My first introduction to that kind of thing was in Edge of the Empire. It's a bit different, in that it uses special dice with 'success', 'bonus' and 'critical' icons, but it's a pretty awesome system. Still very cinematic, which I am, as discussed, not the biggest fan of, but it's a pretty great system all told. I mentioned in the Star Wars thread how much Rogue One seemed like a Star Wars RPG session gone horribly right? I was thinking of Edge of the Empire (well, Age of Rebellion, but it's the same system.) It's made by Fantasy Flight Games, so you can expect pretty decent quality. (There are three official FFG Star Wars games, which are mechanically cross-compatible but focus on different things. Edge of the Empire, the original, is about pirates, smugglers, and other outlaws. Age of Rebellion is about, well, Rebel agents. And Force and Destiny has the players as not-quite-Jedi and is generally OP (all of the books have options for Force Adepts, but F&D actually starts off with a decent selection of Force powers and superior equipment. Including, potentially, lightsabers (normally the second-most-expensive non starship item and extremely rare) and the skill to actually use them.) I've heard of at least unofficial-but-still-Star Wars mods out there, The Old Republic (what it says on the tin) and New Order (for those contrarians who want to play as the Empire. Also potentially useful for statting out rivals-as-PCs?). Finding them might be tricky, though. It'd also be a pretty good system to run just about any space opera or science-fantasy sort of setting...
So I've been leery of the apocalypse engine bc of some of the storygamisms I have seen lurking about, but I appreciated the elegance of the Magical Fury and Magical Burst games, and now @antediluvian has started running a solo Dungeon World game for me, and I kind of love it. Reading through the srd has been very helpful. I can see that the game experience the designers want to deliver is similar to that of old school d&d games, but they are building the metagame expectations of what the game is about into the system, rather than leaving it as an unwritten part of table culture. There are elements I still balk at, there are a few things I find unintuitive as it deviates from traditional game designs I've been immersed in since roughly 1988, but overall I am digging it. I might even take it up as a system I'd run myself, maybe not as my primary outlet but certainly as one of my preferred options.
i'm disgustingly excited for the magical burst game @Arxon is running like I'm specifically avoiding posting in the dedicated thread so I don't fill it up with sperging
Trust me, I have filled up the SBURB game thread with plenty of sperging over the past year and a half, I'd be happy to read yours!
I also forgot to mention that the way the apocalypse engine uses the word "move" drives me nuts. I can see they are borrowing the term from board games and war games to describe that moment where the fiction checks in with the system to see what happens, but some of these things, referring to them as moves just makes my brain cry out "no!"
HAVE A RANT ABOUT RIFTS, JUICERS, AND JUICER SPORTS Spoiler: Laz rants about juicers for 5 paragraphs So Juicers are people in Rifts who underwent a procedure to turn themselves into super-soldiers. It involves implanting a computer and an injection system that pumps them full of steroids at the cost of only living a max of like 5 years after conversion. Roid rage: the character class. There's the initial procedure, during which the body is altered by the first round of steroids, and then the computer kicks on in threat situations and gives temporary doses for combat situations. But the computer is controlled by the body- there's a whole table for issues juicers can have and if they get conversion-induced panic the computer will give them the combat doses because they saw a spider. Juicers consider themselves invulnerable. They're tough, not quite supernatural physical endurance but they're definitely up there, they have an automatic dodge vs everything all the time. They have a chance to dodge a silent, speed-of-light energy projectile while dead asleep. And they can tear holes in steel. SO except for the expiration date... they're kinda right. The Juicer Uprising world book devotes a small section to Juicer sports. Some of it's just straight-up bloodsport. What kills a juicer? Another juicer. Deadball is a game similar to racquetball if you close one eye and squint, with a very elastic ball that randomly protrudes spikes. Murderthon is a marathon except you can kill your competitors. But juicer football was what I was thinking of. It's more violent, because juicers are, but juicers aren't known for playing by the rules. There is the JFL, which plays by mostly standard rules except full-contact fighting is allowed, but mostly it's played by bored juicers who want 'cleaner' fun other options. It's perfectly viable for a bunch of juicers to decide that the goals are on opposite ends of a town because they have the stamina to play a game that big and the fuck does a juicer need rules for? The violence is intrinsic to juicer sports part because it's a culture developed by people who, voluntarily or not, traded the rest of their lives to be badass super-soldiers for a few years. But also because every aspect of their life is defined by the change, by the bursts of steroids that accompany every adrenaline rush. In some of the supplementary material, like the Rifter and some of the blurbs for Juicer Uprising, it kind of highlights how everything is bland and boring for a juicer except when they've got the adrenaline-triggered chemical rush. Super-soldier conversion aside of course juicer sports are violent, because "I think this fucker might be trying to kill me" is the only thing that gives them a rush. And everything that isn't the steroid high is bland and boring.
I'm going to be running my first Dresden Files Accelerated game tomorrow! It's a slot zero for what will hopefully turn out to be both a fun one-shot game to run at a local convention and a dip in the water for what will hopefully turn out to be a running campaign. I am both excited and terrified.
Oh congrats! I tried to run the original DF RPG a couple of times but none of my friends nor I had played any tabletop before then so we never got it off the ground >.> Good luck!
DFRPG is a beast to run. I have the 3 books they put out just because they're hilarious to read for the marginalia and stuff, and they're a neat source of secondary canon for the books. I'm putting together a t-shit (SplatterCon!!!) for it and everything. DFA is much easier, though I liked DFRPG's city-building. The only problem I have in getting my local group to play FATE games is that the first session isn't the kind of play they're expecting, and it's a little too freeform. So DFA is a little tighter, some of the rules seem more familiar, and the set-up is shorter.
I've fallen down the Eclipse Phase rabbit hole again which is sad because the only time I got to play it was with a mediocre GM and a bad group dynamic and it doesn't really suit the playstyle of the rest of my current D&D group
