... Is this a bad time to mention that I'm writing a Fate campaign? Probably. Moving right along. Nobilis is a diceless game where the entire resolution system runs on successfully making semantics arguments. Chuubo's is a descendant of that game that adds in powersets that depend on what kind of stories your character went through previously. I think I tried pitching one or the other here once?
Resurrecting the thread to say: I bought & played "The Quiet Year" for the first time today with some friends, and it was extremely extremely fun! It's sort of a post-apocalyptic collaborative worldbuilding tabletop game played with a deck of cards, where each card is matched to a pair of questions/prompts that the person whose turn it is has to answer about the world. Our world was set on an abandoned spaceship and included clone children, blue aliens, edutainment, a factional war between the children/the creationists/the scientists, an algae monster, a pair of twins named Monoxide and Dioxide who then cloned themselves and produced Carbon and Dioxide II, rogue AIs, a space cow, etc.
Ooooh I got the Quiet Year as part of a bundle but nobody irl to play it with. I did check it out though; it looked really interesting.
I spent 3 days out of the past 4 gaming (Call of Cthulhu and Exalted) and I will have lots of stuff for this thread when I recover from the drive enough to write it up. For now, let me just say I discovered that Exalted has a spell to make Steven Universe style fusions and I'm going to learn the fuck out of it just for the RP potential.
Today one of my demon players crit-failed on a memory roll, so, since this is demon:the descent and the character is actually a robot, I said he got a headache and all his memories look like jpeg artifacts until he sleeps.
Gimmicky homebrew thoughts: An RPG where hit points are split into Blood, Sweat, and Tears. Tears = mental and emotional fortitude. Mind probes, fear effects, and such things do Tears damage. Tears usually recover quickly, commensurate with severity of hurt, but serious trauma can permanently reduce the amount you have. 0 Tears can look like a lot of things, but mostly it looks like tharn -- character is so numb with fear and sorrow that they sit down and await their fate. Sweat = endurance, stamina, etc. Combat does Sweat damage, as does sustained exertion. It probably recovers the fastest, with just rest and food. 0 Sweat looks like total exhaustion, unable to do more than crawl. Blood = physical flesh-and-bone integrity. Usually, unless you're too incapacitated to defend yourself, you can't even take Blood damage until you've already lost a lot of Sweat. Blood recovery requires long-term rest and medical care, most of the time. 0 Blood is death. (this was mostly born out of me being annoyed at the abstraction of hit points making healing and injury unbelievable in certain games like 4e and 5e D&D. Patrick Stuart reviewed some kind of Lamentations of the Flame Princess offshoot where HP are split into "Flesh" and "Grit," and I thought, "hey, 'Blood' and 'Sweat' would be good names for these two concepts -- oh man...") Eclipse Phase does something like this, with both physical and mental damage reducing your chance of succeeding on rolls. Unfortunately Eclipse Phase is a clunky and complicated system and I'm not emotionally attached to it like I am to clunky and complicated D&D 3.5.
I love FUDGE. I've even created my own sort-of-variant with extended mechanics, TAFFY. A bit more organization in how it's set up, different mechanics, etc, while retaining much of the versatility. I despise FATE. Utterly. That acronym? 'This Ain't FATE, Fuck You'. To me, FATE is everything wrong with narrativism in one neat package. Narrativism simply does not appeal to me, even slightly. Gamist systems? Can be great fun, if not too serious. Simulationism, now that's my jam 110%. And FATE is very, very Narrativist, while FUDGE is... versatile, I guess? You can kind of take it any direction you want. TAFFY is more simulationist, in that it has fixed characteristics and such, but could be played other ways based on the GM. I'll just let a quote I encountered on RPG.net say it... That's not a characteristic, that's a fucking character concept. You just shoved a character concept into a single stat. That's like handing in a D&D character sheet with everything crossed out and '+7' scribbled over it. You're basically playing D2 at that point. Also, it doesn't actually convey much information about the character, mechanically or (less critically), fluff-wise, and despite describing concrete things, is vague and subject to interpretation. We've got 'former', which... doesn't actually tell us anything. It doesn't even tell us what it's attached to, we're just assuming it's 'former saboteur', but could be any of them. Or all. Judging by your description: trick question, it's actually none of the above. Sneaky. Okay, it suggests a skillset. But sneaky how? Are we talking actual physical stealth, subterfuge and deception, or just general, uh, slipperness? And how sneaky? Fox. Well, that's an animal alright. But what does being a fox actually *do*? Saboteur. This is pretty good, and could probably be a decent skill... though it might be nice to know what exactly they're sabotaging. However, it probably shouldn't be mixed in with four other things. That's what dice are for. And associated resources. Or, you know, competent opposition. Slow is a pretty awful aspect. But it's a pretty basic characteristic as well. A game should be able to support an entity being slower than others. Even if it is not in a horde. And I feel that a slow entity should remain slow, even when metagame points are not being expended on it. Also: [Example from the Fate Accelerated book] And here I thought that was what spells were for. I'm... not a big fan of Dissociated mechanics in general. It doesn't have to 1-to-1 describe the IC world, but mechanics should generally be something the character can theoretically interact with. (A character doesn't need to know they have +6 to swords, and their longsword does 1d8+3 damage but they know they can swing a sword decently well, and bad guys tend to fall over when stabbed. A character with 3 Fate Points... what the hell do they know ???) TAFFY has aspects and an associated currency, Elan, but they're very different from FATE's. TAFFY Aspects are bits of a character's personality or backstory that are important to them, and Elan a measure of spirit. Importantly, Aspects are always in-world, not 'meta'. A character might have the Aspect 'burned agent', or 'Obsessed with ancient ruins', but not something like, I dunno, 'glasses girl'. Likewise, Elan can't act outside the character, it doesn't enable them to do anything they otherwise could not. You can use Elan to reroll an attack (you noticed the mistake and adjusted before anything bad happened... better not try that again), or to activate a special ability (it requires a particular effort of will to manifest the Sky-Splitting Strike), or maybe even something like arranging an unspecified resource. (Good thing I had a contingency plan for this situation!) ... but you can't use it for things like 'There just happens to be an a computer terminal in this room, even though there wasn't before!' (??? The writer got lazy, I guess? ???) I suppose this reminds me I should be working on my Fenris campaign thingy. Speaking of fully compatible with Dark Heresy, I tried playing a campaign of Adeptus Evangelion once... which, as the name suggests, is a NGE hack for Dark Heresy by way of X-COM. Sadly, it didn't work out, though I think it might have had potential. Apparently I'm too autistic for Evangelion. I'm also hoping to sometime work on an uber-RPG-cum-Virtual Tabletop modeled after GURPS. Unfortunately, I don't quite have the coding (or statistical) chops quite yet.
A fox does lots of things if you know anything about Chinese mythology which is what she is based in and the setting she's from is. Soooooooo Also I fucking hate simulationism. Entirely. I also hate spell lists. I like narrativism. So take your non-narrative system and fuck off.
In other news tomorrow begins the character and organization creation for Sutra Stories! I AM EXCITED. FATE. CHINESE HEAVEN. SOMEONE MIGHT PICK A CORPSE. oooh
... and those things are? I certainly can't tell from that list. Why, exactly? Too much work/lack of control of outcomes are the usual reasons, but... Spells and spell lists are two very different things. (And I certainly hate making spell lists, or when there aren't rules for creating your own.) I would, if they would just keep making non-narrative systems.
Ok so basically EVERYTHING you bitched about hating in Fate? That's what I love about tabletop rp. That's what I want from tabletop rp. I want my players and myself to be metagaming assholes with our vague and hyperflexible aspects. I want my things to be vague and subject to interpretation to an extent, though contextually they may make a lot of sense. Contextually being a fox means that Abhaya is very good at shapeshifting and illusions. It also means a large portion of society views her as a slut. But it's vague and I get to argue this with the GM. So let's look at her aspect. Yes I am talking about all those forms of sneakiness. It is worded specifically so I can bullshit it in as being fitting the situation. That is what I want. I want something fuzzy. Very, very fuzzy. But also very contextual. As for why I hate simulationism...Because it's not focused on what I give a shit about? I don't really care for gamey shit either. Too much work for shit I don't even want to fucking do. What I want to do is have very, very simple dice rolls and my little store of "Well, I argued this with the dm and metagamed and they said ok yeah sure you told reality to fuck off," and then spend that VAST majority of my time with theme and character work. It's like freeform rp but with just a bit more structure and I get to sit and write aspects and occasionally the gm can go "oh yeah fuck you and all that you stand for we are ignoring the dice today because this is thematically more interesting" and that's lovely. Also misread the spell thing. So again. I like Fate. It is literally my absolute favoritest system ever because it is EXACTLY what I want from a system. Very simple math. No stats. The Fate points and aspects. Simple skills that I can bullshit constantly because they have no associated stat. Very, very theme and character based to the point where that takes precedence over the actual mechanics and dice if we decide it's cooler. If I have to start rolling for stats I get angry. I don't want to roll for stats or buy stat points or assign a standard set of numbers of stat points. Instead I want to go "I WANNA A GAY SUPER SPY AND THIS IS MY CHARACTER CONCEPT AND I CAN USE THAT TO CHEAT".
So again. Fuck off. I like Fate. I am going to continue to like Fate best and view Sutra Stories as the most perfect lovely thing ever. Literally all your complaints are what I like about it.
Well, then. That puts us an impasse. Clearly we must yell at each other over the internet for all eternity! That's the only way to determine whose preferred elfgame is the One True System! Or not. (Yeah, those all sound like good reasons to like FATE, just... not for me.)
Yeah basically. It's just kind of a difference of tastes thing. Like some people REALLY love Pathfinder and I just...didn't care for it much at all. There was lots of dice though. I like the sounds of dice. BUT IT WAS THE WORST AND I WILL NEVER DO THIS AGAIN GOD I HATE IT. ...which is honestly part of why I wanted to learn how to play Fate. Because it sounded kind of like what I liked about freeform rp but with the CLINKY DINKS. DICEY DICE. -rolls dice just because i like the sounds-
Holy shit. An argument over simulationism vs. narrativism that resolves peacefully with each person saying they just want different things out of role-playing games, instead of quarreling over who is Having Fun Incorrectly? I feel like I should screenshot this before it disappears, it's like seeing a cryptid
Yeah I was a bit too cranky, honestly. I think because I assumed I was being told NO YOU HAVE FUN WRONG YOUR THING IS SHIT. So for that I'm sorry. Now let us peacefully go "Oh god I hate your thing?" together.
