I guess my gamestore is doing a Starfinder character generation thing tomo-- oh, it's after Midnight. Today.
I usually don't make characters just to make them, but I am intrigued. It's been almost a decade since I've done anything D20 related, so.. might be good to knock the rust off.
Character creation in starfinder seems pretty straight forward. Lots of options but seems pretty well laid out. I was messing around making a few and the way they do attribute points at start makes a lot of sense and allows for some pretty solid character without having to worry too much about being gimped. All of the character classes seem pretty interesting. Even the soldier is really good and has a bunch of nice options.
The newest Bundle of Holding is a bunch of PbtA games. You know, if you are into that sort of thing. There's at least 3 games in there I want but will never play.
You guys know how much of a Spellbound Kingdom fanboy I am. Well, somebody smarter than me just decided to make a G+ group for it...not sure why I didn't think of it in the first place. https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/109672547896638053402
Related to games I constantly bring up, ICRPG should have a Quick-Start version soon which is pretty exciting. Hank said it was out, but I haven't seen the file on DriveThru yet.
I'm curious, how does that compare with (another cyberpunk PbtA game) The Sprawl? I remember when the KS for The Veil was running, I was initially a little confused about whether or not they were the same game, or two revisions of the same game, or what.
0
Options
admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
I'm curious, how does that compare with (another cyberpunk PbtA game) The Sprawl? I remember when the KS for The Veil was running, I was initially a little confused about whether or not they were the same game, or two revisions of the same game, or what.
YOU'VE ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD
I've run 10ish sessions of The Sprawl, but only read through The Veil. Here are my Opinions.
The Sprawl leans hard on Neuromancer-style black-trenchcoat, street-level cyberpunk. The themes and mechanics of The Sprawl are claustrophobic and dystopian, and expect the PCs to be (1) broke (2) hunted by corporations and (3) forced to make choices that make them question their humanity -- both in terms of morality and in terms of cybernetic alternations -- to survive (1) and (2).
Mechanically, The Sprawl enforces a mission-based structure that enforces the thematic claustrophobia. Every mission is (literally) a race against the Clocks the GM is running that push forward on move results and trigger greater opposition. And everything you do is supposed to take place in a mission -- there's no downtime, there's just legwork for the next mission. Any cyberware you want installed or gear you want to buy is happening on that clock.
Once you accept that structure The Sprawl is a well-built PbtA game. The playbooks are varied and allow for drastically different approaches to the same mission, but the PbtA stat and move structure means that everyone is Good At Things. The GM section is fantastic at codifying the kind of threats that push the themes.
The Veil is... kind of the opposite of that. The Veil is tapped into modern literary cyberpunk and so targets a much broader set of themes. One of the guiding concepts of The Veil is that at the beginning of a campaign you're supposed to think of a Question that you want to explore in play, and one of the core XP systems is that each character has Beliefs (like Burning Wheel) that are supposed to drive not only a character's morality, but their goals. So The Veil can be kind of anything, and you'll need to go into it with some idea of what kind of cyberpunk story you want to tell.
The one theme The Veil insists on is "the veil" itself, which is the idea of a dominating layer of augmented/virtual reality that everyone* is tapped into. It doesn't have any strict mechanics, though different playbooks do interact with the veil in different ways.
*except for one of the playbooks.
The main two mechanical additions are Giri, which is The Veil's Hx/bonds/relationship system, that are basically Debts from Urban Shadows. You acquire Giri by doing favors and can call them in with mechanical incentives and penalties. Not entirely sure why The Veil uses debts, and additionally I kind of wish they hadn't been named after a complex Japanese concept in a genre which has a long history of appropriating East Asian culture but WHATEVER THAT'S A DIFFERENT TOPIC. The major addition is that rather than stats, in The Veil you have emotional states. For most moves you roll +state based on how your character is feeling at the time. It's a fuzzy concept that relies on honest players and negotiation at the table, but there are mechanical incentives to not just roll your highest state over and over again.
The playbooks in The Veil are, again, widely varied, but in a way that's much less clear. A Reporter in The Sprawl works completely differently from a Killer or Soldier, but it's still obvious looking at it how the Reporter is going to interact with the classic cyberpunk mission structure of a corporation hiring the PCs to run a job against another corporation. It's much less clear how the Wayward, which is a playbook in The Veil that's tied to an element of nature, will interact with anything. Now, I can look through The Veil's playbooks and get inspiration for dozens of weird characters, but I can't picture what they'll do in the game.
Overall I think The Veil's main strength and weakness over The Sprawl is how open it is. PbtA games tend to be built to let the limited basic moves and playbooks interact in a way that maps out a genre, and suffer if you try to push outside that genre. The Sprawl does that to a tee, but The Veil wants to be something much broader. In exchange it loses a lot of the clarity of PbtA and demands a lot more discussion about what game you actually want to play.
Blades in the Dark would no doubt pull it off, with its stress mechanic, whole party sheet and advancement thereof, escalation of rolls from controlled to desperate, territory control... okay that started as a suggestion but no, that's the best system for it short of making a brand new one.
after watching the video the concern I have is basically the game being just a bad version of xcom with elfs
maybe it's just me but I don't want to actively encourage less investment in the narrative at my table because there are like 10 expendable characters and people are rotating constantly around trying to find the strategically optimal play
edit: and to be fair the last time i did a "large scale storyline" I let the players influence the outcome right to the very end and it ended up being a very memorable campaign but not very satisfying since they got the "bad ending" due to one player really tilting the odds
Blades in the Dark would no doubt pull it off, with its stress mechanic, whole party sheet and advancement thereof, escalation of rolls from controlled to desperate, territory control... okay that started as a suggestion but no, that's the best system for it short of making a brand new one.
I need to look at that but I think you are on to something. My biggest concern for this style of game is of course the level difference and mixed parties. And honestly, I'd like to see grid combat in an Xcom style game.
0
Options
MrVyngaardLive From New EtoileStraight Outta SosariaRegistered Userregular
edited September 2017
Hm, wouldn't D&D 4e be fine for this? Maybe one of the Modern hacks?
Or perhaps Spycraft 2.0...
Actually, this sounds mostly like domain level play.
MrVyngaard on
"now I've got this mental image of caucuses as cafeteria tables in prison, and new congressmen having to beat someone up on inauguration day." - Raiden333
The elevator pitch for Sleeper: Orphans of the Cold War to my group was X-Men meets XCom. Combat is very dangerous and there is a whole campaign superstructure which involves building facilities and R&D. Nearly 20 games in and we're pretty happy with it.
I've got a copy of Starfinder's core rule book. I'm really happy with the stuff I have read so far. Surely it will have issues as people break it down but I am ecstatic that it is a familiar system I can run with friends and the lore is really fun to work with.
Last night I started a file on Realm Works and started converting a space campaign I had been working on for a while. It's been a joy.
One thing that is weird in starfinder is the way the piloting checks and ship tests increase at higher levels leads to some odd stuff like more advanced ships of the same class are harder to fly. It looks like the devs are looking into those complaints and agree in practice some of that scaling may not be working the way they want it and are working to correct that. Other than a few oddities like that the system looks pretty good. One thing that throws people coming from pathfinder especially looking at the envoy class the bonuses and buffs seem really low. But once you start looking you realize how hard bonuses are to come by and the math is a lot better balanced for most of the systems so the envoy bonuses work out to be really good in practice.
0
Options
admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
It's good that they're looking at that because that sure did look completely broken on release.
It's good that they're looking at that because that sure did look completely broken on release.
It is fine until level 12 or so but at high levels the DC checks just outscale players ability to keep up with them. As for the book binding there are a number of reports on the issue mine so far is okay. It is a really huge book so its possible they did not have the right glue/binding for the size/weight of the book. Seems like they are working to get replacements for people with defective books so if you purchased yours through paizo hit up their customer service folks.
Anybody see the big WFRP Humble Bundle that just went up? Is that system any good? Worth trying for 8-20 bucks?
WFRP is kind of like a more honest D&D. Whereas D&D pretends that you're a hero, but secretly knows you're going to get one-shot by a skeleton at level 1 and die in a shitty dungeon with a treasure cache of 35gp at the end of it, WFRP tells you up front that you're garbage and will always be garbage.
Anybody see the big WFRP Humble Bundle that just went up? Is that system any good? Worth trying for 8-20 bucks?
WFRP is kind of like a more honest D&D. Whereas D&D pretends that you're a hero, but secretly knows you're going to get one-shot by a skeleton at level 1 and die in a shitty dungeon with a treasure cache of 35gp at the end of it, WFRP tells you up front that you're garbage and will always be garbage.
So, yes it's good.
But, conversely WFRP also explicitly states you've been marked out by the gods. Fate points are the Old World god's marking you out for... Adventure.
Anybody see the big WFRP Humble Bundle that just went up? Is that system any good? Worth trying for 8-20 bucks?
WFRP is kind of like a more honest D&D. Whereas D&D pretends that you're a hero, but secretly knows you're going to get one-shot by a skeleton at level 1 and die in a shitty dungeon with a treasure cache of 35gp at the end of it, WFRP tells you up front that you're garbage and will always be garbage.
So, yes it's good.
But, conversely WFRP also explicitly states you've been marked out by the gods. Fate points are the Old World god's marking you out for... Adventure.
This is not necessarily a good thing.
Yeah I'm not very familiar with the warhammer fantasy universe but aren't all the old gods all weird and evil? Being marked by them seems like more of a curse than a blessing.
Anybody see the big WFRP Humble Bundle that just went up? Is that system any good? Worth trying for 8-20 bucks?
WFRP is kind of like a more honest D&D. Whereas D&D pretends that you're a hero, but secretly knows you're going to get one-shot by a skeleton at level 1 and die in a shitty dungeon with a treasure cache of 35gp at the end of it, WFRP tells you up front that you're garbage and will always be garbage.
So, yes it's good.
But, conversely WFRP also explicitly states you've been marked out by the gods. Fate points are the Old World god's marking you out for... Adventure.
This is not necessarily a good thing.
Yeah I'm not very familiar with the warhammer fantasy universe but aren't all the old gods all weird and evil? Being marked by them seems like more of a curse than a blessing.
They're not evil, they just don't particularly care about you at all.
I'm also not sure there's any evidence that the gods are actually gods in WFRP except for the four lords of chaos.
Anybody see the big WFRP Humble Bundle that just went up? Is that system any good? Worth trying for 8-20 bucks?
WFRP is kind of like a more honest D&D. Whereas D&D pretends that you're a hero, but secretly knows you're going to get one-shot by a skeleton at level 1 and die in a shitty dungeon with a treasure cache of 35gp at the end of it, WFRP tells you up front that you're garbage and will always be garbage.
So, yes it's good.
But, conversely WFRP also explicitly states you've been marked out by the gods. Fate points are the Old World god's marking you out for... Adventure.
This is not necessarily a good thing.
Yeah I'm not very familiar with the warhammer fantasy universe but aren't all the old gods all weird and evil? Being marked by them seems like more of a curse than a blessing.
You're thinking of the Ruinous Powers, Nurgle, Tzeentch , Slaanesh, and Khorne. They're the Chaos Gods but there are also other gods of various cultures, such as Sigmar, the god of the empire, The Lady, worshipped by the Bretonnians, etc. Most of them aren't evil.
Yeah, WHFRP (2nd) is good. I'm gonna pick up the bundle for sure. The one time I've played we random'd up characters, I was an elf acrobat (or circus performer, something like that) with the max height and min weight. He was a freaky looking guy.
Note that this is the WFRP game from 2005 (...and also includes the 1986 at higher backing levels) from Green Ronin and Games Workshop, not the 2009 version from Fantasy Flight Games.
I'm a huge mark for warhammer fantasy, it's pretty fun as long as everyone is aware going in that this is not a cinematic game, and that losing limbs in battle and going insane from watching horrors unfold is the order of the day. The mechanics are pretty straightforward, and I really like the job switching for character growth. Calling it a more honest D&D is pretty fair, if you play that type of grim game. I'm definitely picking it up.
The main issues I would say are that it's not especially balanced, it's not a super tactical game (especially compared to something like 4e D&D). There's not a ton of variety in terms of enemies and what they do. But to me it just oozes charm. If you like the idea of rolling on a giant critical hit chart to see whether the blood spray from your newly missing limb blinded an enemy, you'll enjoy it. I'm gonna grab it for sure, especially since it comes with the Tome of Corruption, which until relatively recently was like 50 bucks just for the pdf.
Posts
Character creation in starfinder seems pretty straight forward. Lots of options but seems pretty well laid out. I was messing around making a few and the way they do attribute points at start makes a lot of sense and allows for some pretty solid character without having to worry too much about being gimped. All of the character classes seem pretty interesting. Even the soldier is really good and has a bunch of nice options.
It came out?
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
also night witches is in there which is incredibly cool
Related to games I constantly bring up, ICRPG should have a Quick-Start version soon which is pretty exciting. Hank said it was out, but I haven't seen the file on DriveThru yet.
Edit: Here's that Quick Start for ICRPG. http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/221038/INDEX-CARD-RPG-Free-Quickstart?manufacturers_id=10923
If I get more then one hit I'll do a random drawing or somethin'.
YOU'VE ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD
I've run 10ish sessions of The Sprawl, but only read through The Veil. Here are my Opinions.
The Sprawl leans hard on Neuromancer-style black-trenchcoat, street-level cyberpunk. The themes and mechanics of The Sprawl are claustrophobic and dystopian, and expect the PCs to be (1) broke (2) hunted by corporations and (3) forced to make choices that make them question their humanity -- both in terms of morality and in terms of cybernetic alternations -- to survive (1) and (2).
Mechanically, The Sprawl enforces a mission-based structure that enforces the thematic claustrophobia. Every mission is (literally) a race against the Clocks the GM is running that push forward on move results and trigger greater opposition. And everything you do is supposed to take place in a mission -- there's no downtime, there's just legwork for the next mission. Any cyberware you want installed or gear you want to buy is happening on that clock.
Once you accept that structure The Sprawl is a well-built PbtA game. The playbooks are varied and allow for drastically different approaches to the same mission, but the PbtA stat and move structure means that everyone is Good At Things. The GM section is fantastic at codifying the kind of threats that push the themes.
The Veil is... kind of the opposite of that. The Veil is tapped into modern literary cyberpunk and so targets a much broader set of themes. One of the guiding concepts of The Veil is that at the beginning of a campaign you're supposed to think of a Question that you want to explore in play, and one of the core XP systems is that each character has Beliefs (like Burning Wheel) that are supposed to drive not only a character's morality, but their goals. So The Veil can be kind of anything, and you'll need to go into it with some idea of what kind of cyberpunk story you want to tell.
The one theme The Veil insists on is "the veil" itself, which is the idea of a dominating layer of augmented/virtual reality that everyone* is tapped into. It doesn't have any strict mechanics, though different playbooks do interact with the veil in different ways.
*except for one of the playbooks.
The main two mechanical additions are Giri, which is The Veil's Hx/bonds/relationship system, that are basically Debts from Urban Shadows. You acquire Giri by doing favors and can call them in with mechanical incentives and penalties. Not entirely sure why The Veil uses debts, and additionally I kind of wish they hadn't been named after a complex Japanese concept in a genre which has a long history of appropriating East Asian culture but WHATEVER THAT'S A DIFFERENT TOPIC. The major addition is that rather than stats, in The Veil you have emotional states. For most moves you roll +state based on how your character is feeling at the time. It's a fuzzy concept that relies on honest players and negotiation at the table, but there are mechanical incentives to not just roll your highest state over and over again.
The playbooks in The Veil are, again, widely varied, but in a way that's much less clear. A Reporter in The Sprawl works completely differently from a Killer or Soldier, but it's still obvious looking at it how the Reporter is going to interact with the classic cyberpunk mission structure of a corporation hiring the PCs to run a job against another corporation. It's much less clear how the Wayward, which is a playbook in The Veil that's tied to an element of nature, will interact with anything. Now, I can look through The Veil's playbooks and get inspiration for dozens of weird characters, but I can't picture what they'll do in the game.
Overall I think The Veil's main strength and weakness over The Sprawl is how open it is. PbtA games tend to be built to let the limited basic moves and playbooks interact in a way that maps out a genre, and suffer if you try to push outside that genre. The Sprawl does that to a tee, but The Veil wants to be something much broader. In exchange it loses a lot of the clarity of PbtA and demands a lot more discussion about what game you actually want to play.
Thank you for that great analysis, @admanb. This is the kind of content I want to be reading all day every day.
Love this idea, although I think Dungeon World might work better... IDK.
maybe it's just me but I don't want to actively encourage less investment in the narrative at my table because there are like 10 expendable characters and people are rotating constantly around trying to find the strategically optimal play
edit: and to be fair the last time i did a "large scale storyline" I let the players influence the outcome right to the very end and it ended up being a very memorable campaign but not very satisfying since they got the "bad ending" due to one player really tilting the odds
I need to look at that but I think you are on to something. My biggest concern for this style of game is of course the level difference and mixed parties. And honestly, I'd like to see grid combat in an Xcom style game.
Or perhaps Spycraft 2.0...
Actually, this sounds mostly like domain level play.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
Last night I started a file on Realm Works and started converting a space campaign I had been working on for a while. It's been a joy.
Can't wait to run this thing.
It is fine until level 12 or so but at high levels the DC checks just outscale players ability to keep up with them. As for the book binding there are a number of reports on the issue mine so far is okay. It is a really huge book so its possible they did not have the right glue/binding for the size/weight of the book. Seems like they are working to get replacements for people with defective books so if you purchased yours through paizo hit up their customer service folks.
WFRP is kind of like a more honest D&D. Whereas D&D pretends that you're a hero, but secretly knows you're going to get one-shot by a skeleton at level 1 and die in a shitty dungeon with a treasure cache of 35gp at the end of it, WFRP tells you up front that you're garbage and will always be garbage.
So, yes it's good.
But, conversely WFRP also explicitly states you've been marked out by the gods. Fate points are the Old World god's marking you out for... Adventure.
This is not necessarily a good thing.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
Yeah I'm not very familiar with the warhammer fantasy universe but aren't all the old gods all weird and evil? Being marked by them seems like more of a curse than a blessing.
They're not evil, they just don't particularly care about you at all.
I'm also not sure there's any evidence that the gods are actually gods in WFRP except for the four lords of chaos.
You're thinking of the Ruinous Powers, Nurgle, Tzeentch , Slaanesh, and Khorne. They're the Chaos Gods but there are also other gods of various cultures, such as Sigmar, the god of the empire, The Lady, worshipped by the Bretonnians, etc. Most of them aren't evil.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
The main issues I would say are that it's not especially balanced, it's not a super tactical game (especially compared to something like 4e D&D). There's not a ton of variety in terms of enemies and what they do. But to me it just oozes charm. If you like the idea of rolling on a giant critical hit chart to see whether the blood spray from your newly missing limb blinded an enemy, you'll enjoy it. I'm gonna grab it for sure, especially since it comes with the Tome of Corruption, which until relatively recently was like 50 bucks just for the pdf.
gotta get me summadat
Just remember in WFRP the rats may catch back and or attack you with warpfire throwers.