to run and figuring out what books to get from there. There are some options in EotE and AoR for a character to be Force sensitive so you don't need F&D if a player really wants to be a Force-user. Still, everything well balanced experience-wise so you won't end up with the problem from earlier SW RPGs where Force users got to be good at EVERYTHING. Becoming more proficient at the Force means you don't get the tricks from your non-Force class at the same time.


    The dice system is proprietary but is very intuitive to learn. Skill checks are made by figuring out the difficulty of the check and the ability of the check. You upgrade a number of dice based on skills and circumstances, and it's a simple matter of comparing results. In addition to success and failure there are threats and advantage, so, for example, you could miss shooting a Stormtrooper but could hit the door panel behind him, preventing reinforcements from entering. Or you could hack into the system and get the information you needed, but your hack is noticed by the security system and alarms go off.

  • BrodyBrody The Watch The First ShoreRegistered User regular
    IIRC the dice rolling is handled by generating/rolling a pool, and then comparing the various success/fail, advantage/threat, triumph/despair results, which are symbols with varying frequency depending on the color of the die.

    So you could roll 3 success, two fails, no advantage/threat, and a despair, which would mean you succeed, but things are still going south, which adds a lot of depth to typical pass/fail systems.

    "I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."

    The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson

    Steam: Korvalain
  • LanlaornLanlaorn Registered User regular
    Still, everything well balanced experience-wise so you won't end up with the problem from earlier SW RPGs where Force users got to be good at EVERYTHING. Becoming more proficient at the Force means you don't get the tricks from your non-Force class at the same time.

    Eh, I found it to be pretty far from a well balanced experience. Especially with regard to the Force, they were so terrified of making Jedi overpowered that it's quite the opposite, where gun-man is king of combat until the Jedi has hundreds of experience. Most of the F&D trees are watered down EotE or AoR trees with a couple bad Force talents and +1 Force Rating at the bottom.

    Basically, if you want to be a Jedi you are going to be paying a serious tax for the roleplaying privilege. It will take your Jedi Shadow more experience to do less than a Slicer, and so on, and fighting with a lightsaber is a huge tax in credits and experience that an entry level, basic starting gun surpasses.

    But even ignoring the F&D "I hope you're starting at 300 exp" classes, there are issues where some choices are just clear winners. Also the soak mechanic is poorly implemented, if one character decides to focus on it he can easily get to 12 soak or so, whereupon he is now immune to most blasters and anything that can hurt him one shots any other player. Plus it's incredibly foolish to let damage reduction be such a large fraction of HP, most characters will have between 10 and 20 HP, most guns hit for 8ish and it's possible to rock 10+ damage reduction, what? Cybernetics being limited by the soak stat, but being the best way to RAISE the soak stat, is also incredibly silly.

    I don't mean to badmouth the system too much, they tried a lot of new things and with a few gentlemen's agreements or houserules at the table you can straighten out most of the issues, but IMO Saga Edition remains the best Star Wars RPG in terms of game balance.

  • Albino BunnyAlbino Bunny Jackie Registered User regular
    What people are describing sounds alot like Blades In the Dark with a bit more complexity. Which sounds rad. Even if I really shouldn't buy more RPGs.

  • DevoutlyApatheticDevoutlyApathetic Registered User regular
    Lanlaorn wrote: »
    I don't mean to badmouth the system too much, they tried a lot of new things and with a few gentlemen's agreements or houserules at the table you can straighten out most of the issues, but IMO Saga Edition remains the best Star Wars RPG in terms of game balance.

    While I don't specifically have responses to your complaints, as far as RPGs try to be genre simulators, FFG produces more Star Wars feeling moments and stories than Saga ever did.

    Nod. Get treat. PSN: Quippish
  • OptimusZedOptimusZed Registered User regular
    Force users have access to the same guns as everyone else. And outside of the really combat focused specialties, the've got tricks that are just as good for using them.

    Hell, for the price of hitting the bottom row on a talent tree (roughly 100 XP) you can get your Force dice added to about a dozen skills via Enhance, Mind trick and a that power in the Seeker book. Incredibly relevant skills for adventuring Jedi, like Athletics, Pilot, Persuade, Deception, Perception, etc.

    Jedi aren't the powerhouses in FFG that they were in Saga (and they were hilariously broken in Saga, so your statement above makes little sense to me), but they're still good characters. They're just not god characters. That extra o makes all the difference.

    We're reading Rifts. You should too. You know you want to. Now With Ninjas!

    They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
  • OptimusZedOptimusZed Registered User regular
    Lanlaorn wrote: »
    I don't mean to badmouth the system too much, they tried a lot of new things and with a few gentlemen's agreements or houserules at the table you can straighten out most of the issues, but IMO Saga Edition remains the best Star Wars RPG in terms of game balance.

    While I don't specifically have responses to your complaints, as far as RPGs try to be genre simulators, FFG produces more Star Wars feeling moments and stories than Saga ever did.

    And I love Saga. But it was pretty terrible at feeling like Star Wars unless you forced it too somehow.

    We're reading Rifts. You should too. You know you want to. Now With Ninjas!

    They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
  • Albino BunnyAlbino Bunny Jackie Registered User regular
    Honestly, while the rest of the system seemed kinda needlessly complex, I quite like how the Mistborn RPG tackled a setting with hyper powered magic users that were rare. You could have as many mistborn or allomancers as you want but any one of those characters (while likely the best in the right situation) had less general talent in things like finance or combat. It made it so allomancers could be the heavy hitter aces of your group but they still need the other characters to get into the right spot to shine.

  • LanlaornLanlaorn Registered User regular
    edited December 2016
    OptimusZed wrote: »
    Force users have access to the same guns as everyone else. And outside of the really combat focused specialties, the've got tricks that are just as good for using them.

    Hell, for the price of hitting the bottom row on a talent tree (roughly 100 XP) you can get your Force dice added to about a dozen skills via Enhance, Mind trick and a that power in the Seeker book. Incredibly relevant skills for adventuring Jedi, like Athletics, Pilot, Persuade, Deception, Perception, etc.

    Jedi aren't the powerhouses in FFG that they were in Saga (and they were hilariously broken in Saga, so your statement above makes little sense to me), but they're still good characters. They're just not god characters. That extra o makes all the difference.

    In my experience with Saga the other classes easily were on par with Jedi in combat and typically had more skills to bring to bear outside of combat.

    Gun-man focusing on abusing the condition track was the single most OP build ever that could one-shot anything, Jedi had nothing nearly as broken, even the Skill Focus -> Move Object shenanigans that for some reason bother so many people.

    And yes, I agree, in the FFG games the "best" (most optimized) way to play a "Jedi" (Force enhanced gun-man) is to focus on guns and dice boosting Force talents and powers. But that's not what most people think of when they want to play a Jedi. Plus, the problem isn't even that Jedi are weak - they're comparatively very weak at the start of a campaign but if you play to the point of 300+ exp the Jedi do indeed become hilariously broken powerhouses. I mean, is that old D&D "quadratic wizard" thing fun for anyone?

    Again, I had fun with the system, I don't want to sound too critical, but mechanically IMHO there's a lot to be desired.

    Lanlaorn on
  • OptimusZedOptimusZed Registered User regular
    Move Object was only part of the problem with a well-built Saga Jedi. Someone focusing on it could make Use the Force their perception, pilot, persuade, stealth, physical defenses, etc. They could easily outperform a focused non-Jedi character at what was supposed to be their wheelhouse, because they could boil everything down to a Use the Force check that they could then burn a couple of feats on turning into some ridiculous bonus number. And this is before you start getting into the actual Force Powers that let Jedi break the rules of the game.

    The Quadratic Wizard problem was better in Saga than it was in 3rd Edition, but it was far worse in Saga than it is in FFG's game.

    We're reading Rifts. You should too. You know you want to. Now With Ninjas!

    They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
  • admanbadmanb unionize your workplace Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    ... anyways, it sounds like FFG Star Wars is a pretty cool marriage of PbtA-style narrative mechanics and tasty crunch, but like all crunchy games it suffers from potentially ugly balance problems.

  • LanlaornLanlaorn Registered User regular
    Eh, I still have to disagree with the quadratic wizard issue in FFG, I've played the late campaign Jedi, with enough Force Rating it's exactly what you're describing in Saga, dialed up to 11.

    You add Force Rating to damn near everything, to the point of doubling the skill values a non-Jedi could achieve, and to a wider variety of powers than Saga. One rank in Influence gives you +FR to every single social roll - 5 separate skills! Larger but still relatively small investments in Enhance and Foresee did the same for all physical skills and initiative. Other talents and powers let you do more but you had to Commit the Force Points so I won't even mention them - although they were still very good. And speaking of Move Object, it in particular became ludicrous once you could reliably hurl enormous Silhouette values.

    This whole argument is probably too subjective, relies too much on memories of tables were X seemed really broken compared to Y, but IMHO I was disappointed with the balance in Star Wars Force & Destiny as compared to Edge of the Empire and Age of Rebellion. I think if everyone in the party is playing F&D classes and wants to be Jedi then it's better, but if you mix EotE and AoR classes in or if someone just says whatever I want to full auto shoot people in the face... balance goes out the window.

  • ArdentArdent Down UpsideRegistered User regular
    Guys. FFG is entirely about sniping things out of people's hands.

    #justraynerthings

    Steam ID | Origin ID: ArdentX | Uplay ID: theardent | Battle.net: Ardent#11476
  • OptimusZedOptimusZed Registered User regular
    Agree to disagree, I guess. But you could apply UtF to virtually everything your character did in Saga after a while. It was crazy.

    You can do that to a degree in FFG, but it's still additive and less of your overall skill value in most cases than just straight trading out Athletics or Persuade or whatever for Use the Force.

    We're reading Rifts. You should too. You know you want to. Now With Ninjas!

    They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
  • jdarksunjdarksun Struggler VARegistered User regular
    edited December 2016
    Lanlaorn wrote: »
    This whole argument is probably too subjective, relies too much on memories of tables were X seemed really broken compared to Y, but IMHO I was disappointed with the balance in Star Wars Force & Destiny as compared to Edge of the Empire and Age of Rebellion. I think if everyone in the party is playing F&D classes and wants to be Jedi then it's better, but if you mix EotE and AoR classes in or if someone just says whatever I want to full auto shoot people in the face... balance goes out the window.
    My personal experience with four FFG SW campaigns disagrees with your assessment, but if you're looking for balance in a narrative game I think you're going to be disappointed regardless.

    I've had EotE games that had mostly scum & villainy (but one Exile), played an Emergent in an EotE game, ran AoR with a couple characters that had Force powers, and ran F&D for about a year with four Jedi, a droid that wanted to be a Jedi, and a pilot (who later switched to a Force user). The droid was arguably one of the strongest of the characters, but that campaign got to "everybody's the strongest guy in the room" levels of XP by the end.

    jdarksun on
  • McKidMcKid Registered User regular
    admanb wrote: »
    ... anyways, it sounds like FFG Star Wars is a pretty cool marriage of PbtA-style narrative mechanics and tasty crunch, but like all crunchy games it suffers from potentially ugly balance problems.

    Nah, not really. I'm not the biggest fan of FFG Star Wars, honestly. It almost feels like two games fused right in the middle, with a narrative type dice pool base mechanics on one side and a shitload of crunch that doesn't really reinforces the Star Wars tropes on the other side. Even if the narrative dice pool mechanics is different from a standard pass/fail, it is not PbtA-style in my opinion because it doesn't drive the action forward (i.e. it doesn't have the snowball effect in PbtA jargon). Also, I didn't find the combat mechanics to be quick at all!

    If I wanted to do a Star Wars game, I'd play Scum and Villainy, the Star Wars hack for Blades in the Dark.

  • AssuranAssuran Is swinging on the Spiral Registered User regular
    WEG d6 Star Wars is still the best Star Wars.

    (This has been your daily does of Get of my Lawn, featuring Assuran).

  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    The cool thing about the dice system for Star Wars is that the dice inform players and the GM how a roll succeeds or fails.

    You can know, from the results, that you only missed your shot because there was so much smoke in the room. Or you might know that the reason you convinced the guy to give you the information was because you had done your homework and read up on his family so you had extra leverage.

  • Endless_SerpentsEndless_Serpents Registered User regular
    McKid wrote: »

    If I wanted to do a Star Wars game, I'd play Scum and Villainy, the Star Wars hack for Blades in the Dark.

    Thank you for bringing that to my attention. That looks really cool!


    So, inevitably I've got to the point with this game I'm designing where I could play it with my friends, but I can't be arsed to finish it. Has anyone here completing the design process for a game? Any motivational speeches to hand?

    I suppose it doesn't matter, I was never going to sell it, but it would've been nice to do.

  • ArdentArdent Down UpsideRegistered User regular
    Assuran wrote: »
    WEG d6 Star Wars is still the best Star Wars.

    (This has been your daily does of Get of my Lawn, featuring Assuran).
    Hey I agree. But FFG Star Wars is still a decent game engine. And let's not pretend D6 Star Wars doesn't have its own #jediproblems.

    Steam ID | Origin ID: ArdentX | Uplay ID: theardent | Battle.net: Ardent#11476
  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    WEG d6 was unseated by FFG IMO but that's just MHO

  • FuselageFuselage Oosik Jumpship LoungeRegistered User regular
    McKid wrote: »

    If I wanted to do a Star Wars game, I'd play Scum and Villainy, the Star Wars hack for Blades in the Dark.

    Thank you for bringing that to my attention. That looks really cool!


    So, inevitably I've got to the point with this game I'm designing where I could play it with my friends, but I can't be arsed to finish it. Has anyone here completing the design process for a game? Any motivational speeches to hand?

    I suppose it doesn't matter, I was never going to sell it, but it would've been nice to do.

    I'm pretty Adam Koebel of Dungeon World and other stuff has said that as a nihilist he views creativity and the ideas that humans breathe into life as inspirational or something.

    I take it as "You have ideas, you can share them for other people to enjoy, and that's amazing and wonderful."

    o4n72w5h9b5y.png
  • Grunt's GhostsGrunt's Ghosts Registered User regular
    Fuselage wrote: »
    McKid wrote: »

    If I wanted to do a Star Wars game, I'd play Scum and Villainy, the Star Wars hack for Blades in the Dark.

    Thank you for bringing that to my attention. That looks really cool!


    So, inevitably I've got to the point with this game I'm designing where I could play it with my friends, but I can't be arsed to finish it. Has anyone here completing the design process for a game? Any motivational speeches to hand?

    I suppose it doesn't matter, I was never going to sell it, but it would've been nice to do.

    I'm pretty Adam Koebel of Dungeon World and other stuff has said that as a nihilist he views creativity and the ideas that humans breathe into life as inspirational or something.

    I take it as "You have ideas, you can share them for other people to enjoy, and that's amazing and wonderful."

    He doesn't believe that. He believes in nothing.

  • FuselageFuselage Oosik Jumpship LoungeRegistered User regular
    Fuselage wrote: »
    McKid wrote: »

    If I wanted to do a Star Wars game, I'd play Scum and Villainy, the Star Wars hack for Blades in the Dark.

    Thank you for bringing that to my attention. That looks really cool!


    So, inevitably I've got to the point with this game I'm designing where I could play it with my friends, but I can't be arsed to finish it. Has anyone here completing the design process for a game? Any motivational speeches to hand?

    I suppose it doesn't matter, I was never going to sell it, but it would've been nice to do.

    I'm pretty Adam Koebel of Dungeon World and other stuff has said that as a nihilist he views creativity and the ideas that humans breathe into life as inspirational or something.

    I take it as "You have ideas, you can share them for other people to enjoy, and that's amazing and wonderful."

    He doesn't believe that. He believes in nothing.

    He said something about it in one of his Office Hours videos.

    o4n72w5h9b5y.png
  • admanbadmanb unionize your workplace Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    Adam Koebel is not a nihilist. :P

  • ArdentArdent Down UpsideRegistered User regular
    DarkPrimus wrote: »
    WEG d6 was unseated by FFG IMO but that's just MHO
    But have you seen the Revised, Edited and Updated version?

    Steam ID | Origin ID: ArdentX | Uplay ID: theardent | Battle.net: Ardent#11476
  • Super NamicchiSuper Namicchi Orange County, CARegistered User regular
    weg does not use awesome funny dice

    therefore it is not the best

    kneel before the power of this completely iron-clad and objective argument

  • Albino BunnyAlbino Bunny Jackie Registered User regular
    Man, I'm re reading through Mistborn's rules again and:

    Dice pools with your result being whatever pair you get still seems a dumb resolution method.

    The book completely kills its pacing and readability. Every single paragraph of rules is followed by a (sometimes page long!) example. Which results in actually learning the rules being a Herculean task.

  • Kane Red RobeKane Red Robe Master of Magic ArcanusRegistered User regular
    Hey! I was pretty sure my group were the only people that had ever seen the Mistborn RPG, rad! We ended up houseruling the dice system to work closer to Yahtzee so people could get credit for straights and whatnot. Really we played fast and loose with the rules, seemed to work out okay as a fairly narrative system.

    As far as character balance our only complaint was that due to how downtime rules worked if your party had any amount of regular downtime the party Feruchemist has no real downside. So whoever that is can just become an unstoppable murder machine pretty much at will. Which tends to make any titular Mistborn around a bit sad.

  • Albino BunnyAlbino Bunny Jackie Registered User regular
    edited December 2016
    Honestly I think the only bit of the rules that stands out as 'neat' is the division of Strong/average/weak between powers/reputation/statistics as it allows for characters to be more varied in their ideas than most.

    EDIT: Also because my brain won't stop here's another 'how do you systemise X?' style question.

    How do you systemise over the top brawlers. Specifically in this case Anarchy Reigns (which really should've just kept to it's OST for the trailer). Though more generic ideas for making 'stylish, beefy fight mans' happen work well for me.

    For people who haven't played the games (shame on you) it centers around Bounty Hunters called Chasers and elite law makers dealing with a world gone to shit and chasing their man through a chaotic shit hole of a wild west that is any place outside of the functioning cities.

    So, big, dumb characters, bounty hunter as the main job description and a focus on excessive violence.

    My initial thoughts:

    1) Probably want a dice pool style set up. Something that lets you throw a fistful of them and probably a bunch of Strong Hits (roll 6, get a special effect) Fragged Empire style which help explode the dice pool/give stronger effects.

    2) Presumably you would wanna lean super hard into the murder hobo bit of DnD and have 90% of the characters stuff devoted to 'how do they murder people' while down playing such petty things as 'diplomacy' and 'engineering' as someone elses problem. To which I'd go with having a separate sheet that represents the group's reputations and talents as an agency. Essentially the voice in their ears that offers support. Key features of that would be (so far off the top of my head):

    a) Their reputations, keywords that define how the world at large views their group. If they get the job done without mess they could be professionals, if they punch everyone in sight they could be viewed as messy and so on. When ever they're dealing with people the GM just bounces off their reputations to decide how helpful/not helpful they are and the group can then spend cash (because cash is king) to grease them up the scale. So for example if the group had a reputation for being professional then the lawmaker might willingly volunteer information on where a mark was hiding in good faith that the team wouldn't just wreck the place to get at him.

    b) Their expenses and debts. Bounty hunting isn't really profitable work. Especially when you're violent assholes who like to drink and indulge in cybernetic enhancements. As a result you never track how much money your group has. Instead you track your expenses. You fill an expenses bar to heal up/rest, bribe people and travel (which is an arbitrary GM tool to drain money if needed). You drain it by successfully completing jobs. If you ever go over 10 then your group gains a debt. Where, as a group, you decide who you owe money and what they expect from you. Maybe the loan broker wants you to work for free for a job or two on their behalf. Maybe the mob boss you've being mooching off for a while now sends his boys in to try and make an example of you.

    3) Every character here is a freak in some way and are defined by that. Maybe they have a chainsaw for their arm, maybe they're mostly cybernetics at this point. No matter what they have some defining feature that defines their strong hits in combat.

    4) In terms of how combat works the main task is to create a system where 'just pick whatever option gives the highest dice pool' isn't always the best option. My initial thoughts are maybe some system where you can dizzy enemies to be able to do stronger stuff on them or knock them about into environmental stuff (I think vague area movement with 'props' defined in areas to highlight opportunities for silly environmental stuff would work).

    Albino Bunny on
  • Professor PhobosProfessor Phobos Registered User regular
    I am so tempted to back the Harlem Unbound kickstarter, despite it violating my no-unknown-publisher rule.

  • Albino BunnyAlbino Bunny Jackie Registered User regular
    Second Blades In the Dark session started with them robbing a shipment of family jewels just transported from Iruvia and finishing with one of the group captured by a ring of aristocrats who were managing the sale of the jewelry (which were really just smartly crafted spirit vessels to fool the spirit wardens) while the others scampered off into the sewers with half the loot.

    No one in the group is interested in trying to go back for the captured comrade after watching a guardsman get blown away and the ally get a knife to the gut as the warm up for negotiations.

    Honestly I think right now the biggest issues are:

    1) No one ever uses their ability to 'resist' bad situations

    2) I'm not really sure how detailed/stuff my descriptions should be, how many rolls an action should take and so on.

    3) It's kinda hard to keep the focus on everyone fairly when they're a group of Shadow's and two of them have zero for prowl. Especially for the Hound and Whisper who, if restricted to no killing, wind up sitting out most of the score.

  • RendRend Registered User regular
    Second Blades In the Dark session started with them robbing a shipment of family jewels just transported from Iruvia and finishing with one of the group captured by a ring of aristocrats who were managing the sale of the jewelry (which were really just smartly crafted spirit vessels to fool the spirit wardens) while the others scampered off into the sewers with half the loot.

    No one in the group is interested in trying to go back for the captured comrade after watching a guardsman get blown away and the ally get a knife to the gut as the warm up for negotiations.

    Honestly I think right now the biggest issues are:

    1) No one ever uses their ability to 'resist' bad situations

    2) I'm not really sure how detailed/stuff my descriptions should be, how many rolls an action should take and so on.

    3) It's kinda hard to keep the focus on everyone fairly when they're a group of Shadow's and two of them have zero for prowl. Especially for the Hound and Whisper who, if restricted to no killing, wind up sitting out most of the score.

    1) You could get in the habit of saying "this is the sort of thing you could resist. Would you like to?" Just to remind them that you just sort of SAY when bad stuff happens and they decide whether it actually does. I found this very helpful with one group I introduced the system to.

    3.1) Have them lead group checks, then the people with no prowl still get to prowl with everyone else? They're not going to be good solo commandos with no prowl but they won't get left behind either
    3.2) Why restrict them to no killing?

  • admanbadmanb unionize your workplace Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited December 2016
    1) I definitely remind my players on most significant consequences that they can resist. It's very anathematic to how people play RPGs -- no one hears "she stabs you in the stomach" and responds "no she doesn't" but that's how Blades works. The corollary to this is that Blades consequences should be frequent and harsh.

    2) Descriptions should be detailed enough to paint a vague picture of the environment and get your players imaginations going, but not so detailed that they don't feel comfortable asking questions to get more details when they need fictional advantage (such as, "are there light sources I could pull electroplasm from?").

    2.1) Requiring rolls is in large part a balancing act between pacing and danger. More rolls creates more opportunities for consequences and stress, but also puts more focus on smaller amounts of time so you need to be sure that interesting things are happening in that time. For example, forcing them to make a Prowl roll for every corridor they sneak through is dangerous, but not fun.

    admanb on
  • admanbadmanb unionize your workplace Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited December 2016
    3) One thing to note is that not everyone has to shine during the execution of the score. Blades discourages over-planning but that doesn't mean a Hound can't have tracked down a guard captain and made sure he would be unavailable during the job, or a Whisper can't have wrapped a ritual around the house to envelope it in silence.

    Encouraging flashbacks could help with this a lot.

    admanb on
  • FencingsaxFencingsax It is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understanding GNU Terry PratchettRegistered User regular
    Just got the Masks boom in the mail, and @MikeLL's art looks pretty great!

  • Albino BunnyAlbino Bunny Jackie Registered User regular
    The No killing was something leaned into for the second job because the crew leader (or at least the spider player) wanted to lean on being really sneaky, proper shadows.

    And yeah, part of what stunted participation was that we did have two group checks. Both of which ended in failure even with 2-1-0 as the prowl ratings.
    admanb wrote: »
    3) One thing to note is that not everyone has to shine during the execution of the score. Blades discourages over-planning but that doesn't mean a Hound can't have tracked down a guard captain and made sure he would be unavailable during the job, or a Whisper can't have wrapped a ritual around the house to envelope it in silence.

    Encouraging flashbacks could help with this a lot.

    I should definitely lean into this more and smaller scores to help build up the story I feel.

    Though the group might switch to Star Wars just because it's something more narratively immediate and easy to grasp.

  • OptimusZedOptimusZed Registered User regular
    Star Wars is amazing for getting people hitting the ground running. They've already spent decades world-building for you, and even if you haven't absorbed a ton of it, all it takes for a good baseline is growing up in a western country sometime in the last three decades.

    We're reading Rifts. You should too. You know you want to. Now With Ninjas!

    They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Sign In or Register to comment.