Eclipse Phase has been out for 8 years, and licensed as Creative Commons for all that time. No one used it to make another game. Compare that to Apocalypse World, which has been out for the same amount of time...
Even the designers think the character creation and morph-transfer processes are too complicated and that the skill list is redundant, they're doing do a new edition of their game to fix those problems! If you claim that EP's system is "easy" or "simple", fine, but I'll honestly doubt of your capability to assess a system's complexity.
I think this is an unfair comparison. EP's mechanics and how that game is built is done so because of the themes of it's world, one where body and mind are two separate things and body is interchangeable. PbtA is much more loose of a system and even when you go from Apocalypse World to Dungeon World to Monsterhearts and beyond, while the core dice mechanics are the same, each game is completely different in how it operates. With EP as it is, there aren't many reasons one might build a game where you are technically controlling two different things at once, my only thought is Mecha game or Autoracing game, or Star Trek kinda. So it not being used to spawn other games doesn't point to how bad it is, just that the game does what it does and there aren't many reasons to build a game based off it's system because of it's uniqueness.
If you leave out the transhumanist portion of the rules (the body switching and ego stuff), it's a pretty standard, if unnecessarily complex, percentage based system with attributes and skills and high tech weaponry and whatnot. If it was actually a decent chassis for a game, something else sci-fi would have been built on it. It's been up for grabs for almost a decade in the heyday of cottage RPGs, and nobody's done that.
I mean I quite like the Infinity RPG for the core D20 mechanic but the various little bit are a bit off for me in places
Plus character creation annoys me because even the non-random version is pretty restrictive in some ways. Like, I want to play a NeoTerran ex-Aristeia fighter, and couldn't take the Sports Personality career without rolling a 6 on the PanO table and then a 5 on the Ariadna table. Which is dumb. Just let people take whatever career they want, Jesus.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I mean, they also play RIFTS, so its not the complexity of the system, its the overwhelming despair aspect. Thats why I was thinking of porting it to more of a Culture background might work, where 99% of The Culture lives in a literal utopia, and you are just out trying to help other people.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
Eclipse Phase has been out for 8 years, and licensed as Creative Commons for all that time. No one used it to make another game. Compare that to Apocalypse World, which has been out for the same amount of time...
Even the designers think the character creation and morph-transfer processes are too complicated and that the skill list is redundant, they're doing do a new edition of their game to fix those problems! If you claim that EP's system is "easy" or "simple", fine, but I'll honestly doubt of your capability to assess a system's complexity.
I think this is an unfair comparison. EP's mechanics and how that game is built is done so because of the themes of it's world, one where body and mind are two separate things and body is interchangeable. PbtA is much more loose of a system and even when you go from Apocalypse World to Dungeon World to Monsterhearts and beyond, while the core dice mechanics are the same, each game is completely different in how it operates. With EP as it is, there aren't many reasons one might build a game where you are technically controlling two different things at once, my only thought is Mecha game or Autoracing game, or Star Trek kinda. So it not being used to spawn other games doesn't point to how bad it is, just that the game does what it does and there aren't many reasons to build a game based off it's system because of it's uniqueness.
If you leave out the transhumanist portion of the rules (the body switching and ego stuff), it's a pretty standard, if unnecessarily complex, percentage based system with attributes and skills and high tech weaponry and whatnot. If it was actually a decent chassis for a game, something else sci-fi would have been built on it. It's been up for grabs for almost a decade in the heyday of cottage RPGs, and nobody's done that.
Again, the adaptability of the game DOES NOT equal how good the game is. Technically, there are many d100 games out there, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer 40k Dark Heresy, Aces and Eights, ect. Which is what McKid was trying to imply.
Eclipse Phase has been out for 8 years, and licensed as Creative Commons for all that time. No one used it to make another game. Compare that to Apocalypse World, which has been out for the same amount of time...
Even the designers think the character creation and morph-transfer processes are too complicated and that the skill list is redundant, they're doing do a new edition of their game to fix those problems! If you claim that EP's system is "easy" or "simple", fine, but I'll honestly doubt of your capability to assess a system's complexity.
I think this is an unfair comparison. EP's mechanics and how that game is built is done so because of the themes of it's world, one where body and mind are two separate things and body is interchangeable. PbtA is much more loose of a system and even when you go from Apocalypse World to Dungeon World to Monsterhearts and beyond, while the core dice mechanics are the same, each game is completely different in how it operates. With EP as it is, there aren't many reasons one might build a game where you are technically controlling two different things at once, my only thought is Mecha game or Autoracing game, or Star Trek kinda. So it not being used to spawn other games doesn't point to how bad it is, just that the game does what it does and there aren't many reasons to build a game based off it's system because of it's uniqueness.
If you leave out the transhumanist portion of the rules (the body switching and ego stuff), it's a pretty standard, if unnecessarily complex, percentage based system with attributes and skills and high tech weaponry and whatnot. If it was actually a decent chassis for a game, something else sci-fi would have been built on it. It's been up for grabs for almost a decade in the heyday of cottage RPGs, and nobody's done that.
Again, the adaptability of the game DOES NOT equal how good the game is. Technically, there are many d100 games out there, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer 40k Dark Heresy, Aces and Eights, ect. Which is what McKid was trying to imply.
I agree with the bolded. Eclipse Phase is plenty adaptable. It's just not very good.
Eclipse Phase has been out for 8 years, and licensed as Creative Commons for all that time. No one used it to make another game. Compare that to Apocalypse World, which has been out for the same amount of time...
Even the designers think the character creation and morph-transfer processes are too complicated and that the skill list is redundant, they're doing do a new edition of their game to fix those problems! If you claim that EP's system is "easy" or "simple", fine, but I'll honestly doubt of your capability to assess a system's complexity.
I think this is an unfair comparison. EP's mechanics and how that game is built is done so because of the themes of it's world, one where body and mind are two separate things and body is interchangeable. PbtA is much more loose of a system and even when you go from Apocalypse World to Dungeon World to Monsterhearts and beyond, while the core dice mechanics are the same, each game is completely different in how it operates. With EP as it is, there aren't many reasons one might build a game where you are technically controlling two different things at once, my only thought is Mecha game or Autoracing game, or Star Trek kinda. So it not being used to spawn other games doesn't point to how bad it is, just that the game does what it does and there aren't many reasons to build a game based off it's system because of it's uniqueness.
If you leave out the transhumanist portion of the rules (the body switching and ego stuff), it's a pretty standard, if unnecessarily complex, percentage based system with attributes and skills and high tech weaponry and whatnot. If it was actually a decent chassis for a game, something else sci-fi would have been built on it. It's been up for grabs for almost a decade in the heyday of cottage RPGs, and nobody's done that.
I mean who says it isn't a decent chassis for a game?
I mean, they also play RIFTS, so its not the complexity of the system, its the overwhelming despair aspect. Thats why I was thinking of porting it to more of a Culture background might work, where 99% of The Culture lives in a literal utopia, and you are just out trying to help other people.
Yeah it's a horror game
It's closer to Delta Green and CoC than Transhuman Space, I think
I mean I quite like the Infinity RPG for the core D20 mechanic but the various little bit are a bit off for me in places
Plus character creation annoys me because even the non-random version is pretty restrictive in some ways. Like, I want to play a NeoTerran ex-Aristeia fighter, and couldn't take the Sports Personality career without rolling a 6 on the PanO table and then a 5 on the Ariadna table. Which is dumb. Just let people take whatever career they want, Jesus.
If you're going off the online character creator I'm 90% certain it's incorrect and there's no RAW restriction on hazarding faction careers. You can absolutely have your Aristeia fighter.
I think character creation in that systems super interesting because (for the 6 LP version) you basically pick between being a more average/jack of all trades character but having more infinity points/resources/attributes or being a hyper specialized person.
Plus in general other than signature skills and going deep on one skills talents (for XP saving purposes) character creation doesn't have a *massive* impact in Infinity. You're usually looking at like a 15% difference between 'person who had this skill come up twice due to random chance' and the guy who spent LP steering towards it. It's kinda one of the interesting bits that 'being good' at a task is much less defined by how reliable you are to do it (most characters at worst are going to have a 40% chance of rolling a success then hyper focused ones will hit like 80%) but how likely you are to exceed or do it in a way that creates further benefits from focus and talents.
Eclipse Phase has been out for 8 years, and licensed as Creative Commons for all that time. No one used it to make another game. Compare that to Apocalypse World, which has been out for the same amount of time...
Even the designers think the character creation and morph-transfer processes are too complicated and that the skill list is redundant, they're doing do a new edition of their game to fix those problems! If you claim that EP's system is "easy" or "simple", fine, but I'll honestly doubt of your capability to assess a system's complexity.
I think this is an unfair comparison. EP's mechanics and how that game is built is done so because of the themes of it's world, one where body and mind are two separate things and body is interchangeable. PbtA is much more loose of a system and even when you go from Apocalypse World to Dungeon World to Monsterhearts and beyond, while the core dice mechanics are the same, each game is completely different in how it operates. With EP as it is, there aren't many reasons one might build a game where you are technically controlling two different things at once, my only thought is Mecha game or Autoracing game, or Star Trek kinda. So it not being used to spawn other games doesn't point to how bad it is, just that the game does what it does and there aren't many reasons to build a game based off it's system because of it's uniqueness.
If you leave out the transhumanist portion of the rules (the body switching and ego stuff), it's a pretty standard, if unnecessarily complex, percentage based system with attributes and skills and high tech weaponry and whatnot. If it was actually a decent chassis for a game, something else sci-fi would have been built on it. It's been up for grabs for almost a decade in the heyday of cottage RPGs, and nobody's done that.
Again, the adaptability of the game DOES NOT equal how good the game is. Technically, there are many d100 games out there, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer 40k Dark Heresy, Aces and Eights, ect. Which is what McKid was trying to imply.
I agree with the bolded. Eclipse Phase is plenty adaptable. It's just not very good.
And I'll disagree with the last part. EP is good, sure it's a lot to take in at once, but I think for what the narrative mechanics of it's world is and how that gets translated into game mechanics it's good. We saw that in a less complex system it loses it's feel when they tried to do the Transhumanity's FATE version. I think it could possibly work in a Cortex system, like the Firefly RPG, but I think that engine is under MWP's thumb and not CC.
I mean I quite like the Infinity RPG for the core D20 mechanic but the various little bit are a bit off for me in places
Plus character creation annoys me because even the non-random version is pretty restrictive in some ways. Like, I want to play a NeoTerran ex-Aristeia fighter, and couldn't take the Sports Personality career without rolling a 6 on the PanO table and then a 5 on the Ariadna table. Which is dumb. Just let people take whatever career they want, Jesus.
If you're going off the online character creator I'm 90% certain it's incorrect and there's no RAW restriction on hazarding faction careers. You can absolutely have your Aristeia fighter.
I think character creation in that systems super interesting because (for the 6 LP version) you basically pick between being a more average/jack of all trades character but having more infinity points/resources/attributes or being a hyper specialized person.
Plus in general other than signature skills and going deep on one skills talents (for XP saving purposes) character creation doesn't have a *massive* impact in Infinity. You're usually looking at like a 15% difference between 'person who had this skill come up twice due to random chance' and the guy who spent LP steering towards it. It's kinda one of the interesting bits that 'being good' at a task is much less defined by how reliable you are to do it (most characters at worst are going to have a 40% chance of rolling a success then hyper focused ones will hit like 80%) but how likely you are to exceed or do it in a way that creates further benefits from focus and talents.
To be honest I am, and I'm pretty sure that's buggy as shit. I don't really like the hazarding a career thing, like, I don't want to roll to see if I'm allowed to take the career that creates the character I want? Lifepath and random chargen are things I'm generally not hugely fond of. Sometimes I'll use a lifepath system to randomly roll up a character and then take that concept and use it as a base to actually create the character I want with a point-buy system.
The cor game is pretty solid, like I said. The whole roll D6s and look for 1s, 2s and 6s is a bit clunky and weird IMO, but generally it's fine. I feel like the basic concept I would have gone in for, and the specifics I'd have changed quite a bit in places had I actually made the game, but it works okay. And some of the stuff is pretty cool, plus the setting is worth it IMO. I have actually run a short Infinity game with Eclipse Phase and that worked out pretty well, even if I basically had to hack out massive chunks of the available equipment and morphs and stuff.
I mean I quite like the Infinity RPG for the core D20 mechanic but the various little bit are a bit off for me in places
Plus character creation annoys me because even the non-random version is pretty restrictive in some ways. Like, I want to play a NeoTerran ex-Aristeia fighter, and couldn't take the Sports Personality career without rolling a 6 on the PanO table and then a 5 on the Ariadna table. Which is dumb. Just let people take whatever career they want, Jesus.
If you're going off the online character creator I'm 90% certain it's incorrect and there's no RAW restriction on hazarding faction careers. You can absolutely have your Aristeia fighter.
I think character creation in that systems super interesting because (for the 6 LP version) you basically pick between being a more average/jack of all trades character but having more infinity points/resources/attributes or being a hyper specialized person.
Plus in general other than signature skills and going deep on one skills talents (for XP saving purposes) character creation doesn't have a *massive* impact in Infinity. You're usually looking at like a 15% difference between 'person who had this skill come up twice due to random chance' and the guy who spent LP steering towards it. It's kinda one of the interesting bits that 'being good' at a task is much less defined by how reliable you are to do it (most characters at worst are going to have a 40% chance of rolling a success then hyper focused ones will hit like 80%) but how likely you are to exceed or do it in a way that creates further benefits from focus and talents.
To be honest I am, and I'm pretty sure that's buggy as shit. I don't really like the hazarding a career thing, like, I don't want to roll to see if I'm allowed to take the career that creates the character I want? Lifepath and random chargen are things I'm generally not hugely fond of. Sometimes I'll use a lifepath system to randomly roll up a character and then take that concept and use it as a base to actually create the character I want with a point-buy system.
The cor game is pretty solid, like I said. The whole roll D6s and look for 1s, 2s and 6s is a bit clunky and weird IMO, but generally it's fine. I feel like the basic concept I would have gone in for, and the specifics I'd have changed quite a bit in places had I actually made the game, but it works okay. And some of the stuff is pretty cool, plus the setting is worth it IMO. I have actually run a short Infinity game with Eclipse Phase and that worked out pretty well, even if I basically had to hack out massive chunks of the available equipment and morphs and stuff.
Hazarding a career is something I'd probably happily let players fudge or at least house rule it so they can spend LP to lower the difficulty after rolling for the career. I get why it's a mechanic (specialized characters can pick, others should roll on faction/general career) but the stat gains of certain high end careers are so high that missing out on them for your first career choice seems not ideal.
I think the Lifepath system is kinda interesting but I'm glad they provided the 12LP alternative for people who dislike random stuff. When I'm mucking around with the (super bugged) character creator I tend to spend LP on Faction, planet, education and first career. Considering that those are what set your signature skills.
I mean who says it isn't a decent chassis for a game?
I've played it and run it loads, worked great
Plenty of people have run terrible things and had a fine time. The reasoning being presented is that Eclipse Phase is Creative Commons and nobody wants to touch it for another game. Even the designers are now going back and reworking it. Annecdotes about personal enjoyment don't speak to any of that.
And I'll disagree with the last part. EP is good, sure it's a lot to take in at once, but I think for what the narrative mechanics of it's world is and how that gets translated into game mechanics it's good. We saw that in a less complex system it loses it's feel when they tried to do the Transhumanity's FATE version. I think it could possibly work in a Cortex system, like the Firefly RPG, but I think that engine is under MWP's thumb and not CC.
The Fate conversion was deeply uninspired. To the point where I sort of question whether the people doing it had much investment in either the property or the Fate system. There are great ways to do EP evocatively in Fate, they just didn't use any of them.
I mean, just renaming the stress tracks to "ego" and "morph" would have been something.
Eclipse Phase has been out for 8 years, and licensed as Creative Commons for all that time. No one used it to make another game. Compare that to Apocalypse World, which has been out for the same amount of time...
Even the designers think the character creation and morph-transfer processes are too complicated and that the skill list is redundant, they're doing do a new edition of their game to fix those problems! If you claim that EP's system is "easy" or "simple", fine, but I'll honestly doubt of your capability to assess a system's complexity.
I think this is an unfair comparison. EP's mechanics and how that game is built is done so because of the themes of it's world, one where body and mind are two separate things and body is interchangeable. PbtA is much more loose of a system and even when you go from Apocalypse World to Dungeon World to Monsterhearts and beyond, while the core dice mechanics are the same, each game is completely different in how it operates. With EP as it is, there aren't many reasons one might build a game where you are technically controlling two different things at once, my only thought is Mecha game or Autoracing game, or Star Trek kinda. So it not being used to spawn other games doesn't point to how bad it is, just that the game does what it does and there aren't many reasons to build a game based off it's system because of it's uniqueness.
If you leave out the transhumanist portion of the rules (the body switching and ego stuff), it's a pretty standard, if unnecessarily complex, percentage based system with attributes and skills and high tech weaponry and whatnot. If it was actually a decent chassis for a game, something else sci-fi would have been built on it. It's been up for grabs for almost a decade in the heyday of cottage RPGs, and nobody's done that.
Again, the adaptability of the game DOES NOT equal how good the game is. Technically, there are many d100 games out there, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer 40k Dark Heresy, Aces and Eights, ect. Which is what McKid was trying to imply.
It's not only a question of adaptability. Fate is way more adaptable than AW, yet it is the latter that became the lingua franca of indie rpgs. Because it's a better game. For all the reasons mentionned last page!
Especially as it's basically a serial numbers filed off copy of Call of Cthulhu
Which loads of people do use
It's not chaosium Chthullu. It's actually better than that. (I loathe that game.)
That doesn't change the fact that it's a free range toolset for hard sci fi that, in the course of 8 years of the highest small scale RPG output in history, nobody co-opted.
Eclipse Phase has been out for 8 years, and licensed as Creative Commons for all that time. No one used it to make another game. Compare that to Apocalypse World, which has been out for the same amount of time...
Even the designers think the character creation and morph-transfer processes are too complicated and that the skill list is redundant, they're doing do a new edition of their game to fix those problems! If you claim that EP's system is "easy" or "simple", fine, but I'll honestly doubt of your capability to assess a system's complexity.
I think this is an unfair comparison. EP's mechanics and how that game is built is done so because of the themes of it's world, one where body and mind are two separate things and body is interchangeable. PbtA is much more loose of a system and even when you go from Apocalypse World to Dungeon World to Monsterhearts and beyond, while the core dice mechanics are the same, each game is completely different in how it operates. With EP as it is, there aren't many reasons one might build a game where you are technically controlling two different things at once, my only thought is Mecha game or Autoracing game, or Star Trek kinda. So it not being used to spawn other games doesn't point to how bad it is, just that the game does what it does and there aren't many reasons to build a game based off it's system because of it's uniqueness.
If you leave out the transhumanist portion of the rules (the body switching and ego stuff), it's a pretty standard, if unnecessarily complex, percentage based system with attributes and skills and high tech weaponry and whatnot. If it was actually a decent chassis for a game, something else sci-fi would have been built on it. It's been up for grabs for almost a decade in the heyday of cottage RPGs, and nobody's done that.
Again, the adaptability of the game DOES NOT equal how good the game is. Technically, there are many d100 games out there, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer 40k Dark Heresy, Aces and Eights, ect. Which is what McKid was trying to imply.
It's not only a question of adaptability. Fate is way more adaptable than AW, yet it is the latter that became the lingua franca of indie rpgs. Because it's a better game. For all the reasons mentionned last page!
For a long time, Fate was the lingua franca of indie RPGs
I lost count of how many games basically just used Fate rather than making their own system
Eclipse Phase has been out for 8 years, and licensed as Creative Commons for all that time. No one used it to make another game. Compare that to Apocalypse World, which has been out for the same amount of time...
Even the designers think the character creation and morph-transfer processes are too complicated and that the skill list is redundant, they're doing do a new edition of their game to fix those problems! If you claim that EP's system is "easy" or "simple", fine, but I'll honestly doubt of your capability to assess a system's complexity.
I think this is an unfair comparison. EP's mechanics and how that game is built is done so because of the themes of it's world, one where body and mind are two separate things and body is interchangeable. PbtA is much more loose of a system and even when you go from Apocalypse World to Dungeon World to Monsterhearts and beyond, while the core dice mechanics are the same, each game is completely different in how it operates. With EP as it is, there aren't many reasons one might build a game where you are technically controlling two different things at once, my only thought is Mecha game or Autoracing game, or Star Trek kinda. So it not being used to spawn other games doesn't point to how bad it is, just that the game does what it does and there aren't many reasons to build a game based off it's system because of it's uniqueness.
If you leave out the transhumanist portion of the rules (the body switching and ego stuff), it's a pretty standard, if unnecessarily complex, percentage based system with attributes and skills and high tech weaponry and whatnot. If it was actually a decent chassis for a game, something else sci-fi would have been built on it. It's been up for grabs for almost a decade in the heyday of cottage RPGs, and nobody's done that.
Again, the adaptability of the game DOES NOT equal how good the game is. Technically, there are many d100 games out there, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer 40k Dark Heresy, Aces and Eights, ect. Which is what McKid was trying to imply.
It's not only a question of adaptability. Fate is way more adaptable than AW, yet it is the latter that became the lingua franca of indie rpgs. Because it's a better game. For all the reasons mentionned last page!
For a long time, Fate was the lingua franca of indie RPGs
I lost count of how many games basically just used Fate rather than making their own system
Yes, for the like 4 years between the release of Spirit of the Century and the release of Apocalypse World.
I mean who says it isn't a decent chassis for a game?
I've played it and run it loads, worked great
Plenty of people have run terrible things and had a fine time. The reasoning being presented is that Eclipse Phase is Creative Commons and nobody wants to touch it for another game. Even the designers are now going back and reworking it. Annecdotes about personal enjoyment don't speak to any of that.
Again, the adaptability of the game DOES NOT equal how good the game is.
Quoting that again because you are saying the same thing again.
Just because they are going back to rework it doesn't mean that the original system is bad. It just means that they are reworking it. Is a 69 Mustang a bad car because Ford has reworked the Mustang every year since then? No, it's just that we have built better, faster, more fuel efferent Mustangs every year (Ok, 71-74 were bad Mustangs... but the concept still counts). The game has been out for 8 years now, and new ideas and mechanics have come forth in those 8 years. It would be stupid not to address that and try to incorporate those new ideas into your game if it makes it run better. Look at the difference between 13th Age and D&D 5E. 13th Age is built from the concepts of 3rd and 4th Edition D&D with some of the indie game ideas mixed in while 5E decided not to grow the brand forward mechanically but instead try to recapture the older games' magic that kinda disappeared in 4E. And we can see the results of those decisions. But because 13th Age exists doesn't mean that 4E or 3rd/3.5 were bad games, it just means that those kinds of game have evolved. The Original Legend of Zelda isn't a shit game suddenly because Breath of the Wind is out, it just means that the mechanics have evolved and the designers want to evolve with them.
Eclipse Phase has been out for 8 years, and licensed as Creative Commons for all that time. No one used it to make another game. Compare that to Apocalypse World, which has been out for the same amount of time...
Even the designers think the character creation and morph-transfer processes are too complicated and that the skill list is redundant, they're doing do a new edition of their game to fix those problems! If you claim that EP's system is "easy" or "simple", fine, but I'll honestly doubt of your capability to assess a system's complexity.
I think this is an unfair comparison. EP's mechanics and how that game is built is done so because of the themes of it's world, one where body and mind are two separate things and body is interchangeable. PbtA is much more loose of a system and even when you go from Apocalypse World to Dungeon World to Monsterhearts and beyond, while the core dice mechanics are the same, each game is completely different in how it operates. With EP as it is, there aren't many reasons one might build a game where you are technically controlling two different things at once, my only thought is Mecha game or Autoracing game, or Star Trek kinda. So it not being used to spawn other games doesn't point to how bad it is, just that the game does what it does and there aren't many reasons to build a game based off it's system because of it's uniqueness.
If you leave out the transhumanist portion of the rules (the body switching and ego stuff), it's a pretty standard, if unnecessarily complex, percentage based system with attributes and skills and high tech weaponry and whatnot. If it was actually a decent chassis for a game, something else sci-fi would have been built on it. It's been up for grabs for almost a decade in the heyday of cottage RPGs, and nobody's done that.
Again, the adaptability of the game DOES NOT equal how good the game is. Technically, there are many d100 games out there, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer 40k Dark Heresy, Aces and Eights, ect. Which is what McKid was trying to imply.
It's not only a question of adaptability. Fate is way more adaptable than AW, yet it is the latter that became the lingua franca of indie rpgs. Because it's a better game. For all the reasons mentionned last page!
For a long time, Fate was the lingua franca of indie RPGs
I lost count of how many games basically just used Fate rather than making their own system
Yes, for the like 4 years between the release of Spirit of the Century and the release of Apocalypse World.
I mean who says it isn't a decent chassis for a game?
I've played it and run it loads, worked great
Plenty of people have run terrible things and had a fine time. The reasoning being presented is that Eclipse Phase is Creative Commons and nobody wants to touch it for another game. Even the designers are now going back and reworking it. Annecdotes about personal enjoyment don't speak to any of that.
Again, the adaptability of the game DOES NOT equal how good the game is.
Quoting that again because you are saying the same thing again.
Just because they are going back to rework it doesn't mean that the original system is bad. It just means that they are reworking it. Is a 69 Mustang a bad car because Ford has reworked the Mustang every year since then? No, it's just that we have built better, faster, more fuel efferent Mustangs every year (Ok, 71-74 were bad Mustangs... but the concept still counts). The game has been out for 8 years now, and new ideas and mechanics have come forth in those 8 years. It would be stupid not to address that and try to incorporate those new ideas into your game if it makes it run better. Look at the difference between 13th Age and D&D 5E. 13th Age is built from the concepts of 3rd and 4th Edition D&D with some of the indie game ideas mixed in while 5E decided not to grow the brand forward mechanically but instead try to recapture the older games' magic that kinda disappeared in 4E. And we can see the results of those decisions. But because 13th Age exists doesn't mean that 4E or 3rd/3.5 were bad games, it just means that those kinds of game have evolved. The Original Legend of Zelda isn't a shit game suddenly because Breath of the Wind is out, it just means that the mechanics have evolved and the designers want to evolve with them.
As I said earlier, we disagree on how adaptable the basic bits of the EP system are. If you strip out the body swapping and turn them into alien species or something instead, it's pretty standard hard sci fi. In fact, it was praised as such last page. That's not a genre that's absent in the RPG zeitgeist, at all. But the creative commons ruleset that exists for it remains unused. It's got attributes, skills, gear and a bunch of really grisly treatments of sci-fi hazards. It's perfect for any number of adaptations but nobody wants to do that, because besides being adaptable and mathy it's really nothing to write home about. Rather than using this thing that's been layed out on a platter for them, small time designers are choosing instead to spend tons of time writing their own system.
I agree that the evolution of a game line isn't immediately a black mark. But it does mean that things have been identified as being not great in some areas. And this isn't like the bigger corporate games that use turnover to drive sales. The market share for Eclipse Phase is comparatively rather small and pretty static. They're just clamoring for a better thing to run the game in. That's why we got the Fate conversion as a stopgap.
I mean who says it isn't a decent chassis for a game?
I've played it and run it loads, worked great
Plenty of people have run terrible things and had a fine time. The reasoning being presented is that Eclipse Phase is Creative Commons and nobody wants to touch it for another game. Even the designers are now going back and reworking it. Annecdotes about personal enjoyment don't speak to any of that.
Again, the adaptability of the game DOES NOT equal how good the game is.
Quoting that again because you are saying the same thing again.
Just because they are going back to rework it doesn't mean that the original system is bad. It just means that they are reworking it. Is a 69 Mustang a bad car because Ford has reworked the Mustang every year since then? No, it's just that we have built better, faster, more fuel efferent Mustangs every year (Ok, 71-74 were bad Mustangs... but the concept still counts). The game has been out for 8 years now, and new ideas and mechanics have come forth in those 8 years. It would be stupid not to address that and try to incorporate those new ideas into your game if it makes it run better. Look at the difference between 13th Age and D&D 5E. 13th Age is built from the concepts of 3rd and 4th Edition D&D with some of the indie game ideas mixed in while 5E decided not to grow the brand forward mechanically but instead try to recapture the older games' magic that kinda disappeared in 4E. And we can see the results of those decisions. But because 13th Age exists doesn't mean that 4E or 3rd/3.5 were bad games, it just means that those kinds of game have evolved. The Original Legend of Zelda isn't a shit game suddenly because Breath of the Wind is out, it just means that the mechanics have evolved and the designers want to evolve with them.
As I said earlier, we disagree on how adaptable the basic bits of the EP system are. If you strip out the body swapping and turn them into alien species or something instead, it's pretty standard hard sci fi. In fact, it was praised as such last page. That's not a genre that's absent in the RPG zeitgeist, at all. But the creative commons ruleset that exists for it remains unused. It's got attributes, skills, gear and a bunch of really grisly treatments of sci-fi hazards. It's perfect for any number of adaptations but nobody wants to do that, because besides being adaptable and mathy it's really nothing to write home about. Rather than using this thing that's been layed out on a platter for them, small time designers are choosing instead to spend tons of time writing their own system.
I agree that the evolution of a game line isn't immediately a black mark. But it does mean that things have been identified as being not great in some areas. And this isn't like the bigger corporate games that use turnover to drive sales. The market share for Eclipse Phase is comparatively rather small and pretty static. They're just clamoring for a better thing to run the game in. That's why we got the Fate conversion as a stopgap.
I think the FATE thing was a responds to the fact that crunchy games like EP weren't as popular anymore. Which I think is going to change. I've seen people talking about missing the crunchiness that games like FATE and PbtA aren't giving them so I expect to see a rise in the customization and crunchiness in games in a few years. Maybe not as crunchy as Shadowrun or even D&D, but maybe much higher than the current popular games.
I genuinely think Infinity seems to hit the middle ground pretty well. Though I'm still not 100% sure from the rules how infowar and psywar stuff is supposed to work.
Fate isn't a crunch lite system. It's a crunch-optional system.
Other than that, I don't know how the zeitgeist is gonna turn. It seems like there's still a shiny new PbtA game dropping every other month or so, though. Star Wars going narrative in a big way and the same company probably doing something similar with L5R leaves that crunchy space open for the little guys, I guess.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds.2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
edited May 2017
Aside from the general brilliance of the PbtA system I think one of the most important things Apocalypse World did was demonstrate how powerful a focused, streamlined system can be. The issue with games like Shadowrun or Pathfinder aren't that the core rules are too complicated, it's all the extra rules they piled in until it was fit to burst. On the flip side you have games like Burning Wheel and Torchbearer, which arguably demand more from their players then SR/PF post-character-creation, but with far fewer pages of rules.
Star Wars feels like a weird mix where it's the narrative core of a PbtA game, but with the kitchen sink design of a Shadowrun.
Moves in the PbtA systems are just a stroke of brilliance. You can do these half dozen things, plus some stuff that's on your character sheet, all of which is genre appropriate. If it's not covered by a move, it's probably not worth worrying about and if it comes up it either just happens or is impossible.
Ironically, I find that Fate is one of the hardest games for groups to really get the most out of. Breaking out of the mindset of "do thing, get result" and realizing that the entire thing is a narrative structure to push on using the tools available is some black belt level RPG playing.
Yeah the complexity of the gear, the morphs, the skills system and such makes it feel like a harder sci-fi game, which I like
There's nothing pulpy about EP. It's a pretty brutal and unforgiving system, just like how the setting can be pretty brutal and unforgiving too.
And the plus side due to the morph system a GM can play it brutal and unforgiving because if a character dies thats the cost of doing business and not something for anybody to get overly upset at just reset to a backup sleve into a new morph and duck faster next time.
Yeah the complexity of the gear, the morphs, the skills system and such makes it feel like a harder sci-fi game, which I like
There's nothing pulpy about EP. It's a pretty brutal and unforgiving system, just like how the setting can be pretty brutal and unforgiving too.
And the plus side due to the morph system a GM can play it brutal and unforgiving because if a character dies thats the cost of doing business and not something for anybody to get overly upset at just reset to a backup sleve into a new morph and duck faster next time.
That's the setting, though, not the system. The impermanence of death definitely takes some of the sting out of how fragile everyone is, but that's also a staple of that genre for obvious reasons.
I like EP's system. Streamlining to improve is good, rules-light just because it's a darling these days would not be what I wanted. I like the granularity in that game.
The early previews of 2nd have just been complexity drops, it's still fundamentally the same system and still pretty granular. They're just going from sixty skills to like, thirty. That sort of thing.
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If you leave out the transhumanist portion of the rules (the body switching and ego stuff), it's a pretty standard, if unnecessarily complex, percentage based system with attributes and skills and high tech weaponry and whatnot. If it was actually a decent chassis for a game, something else sci-fi would have been built on it. It's been up for grabs for almost a decade in the heyday of cottage RPGs, and nobody's done that.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I mean I quite like the Infinity RPG for the core D20 mechanic but the various little bit are a bit off for me in places
Plus character creation annoys me because even the non-random version is pretty restrictive in some ways. Like, I want to play a NeoTerran ex-Aristeia fighter, and couldn't take the Sports Personality career without rolling a 6 on the PanO table and then a 5 on the Ariadna table. Which is dumb. Just let people take whatever career they want, Jesus.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
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Again, the adaptability of the game DOES NOT equal how good the game is. Technically, there are many d100 games out there, Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer 40k Dark Heresy, Aces and Eights, ect. Which is what McKid was trying to imply.
I agree with the bolded. Eclipse Phase is plenty adaptable. It's just not very good.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I mean who says it isn't a decent chassis for a game?
I've played it and run it loads, worked great
Yeah it's a horror game
It's closer to Delta Green and CoC than Transhuman Space, I think
If you're going off the online character creator I'm 90% certain it's incorrect and there's no RAW restriction on hazarding faction careers. You can absolutely have your Aristeia fighter.
I think character creation in that systems super interesting because (for the 6 LP version) you basically pick between being a more average/jack of all trades character but having more infinity points/resources/attributes or being a hyper specialized person.
Plus in general other than signature skills and going deep on one skills talents (for XP saving purposes) character creation doesn't have a *massive* impact in Infinity. You're usually looking at like a 15% difference between 'person who had this skill come up twice due to random chance' and the guy who spent LP steering towards it. It's kinda one of the interesting bits that 'being good' at a task is much less defined by how reliable you are to do it (most characters at worst are going to have a 40% chance of rolling a success then hyper focused ones will hit like 80%) but how likely you are to exceed or do it in a way that creates further benefits from focus and talents.
And I'll disagree with the last part. EP is good, sure it's a lot to take in at once, but I think for what the narrative mechanics of it's world is and how that gets translated into game mechanics it's good. We saw that in a less complex system it loses it's feel when they tried to do the Transhumanity's FATE version. I think it could possibly work in a Cortex system, like the Firefly RPG, but I think that engine is under MWP's thumb and not CC.
There's nothing pulpy about EP. It's a pretty brutal and unforgiving system, just like how the setting can be pretty brutal and unforgiving too.
To be honest I am, and I'm pretty sure that's buggy as shit. I don't really like the hazarding a career thing, like, I don't want to roll to see if I'm allowed to take the career that creates the character I want? Lifepath and random chargen are things I'm generally not hugely fond of. Sometimes I'll use a lifepath system to randomly roll up a character and then take that concept and use it as a base to actually create the character I want with a point-buy system.
The cor game is pretty solid, like I said. The whole roll D6s and look for 1s, 2s and 6s is a bit clunky and weird IMO, but generally it's fine. I feel like the basic concept I would have gone in for, and the specifics I'd have changed quite a bit in places had I actually made the game, but it works okay. And some of the stuff is pretty cool, plus the setting is worth it IMO. I have actually run a short Infinity game with Eclipse Phase and that worked out pretty well, even if I basically had to hack out massive chunks of the available equipment and morphs and stuff.
Hazarding a career is something I'd probably happily let players fudge or at least house rule it so they can spend LP to lower the difficulty after rolling for the career. I get why it's a mechanic (specialized characters can pick, others should roll on faction/general career) but the stat gains of certain high end careers are so high that missing out on them for your first career choice seems not ideal.
I think the Lifepath system is kinda interesting but I'm glad they provided the 12LP alternative for people who dislike random stuff. When I'm mucking around with the (super bugged) character creator I tend to spend LP on Faction, planet, education and first career. Considering that those are what set your signature skills.
The Fate conversion was deeply uninspired. To the point where I sort of question whether the people doing it had much investment in either the property or the Fate system. There are great ways to do EP evocatively in Fate, they just didn't use any of them.
I mean, just renaming the stress tracks to "ego" and "morph" would have been something.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Which is basically supposition
Yes nobody used it. Doesn't mean they didn't because it was bad.
Plenty of people used the D20 OGL. Doesn't make it any good.
It's not only a question of adaptability. Fate is way more adaptable than AW, yet it is the latter that became the lingua franca of indie rpgs. Because it's a better game. For all the reasons mentionned last page!
Which loads of people do use
It's not chaosium Chthullu. It's actually better than that. (I loathe that game.)
That doesn't change the fact that it's a free range toolset for hard sci fi that, in the course of 8 years of the highest small scale RPG output in history, nobody co-opted.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
For a long time, Fate was the lingua franca of indie RPGs
I lost count of how many games basically just used Fate rather than making their own system
Yes, for the like 4 years between the release of Spirit of the Century and the release of Apocalypse World.
Quoting that again because you are saying the same thing again.
Just because they are going back to rework it doesn't mean that the original system is bad. It just means that they are reworking it. Is a 69 Mustang a bad car because Ford has reworked the Mustang every year since then? No, it's just that we have built better, faster, more fuel efferent Mustangs every year (Ok, 71-74 were bad Mustangs... but the concept still counts). The game has been out for 8 years now, and new ideas and mechanics have come forth in those 8 years. It would be stupid not to address that and try to incorporate those new ideas into your game if it makes it run better. Look at the difference between 13th Age and D&D 5E. 13th Age is built from the concepts of 3rd and 4th Edition D&D with some of the indie game ideas mixed in while 5E decided not to grow the brand forward mechanically but instead try to recapture the older games' magic that kinda disappeared in 4E. And we can see the results of those decisions. But because 13th Age exists doesn't mean that 4E or 3rd/3.5 were bad games, it just means that those kinds of game have evolved. The Original Legend of Zelda isn't a shit game suddenly because Breath of the Wind is out, it just means that the mechanics have evolved and the designers want to evolve with them.
Errr
Yes?
As I said earlier, we disagree on how adaptable the basic bits of the EP system are. If you strip out the body swapping and turn them into alien species or something instead, it's pretty standard hard sci fi. In fact, it was praised as such last page. That's not a genre that's absent in the RPG zeitgeist, at all. But the creative commons ruleset that exists for it remains unused. It's got attributes, skills, gear and a bunch of really grisly treatments of sci-fi hazards. It's perfect for any number of adaptations but nobody wants to do that, because besides being adaptable and mathy it's really nothing to write home about. Rather than using this thing that's been layed out on a platter for them, small time designers are choosing instead to spend tons of time writing their own system.
I agree that the evolution of a game line isn't immediately a black mark. But it does mean that things have been identified as being not great in some areas. And this isn't like the bigger corporate games that use turnover to drive sales. The market share for Eclipse Phase is comparatively rather small and pretty static. They're just clamoring for a better thing to run the game in. That's why we got the Fate conversion as a stopgap.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I think the FATE thing was a responds to the fact that crunchy games like EP weren't as popular anymore. Which I think is going to change. I've seen people talking about missing the crunchiness that games like FATE and PbtA aren't giving them so I expect to see a rise in the customization and crunchiness in games in a few years. Maybe not as crunchy as Shadowrun or even D&D, but maybe much higher than the current popular games.
Other than that, I don't know how the zeitgeist is gonna turn. It seems like there's still a shiny new PbtA game dropping every other month or so, though. Star Wars going narrative in a big way and the same company probably doing something similar with L5R leaves that crunchy space open for the little guys, I guess.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Star Wars feels like a weird mix where it's the narrative core of a PbtA game, but with the kitchen sink design of a Shadowrun.
Ironically, I find that Fate is one of the hardest games for groups to really get the most out of. Breaking out of the mindset of "do thing, get result" and realizing that the entire thing is a narrative structure to push on using the tools available is some black belt level RPG playing.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
And the plus side due to the morph system a GM can play it brutal and unforgiving because if a character dies thats the cost of doing business and not something for anybody to get overly upset at just reset to a backup sleve into a new morph and duck faster next time.
That's the setting, though, not the system. The impermanence of death definitely takes some of the sting out of how fragile everyone is, but that's also a staple of that genre for obvious reasons.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
The early previews of 2nd have just been complexity drops, it's still fundamentally the same system and still pretty granular. They're just going from sixty skills to like, thirty. That sort of thing.