No. You gotta all be furries. No fucking bodymods. I want my fantasy or religion or my furries as just part of the setting. I mean I could just have straight cyberpunk but...why. Why when I can have angels with tablets and smart phones and weird cyberpunk drugs.
And on the note of shit like smart phones...If you need more reason to look into Sutra Stories mirrors perform a lot of the functions that things like computers and such do in Heaven. People got magic mirrors like King Enma but you can use those for fantasy skype chats. Like technology as we know it is a thing and it plays into Heaven. You have things like trains and cars and the like. But mirrors are the big thing with communication and so on. I like to think that they always have. Like Heaven's had smart phones and touch screen computer monitors since way fucking back basically. You're all writing shit down Ming Dynasty and drunk gods are enjoying what is basically Heavenly chat roulette.
FUDGE rpg is the predecessor of FATE, and invented the 4dF dice; in some ways it was more of a core mechanic and a toolkit of options to assemble your own game. Fate Core started as a Fudge variant and quickly grew into its own thing. An Overview of Fudge The Core Rules - the 1995 rules are the basic heart of Fudge; the 5-point Fudge variant is mostly a method of character creation. There is a book out there with like 300 pages of optional add-ons and variants (including 4 or 5 different magic systems). One of the things that bugs me about Fate is how Aspects work - and this is probably just an issue of taste, but it bothers me that an Aspect has to be invoked (or tagged, or whatever the terminology is these days) in order for it to *be real.* Example from the Fate Accelerated book that drives me bonkers: Zombies have the Slow aspect, so if you invoke that you gain an advantage against them. But in order to do so, you have to either spend a Fate point to validate this fact about your enemies in a metagame mechanic, or spend an action to set yourself up to take advantage of a known Aspect. That bugs me, because i feel like if zombies being slow is a true fact about them, then i shouldn't have to spend a limited resource to interact with that fact about them, or spend my turns alternating between setting up to take advantage of their sloth and actually doing so. The mechanic disconnects from the fiction in a way that drives me nuts. (Now, if invoking the aspect made it have a lasting effect for the entire scene, i think i'd be okay with that; but i suspect that the mechanical balance is too precious for that to be a legitimate option in the RAW.) (honestly, i need to stop talking about Fate because i just get so damn salty, i'm a damn saltine cracker over here) ETA: (and i wouldn't want to nitpick most people's beloved system, but you, Aon, are the Great Feisty One so i feel like you are gonna be more comfortable with some griping and won't feel like i'm somehow saying that your choice is bad or anything; i think you know me better than that)
Oh no it's fine! The fate points and the aspects are literally my favorite parts of the system and it's why it's my favorite. The lack of them would feel a bit...odd to me? Even pointless? I like how I have these limited resources that I can use to break reality over my knee. Also zombies having slowness as an aspect sounds like a terrible fucking aspect to me. For me I like how personalized and interesting they are. Or should be. Like yeah we can go "Oh well Abhaya is fast so her aspect is "Quick"". No. That's boring and dumb. Of course she's fast. She's a fucking fox. Specifically she was a Former Sneaky Fox Saboteur. Which is flexible and interesting. Which is why it was one of her aspects (namely her Incarnation to use Sutra Stories lingo. basically what your character is). While her speediness plays into her skills and some of her abilities (I forget the exact name of these things in Sutra Stories right now. but basically you could get a series spells and other such effects through play) it also plays into her aspect. But that's not the only part of her aspect. A lot goes into being a former spy/assassin. Like her ability to kill quietly or hide. Or her contacts or mental training and discipline. But at the same time it's not all good for her. Because well...She's a "former" one. Her old bosses and compatriots had dirt on her. And she when she was caught by the Celestial Investigation Service she was put up for the metaphorical slaughter as "Just some terrorist". Emotionally she had tons of baggage about it too. So while I had many ways in which I could use her aspect for good there were also many ways in which the gm could use her aspect to cripple her. Or just spice up the narrative. But if Abhaya could always make use of her bestest super spy abilities without the chance of fucking up then...What would be the point of playing? There's no drama. But if it's a resource she can look super awesome and do a cool thing or be torn the fuck apart emotionally in especially brutal ways at times. Just enough times to keep things interesting. Basically it's a way of ratcheting up the drama at times. But not all the time. Because then it gets dull. If you're giving a zombie an obvious fucking aspect like Slow and not even sprucing it up at all you are making a bad aspect. Also what is even the plus side of Slow? There needs to be an advantage to it. They're double edged swords. Even the situational ones or ones that monsters have. What is the fact that the zombie so fucking slow just something triggers me deeply and renders my character useless? ???? Because otherwise it's just a weakness for the zombie and one that we all can fucking tell just by saying "Zombie". That's a waste of an aspect. Which is why Abhaya isn't just quick. She's a fox. Of course she's fucking quick. But she's also not just a fox because that's boring too. What kind of fox is she? What does that mean to her and those around her? It's not a problem with aspects as a concept. It's a problem with someone being shit and making a shit aspect and utilizing them like shit. They're there for you to occasionally rend reality to pieces and tell it to do what you want. Because it's neat for the time. At least that is how it works when I play the game and with friends of mine I have with.
I AM NOT FUCKING OVER THIS AND HAVE TOLD LIKE FIVE PEOPLE ABOUT IT. EDIT: Friend I mentioned it to said that'd make it like...Shambling Hordes if anything. Which does carry across the idea that you could exploit their slowness to great effect. But also that one could exploit that they're a large group. As one other example. But this has obvious advantages too. Yes they're slow but they have numbers and they're determined.
See, that sounds way better - Shambling Hordes, becasue shambling is a slow movement, but being in a horde means that taking advantage is going to require some thoughtful planning (in mechanics represented by using an action instead of a Fate point) or counting on luck (which a metagame resource like Fate is great for). So it sounds like the real problem is that the folks who wrote Fate Accelerated did a shitty job. (Mind you, when Fred Hicks was first experimenting with repalcint Attributes with Aspects, they were as bad as that - Strong was an example aspect in one of his original articles in Fudge fandom, and it sounds like he learned a lot about what makes Aspects an interesting game mechanic over the years before he published the current version of Fate)
In Icons, btw, characters have Attributes but also have Qualities, which are basically Aspects under a different name. And it does spell out specifically that Qualities can and should imply both good and bad. So Steven Kenson got it even if the Accelerated writer(s) didn't.
It's super fun if you get a good group together for it yeah. But when done poorly you get things like...well...Slow. For Zombies. The other thing I like about how they and the skills work is that there's nothing concrete about it. The mechanics are decided at the table and cold hard system rules can take a break at times if the players decide that it's better that way. One of the most fun things about the game to me, as I said earlier, the arguing about what you can do. There's a lot of discussion and back and forth between the players and the gm. That's one of the fun things about rpgs in general? Though something is just lovely about being able to be like ok so yeah this is the time for my wizard's addiction to cherry pepsi or whatever the fuck to really shine. And ooh. Good. The double edged nature of them is part of why they're fun, I think? I really love knowing that I can agree to take the fall and fuck up because narratively it feels right. But for my hard work I do get compensated. So there's a mechanical strategic thing going on behind there too. Something about the system being designed with and even at times encouraging failure really gets to me.
okay, stepping away from the salt mines: Magical Girls! Specifically, Magical Burst - an awesome rpg currently a WIP available free at that there link. It is built in part from the Apocalypse World design, and has gone through several changes as the designer has refined his vision; the current version 5.0 Alpha pings all kinds of happy buttons for me. It's also clearly influenced by Madoka, but is intended not so much to ape the specifics of that series, but rather to engage the magical girl genre and question its precepts. It implies a dark tone consistent with PMMM's deconstruction, but there is certainly room for a more upbeat campaign, although still shadowed with the risk of magical girls losing hope and succumbing to despair. I would run or play it given a chance, and I would gladly reskin this archetcture to run other games, too - i have already sketched out a concept that merges MB with the fluff from The Whispering Vault to create a different kind of monstrous fantasy campaign.
omfg OMFG that sounds like my shit Like I have no idea what that system it is built from is but magical girls are a thing I really love. Also this reminds me of the stupid madness that is the Maid RPG. It's dumb. It's awful. But I love it.
D:tD has, in the third book, an Exaltation (pretty much "what kind of super powers do you have and possibly why", it's close to the concept from Exalted but not identical) that's basically for making magical girl and sentai hero type characters. It's definitely a heavier-crunch system than Fate or Maid, though, and I know that's not to everyone's liking.
gaaaah i have characters for shadowrun, the dresden files rpg, and a shitton of nwod games but I CAN'T PLAY THEEEEEEEEEM argh
Hell yeah magical burst! I check that website every week to see about the editions. I've ALWAYS wanted to play a game, but getting a group together is. Difficult. I do like how you can do magical girl darkness, but it's not required - making it so that magic is a horrible thing that kills you is an option but not required, which shows up unfortunately often in games trying to be Madoka. And the powers system is pretty cool sounding. That said, I kinda miss the previous editions' giant list of Changes. But that is because I am fond of that kinda thing. And would probably intentionally try to accumulate overcharge to get interesting Changes. Some of them are just neat! Also Aon, the guy making magical burst is the guy who translated Maid RPG. so there's some trivia.
...aww, the fifth edition got rid of the powers table! I thought that was a cool feature, was it just hard to balance? I mean some of them (like the shadow object one) might be hard on the GM but still...
...I don't even remember what those are which says a lot about how much of 4e I played. Which was...one game? Basically. What were they like?
I think he felt like fourth draft got bogged down in minutiae (if we're still talking about Magical Burst) so fifth draft simplified things a lot. I really like it but I'm hoping he'll update sometime soon because I want to see what the advanced options will look like.
