Spoiler: nsfw??? mentions the game that must not be mentioned So what I'm hearing is that we need you guys to create characters in FATE and the one that rolls the genitals with the greatest volume wins.
oh my fucking god Fuck. Now I want to reread that fucking critique of that system I found years back with like the LIST of shit you roll for at the start and I just roll for vaginal circumference
IT HAS THE FIRST SAME THREE LETTERS THAT'S PRACTICALLY THE SAME THING RIGHT No No it is not but yes that's what I meant
I remember the creators of that game being offended at some review calling it "The Date-Rape RPG", because there are no rules for dating.
that's one of the most infamously bad things, yeah. I remember reading about someone who actually tried to play it as written and discovered it literally couldn't work without house rules, too.
Oh yes right. That's another thing I really like about it. I like that I as a player get to play part of the author somewhat. Along with the gm. Like we're all authors and we're all also playing characters. I'm not just Howard. I'm also Conan. I'm both. And the gm is the author and like ALL THE CHARACTERS. Which is how I got comfortable with the idea of gming. I still get to be characters and it's not like I wasn't also an author as a player.
Now that I actually think about it, yeah, FATE makes a lot of sense from a 'freeform RPG but with a resolution mechanic' perspective. It lets you do your thing without getting in the way, but has just enough resolution mechanics to give an engaging swing to things, and has Fate points for 'god-modding' your way out of things you don't want. Like, I'm very Not a Fan of Narrative systems, but I don't begrudge people who do. The only thing that makes me salty is that it seems pretty much all the systems coming out are that way. >Oh, there's this new system for <X> out, you should look into it. >Huh, I'll take a look. >'Rules-Light Narrative Generic' >*closes PDF*. Sigh. Nevermind. FATAL is pretty much a 3edgy5me smut RPG. Which, fair enough, Dead Dove Do Not Eat and all... But it's also horrible mechanically. The basic roll is 2/4d100, which is just... literally everything is random. The system is well, unworkable. Also, there's a random spell failure chart with a high chance. This wouldn't necessarily be bad, Dark Heresy has such a table... except one of the results on this table is 'the world explodes'. This would be a bad thing if the game weren't FATAL. (And, of course, their pretension to being 'the most historically and scientifically accurate game imaginable'... when, well, it's FATAL.)
Has anyone else played something in Cortex System? I know it from Serenity RPG. There's also a BSG version and the base (not connected to any existing fandom) version. It's my absolute favourite system, because the dice rolls are fairly straightforward, but complicated enough to still entertain me, and the character creation is more versatile than D&D and such while having enough constraints to not give me indecision bluescreen. I've also played Dresden RPG (based on Fate) and D&D3.5 and Pathfinder. Cortex is, to me, the sweet spot between "...I think I need a separate reference sheet for all my stabs, because there's a metric fuckton of numbers here" of D&D and "...but, but, not enough numbers, how can I play if not enough numbers ._." of Dresden.
I really want to try something with the Cortex system, having the different dice for different strength abilities is cool AND a great excuse to collect dice!
Yeah they seem fun! There's a bunch of cool looking games with that system - there's a superhero one, various monsterpeople one, a wiki admin of one of my favorite fandoms is putting together a hack for that setting...
I've posted about The Sprawl before, but it's a system I really love (I've now both played it and ran a game in it) and it's powered by the apocalypse too! I love the non-binary success states for rolls in Apocalypse systems; whenever you get a 7-9 on your 2d6+stat roll, you get a weak success and shit gets complicated. (Unexpected consequences! Difficult choices! It is great.)
