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Cluedrew
2018-01-14, 06:40 PM
Occasionally we see things about the worst of something in role-playing games. Then someone mentions the game that should not (but often is regardless) be named and then it is hard to say much beyond that because it just is so bad. But how bad can good be? Or alternately, a system that is bad but you enjoy it anyways.

I was thinking about my answer to this question and I ended up at the big one: D&D 3.X/5e. I combine them because for me the reasons I think they are bad, but like it anyways, are the same. 4e is its own story, and I haven't played any of the older editions (although I have read some). What is wrong: the weird partial specialization of the setting, length of combat, prevalence of combat, the lack of non-combat options, magic, how the upper sections of the level chart are sort of ignored, numerous half baked solutions and various historical artifacts that have become some kind of untouchable aspect of the system and more.

But why is it still fun? Well having a reason to sit down with friends is always a plus. It is a touchstone most people understand (although outside of the role-playing community, only in vague terms). Although I occasionally do something on the side during combat and have wing most out of combat things, eventually things happen in a reasonable way and the plot moves forward. So yeah, I suppose "just good enough" is no high praise, but to me good enough.

And that is why I consider D&D 3.X/5e to be the worst role-playing game I enjoy. What about everybody else?

Honest Tiefling
2018-01-14, 06:45 PM
DnD 4th edition. I think it was a mess (bloated HP, skill system was weird, borked a beloved setting)...But it was trying something. It had a lot of good ideas that were later stolen by Pathfinder or DnD 5th edition. The idea that classes SHOULD be balanced is one I prefer, even if I don't expect perfection.

And I still like the idea of Points of Light. I still like the default non-FR pantheon and glad to see there are hints of the Raven Queen returning.

Lord Raziere
2018-01-14, 06:49 PM
I dunno, its toss up between pathfinder, Exalted 2e, Wh40k rpgs and Anima Beyond Fantasy. though given that I'll probably never find anyone to play the last one and given its over-complexity at least in character creation, Anima's probably the worst.....I mostly enjoy it for its setting, honestly I should probably just take the setting and use better mechanics for them.

Doorhandle
2018-01-14, 07:44 PM
3.5 for me. It’s a worse version of pathfinder ruleset (which makes sense, for obvious reasons :biggrin:) that’s even more broken, to say nothing of the occasionally janky artwork and ideas. But there’s many reasons it lived as long as it did, some which are even good: such as the endless amount of content, and the wide variety of potential nemeses.

edit: I think I would actually include Dungeon World and Mythender to this list, upon reflection

Dungeon World took many good ideas from apocalypse world , but it's so dependant on knowing how to run it there are multiple (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzeF5GXNEsnfUjU0NXRDM1dFN1k/view)documents (https://imgur.com/YXrw1Zq) dedicated (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MC_W_qxY7kScRK_2arLhGvATX0HyQz6dTIKFj_HI2T4/edit)to figuring (http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=2693.msg16185#msg16185)out (https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/65809/how-to-ask-nicely-in-dungeon-world) how to dungeon-master it correctly (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ORjM3sxhQrwNI_chlNzYFMD5OFHj7u-Rs_gY4kHkzO0/edit)! But it's still a great mix of simple, yet flexible mechanics that do not overly interfere with each character class having its own unique tricks, and the fail/win at cost/clean win mechanic is fantastic.

With Mythender, it has a unique rule set (a benefit and a curse) and there's only one "right" way to play which irks me more than it should: but everything is honed toward that one way into a great god-stomping experience.

Either way, with both those rulesets I feel I have to struggle against the very rules of the system to run the game, as opposed to 3.5 and pathfinder where you can safely ignore the non-basics and still have it function very well.

BlizzardSucks80
2018-01-14, 11:35 PM
I play Pathfinder a lot and I think I use it to enjoy at one point but now I loathe playing it. Maybe it's just burnout, maybe it's realizing the crappiness of it. Idk.

But the worst RPG I enjoy would have to be D&D 3.5 or D&D 4.0.

I don't play many other RPGs these days, cept the ones I make, which usually fall flat neways

Quertus
2018-01-15, 01:44 AM
Worst I enjoy? Hmmm... I think it's a toss-up.

Shadow Run is horrible. It's "only one player can actually participate in (or, usually, is even aware of) any given minigame". So, in an X player game, you sit there twiddling your thumbs (X-1)/X of the time; the other 1/X of the time, you're on your own, as the party's only hope. And the rules in general aren't especially great.

Why do I still enjoy it? Because fast characters feel fast in a way no other system I've ever played can match. Magical characters feel Magical (almost deserving of the rainbow here). There are rules for creating custom spells (not so much for custom cybernetics). And there's replay value, with different characters playing differently (even within the same archetype). Character creation is easy. And Good Karma.

Warhammer is tough competition, though. It's known as the system of fail at my tables. Stats are usually around 30, which is your % chance of succeeding at an average roll in a skill governed by that stat; half that if you're not proficient (and it's not "trained only"). 96+ is a botch. One of these days, I intend to run a party through a waitress trying to take their order, and the cook trying to prepare their food without poisoning them. I expect heavy casualties.

Combat is miss miss miss miss death. I had a tough charter go from full health to 0 in one hit from civilians. Oh, and if you survive combat, there's limb loss, and deadly disease from scratches.

The magic system is fairly painful even before demons come and eat your face (and, usually, the rest of the party).

There are a few good tactics; everything else is in the "why did you bother?" range. So, IMO, worse than 3e D&D tiers.

Oh, and I don't get the setting, so I have no choice but to play completely incompetent characters that don't fit.

Oh, and some versions of the game, you don't choose your "class", so I'm not always playing a mage.

Why do I enjoy it? I guess because Mutations are fun. And the stories are often fun to tell after the fact? I'm not really sure.

2D8HP
2018-01-15, 02:13 AM
That would be Gamma World

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-aKH4KpHOp-8/WFGzfFMAhAI/AAAAAAAAC4M/0BRP2tBUrWEDNCyyZQP35uWsSmd6ttKMwCLcB/s320/GammaWorld0001.jpg

It just made no sense, but it seized my imagination.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51UnHyxPqjL._SY400_.jpg

The rules were a bit like D&D, but with absurd mutations and even higher hit points.

To my embarrassment I tried to GM my parents in a game! ....and I basically had my gaming friends mock me by calling a session I ran "Bart Wars" (after our local subway system).

Wow, I just about forgot about it (it's been more than 35 years!) until this thread sparked my memory.

vasilidor
2018-01-15, 03:18 AM
Palladium's Heroes Unlimited & Rifts. Need I say more?

Black Jester
2018-01-15, 06:29 AM
Many years ago, I had a splendid evening with a few friends, a few bottles of wine, and the FATAL character creation system. That was probably the most fun to garbage material I have ever witnessed.

Florian
2018-01-15, 08:17 AM
That might be Rifts and Shadowrun. Reason why I count them as bad: the style they wanted to be (sandbox, black mirror shades heist, respectively) and what they supported (basically: dungeon crawls with funky fluff) was way off. Still, enjoyed decades of playing them.

VincentTakeda
2018-01-15, 09:11 AM
Palladium's heroes unlimited with ninjas and superspies is pretty exclusively my jam for the last 2 decades.

Anonymouswizard
2018-01-15, 11:29 AM
DnD 4th edition. I think it was a mess (bloated HP, skill system was weird, borked a beloved setting)...But it was trying something. It had a lot of good ideas that were later stolen by Pathfinder or DnD 5th edition. The idea that classes SHOULD be balanced is one I prefer, even if I don't expect perfection.

And I still like the idea of Points of Light. I still like the default non-FR pantheon and glad to see there are hints of the Raven Queen returning.

I still to this day say that I think that 4e is a better game than 3.X or 5e, even though out was the opposite. The reason being that 4e was exactly what it wanted to be, and changes tended to move it closer towards an ideal (until essentials). There were serious problems for me and I don't agree with a lot of it, but of I had to run an edition of WotC D&D it would be 4e (although I'd need the books, I got rid of them).

Otherwise, Eclipse Phase is a game with lots of good ideas and an amazing setting, but the system has many problems (starring at character creation, spend 1000 points on various party's of your character, as long as at least 400 are spent on active skills and 300 on knowledge skills). Recalculating skill totals whenever you change morphs, several rolls required for one action, other minor things. Many of the things I hoped for in 2e haven't been implemented, so I'm unlikely to pick up the new core book as long as I still have first edition. Thankfully there's an official conversion to Fate Core, which I love, so I can still enjoy the setting without the system.

I also have a soft spot for AD&D2e, even with all it's problems, but it's hard to get people to play it.

Quertus
2018-01-15, 11:57 AM
I'm seeing Rifts a lot. I'll agree with it being bad, with things like individual XP tables despite a complete and utter lack of balance to make 3e D&D cringe (average human to demigods starting characters, complete with wealth disparity, and my 15th level character can't hurt your 1st level character, because I don't deal mega damage?), HP vs "no save just die" attacks, etc etc. I guess I just didn't have enough fun playing it before the game fell apart (which happened every time I played) for it to count.


Otherwise, Eclipse Phase is a game with lots of good ideas and an amazing setting, but the system has many problems (starring at character creation, spend 1000 points on various party's of your character, as long as at least 400 are spent on active skills and 300 on knowledge skills). Recalculating skill totals whenever you change morphs, several rolls required for one action, other minor things. Many of the things I hoped for in 2e haven't been implemented, so I'm unlikely to pick up the new core book as long as I still have first edition. Thankfully there's an official conversion to Fate Core, which I love, so I can still enjoy the setting without the system.

I also have a soft spot for AD&D2e, even with all it's problems, but it's hard to get people to play it.

Woot 2e D&D. Still the Best* Game Ever!

How is the Eclipse Phase "spend 1000 points on character creation" a big enough problem to be worthy of this thread? :smallconfused:

* a) most fun; b) most fun for a diverse array of play styles

Lord Torath
2018-01-15, 12:06 PM
I guess I should cop to 2E AD&D being my favorite Worst game. Still play it quasi-regularly with my kids. I'd love it if I could find a local 2E game.

Although I could also say 2E Shadowrun or Palladium Robotech (although I've never actually played Palladium).

Florian
2018-01-15, 12:06 PM
How is the Eclipse Phase "spend 1000 points on character creation" a big enough problem to be worthy of this thread? :smallconfused:

Same problems as Shadowrun, just multiplied x4 because of transhumanism.

Lord Raziere
2018-01-15, 12:08 PM
How is the Eclipse Phase "spend 1000 points on character creation" a big enough problem to be worthy of this thread? :smallconfused:


I'll be honest, I love Eclipse Phase but its 1000 point character creation is ridiculous. especially when you have loads of skills. and equipment to spend it on. and credits, and such and so on. its basically unwieldy and you have balance the whole 1000 points for character creation yourself without knowing whats really important when there is a lot of directions for a campaign.

like, the package system in the Transhuman supplement REALLY helps in character creation because you can just pick a few packages to combine together to get a good well-rounded skill set. all the hassle of calculating it yourself? just no, 1000 points? just no.

of course, Eclipse Fate is even better because hey, why bother with the stupidly long equipment lists and skill lists when you can just snip it all down to the essentials? like honestly, just an improvement in general, less fiddly details. course, there is also Mindjammer which is basically Fate transhumanism but with the Culture instead of Dead Space.

Hunter Noventa
2018-01-15, 12:32 PM
Palladium's Heroes Unlimited & Rifts. Need I say more?

Ah yes, Rifts. We had so much fun with that system back in college. With our giant robots and our video-games-made-real and our head-butting eldritch abominations with transforming space battleships. It certainly is enjoyable, but it doesn't make the rules any less terrible to work with.

Quertus
2018-01-15, 12:43 PM
Same problems as Shadowrun, just multiplied x4 because of transhumanism.


I'll be honest, I love Eclipse Phase but its 1000 point character creation is ridiculous. especially when you have loads of skills. and equipment to spend it on. and credits, and such and so on. its basically unwieldy and you have balance the whole 1000 points for character creation yourself without knowing whats really important when there is a lot of directions for a campaign.

like, the package system in the Transhuman supplement REALLY helps in character creation because you can just pick a few packages to combine together to get a good well-rounded skill set. all the hassle of calculating it yourself? just no, 1000 points? just no.

of course, Eclipse Fate is even better because hey, why bother with the stupidly long equipment lists and skill lists when you can just snip it all down to the essentials? like honestly, just an improvement in general, less fiddly details. course, there is also Mindjammer which is basically Fate transhumanism but with the Culture instead of Dead Space.

Ok, I get "way too many specific little skills", and "world is cool and diverse enough that, since you're not able to build an omnimancer, there's too much chance of building a character who is useless in the campaign" (which is one of my biggest reasons to hate on cries for limiting 3e D&D wizards to specific specialties, btw).

But is there some other reason to hate on the point buy nature of the system that I'm missing?

Tinkerer
2018-01-15, 12:53 PM
I'm seeing Rifts a lot. I'll agree with it being bad, with things like individual XP tables despite a complete and utter lack of balance to make 3e D&D cringe (average human to demigods starting characters, complete with wealth disparity, and my 15th level character can't hurt your 1st level character, because I don't deal mega damage?), HP vs "no save just die" attacks, etc etc. I guess I just didn't have enough fun playing it before the game fell apart (which happened every time I played) for it to count.


That's one thing that people always mention regarding Rifts is the Mega-Damage System which confuses me. They treat it as though it is some factor that only certain exclusive classes get when over 99.5% of classes (no that isn't hyperbole, Palladium has well over 1000 classes although many of them are essentially reskinned versions of other classes) gets the equipment right from character generation and the expectation is that the 0.5% grab the equipment at the first available opportunity (I think all the classes which don't start with Mega Damage equipment are travelers from another world). Palladium has a LOT of problems but I don't think Mega Damage is one of them. Now M.D. bloat on the other hand...

Plus a game system saying that it's characters are unbalanced goes a long way with me, that's why you'll hear me deriding 3.X's lack of balance but not Palladium's. 3.X says in the DMG that you'll be able to determine the power level of a party and what challenges are appropriate based on the character levels, Palladium doesn't suffer from that delusion.

Note the above paragraphs are because you seemed to be wondering why it still hold a place in people's hearts when those issues existed, not to challenge what you were saying.

I'm just gonna go with the Palladium system as opposed to any particular game line within it. I view all of the games as essentially one large game, particularly considering the most popular world is also the one which goes all in on dimensional travel. Imagine how different D&D would be if instead of Greyhawk/FR as the default setting it was Spelljammer instead. Regarding the horrible rules I think that every Palladium GM kinda made a bunch of their own house rules. Indeed for those who don't know the Palladium in house testing groups don't even use the Palladium rules. That helps to explain so many of the errors in the books it's kinda ridiculous.

Lord Raziere
2018-01-15, 01:00 PM
Ok, I get "way too many specific little skills", and "world is cool and diverse enough that, since you're not able to build an omnimancer, there's too much chance of building a character who is useless in the campaign" (which is one of my biggest reasons to hate on cries for limiting 3e D&D wizards to specific specialties, btw).

But is there some other reason to hate on the point buy nature of the system that I'm missing?

your point buy is both your point buy for your equipment AND your skills.

in a transhuman game where your consciousness is literally uploaded and beamed across the solar system as the fastest method of travel, that means your body is equipment.

and starting equipment is basically useless. because say your character is on Mars, and your mission takes you to say, Earth's moon, two relatively close settlements of transhumanity. you get beamed across and all your equipment you bought at character creation is still on mars, including your body. which means spending your character creation points on equipment, including your body, is a trap. especially when you can fab all your equipment from whatever local place you come to. meaning its better to have blueprints of what you want/need in your mind than the things themselves because you can just fab up things from the blueprint.

of course, character creation doesn't tell you that, so.....

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-15, 01:20 PM
your point buy is both your point buy for your equipment AND your skills.

in a transhuman game where your consciousness is literally uploaded and beamed across the solar system as the fastest method of travel, that means your body is equipment.

and starting equipment is basically useless. because say your character is on Mars, and your mission takes you to say, Earth's moon, two relatively close settlements of transhumanity. you get beamed across and all your equipment you bought at character creation is still on mars, including your body. which means spending your character creation points on equipment, including your body, is a trap. especially when you can fab all your equipment from whatever local place you come to. meaning its better to have blueprints of what you want/need in your mind than the things themselves because you can just fab up things from the blueprint.

of course, character creation doesn't tell you that, so.....

Ah, yes, trap options combined with system/setting disconnect.

Lovely.

(We won't get into my skepticism about transhumanism and the singularity.)

Florian
2018-01-15, 01:28 PM
But is there some other reason to hate on the point buy nature of the system that I'm missing?

The game deals with the transhumanity concept. You can buy any "body" you want, any "skills and knowledge" and any "Personality". Get a job as a PI on Mars? Then the "core of you" gets transferred over to a PI Marlow edition body with all the necessary skills and abilities, as well as there necessary personality installed to do the job.

So what you do at chargen is create the "character" that you are _not_ during the game. Pretty pointless.

Jama7301
2018-01-15, 02:36 PM
Worst game I've played or run, probably a tossup between 3.5 and Shadowrun. Unfun answers, but whatever.

Game that I want to play, but it's probably bad due to some design choices? Technoir. No numeric damage, just Adjectives in 3 flavors of severity: Fleeting, Sticky, and Locked. Try to convince someone to do something? If you're using just your stat, you can only apply a Fleeting, short term adjective, like Hesitant. Did you spend any of your normally on-turn refilling bonus dice on this roll, instead of saving them for defense? You can give one of those to the GM to make it Sticky (friendly), or two to make it Locked (loyal). Now they have dice to use on any of the PCs.

It's vague as hell, and it appears to have a weird ebb and flow to conflict. Feels like cautious players will try to "creatively" use lower-powered Adjectives to mimic higher leveled ones, so they can't be hurt in return.

But damned if I don't want to play this game or run it at least once.

Tanarii
2018-01-15, 04:18 PM
Rifts. The Palladium System is just awful, a total Fantasy Heartbreaker. But once you layer Megadamnage and M.D.C. on top of it, it breaks completely.

But it's incredible setting. Especially since it totally encourages you to mish-mash the entire Palladium system together. Having a Wolfen, Super Hero, Ninja or Superspy, adventure with the mandatory Juicer every party inevitably has can be crazy fun. Kinda like throwing all the 1e or 2e or 3e or 4e D&D splatbooks together into a single huge kitchen sink setting and running the game. It's simultaneously terrible and incredibly stupid fun.

Edit: that said, certainly most of the other systems folks have been listing qualify as terrible but fun.
Gamma World is an inexplicable mess of slapped together & not at all explained abilities in the early editions. How anything is supposed to work is never clear.
Shadowrun & Gurps are almost totally unplayable if you try to actually use all the subsystems, the game bogs down completely.
Runequest's & Warhammer early edition's magic systems were as opaque & foggy as an olde timey London night.

CharonsHelper
2018-01-15, 04:33 PM
Cthulhutech -

The system is a freakin' hot mess, and I heard that later some of the lore got rather creepy (and in a Kevin Spacey way rather than the Lovecraft way they were going for) - but it was still great fun for a session or three. Especially the session in which I made it all about mystery and the aesthetics - and OOC problem solving - so the horrid system didn't ruin it.

Even the fluff falls apart with too much examination (based upon mechanics - a half dozen of the tiny mecha would slaughter the biggest - and considering how much bigger it is it would make no sense to build anything but bunches of the little ones and overwhelm the opposition - etc.).

I don't think that I'd play it again, but I still enjoy picking up the core book to skim some fluff from time to time.

Hunter Noventa
2018-01-15, 04:34 PM
Shadowrun & Gurps are almost totally unplayable if you try to actually use all the subsystems, the game bogs down completely.


Ugh, Shadowrun. Sure, no other RPG ever ended an encounter with 'spontaneous cowboy orgy', but no other RPG can have 5/6ths of the party sitting out of an encounter on a regular basis either.

CharonsHelper
2018-01-15, 04:36 PM
Ugh, Shadowrun. Sure, no other RPG ever ended an encounter with 'spontaneous cowboy orgy', but no other RPG can have 5/6ths of the party sitting out of an encounter on a regular basis either.

Yeah - if you have a sub-system in which most of the party has to sit out it needs to be FAST. Shadowrun's has multiple systems designed for only 1-2 PCs to play through - and they're all slow.

I do like a lot of their fluff and some of their mechanics. But - in Shadowrun's case the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Tanarii
2018-01-15, 04:41 PM
Yeah - if you have a sub-system in which most of the party has to sit out it needs to be FAST. Shadowrun's has multiple systems designed for only 1-2 PCs to play through - and they're all slow.

I do like a lot of their fluff and some of their mechanics. But - in Shadowrun's case the whole is less than the sum of its parts.Which is why while it has a great setting, I don't really enjoy it unless the entire party is built around ONE of the subsystems, or maybe one with a minor in a second for quickly dipping a toe into one of the others. Then it's playable, but doesn't really qualify for "worst" any more.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-15, 04:45 PM
This is a hard thread for me to answer, because for me "bad system" and "enjoy" are for the most part mutually exclusive. I can't ignore all the things the system does objectively wrong and/or subjectively bad.

At best, there are campaigns I've enjoyed despite the flaws in the system -- see, any Vampire or Werewolf campaign we did back in the day.

Lord Raziere
2018-01-15, 04:59 PM
This is a hard thread for me to answer, because for me "bad system" and "enjoy" are for the most part mutually exclusive. I can't ignore all the things the system does objectively wrong and/or subjectively bad.


Yeah, you seem to be unable to filter out flaws like that in general when it comes to media. Whether thats a good thing or bad thing I don't know, nor can I rightly judge, but it does seem to narrow your options from my subjective perspective.

I guess I can enjoy pathfinder because I can find a way to ignore or filter out the glaring martial/caster disparity problem to enjoy a game that sounds good to me like Eberron, but that might also because I have things like Path of War and the Spheres books to distract me and remind me that if I ever want to truly go full balance on PF, I have those 3rd party sources to at least get closer to the ideal.

Honest Tiefling
2018-01-15, 06:54 PM
I get the feeling he's the type who don't enjoy bad movies. But hey, different strokes for different folks, right?

So Max_Killjoy...What game did you WANT to love but just couldn't bring yourself to enjoy?

JNAProductions
2018-01-15, 06:57 PM
3.P.

It's a god-awful system, but it's fun!

Jay R
2018-01-15, 09:54 PM
Chivalry and Sorcery. It's the most lush, vivid beautiful, consistent, realistic, glorious, fascinating and compelling unplayable mess I've ever seen.

I actually had a GM who could run it once. And it was wonderful.

RazorChain
2018-01-15, 09:57 PM
Rifts. The Palladium System is just awful, a total Fantasy Heartbreaker. But once you layer Megadamnage and M.D.C. on top of it, it breaks completely.

But it's incredible setting. Especially since it totally encourages you to mish-mash the entire Palladium system together. Having a Wolfen, Super Hero, Ninja or Superspy, adventure with the mandatory Juicer every party inevitably has can be crazy fun. Kinda like throwing all the 1e or 2e or 3e or 4e D&D splatbooks together into a single huge kitchen sink setting and running the game. It's simultaneously terrible and incredibly stupid fun.

It's with one of the two systems I always wanted to try but never got to it, Palladium and Rolemaster



Edit: that said, certainly most of the other systems folks have been listing qualify as terrible but fun.
Gamma World is an inexplicable mess of slapped together & not at all explained abilities in the early editions. How anything is supposed to work is never clear.
Shadowrun & Gurps are almost totally unplayable if you try to actually use all the subsystems, the game bogs down completely.
Runequest's & Warhammer early edition's magic systems were as opaque & foggy as an olde timey London night.

I have played both Warhammer and RuneQuest. In WRFRP 1st edition we tended to avoid magic because it had a tendency to blow up in our faces with horrible consequences. I played RQ second edition and the magic system was nothing to brag about but to most people sacrificing Power, like from the actual stat, for one use spells was unthinkable so everybody gravitated towards sorcery.

Early editions of Shadowrun were not good mechanically, remember once when my character threw a 6 pack of grenades into a room with couple of troll guards and they just dusted themselves off and attacked us. And I never made the mistake again to have a character with bad initiative, everybody had acted twice before my turn came. I last played 5th edition and Shadowrun is just so much fun...almost as fun as Cyberpunk 2020.

Gurps is a game you can't play with all the subsystems because you are forced to pick and chose: Basic Combat or Advanced Combat and use the cinematic combat rules or wuxia maybe? Do we use extra effort or not? Are you going to use the bleeding rules or just ignore them? Should we use the expanded hit location rules or just the basics hit locations?

If you are going to use every rule in the book that you can get into play then you'll bog the game down. You can calculate how big a hole you can dig in two hours, make everybody roll for infection for every scrape they take. Roll for disease and one PC dies from a urinary tract infection. You want to throw that rock, let's calculate it's velocity and how far you can throw it and how much damage you do? You want to jump between those buildings and instead of rolling your DX, jumping or acrobatics let's calculate your velocity and how far you can jump at said velocity and then you can roll for extra effort because you are pushing yourself and then we arrive at the distance you can jump. Or you can just roll Jump skill at -1. Gurps is a fantastic toolkit for running games that adhere to realism or semi-realism but it is what you make of it. In the hands of a mad rules lawyer it becomes a nightmare.

rs2excelsior
2018-01-15, 10:13 PM
Arguably, Paranoia. I haven't actually -looked- at the rulebook, but from my experience playing, it's a game where anything can kill you (we've usually had 3-4 character deaths before the party even gets their mission), your powers and skills don't work half the time, and generally player agency swings wildly over the course of a session. And yet, it's been a lot of fun. A lot of that is due to our GM for the system. I think I'm a pretty good GM for 3.5/Pathfinder, but I'd probably be horrible with Paranoia. Ours is good at making it work and keeping things moving. We go into a Paranoia session expecting ridiculousness, we get ridiculousness, and everyone has a good time. I had a hippie character try to give an out of control robotic car a hug, lose both of his legs, and get bolted onto the car to use it as a means of transport. We've had a character get their brain put into a giant death robot, and when the death robot got destroyed we took the brain and one of its arm cannons and attached them to an RC car. It's a lot of fun, despite doing basically everything "wrong"--so long as everyone buys into the concept of the game.

Tinkerer
2018-01-15, 11:31 PM
It's a lot of fun, despite doing basically everything "wrong"--so long as everyone buys into the concept of the game.

On second thought, let's not go to Alpha Complex. 'Tis a silly place.

Arbane
2018-01-16, 03:41 AM
On second thought, let's not go to Alpha Complex. 'Tis a silly place.

Are gratuitous Monty Python quotes treason? If not, they should be. :smallbiggrin:

Acanous
2018-01-16, 05:18 AM
FATAL.
I kid. No seriously I'm joking, don't ban me.

Anonymouswizard
2018-01-16, 05:29 AM
Are gratuitous Monty Python quotes treason? If not, they should be. :smallbiggrin:

Declaration of what should be treason is treason. Please report to your nearest maximum fun chamber.


But yeah, Paranoia is a game I've always wanted to try. Sadly the one time I had the chance one of the group members refused outright to play it, because he wanted to feel like a powerful dude killing all the monsters and wasn't interested in a more comedic game.

exelsisxax
2018-01-16, 11:06 AM
FATAL.
I kid. No seriously I'm joking, don't ban me.

The proper punishment is death! DEATH!

Worst system that I enjoy playing is probably PF. But if we go deeper, nWoD is the worst system that I have enjoyed playing a game in.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-16, 01:09 PM
I get the feeling he's the type who don't enjoy bad movies. But hey, different strokes for different folks, right?


No, I don't enjoy bad movies. Sometimes there are movies other people think are bad, that I like, but I don't like movies that I perceive as bad.




So Max_Killjoy...What game did you WANT to love but just couldn't bring yourself to enjoy?


Way back in the day, at college (early 90s), there were games I thought would be good because friends and/or follow members of the "gamers' guild" made them sound like excellent games... but I ended up really disliking the systems, and often the setting assumptions baked into the systems. Cyberpunk, Deadlands (one of the contributors was playtesting material for it at the time), some others.

exelsisxax
2018-01-16, 01:26 PM
No, I don't enjoy bad movies. Sometimes there are movies other people think are bad, that I like, but I don't like movies that I perceive as bad.

Kung-pow: enter the fist, legend of ron burgundy, history of the world part 1, the room.

Just because they're terrible movies(mostly on purpose) doesn't mean they aren't enjoyable, you just need to change your perspective. Don't think of them as movies, but gag reels/live improv skits.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-16, 01:29 PM
Kung-pow: enter the fist, legend of ron burgundy, history of the world part 1, the room.

Just because they're terrible movies (mostly on purpose) doesn't mean they aren't enjoyable, you just need to change your perspective. Don't think of them as movies, but gag reels/live improv skits.

Love it when "you don't like what I like" becomes "you need to change your perspective".

Do I really need to go through the process of defending not liking what I don't like?

How far into that process of defending my own tastes will I predictably be accused of denigrating other people's tastes?

exelsisxax
2018-01-16, 01:59 PM
Love it when "you don't like what I like" becomes "you need to change your perspective".

Do I really need to go through the process of defending not liking what I don't like?

How far into that process of defending my own tastes will I predictably be accused of denigrating other people's tastes?

As far as the question is about bad systems and not systems you personally don't like. I don't like mangoes, but a mango is indeed food. An airplane (http://tailgatefan.cbslocal.com/2012/10/01/michel-lotito-the-man-who-ate-an-airplane-and-everything-else/), regardless of your personal tastes, is not food.

FATAL is a bad system, and if you disagree you are wrong. I personally do not like FATE, and if you disagree you have a different opinion.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-16, 02:33 PM
As far as the question is about bad systems and not systems you personally don't like. I don't like mangoes, but a mango is indeed food. An airplane (http://tailgatefan.cbslocal.com/2012/10/01/michel-lotito-the-man-who-ate-an-airplane-and-everything-else/), regardless of your personal tastes, is not food.

FATAL is a bad system, and if you disagree you are wrong. I personally do not like FATE, and if you disagree you have a different opinion.


The sidebar was about movies, not game systems. Listing off movies you like but I don't, and telling me that I just need to try harder to like them and/or that my perspective is "wrong" is neither useful nor particularly civil. If your only response to someone not liking something is to try to chalk that up to a personal failing on their part, then don't bother.


My comment about particular games was in response to a question about games I wanted to like but found unenjoyable -- not a direct response to the subject of the thread.


For context (which for some reason seems to go largely ignored on these forums), here's the entire exchange:




This is a hard thread for me to answer, because for me "bad system" and "enjoy" are for the most part mutually exclusive. I can't ignore all the things the system does objectively wrong and/or subjectively bad.

At best, there are campaigns I've enjoyed despite the flaws in the system -- see, any Vampire or Werewolf campaign we did back in the day.



Yeah, you seem to be unable to filter out flaws like that in general when it comes to media. Whether thats a good thing or bad thing I don't know, nor can I rightly judge, but it does seem to narrow your options from my subjective perspective.

I guess I can enjoy pathfinder because I can find a way to ignore or filter out the glaring martial/caster disparity problem to enjoy a game that sounds good to me like Eberron, but that might also because I have things like Path of War and the Spheres books to distract me and remind me that if I ever want to truly go full balance on PF, I have those 3rd party sources to at least get closer to the ideal.



I get the feeling he's the type who don't enjoy bad movies. But hey, different strokes for different folks, right?

So Max_Killjoy...What game did you WANT to love but just couldn't bring yourself to enjoy?



No, I don't enjoy bad movies. Sometimes there are movies other people think are bad, that I like, but I don't like movies that I perceive as bad.

Way back in the day, at college (early 90s), there were games I thought would be good because friends and/or follow members of the "gamers' guild" made them sound like excellent games... but I ended up really disliking the systems, and often the setting assumptions baked into the systems. Cyberpunk, Deadlands (one of the contributors was playtesting material for it at the time), some others.

Grod_The_Giant
2018-01-16, 05:09 PM
Probably going to go with 3.5/PF, same as everyone else... I could maybe say Exalted 2e, because I enjoyed the campaign I played in with that, but I never really learned the system and certain parts (CoughMagicTakesTwoTurnsInASlowCombatSystemCough) did severely cramp my fun.

Cluedrew
2018-01-16, 05:31 PM
Dungeon World so dependant on knowing how to run it there are multiple (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzeF5GXNEsnfUjU0NXRDM1dFN1k/view)documents (https://imgur.com/YXrw1Zq) dedicated (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MC_W_qxY7kScRK_2arLhGvATX0HyQz6dTIKFj_HI2T4/edit)to figuring (http://apocalypse-world.com/forums/index.php?topic=2693.msg16185#msg16185)out (https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/65809/how-to-ask-nicely-in-dungeon-world) how to dungeon-master it correctly (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ORjM3sxhQrwNI_chlNzYFMD5OFHj7u-Rs_gY4kHkzO0/edit)!That is not such a rare problem. I mean even considering how many people play D&D, there is a lot of stuff about how to run the various editions. And for the experienced players I'm not sure if so much is because it is harder, or because it is a paradigm shift. I should say I've never played Dungeon World, just some other Powered by the Apocalypse systems. I remember the first time I played it wondering if you had to know all the whys of the system to make it work (ex. narrating the right level of severity to a consequence). Although you do have to do that, is it really any harder than setting a target number?

Or they might just be different enough that grading them like this is ultimately useless.


Wow, I just about forgot about it (it's been more than 35 years!) until this thread sparked my memory.Ha, quite a trip down memory line there. Besides that, the largest subgroup of "bad fun"* games seem to be the ones that focused in on a really cool idea (or group there of) and then implemented it badly. I don't know much about Gamma World, but from your brief description it seems to fit.

* Not to be confused with wrong fun.


[I]Chivalry and Sorcery. [...] I actually had a GM who could run it once. And it was wonderful.I'm curios, is there anything in particular reason that running it was so hard to run? Did the rules just require near perfect memorization and understanding to use?

Quertus
2018-01-16, 06:23 PM
Arguably, the worst system I ever enjoyed was a homebrew. It was overly simplistic, easy to game the system, completely unbalanced, yet still thoroughly enjoyable.


That's one thing that people always mention regarding Rifts is the Mega-Damage System which confuses me. They treat it as though it is some factor that only certain exclusive classes get when over 99.5% of classes (no that isn't hyperbole, Palladium has well over 1000 classes although many of them are essentially reskinned versions of other classes) gets the equipment right from character generation and the expectation is that the 0.5% grab the equipment at the first available opportunity (I think all the classes which don't start with Mega Damage equipment are travelers from another world). Palladium has a LOT of problems but I don't think Mega Damage is one of them. Now M.D. bloat on the other hand...

Plus a game system saying that it's characters are unbalanced goes a long way with me, that's why you'll hear me deriding 3.X's lack of balance but not Palladium's. 3.X says in the DMG that you'll be able to determine the power level of a party and what challenges are appropriate based on the character levels, Palladium doesn't suffer from that delusion.

Note the above paragraphs are because you seemed to be wondering why it still hold a place in people's hearts when those issues existed, not to challenge what you were saying.

I'm just gonna go with the Palladium system as opposed to any particular game line within it. I view all of the games as essentially one large game, particularly considering the most popular world is also the one which goes all in on dimensional travel. Imagine how different D&D would be if instead of Greyhawk/FR as the default setting it was Spelljammer instead. Regarding the horrible rules I think that every Palladium GM kinda made a bunch of their own house rules. Indeed for those who don't know the Palladium in house testing groups don't even use the Palladium rules. That helps to explain so many of the errors in the books it's kinda ridiculous.

Actually, I'm not wondering why it holds a place in people's heart do much as, well, explaining why I find it's a bad system. The setting is almost perfect to hold a place in my heart, but the mechanics worse than fall flat. Sure, it's rare to have a 15th level character unable to harm a 1st, but it's possible. Much more obviously so than the dysfunctions in 3e D&D. And fairly "as designed", being the obvious consequence of the central Mega damage mechanic. Yet it, IME, does not get the same level of hate.

The other reason I find that system annoying is that it isn't intuitive. Weird magic monsters require special conditions or materials to defeat? Sure. I can buy that. D&D implements it differently in various editions, but whatever, I'll buy in. But this completely mundane armor (or tree?!) just straight up can't be harmed by normal weapons, because mega damage? Yeah, I just don't follow the underlying logic. Or, to get even crazier, the different types of strength: normal, supernatural, robotic, etc. You can have two characters / creatures such that one can lift more than the other, yet the "stronger" one's attacks just bounce off Mega damage materials. Ok, that's fine. Until you get the same results when they both use the same weapon. Or how, the walls the stronger one can actually hurt? The weaker one just instajibs them.

I don't know if that's why other people complain about mega damage, but that's my thoughts on the matter.

A lot of the rest of the system is simple enough, and what I'll dub "success-oriented", so it's not all bad.


your point buy is both your point buy for your equipment AND your skills.

in a transhuman game where your consciousness is literally uploaded and beamed across the solar system as the fastest method of travel, that means your body is equipment.

and starting equipment is basically useless. because say your character is on Mars, and your mission takes you to say, Earth's moon, two relatively close settlements of transhumanity. you get beamed across and all your equipment you bought at character creation is still on mars, including your body. which means spending your character creation points on equipment, including your body, is a trap. especially when you can fab all your equipment from whatever local place you come to. meaning its better to have blueprints of what you want/need in your mind than the things themselves because you can just fab up things from the blueprint.

of course, character creation doesn't tell you that, so.....

So, the system lets you spend up to 30% of your build resources on trap options?


The game deals with the transhumanity concept. You can buy any "body" you want, any "skills and knowledge" and any "Personality". Get a job as a PI on Mars? Then the "core of you" gets transferred over to a PI Marlow edition body with all the necessary skills and abilities, as well as there necessary personality installed to do the job.

So what you do at chargen is create the "character" that you are _not_ during the game. Pretty pointless.

I'm not sure... where to go with this one. How would you suggest doing a Transhumanity point buy to make the system work acceptably? Place the build points in separate pools? Only build the personality beforehand, and build the body during the game?

LordEntrails
2018-01-16, 07:24 PM
KnightHawks. The starship part of Star Frontiers. The funnest of the bad systems.
Lots of great fun, but simply had the laws of physics wrong. Which for a sci-fi game is unacceptable to simply not account for moment or the speed of light.

Loved Gamma World, but don't remember it enough to know if it was a bad system. I do remember that you had to be a mutant, and hope for two heads to have twice as many mutations/mental powers!

Tunnels & Trolls was a bad system, but it wasn't very fun either.

Elfquest wasn't really broken, because it wasn't really complete. It was all about replaying the adventure from the comics so things like the economy was simply ignored, their were no prices for weapons or armor...

Top Secret, not broken

Twilight 2000, another system that just didn't seem complete. But a fun concept and mechanics were standard for the era.

rs2excelsior
2018-01-16, 09:02 PM
KnightHawks. The starship part of Star Frontiers. The funnest of the bad systems.
Lots of great fun, but simply had the laws of physics wrong. Which for a sci-fi game is unacceptable to simply not account for moment or the speed of light.

Various Star Wars/Star Trek RPGs would like to disagree :smallbiggrin:

Honest Tiefling
2018-01-16, 09:24 PM
Do I really need to go through the process of defending not liking what I don't like?

I'd say no. People just like different things, and even bad movies are an acquired taste. I love Jean-Clade Van Damme movies, but I'm not going to get bent out of shape if people can't love nonsensical plots, bad acting and poor characterization. You don't like bad movies? Good for you for having taste.

I was sorta hoping you'd go over what you WANTED to like in those games, because that'd be rather close to the thread topic...Those bits of bad games we just love.


Various Star Wars/Star Trek RPGs would like to disagree :smallbiggrin:

Star Wars is barely Sci-fi and is often called Space Fantasy for a reason. Star Trek started as Sci-fi but really became space-techno-babble at the end. Neither are hard sci-fi, which I think our Lord Entrails desires.

rs2excelsior
2018-01-16, 09:49 PM
Star Wars is barely Sci-fi and is often called Space Fantasy for a reason. Star Trek started as Sci-fi but really became space-techno-babble at the end. Neither are hard sci-fi, which I think our Lord Entrails desires.

Very true. Star Wars and Star Trek were largely responsible for bringing science fiction into more "mainstream" culture, but hard sci-fi they most definitely are not. "Space Opera" at best. And from watching the original series of Star Trek... there's no shortage of technobabble at the beginning, either (not to say I don't love Star Trek, especially TOS--I'm a huge fan of both Wars and Trek).

That said, even most hard sci-fi sweeps lightspeed limitations under the rug. It's almost required to have interesting stories that occur on larger scales than a single star system. Even bypasses like wormholes break causality unless you ignore relativistic effects, which most do (or at least downplay them) because pretty soon your FTL-time travel machine becomes a tangled mess of paradoxes that makes people's brains hurt.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-16, 10:09 PM
Very true. Star Wars and Star Trek were largely responsible for bringing science fiction into more "mainstream" culture, but hard sci-fi they most definitely are not. "Space Opera" at best. And from watching the original series of Star Trek... there's no shortage of technobabble at the beginning, either (not to say I don't love Star Trek, especially TOS--I'm a huge fan of both Wars and Trek).

That said, even most hard sci-fi sweeps lightspeed limitations under the rug. It's almost required to have interesting stories that occur on larger scales than a single star system. Even bypasses like wormholes break causality unless you ignore relativistic effects, which most do (or at least downplay them) because pretty soon your FTL-time travel machine becomes a tangled mess of paradoxes that makes people's brains hurt.


I think people look at TOS through rose-colored viewscreens... there was a lot of just bizarre Hollyweird "science" in that show.


The only forms of FTL that make me worried about causality are the sort that allow the traveler to actually arrive somewhere before they left that same local spot, or otherwise actually send data back in (local) time somehow. If nothing can get back to where it was before it left there, then what's the big deal? Simply being able to "take a shortcut" and get 10 LY in "normal" space away, and them come back 10 LY, faster than light could do it shouldn't trouble causality any more than taking a helicopter from London to Edinburgh and back and thereby beating the guy riding a horse by several days shouldn't trouble causality. Sometimes it seems like people think that data getting somewhere faster than light is automatic causality trouble, rather than the data simply getting there faster.

The FTL in my science fiction setting is specifically not a "normal space" cheat, in part because I wanted to avoid any of the strange relativity and causality issues, some of the more ridiculous inertia issues, etc. Ships can't go anywhere near C in "normal space".




I'd say no. People just like different things, and even bad movies are an acquired taste. I love Jean-Clade Van Damme movies, but I'm not going to get bent out of shape if people can't love nonsensical plots, bad acting and poor characterization. You don't like bad movies? Good for you for having taste.

I was sorta hoping you'd go over what you WANTED to like in those games, because that'd be rather close to the thread topic...Those bits of bad games we just love.


It's been over 20 years, what I remember was that I thought I'd like them because those people I knew made them sound like fun, and I wanted to play an RPG with some of them, but that I didn't like the systems once I had a chance to play them

LordEntrails
2018-01-16, 10:10 PM
...
Star Wars is barely Sci-fi and is often called Space Fantasy for a reason. Star Trek started as Sci-fi but really became space-techno-babble at the end. Neither are hard sci-fi, which I think our Lord Entrails desires.

I wouldn't say hard sci-fi. (Note, I haven't played other starship combat RPGs, so can't compare). But the base ship movement rules are so far from real physics. There is no conservation of momentum or anything close, for instance a ship going .5c in one direction can use 3 maneuverability points in a single turn and be heading in 180 degrees from the previous heading.

It's like they use simplified rules for a car. I mean I get it. Turning spaceship combat into a game of long turns and relatively gradual maneuvers isn't very exciting.

Like I said, Knight Hawks is fun. But the rules are bad :)

Another example, in KH, is the best tactics are speed. If you have maneuver of 3 or higher, then you can always turn around and come back and do strafing type runs every turn where an opponent moving slowing almost never gets a turn.

And, even though jumps happen at light speed, there are no rules that prevent a ship in combat from travelling faster than c.

rs2excelsior
2018-01-16, 10:29 PM
The only forms of FTL that make me worried about causality are the sort that allow the traveler to actually arrive somewhere before they left that same local spot, or otherwise actually send data back in (local) time somehow. If nothing can get back to where it was before it left there, then what's the big deal? Simply being able to "take a shortcut" and get 10 LY in "normal" space away, and them come back 10 LY, faster than light could do it shouldn't trouble causality any more than taking a helicopter from London to Edinburgh and back and thereby beating the guy riding a horse by several days shouldn't trouble causality. Sometimes it seems like people think that data getting somewhere faster than light is automatic causality trouble, rather than the data simply getting there faster.

Actually... any form of faster than light travel (or communication) has the potential to break causality.

Short explanation: absolutely simultaneous events do not exist. Because of both spacial and time dilation involved with movement close to the speed of light, events that are simultaneous in one reference frame will not be simultaneous in another reference frame moving at a high rate of speed compared to the first. Which means I might see something happen and simultaneously send an FTL message to a starship clipping along at 0.8c relative to me... and the message get there before the event happens in their reference frame (not just before they see it, due to the lightspeed lag on propagation of information... actually, really before it happens, with information transmission delays factored in). Which means they can use that information to stop the event (say a bullet being fired and a person killed), thus breaking causality.

Long explanation: well, go here (http://www.physicsguy.com/ftl/html/FTL_intro.html). It's explained better than I could. (And it took me several reads to fully wrap my head around.)

Basically, because space and time don't actually work in the Newtonian sense we're used to, any form of FTL is functionally equivalent to time travel and has the potential to violate causality. Period. It's the elephant in the room for most (not all, but most) hard sci-fi, because it's just so hard to actually get around.

CharonsHelper
2018-01-16, 10:49 PM
That said, even most hard sci-fi sweeps lightspeed limitations under the rug. It's almost required to have interesting stories that occur on larger scales than a single star system. Even bypasses like wormholes break causality unless you ignore relativistic effects, which most do (or at least downplay them) because pretty soon your FTL-time travel machine becomes a tangled mess of paradoxes that makes people's brains hurt.

Actually - there are a lot of physicists who believe that warping space around as ship is very possible. (though I don't think it'd work like in Star Trek) You aren't breaking relativity because you're not technically going FTL, you're just going FTL relative to the rest of the universe.

I remember reading an article (semi-pop science - but sue me, I'm not a physicist) in which they'd figured out that theoretically it wouldn't even take that much energy to do with the right shaped warp bubble. (previous calculations made it possible - but take so much energy as to be unobtainable)

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-16, 11:02 PM
Actually... any form of faster than light travel (or communication) has the potential to break causality.

Short explanation: absolutely simultaneous events do not exist. Because of both spacial and time dilation involved with movement close to the speed of light, events that are simultaneous in one reference frame will not be simultaneous in another reference frame moving at a high rate of speed compared to the first. Which means I might see something happen and simultaneously send an FTL message to a starship clipping along at 0.8c relative to me... and the message get there before the event happens in their reference frame (not just before they see it, due to the lightspeed lag on propagation of information... actually, really before it happens, with information transmission delays factored in). Which means they can use that information to stop the event (say a bullet being fired and a person killed), thus breaking causality.

Long explanation: well, go here (http://www.physicsguy.com/ftl/html/FTL_intro.html). It's explained better than I could. (And it took me several reads to fully wrap my head around.)

Basically, because space and time don't actually work in the Newtonian sense we're used to, any form of FTL is functionally equivalent to time travel and has the potential to violate causality. Period. It's the elephant in the room for most (not all, but most) hard sci-fi, because it's just so hard to actually get around.

Short version of where I was going with it -- is it a problem in a setting without relativistic travel in what we'd call "normal space", but FTL using something that takes the vessel completely out of "normal" space?

rs2excelsior
2018-01-16, 11:13 PM
Actually - there are a lot of physicists who believe that warping space around as ship is very possible. (though I don't think it'd work like in Star Trek) You aren't breaking relativity because you're not technically going FTL, you're just going FTL relative to the rest of the universe.

I remember reading an article (semi-pop science - but sue me, I'm not a physicist) in which they'd figured out that theoretically it wouldn't even take that much energy to do with the right shaped warp bubble. (previous calculations made it possible - but take so much energy as to be unobtainable)

It's not just the lightspeed barrier. Due to how relativity works, FTL travel or communication is fundamentally identical to time travel and can violate causality, whether you're moving faster than light or you're in a pocket of space that is. Either that, or our understanding of relativity is fundamentally wrong (not impossible, but we've verified it to a very high degree of precision--a replacement theory would have to match those observations). Or causality isn't real, but the implications of that are worse. Look at the link in my previous post, that explains why the problem isn't with breaking the lightspeed barrier.

I believe what you're referencing is an Alcubierre (sp?) bubble. I believe it's theoretically possible to form one, but takes infinite energy to break back out. And even if the math allowed it, you still get causality violations.

EDIT:

Short version of where I was going with it -- is it a problem in a setting without relativistic travel in what we'd call "normal space", but FTL using something that takes the vessel completely out of "normal" space?

Yes. The problem is due to the fact that different observers perceive space, time, and simultaneity differently. Regardless of how you get around going faster than light, it causes the same problems. Unless by "without relativistic travel" you mean relativity doesn't hold, in which case it has other physical implications. For one, the speed of light can no longer be determined by universal constants.

(I am happy to continue this discussion--sci-fi and how sci-fi tech interacts with real physics is something I'm very interested in, though not an expert--although I feel we should move to another thread if we're going to. It's off topic for this one.)

Jay R
2018-01-16, 11:37 PM
Chivalry and Sorcery. It's the most lush, vivid beautiful, consistent, realistic, glorious, fascinating and compelling unplayable mess I've ever seen.

I actually had a GM who could run it once. And it was wonderful.

I'm curios, is there anything in particular reason that running it was so hard to run? Did the rules just require near perfect memorization and understanding to use?

There are two kinds of hit points - Fatigue and Body. Attacks reduce fatigue first, and then body, unless it's a critical hit. There are other exceptions, I think.

There are 25 kinds of magic-users, each with their own rules, mutually incompatible. For instance, Alchemists do not go up in level by experience points, but based on a specific set of goals - studying plants to reach one level, studying metals to reach another, creating the Water of Emeralds to reach a different one.

A magic-user's power is based on his or her MKL (magic level), concentration level, PMF (Personal Magic Factor), etc.

How many experience points a task generates depends on class. A knight gets full points for defeating somebody who yields, but only half points for killing them. Defeating foes by dishonorable measn gives only 1/2 experience to fighters, but full points to thieves or assassins. Backstabbing get 50% for thieves, 100% for brigands, and 200% for assassins - if it kills immediately. Only 25% if they bungle the job and have to face their foe in combat.

Lots of brilliant, carefully written, immersive ideas, impossible to keep track of.

Tanarii
2018-01-17, 01:58 AM
It's like they use simplified rules for a car. I mean I get it. Turning spaceship combat into a game of long turns and relatively gradual maneuvers isn't very exciting.

David Weber made it an interesting read in his honorverse series.

Florian
2018-01-17, 05:11 AM
David Weber made it an interesting read in his honorverse series.

The "Lost Fleet" series is imho even better at it, also taking the problems with relativistic speed, accelerating and breaking more into account. Good read, as is the Honor Harrington series, but not a mechanic that I can see as functional in an RPG.


I'm not sure... where to go with this one. How would you suggest doing a Transhumanity point buy to make the system work acceptably? Place the build points in separate pools? Only build the personality beforehand, and build the body during the game?

I don´t think that point-buy is actually good for handling this genre, as is handling it on that level of fine granularity. In a sense, same problem with Shadowrun. Ok, I admit that I'm influenced by the Takeshi Kocas series:

Core Personality: Pick some "edges" and "flaws" that the core personality will always be good at, no matter what "sleeve". Ex: "Black Ops Training", "Suppress Sleeve Instincts", "Social Brute".

Sleeves: Come as full character sheets, apply Core Personality like quick template. If it doesn't have "Black Ops" stuff, add it, if it has "Black Ops" stuff, gain a hefty bonus. Done.

Sinewmire
2018-01-17, 06:39 AM
Iron Heroes by Monte Cook.

It's based around 3.5, but set in a low-magic universe, so there is one fiendishly complicated magic class, the Arcanist, and the rest are all mundanes. Barbarian, Armiger, Executioner, Zoomer Harrier and so forth.

I liked the idea of a low-magic system with feat-trees, skill groups and skill challenges, and class abilities with pools of action points, but the system is utterly unbalanced and you can do some ridiculous things with it. It needs a medium amount of optimisation - too much and the players are so OP the game is "how many enemies can player x kill, whilst others mop up", too low and you end up with unplayable characters.

Knaight
2018-01-17, 06:48 AM
Diana: Warrior Princess. The mechanics are nothing special, and while it's not a bad game I normally require mechanics to be fairly good to be interested. The setting on the other hand is one of the funniest things I've ever read, and for that alone it's a favorite.

Anonymouswizard
2018-01-17, 06:55 AM
So, the system lets you spend up to 30% of your build resources on trap options?

More that it encourages you. It's a stupid idea to buy gear or augmentations compared to the blueprints. But getting the actual stuff because you can't use blueprints until you have access to a CM or suitable fabber and for augmentations biomorphs then need to spend time in a healing vat, and blueprints are ten times as expensive as the item. It's a common houserule that buying blueprints also means that the body you're using for the first mission will have a ready to use version of the item or augmentation.

Then the system heavily pushes taking a genetically engineered body or cool tricked out robot shell. But if you take anything better than a Splicer or Synth then you will likely be spending a lot of time in a worse body because that's all that's available. Combat bodies get it especially bad, as the key stat that matters in combat is Speed, and drugs or drug glands can push your speed to 3 for relatively little CP compared to a Fury or Reaper, leaving the main advantage being stat boosts and Durability. Oh sure, they have augs, but those can be slapped on any body. Meanwhile the player who picked a Splicer or Flat had an additional 20-100 points to spend, if they focused that on Rep then they're likely walking around in a very tricked out body when needed by simply calling in favours. Beaming to another hab? The guy who spent an additional 30 points building up their Rep scores can likely call in a lot of help, including arranging to have a nice body waiting for them at the clinic.


I'm not sure... where to go with this one. How would you suggest doing a Transhumanity point buy to make the system work acceptably? Place the build points in separate pools? Only build the personality beforehand, and build the body during the game?

My general rule would be to focus on the mind (Ego as EP calls it), and have the body grant relatively minor benefits. I'd also have bodies and equipment paid for out of a metagame resource rather than an in-game resource, or a very generic 'resources' trait that is used for picking up anything temporary. Resources would be 'invested', you can't have more than your Resources in equipment and bodies at any one time, but you can give things up to gain more resources.

In Transhumanity's Fate skills are considered to be entirely based on the Ego, your body just provides you with a couple of Aspects, your Physical Stress, and maybe some stunts. Some bodies are free, others require you to reduce your Refresh as long as you're in them. It actually works really well.

Sinewmire
2018-01-17, 07:11 AM
Oh, and the original Deathwatch!

Space Marine devastator with a Lascannon, a few skills, and suddenly you're relling 10d10 +9 damage, and if you roll a 10 and crit, you roll 10d10 again and add it. If you roll a 10 on any of *those*... and it never ends. If you keep rolling a 10 on one of your ten 10-sided dice, you roll 'em again.

So we're getting silly stuff like 659 damage... most enemies can take about 25 before exploding.

The whole game really wasn't playtested enough, and they made an errata so that you had a higher damage bonus rather than rolling so many dice, and specified it was *just* that one dice that got re-rolled, not all of them. I mean, your sidearm, the bolt pistol, was 2d10+4, and it was Tearing, meaning you could roll an extra dice and discard the lowest of the three. Madness!

CharonsHelper
2018-01-17, 07:20 AM
The whole game really wasn't playtested enough...

I will say - stuff like that isn't really a play-testing issue. It's a basic math issue. Crap like that should never make it off the drawing board to even be at the first play-test.

Lapak
2018-01-17, 09:51 AM
Of games I have actually played, probably Twilight:2000. The character creation process was amazing but generated completely unbalanced parties, there were mechanics that could completely break your game if used as intended (radiation poisoning was a notable one) and the combat was... not great. We had more than one gunfight devolve into farce as non-lethal limb damage piled up and left everyone involved incapable of winning OR of fleeing the field.

But I did (and do) love it for its world-building, its attention to detail in setting and equipment, and the character creation. (Unbalanced, yes; flavorful and enjoyable, also yes.)

Of games I have not played but love the idea of them, probably Scion. Which has marvelous foundations and then a ruleset which a casual read-through seems to show as ‘Exalted, but not nearly as functional.’

Thinker
2018-01-17, 09:57 AM
Yes. The problem is due to the fact that different observers perceive space, time, and simultaneity differently. Regardless of how you get around going faster than light, it causes the same problems. Unless by "without relativistic travel" you mean relativity doesn't hold, in which case it has other physical implications. For one, the speed of light can no longer be determined by universal constants.

(I am happy to continue this discussion--sci-fi and how sci-fi tech interacts with real physics is something I'm very interested in, though not an expert--although I feel we should move to another thread if we're going to. It's off topic for this one.)

I'm no physicist, but I enjoy sci-fi (usually soft sci-fi more than hard sci-fi) so please excuse the question if it is completely ignorant. Would this scenario cause issues with causality? I want to travel from Point A to Point B in 1 day. The normal time for the journey is 10 days at light speed. I transition from normal-space to sub-space, effectively an alternate dimension. From sub-space, I cannot perceive or be affected by objects or actions that take place in normal-space, nor can I send or receive any information from normal space. When I transition back from sub-space to normal-space, it has only been 1 day.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-17, 10:15 AM
I'm no physicist, but I enjoy sci-fi (usually soft sci-fi more than hard sci-fi) so please excuse the question if it is completely ignorant. Would this scenario cause issues with causality? I want to travel from Point A to Point B in 1 day. The normal time for the journey is 10 days at light speed. I transition from normal-space to sub-space, effectively an alternate dimension. From sub-space, I cannot perceive or be affected by objects or actions that take place in normal-space, nor can I send or receive any information from normal space. When I transition back from sub-space to normal-space, it has only been 1 day.


That's pretty much the scenario as it would occur in my setting. Ships traveling FTL cannot communicate with or be perceived by anything in "normal" space, and can only perceive "mass shadows" (to borrow a term) from normal space in certain circumstances.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-01-17, 10:34 AM
That's pretty much the scenario as it would occur in my setting. Ships traveling FTL cannot communicate with or be perceived by anything in "normal" space, and can only perceive "mass shadows" (to borrow a term) from normal space in certain circumstances.


I'm no physicist, but I enjoy sci-fi (usually soft sci-fi more than hard sci-fi) so please excuse the question if it is completely ignorant. Would this scenario cause issues with causality? I want to travel from Point A to Point B in 1 day. The normal time for the journey is 10 days at light speed. I transition from normal-space to sub-space, effectively an alternate dimension. From sub-space, I cannot perceive or be affected by objects or actions that take place in normal-space, nor can I send or receive any information from normal space. When I transition back from sub-space to normal-space, it has only been 1 day.

As a physicist, any FTL information transfer (including movement), no matter how it's done, breaks causality and is indistinguishable from time travel. Doesn't matter if you skip the intervening space, doesn't matter if you bend the space. Full stop. Relativity (special here, not even general) is a hard taskmaster.

Which is why only a tiny fraction of "hard" sci-fi actually cares about that.

CharonsHelper
2018-01-17, 10:45 AM
As a physicist...

Sorry - but you're actually a physicist?

Cool.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-01-17, 10:49 AM
Sorry - but you're actually a physicist?

Cool.

More specifically, I'm a high school teacher who got a PhD in Computational Quantum Chemistry before turning to teaching full time. Non-traditional life paths FTW! My research was more in atomic and molecular scattering (coupling quantum electrons with classical nuclei), but I did my fair share of relativistic mechanics. At this point, I'd rather not do the math, but some things stuck.

Edit: and CQC (no, not that CQC) is actually a physics domain. The chemists call it Computational Chemical Physics. Seems nobody wants to own it :smallannoyed:

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-17, 10:56 AM
As a physicist, any FTL information transfer (including movement), no matter how it's done, breaks causality and is indistinguishable from time travel. Doesn't matter if you skip the intervening space, doesn't matter if you bend the space. Full stop. Relativity (special here, not even general) is a hard taskmaster.


For those who want to understand why this would be the case, please point us to a source that explains it without "it is because it is" presumptions.

Cluedrew
2018-01-17, 11:10 AM
I think to get the explanation without any "it is because it is" sections too it would probably take... the full (or close to it) education. I've studied almost as much physics as one can without being a physicist (formally or informally). After numerous attempts at trying to understand it from different sources that I think bad explanations might not be the problem. It might just be a long and complicated answer that can't be understood without the proper background.

Anonymouswizard
2018-01-17, 11:21 AM
That's pretty much the scenario as it would occur in my setting. Ships traveling FTL cannot communicate with or be perceived by anything in "normal" space, and can only perceive "mass shadows" (to borrow a term) from normal space in certain circumstances.

Still no. FTL breaks reality, and every system is a handwave.

For story purposes, once you want action happening in multiple systems you need one of the following:

The ability to travel Faster Than Light.
Inertial dampening or some other method of allowing people to survive insanely high acclerations, and the willingness to abuse time dilation for short passenger-side jumps.
Willingness to have time skips of anywhere from tens to thousands of years, depending on drive types.


Note that number one is by far the most common, but numbers two and three can work even in a game. To see number three in a story I highly suggest Revelation Space by Alistair Renoylds, interstellar ships effectively have reactionless drives allowing for constant acceleration, but limitations of the human body mean they don't go above 1g for anything except short bursts. The later stories start to move more and more into number 2, although that one is also much more common with people using various 'NAFAL' drives (the difference between a standard NAFAL ship and a Lighthugger is that the NAFAL ship instantly hits near-c speeds to the point where it consists of a split second accelerating and a split second decelerating, a Lighthugger requires a week to hit low percentages of c and will be accelerating for years).

Note that if you have characters who live for centuries option 2 can become a lot more like a standard space opera, just set over decades to centuries rather than weeks to years. Otherwise every jump into a star system means you're effectively going to a location you've never seen before.

Now trading materials between systems essentially requires FTL unless you have very valuable materials located only in a couple of places, but information trade and even warfare can remain, as could trade of valuable produced goods (sure, we make computers here in GDE-43, but the ones from HYU-98 are smaller and more powerful by two orders of magnitude, even if they cost twenty times the price).

Now bending or breaking one bit of physics doesn't mean we have to do it for everything, it's fine to have both Newtonian movement and FTL travel, but unless we're entirely on the wrong track there are no cheats that make FTL scientifically plausible without causing a lot of headaches and generating causeless effects.

EDIT: no ability to supply sources for stuff like 'FTL breaks causality', but I'd also be happy for more sharing. I understand the basics of the FTL means time travel stuff, thanks to an explanation by a physicist friend, but can't explain it myself.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-17, 11:29 AM
Still no. FTL breaks reality, and every system is a handwave.


Last post on this, because it's off topic for this thread.

We understand that "time is local". We understand how FTL that actually ends up with people arriving back at a place before they left, or otherwise getting information about events back to before the events occurred (locally) breaks causality. That doesn't need to be explained in any way.

The problem is the next part, which asserts that any FTL by any means* risks causality breakdowns -- that assertion is made here and elsewhere whenever FTL comes up, but I have yet to see any explanation anywhere that amounts to more anything more than "because it does" or "trust me".

(* even FTL that removes the vessel entirely from "normal" space and thus from all communication with or observation by anyone not moving FTL, even in settings without "normal" space travel anywhere near the speed of light so that relativistic time dilation is not an issue.)

Don't bother repeating "because it does". Don't bother repeating "it's a rule of nature". If you don't have a link to an actual, non-tautological, non-"it is because it is" explanation, then just move on.

E - See other thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?548530-FTL-and-Violating-Causality&p=22761699#post22761699).

Lord Torath
2018-01-17, 11:47 AM
For example, Person A sees spaceship B explode Planet C, then transmits this information instantaneously to spaceship D traveling at Speed Ec, enabling someone on the spaceship to prevent the exploding. Assuming the light from the shooting reaches Person A before it reaches spaceship D, of course.

Can someone explain (maybe with some numbers for distance, local time elapsed by each party, etc.) how this can happen if you allow FTL travel (either of information or mass)?

PhoenixPhyre
2018-01-17, 11:49 AM
Last post on this, because it's off topic for this thread.

We understand that "time is local". We understand how FTL that actually ends up with people arriving back at a place before they left, or otherwise getting information about events back to before the events occurred (locally) breaks causality. That doesn't need to be explained in any way.

The problem is the next part, which asserts that any FTL by any means* risks causality breakdowns -- that assertion is made here and elsewhere whenever FTL comes up, but I have yet to see any explanation anywhere that amounts to more anything more than "because it does" or "trust me".

(* even FTL that removes the vessel entirely from "normal" space and thus from all communication with or observation by anyone not moving FTL, even in settings without "normal" space travel anywhere near the speed of light so that relativistic time dilation is not an issue.)

Don't bother repeating "because it does". Don't bother repeating "it's a rule of nature". If you don't have a link to an actual, non-tautological, non-"it is because it is" explanation, then just move on.

That's not how it works. There are things that can be simplified for a lay (non-mathematical) audience, and there are things that can't (and retain the important aspects/cover all the edge cases). This is one of the second type. Here's a loose and breezy explanation: http://www.askamathematician.com/2012/07/q-how-does-instantaneous-communication-violate-causality/, but that only covers some of the special aspects.

In general, any space-like curve (including FTL transport or communications, but not only those) causes causality issues. Related searches would involve light cones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone).

rs2excelsior
2018-01-17, 11:52 AM
For those who want to understand why this would be the case, please point us to a source that explains it without "it is because it is" presumptions.


Last post on this, because it's off topic for this thread.

We understand that "time is local". We understand how FTL that actually ends up with people arriving back at a place before they left, or otherwise getting information about events back to before the events occurred (locally) breaks causality. That doesn't need to be explained in any way.

The problem is the next part, which asserts that any FTL by any means* risks causality breakdowns -- that assertion is made here and elsewhere whenever FTL comes up, but I have yet to see any explanation anywhere that amounts to more anything more than "because it does" or "trust me".

(* even FTL that removes the vessel entirely from "normal" space and thus from all communication with or observation by anyone not moving FTL, even in settings without "normal" space travel anywhere near the speed of light so that relativistic time dilation is not an issue.)

Don't bother repeating "because it does". Don't bother repeating "it's a rule of nature". If you don't have a link to an actual, non-tautological, non-"it is because it is" explanation, then just move on.

The link in my last post (http://www.physicsguy.com/ftl/html/FTL_intro.html) does exactly that, in layman's terms, in great detail. Not just the intro page I linked, read that and the rest of the site too. Part I and IV particularly--Part I explains how relativity works and how it bends space and time (and explains the tools used to look at relativistic travel effects), and Part IV explains how that applies to FTL and why it WILL violate causality (and some ways you could limit the damage, as well as why they're physically impossible as well, according to our current understanding). II and III are "optional reading" that go a bit more in depth into the concept of relativity but aren't required to understand how it applies to FTL.

It's a long read, but it's a complicated topic. You're either going to get answers along the lines of "because it does" or you're going to buckle in and take some time going through the situation. Not much in between.

Understand that when we say "FTL breaks causality," that doesn't mean any use of FTL will automatically violate causality and send the universe into a spiral of paradoxes, but any use of FTL can result in a situation that violates causality. It's due to the fact that information travelling faster than the speed of light (and people can carry information, if you have FTL travel but not communication) can take advantage of the fact that simultaneous events in one reference frame ARE NOT simultaneous in another. Meaning you can have information about an event before it happens in the local reference frame. Not just before they see it due to speed of light--before it actually, truly happens.

Also my last post on this topic. As I said before, I'd be happy to continue the discussion in another thread if y'all would like.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-17, 11:54 AM
That's not how it works. There are things that can be simplified for a lay (non-mathematical) audience, and there are things that can't (and retain the important aspects/cover all the edge cases). This is one of the second type. Here's a loose and breezy explanation: http://www.askamathematician.com/2012/07/q-how-does-instantaneous-communication-violate-causality/, but that only covers some of the special aspects.

In general, any space-like curve (including FTL transport or communications, but not only those) causes causality issues. Related searches would involve light cones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_cone).

We'll see. If past "explanations" offered are any indication, it will once again come down to "getting information to a place before light would get it there is bad because it's bad for information to get there before the light does", which is the "explanation" I keep seeing. :smallfrown:

E - See other thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?548530-FTL-and-Violating-Causality&p=22761699#post22761699).

Lord Torath
2018-01-17, 11:57 AM
Let's move any further discussion of this topic here:
FTL and Violating Causality (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?548530-FTL-and-Violating-Causality&p=22761699#post22761699).

We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion of RPGs that are bad, but you still enjoy playing. :smallbiggrin:

I had a fun time playing RoleMaster back in 1994 with a buddy. But different armor values automatically assumed particular armor types. Armor 20, for example (IIRC), assumed full plate, and had exceptionally poor performance vs lightning/electricity. Works great for humans. Less so when it's a triceratops in natural armor. The Critical Hit tables were fun, but also sometimes confusing. Still, had a blast!

BlacKnight
2018-01-17, 11:59 AM
Last post on this, because it's off topic for this thread.

We understand that "time is local". We understand how FTL that actually ends up with people arriving back at a place before they left, or otherwise getting information about events back to before the events occurred (locally) breaks causality. That doesn't need to be explained in any way.

The problem is the next part, which asserts that any FTL by any means* risks causality breakdowns -- that assertion is made here and elsewhere whenever FTL comes up, but I have yet to see any explanation anywhere that amounts to more anything more than "because it does" or "trust me".

It doesn't seem to me that you have understood why FTL=time travel. It doesn't matter if you go very fast or you are just teleporting instantly to another star system. The moment you do it means there is at least one observer that has seen you going in the past.
But to make it simple: can you explain why FTL=time travel when done with "normal means" (whatever this means). Because I honestly don't understand why you think it's important that the starship can communicate during the FTL trip.

Florian
2018-01-17, 12:50 PM
he problem is the next part, which asserts that any FTL by any means* risks causality breakdowns -- that assertion is made here and elsewhere whenever FTL comes up, but I have yet to see any explanation anywhere that amounts to more anything more than "because it does" or "trust me".

Roughly, as I understood it, with two things:

1) We have four dimension. 3 space relative, 1 time relative. Take place A and B, happening at the same relative time in relative space. Now FTL from a to B and you will land in the past of B. Why? Because Time is the constant with which space is measured, you're faster than that, this will also affect the fourth axis, time.

2) Now indent of movie-like straight "zoom!", let's make FTL maneuverable. Start at A, go full force FTL and head straight back to A. You'd be back before you started.

Steel Mirror
2018-01-17, 12:56 PM
My favorite horrible system is called Adeptus Evangelion (there are various editions, and I've played a bunch, and they are all awful in their own special ways). It's an RPG based on a Japanese show about giant robots and kids and social dysfunction, originally built on the Dark Heresy rules by a group of fans, and eventually revised into something of its own system.

Chargen is complicated and messy, though not I think to quite the same standard as some other games people have mentioned. But the rulebooks are opaque, I've always hated the dice system (it's hard to get a better than 40ish percent chance to succeed on anything but hurting something in a giant robot), combat is a crawl, and the game tends to actively undermine even the places where it does something well with baffling game design decisions.

The game encourages the PCs to consist of a few giant robot pilot teenagers plus an adult 'Operations Director', who stays behind at the base during battles and basically orders tanks and planes around to help fight off the giant monsters. Since those tanks and planes have about as much effect on the baddies as they do against Godzilla in one of his movies, that means the OD is basically useless during the coolest parts of the game, but is rewarded afterwards by having to do math homework to tally up how much damage the base incurred in the last attack so that they can assign resources to handle the repairs. :smallbiggrin: Some games encourage you not to split the party, AdEva explicitly makes it so one of the characters can't play in the coolest part of the game.

The worst part about the game is the combat. I've probably played in a dozen promising games that flamed out in the first fight scene, because the rules are terribly imbalanced, finicky, and swingy. Since it's based on a show where every (okay most) battle was robot good guys vs a single overpowering badass, every fight is basically a boss fight. But unfortunately the rules undermine that setup by being more suited to squad-type combat against multiple foes (it is based on DH), so battles are prone to either anticlimax where the PCs curb stomp the bad guy with a lucky shot or superior action economy, or the reverse happens and it's a long impossible slog where an invulnerable enemy grinds through PCs one by one without much of a chance to meaningfully fight back.

Now the game has some good points too, largely inherited from DH. The critical hit tables are good and gnarly, as fits the show's emphasis on visceral combat where limbs fly and people die suddenly and unpredictably. Character customization is both broad and satisfying, and it does a pretty good job of letting you craft your own miserable little teenage jerk who feels like they could have been right at home with the show's original cast. And the robot building options are undeniably fun (if very unbalanced).

But despite all that, I've probably played more good sessions of AdEva in the last 10 years than all other games combined. It probably helps that the show itself was about a bunch of deeply flawed individuals in a totally messed up world fighting a losing battle against sheer horror and their own failings. The fact that the rules are fighting against you and the game itself is a bit of a crapshow seems oddly fitting for the show's particular brand of post apocalypse. Probably the main reason I've had so much fun with the game is my group though, several of whom I've played a bunch of different games with over the years, but whom I met through an AdEva game on these forums.

So I'll always have a bit of a soft spot for the game, even if I complain about it relentlessly every time I actually sit down to play it. :smallamused:

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-17, 01:16 PM
Roughly, as I understood it, with two things:

1) We have four dimension. 3 space relative, 1 time relative. Take place A and B, happening at the same relative time in relative space. Now FTL from a to B and you will land in the past of B. Why? Because Time is the constant with which space is measured, you're faster than that, this will also affect the fourth axis, time.

2) Now indent of movie-like straight "zoom!", let's make FTL maneuverable. Start at A, go full force FTL and head straight back to A. You'd be back before you started.

See other thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?548530-FTL-and-Violating-Causality&p=22761699#post22761699).

LordEntrails
2018-01-17, 03:00 PM
David Weber made it an interesting read in his honorverse series.

Agreed.


The "Lost Fleet" series is imho even better at it, also taking the problems with relativistic speed, accelerating and breaking more into account. Good read, as is the Honor Harrington series, but not a mechanic that I can see as functional in an RPG.

And agreed again. Weber and others make reading it interesting and compelling. But as pointed out, how do you make such fun in a RPG mechanic? I've never seen one that does.

Tanarii
2018-01-17, 03:14 PM
The "Lost Fleet" series is imho even better at it, also taking the problems with relativistic speed, accelerating and breaking more into account. Good read, as is the Honor Harrington series, but not a mechanic that I can see as functional in an RPG.



Agreed.



And agreed again. Weber and others make reading it interesting and compelling. But as pointed out, how do you make such fun in a RPG mechanic? I've never seen one that does.
For sure, I should have made it clear I was making no claims about RPG playability.

Possibly it might work as a straight up (rather complex) War Game if done right. I wouldnt mind a game, tabletop or PC, along the lines of a Honorverse (with less math) and Star Wars Armada mashup. Or something like the naval battles aspect of Empire Total War, adapted to space.

Edit: also thanks for the tip on Lost Fleet I'll check it out

Florian
2018-01-17, 03:20 PM
Somewhat ironical, but I think the Rogue Trader space combat rules would be a good place to start. While the core rules were based on "age of sails in space", the later supplements really build up a nasty space combat engine.

Tinkerer
2018-01-17, 03:44 PM
My favorite horrible system is called Adeptus Evangelion (there are various editions, and I've played a bunch, and they are all awful in their own special ways). It's an RPG based on a Japanese show about giant robots and kids and social dysfunction, originally built on the Dark Heresy rules by a group of fans, and eventually revised into something of its own system.


Haha, if I had ever actually gotten to read or play that one I can almost guarantee that it would be on my list.

Kaptin Keen
2018-01-17, 04:17 PM
The best truly awful RPG that ever was?

Earthdawn. Hands down. None above, and none beside. It's the most ingenius setting, the best crafted lore, the greatest sum of new ideas I've ever seen in any game - combined with the most ... maimed, broken, limping-along-on-double-crutches-with-no-legs mechanics there ever were. It was like someone set out to deliberately make the previous worst game ever (Shadowrun) even worse.

In it's way, it's glorius.


DnD 4th edition. I think it was a mess (bloated HP, skill system was weird, borked a beloved setting)...But it was trying something.

I wanted to give honorable mentions to this. DnD4 really was trying to reinvent itself better. Good ideas, bad execution.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-17, 04:20 PM
My favorite horrible system is called Adeptus Evangelion (there are various editions, and I've played a bunch, and they are all awful in their own special ways). It's an RPG based on a Japanese show about giant robots and kids and social dysfunction, originally built on the Dark Heresy rules by a group of fans, and eventually revised into something of its own system.


Also perhaps the best summary description of Evangelion I've ever seen.

Grod_The_Giant
2018-01-17, 04:23 PM
For sure, I should have made it clear I was making no claims about RPG playability.

Possibly it might work as a straight up (rather complex) War Game if done right. I wouldnt mind a game, tabletop or PC, along the lines of a Honorverse (with less math) and Star Wars Armada mashup. Or something like the naval battles aspect of Empire Total War, adapted to space.

Edit: also thanks for the tip on Lost Fleet I'll check it out
I have a copy of something called the "Saganami Island Tactical Simulator" sitting at the back of my closet, which would seem to be an Honorverse wargame. My memory says that it's complicated as hell, but I also haven't looked at it since high school, so who really knows.

You could probably get some of those mechanics into a tabletop game, but I'm pretty sure you'd get a lot of the slowness there too. And probably a lot of the math-- you'd have to launch ranged attacks at a point in space and have them arrive turns later, while ships have limits on how fast they can change speed and direction that lock them into certain predictable patterns of movement. The hardest part might be keeping the delayed-information side of said encounters...

Tanarii
2018-01-17, 04:39 PM
You could probably get some of those mechanics into a tabletop game, but I'm pretty sure you'd get a lot of the slowness there too. And probably a lot of the math-- you'd have to launch ranged attacks at a point in space and have them arrive turns later, while ships have limits on how fast they can change speed and direction that lock them into certain predictable patterns of movement. The hardest part might be keeping the delayed-information side of said encounters...
Depends how detailed you want to get. The honorverse combats basically boil down to ship vector + missile vector to determine transit time & maximum engagement envelope, and final attack run speed & pre-auto-targeting telemetry updates determine accuracy. In other words, you can always find the target as long as it's within max engagement range, you don't need to explicitly target a specific point in space. You just launch them at some point within range, and they will meet at whatever point their vector & the ships vector make them meet at, then use the final speed & telemetry lag at that point of engagement to determine accuracy. So from point of view of game mechanics, you can short-cut those features in a forward direction. Relative speeds & accelerations --> max range, transit time, final speed & telemetry lag. Transit time--> final engagement position. Final speed & telemetry time --> accuracy.

If you want to work backwards from best accuracy to what range to launch at, like a pro from the books, then you'll be doing the same math and stuff the characters in the books are doing (except with the game's mechanics). And yeah, that'd quite likely be fairly daunting unless it's really simplified abstraction.

Florian
2018-01-17, 04:44 PM
You could probably get some of those mechanics into a tabletop game, but I'm pretty sure you'd get a lot of the slowness there too. And probably a lot of the math-- you'd have to launch ranged attacks at a point in space and have them arrive turns later, while ships have limits on how fast they can change speed and direction that lock them into certain predictable patterns of movement. The hardest part might be keeping the delayed-information side of said encounters...

*Cough* Rogue Trader *Cough*

Seriously, a lot of that has been solved. Torpedos and Nova Cannons need to be targeted at points in space and have travel time, as do the smaller attack craft. Ships have different compartments and layers of impenetrable shields. You must kill that shield and the damage is resolved against compartments, crew and ship structure instead of simple hp damage.

The delay part is also part of the game. You play the officers of the ship, each manning a station and you can only "shout out" one command per turn each. As you're on the flagship, that also means you can set a command for your ship or order one of the attached squadrons around. So it´s either "Ship, scan for incoming torpedos!" or "Hydra Squadron, scan for mines at your port side!".

Tanarii
2018-01-17, 04:54 PM
*Cough* Rogue Trader *Cough*I'm going to have to go back and give those rules another read. I mostly focused on reading Only War related material, with a splash of Dark Heresy, after reading the All Guardsman Party.

Arbane
2018-01-17, 05:36 PM
Diana: Warrior Princess. The mechanics are nothing special, and while it's not a bad game I normally require mechanics to be fairly good to be interested. The setting on the other hand is one of the funniest things I've ever read, and for that alone it's a favorite.

To explain: DWP is supposedly a game written in the far future, based on the titular character's modern-day adventures, with all the scrupulous historical and mythological accuracy of Xena, Warrior Princess. :D

Grod_The_Giant
2018-01-17, 05:42 PM
*Cough* Rogue Trader *Cough*

Seriously, a lot of that has been solved. Torpedos and Nova Cannons need to be targeted at points in space and have travel time, as do the smaller attack craft. Ships have different compartments and layers of impenetrable shields. You must kill that shield and the damage is resolved against compartments, crew and ship structure instead of simple hp damage.

The delay part is also part of the game. You play the officers of the ship, each manning a station and you can only "shout out" one command per turn each. As you're on the flagship, that also means you can set a command for your ship or order one of the attached squadrons around. So it´s either "Ship, scan for incoming torpedos!" or "Hydra Squadron, scan for mines at your port side!".
Sounds like I need to check that one out.

Anonymouswizard
2018-01-17, 05:51 PM
Somewhat ironical, but I think the Rogue Trader space combat rules would be a good place to start. While the core rules were based on "age of sails in space", the later supplements really build up a nasty space combat engine.

I personally like the system from GURPS Spaceships, it's abstract but it has everything you need.

How far away is another ship? Well what's your position relative to them? If you've previously matched velocity and they haven't shaken you off you'll be in a better position than of you're on an attack vector or just drifting in the combat area. Exact positioning isn't important, but delta-v is as of you're not spending any you're studying and not during fire or maintaining a good position. When you've got your relative position cross reference that with your turn length to find the range your ships ate at, any weapons within range can fire (other weapons are assumed to be too inaccurate or dispersed to have a major effect. This means you can only use guns when engaged most of the time, most weapons fire at longer ranges will be larger missiles and high powered beams, and generally only missiles for low tech. This makes source combat a game of delta-v without lots of vector maths.

tensai_oni
2018-01-17, 06:34 PM
The best truly awful RPG that ever was?

Earthdawn. Hands down. None above, and none beside. It's the most ingenius setting, the best crafted lore, the greatest sum of new ideas I've ever seen in any game - combined with the most ... maimed, broken, limping-along-on-double-crutches-with-no-legs mechanics there ever were. It was like someone set out to deliberately make the previous worst game ever (Shadowrun) even worse.

In it's way, it's glorius.

Agreed. It's been a long time since I played Earthdawn, but the lore and the world building are simply amazing, while the mechanics have the unique and dubious honor of being simultaneously hand-crafted for the system, intricately woven with the in-character elements, and borderline unplayable in how clunky, counter intuitive, and badly balanced they are.

EDIT: Also I want to say that I love the mechanics on a conceptual level, how your score affects what dice you roll and so on, it all looks fascinating and cool as you read about it, it's just horrible in actual play.

TheNotoriousSMP
2018-01-17, 07:09 PM
Probably Scion. I love the idea behind it and I've played in some great games but holy **** are a lot of the mechanics complete garbage.

Earthwalker
2018-01-18, 05:20 AM
Agreed. It's been a long time since I played Earthdawn, but the lore and the world building are simply amazing, while the mechanics have the unique and dubious honor of being simultaneously hand-crafted for the system, intricately woven with the in-character elements, and borderline unplayable in how clunky, counter intuitive, and badly balanced they are.

EDIT: Also I want to say that I love the mechanics on a conceptual level, how your score affects what dice you roll and so on, it all looks fascinating and cool as you read about it, it's just horrible in actual play.


The best truly awful RPG that ever was?

Earthdawn. Hands down. None above, and none beside. It's the most ingenius setting, the best crafted lore, the greatest sum of new ideas I've ever seen in any game - combined with the most ... maimed, broken, limping-along-on-double-crutches-with-no-legs mechanics there ever were. It was like someone set out to deliberately make the previous worst game ever (Shadowrun) even worse.

In it's way, it's glorius.

I wanted to give honorable mentions to this. DnD4 really was trying to reinvent itself better. Good ideas, bad execution.

I have recently started running an Earthdawn game using the new fourth edition.
It has fixed some of the features that really annoyed me about the system. The Classes now have option each time you level up so you don't have two people playing warriors, but with exactly the same talents.
All classes can do things now (No more thieves waiting till level 7 to get sneak)
The balance is better across the board.

All in all its fixed a lot of what drove me mad.

The world is of course still wonderful and the main reason I play.

Satinavian
2018-01-18, 06:37 AM
We'll see. If past "explanations" offered are any indication, it will once again come down to "getting information to a place before light would get it there is bad because it's bad for information to get there before the light does", which is the "explanation" I keep seeing. :smallfrown:

E - See other thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?548530-FTL-and-Violating-Causality&p=22761699#post22761699).
Let me try my luck.

We actually only need special relativity for that. So no curved space etc to keep it really simple.

But we do need the "Relativity" part. Which governs how perspetive shanges when you change the frame of referrence. Everyone already knows that a moving observer experiences time to flow slower and lengths changed accordingly. But keep in mind that the moving observer himself thinks that his timeflow is completely normal and the time from everyone else flows slower. And that the math says that both perspectives are valid.

How can that be ? How can everyone think that the time flows slower for everyone else and at the same time all perspectives are mathematically true ? That is because all those people have different ideas about which events actually happen at the same time.

Turns out the phrase "at the same time" does not really have a meaning when you are discussing different places. There is a past which is every spacetime coordinate where you can reach your place while staying slower than light, there is a future which is every coordinate that you can reach going slower than the speed of light. But every single other spacetime coordinate is neither past nor future nor at the same time but can appear as any of them depending on perspective alone. Going FTL means going to such a point. Which means that to some observers it is just really fast travel, to other observers it is timetravel into the past. And every observer is right.

Now a such journey would not destroy causality because while it might be a travel into the past it is also a travel far away and you can't come back before you left because that would take to long. But as soon as you can travel FTL backwards too, there is nothing preventing you from arriving before you left. That is always the case as soon as FTL is in the picture. There is no "only a little but faster than light" because that velocity also depends on the observer and every bit faster becomes "arbitrarily much faster" as soon as you switch referrence and all referrences are equally valid (Relativity again).

Edit : I didn't actuall read the other thread. Didn't realize it was a new one. Will continue there.

Kaptin Keen
2018-01-18, 07:41 AM
EDIT: Also I want to say that I love the mechanics on a conceptual level, how your score affects what dice you roll and so on, it all looks fascinating and cool as you read about it, it's just horrible in actual play.

Agreed. I remember loving the idea that - here was an RPG that actually used all the dice.


I have recently started running an Earthdawn game using the new fourth edition.

I should actually get that =)

Earthdawn is the only game I know of where everything seems ... transparent. I know how the world works, magic and threads and the astral and ... everything. But the mechanics are just awful.

Tyrrell
2018-01-18, 09:55 AM
I'd say 1rst ed. AD&D the authors had really never learned anything from other RPG's and it has all sorts of weird clunky things that look like they were just added on rather than thought out from the start. But I played the heck out of it and loved it. :smallsmile:

More seriously I really like FFG's deathwatch. I think that GW's 40K setting is absurd and the rules are painfully inelegant (they took a system originally designed for fantasy rat catchers and adapted it for space marines) but somehow its baroque mass of rules oddness is a good match for the baroque oddness of the setting and what looks like the worst of the mess (squad maneuvers and cohesion points) is the most fun.

Anonymouswizard
2018-01-18, 10:19 AM
More seriously I really like FFG's deathwatch. I think that GW's 40K setting is absurd and the rules are painfully inelegant (they took a system originally designed for fantasy rat catchers and adapted it for space marines) but somehow it's baroque mass of rules oddness is a good match for the baroque oddness of the setting and what looks like the worst of the mess (squad maneuvers and cohesion points) is the most fun.

I never got to use the bolded part the one time I played Deathwatch, which was a massive shame. The Solo Mode/Squad Mode dynamic looked really interesting, especially as we ended up working together as a squad as much as possible, and yet the GM refused point blank to read the rules for Squad Mode or Solo Mode as they weren't the rules for killing things, he later railroaded us into getting in a drop pod and dropping into an enemy location without knowing what was there, despite there being redshirtsImperial Guard on the planet who could have scouted for us, and the GM had just shown that the Deathwatch had an available surface to orbit vehicle and pilot who could have got us into a position to make a tactical approach.

I know Space Marines are supposed to not be cowardly, but I don't see what was so cowardly about my plan. We fly down, scout around for a back entrance, and if we find none I meltagun the wall and the devestator unleashes Heavy Bolter Hell on the people on the ground floor. But apparently the ship we used ten minutes ago isn't available and the Signiture Gear (Meltagun) talent doesn't let you have a meltagun at the start of the mission.

I should note that not reading the rules was a regular thing with this GM, it once took him five weeks to admit he wasn't giving us XP because he couldn't work out the rules for spending it. I mean, he was dyslexic, but everybody else read the rules and understood them in two minutes, explained them, and he refused to give us XP until he had read the rules (I mean, he could have said 'I don't want to give out XP', we'd have accepted that).

rs2excelsior
2018-01-18, 12:47 PM
I have a copy of something called the "Saganami Island Tactical Simulator" sitting at the back of my closet, which would seem to be an Honorverse wargame. My memory says that it's complicated as hell, but I also haven't looked at it since high school, so who really knows.

You could probably get some of those mechanics into a tabletop game, but I'm pretty sure you'd get a lot of the slowness there too. And probably a lot of the math-- you'd have to launch ranged attacks at a point in space and have them arrive turns later, while ships have limits on how fast they can change speed and direction that lock them into certain predictable patterns of movement. The hardest part might be keeping the delayed-information side of said encounters...

I've got Saganami Island Tactical Simulator! It is indeed an Honorverse wargame, and a rather good one. 1st edition rules are indeed, as you say, complicated as hell. 2nd edition, while still not exceedingly simple, aren't particularly complicated by wargame standards. You can fight out a battle between a handful of ships pretty easily, and the 3D vector movement is handled intuitively (at least, how thrust adds to your vector and how the ship moves are intuitive--it's not always intuitive how to get where you're going or what vector you should be on, but figuring that out is part of the fun).

If you want a similar game but not in the Honorverse and with a lower general tech level, the same designers make Attack Vector: Tactical as well. Uses largely the same rules, at least for maneuvering, as far as I know--I don't actually have that one.

Cluedrew
2018-01-18, 01:36 PM
I know Space Marines are supposed to not be cowardly, but I don't see what was so cowardly about my plan.Cowardly: Avoids danger they need to face.
Stupidity: Heads into danger they don't need to face.

In other words probably nothing.

I suppose I could mention Roll for Shoes. I've never actually played it without house rules, but not to fix any of the problems in the system. It has 7 rules so I added a few more for the environment and to make damage a bit more meaningful. You could very well play it without it. Which is why it didn't make my first choice, but it has a single generic way to preform actions, an XP and growth system. Done. Anything else is improvised on the fly.

Anonymouswizard
2018-01-18, 01:56 PM
Cowardly: Avoids danger they need to face.
Stupidity: Heads into danger they don't need to face.

In other words probably nothing.

That's my point, everybody grumbled because I 'didn't act like a Space Marine', and looking back on it I can't see anything saying a SM wouldn't ask to scout or prepare before dropping on a Chaos Cult (which, I should point out, appeared to be significantly below the problem scale we'd normally be called in for, as Chaos didn't have a foothold on this planet until we had just finished driving off the Tyranids). Apparently there was a Greater Daemon being summoned or something, which is SM stuff, but we didn't know that. Apparently the Inquisition was short on Accolytes.

Note that none of the 40k RPGs have survived my latest purge, because I have multiple SF games I'd much rather run. However the games are still fun, in that 'we didn't redesign this fantasy game enough' way.


I suppose I could mention Roll for Shoes. I've never actually played it without house rules, but not to fix any of the problems in the system. It has 7 rules so I added a few more for the environment and to make damage a bit more meaningful. You could very well play it without it. Which is why it didn't make my first choice, but it has a single generic way to preform actions, an XP and growth system. Done. Anything else is improvised on the fly.

Yeah, sometimes rules light isn't enough for a game. But such games can still be fun if people know how to build around them for their group.

Sinewmire
2018-01-19, 11:55 AM
That's my point, everybody grumbled because I 'didn't act like a Space Marine', and looking back on it I can't see anything saying a SM wouldn't ask to scout or prepare before dropping on a Chaos Cult (which, I should point out, appeared to be significantly below the problem scale we'd normally be called in for, as Chaos didn't have a foothold on this planet until we had just finished driving off the Tyranids). Apparently there was a Greater Daemon being summoned or something, which is SM stuff, but we didn't know that. Apparently the Inquisition was short on Accolytes.

"Inquisitor, you are criminally underutilising our skills. We are not investigators, we are not infiltrators, we are the Angels of Death. How many worlds will fall because we are here instead of there and you cannot even provide us with a simple situation report?

Deployment of the Deathwatch is a privilege, not an entitlement, and if you continue to act in this slapdash fashion, I cannot imagine your future requests for aid will be granted.

We will fight this battle, because we are here, and it would be an insult to those who have died in our transit time not to make their sacrifice worthwhile. If any of us survive this mission - and for the sake of your soul I hope we do - we shall have words."

Anonymouswizard
2018-01-19, 01:10 PM
"Inquisitor, you are criminally underutilising our skills. We are not investigators, we are not infiltrators, we are the Angels of Death. How many worlds will fall because we are here instead of there and you cannot even provide us with a simple situation report?

Deployment of the Deathwatch is a privilege, not an entitlement, and if you continue to act in this slapdash fashion, I cannot imagine your future requests for aid will be granted.

We will fight this battle, because we are here, and it would be an insult to those who have died in our transit time not to make their sacrifice worthwhile. If any of us survive this mission - and for the sake of your soul I hope we do - we shall have words."

I might save this for if I'm in this sort of situation in a 40k game again, in that group I was one of two (both of us players) who could pull off the Space Marine voice through deepness, and I have enough theatrical training to hide how hilarious my speech impediment can be for a couple of sentences at a time. The GM in that game certainly couldn't, and the only reason I didn't was that most of our interaction was inter-squad, where my character sounding like a nerd was more reasonable (I was an apothecary).

What made me annoyed was that he was running a scenario that would have made a great combat focused Dark Heresy campaign. But we played Deathwatch because Space Marines.

Deathwatch is one of the few things that make 40k Space Marines actually fun for me, because I get to act as that larger than life mythic character halfway between a soldier, a monk, and an angel. EDIT: and acting tactically is part of that.

Also, off topic, but I've always worked under the assumption that 'all Space Marines are male' is because of their culture tending to produce personalities that the Imperium regards as male, all having a hypermasculine physique, and Space Marines just not caring what's underneath your codpiece.

'No, Captain Damocles is male. The presence of a vagina does not change that. Now get back to your training, young scout.'

Florian
2018-01-19, 02:39 PM
Deathwatch is one of the few things that make 40k Space Marines actually fun for me, because I get to act as that larger than life mythic character halfway between a soldier, a monk, and an angel. EDIT: and acting tactically is part of that.

Dunno. Deathwatch never managed to inspire me, even tho I was fixed due to Dawn of War at the time and the mechanics worked more or less well. *Shrugs* I'm an imperial guards guy.

vasilidor
2018-01-19, 05:22 PM
I also like "Big Eyes, Small Mouth" (also known as BESM), but Palladium is so much more complex, often needlessly.

JBPuffin
2018-01-19, 07:57 PM
I’d have to say RIFTS. Got several of the books for Christmas in middle school because it promised the opportunity to play just about anything...and falls completely flat on its face in the attempt, considering its hyper-specific “official” setting and the lack of clear rules for designing OCCs and races and whatnot, but I still can enjoy the process of creating a character. I made a Russian Living Fire Sorcerer who started with a 9 Speed and ended up with a 25 (not to mention having no stat less than 11 when he started with a pair of 9s and an 8...Physical Skills, man, Physical Skills).

And, while it doesn deliver on the promise of playing whatever I want, the things it does offer can be pretty cool. The aforementioned Living Fire Sorcerer OCC, the tank-tread-bearing Combat Cyborg, the Ley Line Walkers, the Tech Wizard...and if I wanted to, I could probably whip up an OCC/RCC/race more balanced than what Siembieda could :P.

So yeah. RIFTS. Not a good game, but easily a fun one in the same ways other Palladium games can be (by ignoring 40-70% of the combat rules :D).

Doorhandle
2018-01-19, 08:18 PM
The best truly awful RPG that ever was?

Earthdawn. Hands down. None above, and none beside. It's the most ingenius setting, the best crafted lore, the greatest sum of new ideas I've ever seen in any game - combined with the most ... maimed, broken, limping-along-on-double-crutches-with-no-legs mechanics there ever were. It was like someone set out to deliberately make the previous worst game ever (Shadowrun) even worse.

In it's way, it's glorius.



I wanted to give honorable mentions to this. DnD4 really was trying to reinvent itself better. Good ideas, bad execution.

Agreed with earthdawn...thought that thing that disappointed me was that everything was supposed to be magical, but didn't really feel that different. Like, i was expecting basic pickpocketing to involve things like "teleporting gold out of your wallet" rather than just "reach in a grab it." Maybe it was just the D.M...and the fact I only got one session before he had a kid and thus ran out of time to D.M.


I also like "Big Eyes, Small Mouth" (also known as BESM), but Palladium is so much more complex, often needlessly.

Eh, I think that gave decent D.M advice, but the rules system just smacked of "this is a slightly worse version of mutants and masterminds." So, not enough to be "best worst," just underwhelming.

Telwar
2018-01-19, 08:52 PM
I really would have loved to have played Exalted. And Earthdawn. Le sigh.

Cluedrew
2018-01-19, 09:33 PM
"Inquisitor, you are criminally underutilising our skills. We are not investigators, we are not infiltrators, we are the Angels of Death. How many worlds will fall because we are here instead of there and you cannot even provide us with a simple situation report?

Deployment of the Deathwatch is a privilege, not an entitlement, and if you continue to act in this slapdash fashion, I cannot imagine your future requests for aid will be granted.

We will fight this battle, because we are here, and it would be an insult to those who have died in our transit time not to make their sacrifice worthwhile. If any of us survive this mission - and for the sake of your soul I hope we do - we shall have words.""I wish to roll intimidate."

Which is to say, that is a pretty good speech. I'm not an expert on 40K but it feels like something a Space Marine would say when faced with that sort of situation. Any still, imagining it coming from an 8-foot humanoid tank, it is scary.

Kaptin Keen
2018-01-20, 02:12 AM
Agreed with earthdawn...thought that thing that disappointed me was that everything was supposed to be magical, but didn't really feel that different. Like, i was expecting basic pickpocketing to involve things like "teleporting gold out of your wallet" rather than just "reach in a grab it." Maybe it was just the D.M...and the fact I only got one session before he had a kid and thus ran out of time to D.M.

Hm - teleporting money sounds like a mage thing to me. A rogue, a magical thief, to me is more like .. faster than the eye can follow, more agile than flesh and bone would seem capable of, sense danger before it happens, stuff like that.

I don't remember rogue's in ED. I should look it up. But otherwise, you're right - several classes felt weirdly underwhelming, while others were wildly OP =)

Doorhandle
2018-01-20, 08:34 PM
Hm - teleporting money sounds like a mage thing to me. A rogue, a magical thief, to me is more like .. faster than the eye can follow, more agile than flesh and bone would seem capable of, sense danger before it happens, stuff like that.

I don't remember rogue's in ED. I should look it up. But otherwise, you're right - several classes felt weirdly underwhelming, while others were wildly OP =)

Isn't the whole logic of "everything is a magical talent" that event the rogues are capable of turning invisible and teleporting things around though? Just by virtue of being good at thieving, as opposed to having normal wizard training?
The latter, I feel, is adequately covered in D&D by the fact a high-level thief is going to have around a 8+ dex bonus where "above average" is merely 1+.

Cluedrew
2018-01-20, 09:51 PM
To Doorhandle: If D&D used stat+d6 or stat+d8, I would agree with you that a +8 modifier is enough to show someone is best of the best. With stat+d20, I don't think that number "adequately" represents being really good. Of course it is hard to pick a cut off for that sort of thing, but I think the number should be higher if it is going to be done by the number alone. The other option is of course to mix in a bunch of other non-numeric bonuses to show it, but D&D doesn't really do that for anything besides combat and spell casting anyways.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-20, 10:14 PM
To Doorhandle: If D&D used stat+d6 or stat+d8, I would agree with you that a +8 modifier is enough to show someone is best of the best. With stat+d20, I don't think that number "adequately" represents being really good. Of course it is hard to pick a cut off for that sort of thing, but I think the number should be higher if it is going to be done by the number alone. The other option is of course to mix in a bunch of other non-numeric bonuses to show it, but D&D doesn't really do that for anything besides combat and spell casting anyways.

The relationship between die/dice and modifier(s), has to also take into account what sort of skill vs luck ratio you want, what sort of gap you want between the worst and the best, if certain tasks are impossible without enough skill and/or guaranteed with enough skill, and other factors.

LordEntrails
2018-01-20, 11:06 PM
The relationship between die/dice and modifier(s), has to also take into account what sort of skill vs luck ratio you want, what sort of gap you want between the worst and the best, if certain tasks are impossible without enough skill and/or guaranteed with enough skill, and other factors.
3.5 makes big difference, I mean 1d20+30 vs 1d20+2...

Arbane
2018-01-20, 11:08 PM
3.5 makes big difference, I mean 1d20+30 vs 1d20+2...

Yeah, but that can give fairly goofy results. The Strongest Man Alive has like a +6 strength modifier, which means they'll fail at arm-wrestling some doofus with average strength about 30% of the time.

Tanarii
2018-01-20, 11:47 PM
Yeah, but that can give fairly goofy results. The Strongest Man Alive has like a +6 strength modifier, which means they'll fail at arm-wrestling some doofus with average strength about 30% of the time.
I like the 5e way. The DM is only supposed to call for rolls when there is a question of success or failure in the first place. And can assign advantage or disadvantage as he sees fit. For example, in a contest of strength where having even slightly higher strength really matters.

In 5e an straight opposed contest would be tSMA +5 vs Doofus +0, or only 70% for tSMA to win. But that assumes the DM doesn't just decide its automatic succeess for tSMA. Or assign tSMA advantage for 93% success. Or that and give Doofus disadvantage, for a 97.68% chance of success.

Edit: following the quoted posts back: between only rolling when success/failure is in question, and applying advantage and disadvantage, it gives the DM the ability to address both having numbers that make sense, and to a degree the value of a modifier vs the value of the die size. Otoh the value of modifiers vs die size, and the way 5e does it vs mid to high level 3e modifiers, has been a frequent topic of who prefers what in regards to what constitutes being "skilled" in the 5e forum. I like the 5e way of smaller modifiers more but that's a personal preference.

lightningcat
2018-01-21, 03:04 AM
As someone who actually likes Exalted 2e, I still find Scion to be a broken mess of a game. Epic Dexterity breaks the game ao hard it is not even a little funny. But the idea behind Scion is so awesome, that I will still play it.
Although some of the flaws of it did let me improve my version of the engine, so there is that as well.

Berenger
2018-01-21, 07:01 AM
Yeah, but that can give fairly goofy results. The Strongest Man Alive has like a +6 strength modifier, which means they'll fail at arm-wrestling some doofus with average strength about 30% of the time.

My solution would be that arm-wrestling always defaults to Take 10 on a grapple check and is only rolled if both participants have the same grapple modifier. But yes.

Jormengand
2018-01-21, 10:50 AM
Yeah, but that can give fairly goofy results. The Strongest Man Alive has like a +6 strength modifier, which means they'll fail at arm-wrestling some doofus with average strength about 30% of the time.

3.5 specifically calls out arm-wrestling as something that doesn't require a check. As I recall, "Just as you don't roll a height check to see if you're taller than someone, you don't roll a strength check to see if you're stronger than someone." Apparently it's PHB 62, but I can't check books right now.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-21, 11:52 AM
3.5 specifically calls out arm-wrestling as something that doesn't require a check. As I recall, "Just as you don't roll a height check to see if you're taller than someone, you don't roll a strength check to see if you're stronger than someone." Apparently it's PHB 62, but I can't check books right now.

How many players are going to be satisfied with "Well one character has a STR of 16, and the other has a STR of 15, so the one with 16 auto-wins" ?

Jormengand
2018-01-21, 12:01 PM
How many players are going to be satisfied with "Well one character has a STR of 16, and the other has a STR of 15, so the one with 16 auto-wins" ?

In a direct contest of who's stronger? I am. In an indirect contest where luck is a factor as much as strength, then you roll, of course.

Tanarii
2018-01-21, 01:37 PM
3.5 specifically calls out arm-wrestling as something that doesn't require a check. As I recall, "Just as you don't roll a height check to see if you're taller than someone, you don't roll a strength check to see if you're stronger than someone." Apparently it's PHB 62, but I can't check books right now.3e was interesting in that while it had explicit things saying to only roll when resolution was needed (basically the same as 5e), no one appeared to play it that way. The skill system quickly became "roll for everything more complicated than walking down the street" in rapid order. Unsurprising, given it was the first comprehensive, mathematically well designed, and most importantly integrated skill system D&D had for resolving common adventuring tasks. NwPs and BECMI's gazetteer/RC skill systems being fairly useless as a resolution system, and thieves skills being mostly restricted to thieves, as well as being far too hard at low levels and far too easy at high. Which made the temptation to use the 3e skills system constantly far too strong.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-21, 01:43 PM
In a direct contest of who's stronger? I am. In an indirect contest where luck is a factor as much as strength, then you roll, of course.

So someone who is 5% stronger in an overall "attribute" sense is always going to win every "contest of strength"?

Because that's what it means to have the guy with 16 STR beat the guy with 15 STR automatically every time.

LordEntrails
2018-01-21, 02:16 PM
So someone who is 5% stronger in an overall "attribute" sense is always going to win every "contest of strength"?

Because that's what it means to have the guy with 16 STR beat the guy with 15 STR automatically every time.

Pretty much. If I arm wrestle Dwayne Johnson, I am NEVER going to win, not even 5% of the time.

If strength is an absolute measure of strength, the guy who can lift 250 lbs is always going to be able to life more than the guy who can lift 240 lbs.

Now, if the contest involves things like uncertainty, luck, or entropy, then you roll. Such as trying to open or hold closed a door is simulated with a strength roll, but also (irl) includes other factors like time, tactics, body position, awareness, reaction time, etc. So a roll is used.

But a fair arm wrestling match is designed to be a measure of pure strength, and not luck, so no roll needed.

Max_Killjoy
2018-01-21, 02:28 PM
Pretty much. If I arm wrestle Dwayne Johnson, I am NEVER going to win, not even 5% of the time.

If strength is an absolute measure of strength, the guy who can lift 250 lbs is always going to be able to life more than the guy who can lift 240 lbs.

Now, if the contest involves things like uncertainty, luck, or entropy, then you roll. Such as trying to open or hold closed a door is simulated with a strength roll, but also (irl) includes other factors like time, tactics, body position, awareness, reaction time, etc. So a roll is used.

But a fair arm wrestling match is designed to be a measure of pure strength, and not luck, so no roll needed.

First, that's not what I said -- unless you're within 5% of the "nominal" strength of Dwayne Johnson? I asked if someone is going to win 100% of the time, no chance, no variation, no risk, based on a 5% difference. Not if everyone had a 5% chance of winning against any opponent regardless of their relative nominal strength.

Second, real-world strength isn't an absolute or fixed quality even for a single person. Various physiological factors (from how well you've been eating the last few days, to how well you slept last night, to whether you've already been exerting yourself, today to etc) can cause variations in actual output that exceed a 5% difference in nominal strength.

Third, there are no contests of strength that don't also involve some degree of skill and at least a smidgen of luck.

Tanarii
2018-01-21, 02:48 PM
First, that's not what I said -- unless you're within 5% of the "nominal" strength of Dwayne Johnson? I asked if someone is going to win 100% of the time, no chance, no variation, no risk, based on a 5% difference. Not if everyone had a 5% chance of winning against any opponent regardless of their relative nominal strength. To add to your things worth noting, it's worth noting that the Strength score isn't arm strength. And in the latest edition, it also includes training/skill at Str-type activities. A person with +1 more Str modifier might have 10% less arm strength capacity in the kind of arm strength arm-wrestling specifically uses.

Jormengand
2018-01-21, 05:04 PM
So someone who is 5% stronger in an overall "attribute" sense is always going to win every "contest of strength"?

Because that's what it means to have the guy with 16 STR beat the guy with 15 STR automatically every time.

Yup! Just like I'm going to win every direct contest of height against my sister, who is an inch shorter than me. I've never seen two people who've gone at an arm-wrestle multiple times come up with different results each time, FWIW.

Lapak
2018-01-21, 06:38 PM
Yup! Just like I'm going to win every direct contest of height against my sister, who is an inch shorter than me. I've never seen two people who've gone at an arm-wrestle multiple times come up with different results each time, FWIW.
Arm wrestling, like regular wrestling, involves - or can involve - technique as well as raw strength. Just as weight-lifting events can, for that matter; people with with the same levels of muscle mass and theoretical maximum power don't necessarily lift the same amount of weight in a deadlift or a bench press or a squat, even though those things are as pure a test of 'strength' as you can ask for. Technique matters. Mental state matters. Tiredness matters - did the guy with 16 strength just arm-wrestle eight guys in a row? All of that is probably going to have an impact.

Games obviously don't have to be perfect simulations of all this, of course, and it's perfectly reasonable to say 'in my game, 16 strength beats 15 strength in arm wrestling every time.' But there are equally legitimate reasons to say it doesn't happen that way. Which is why it's good that there's different mechanics for different people's preferences!

Cluedrew
2018-01-21, 07:53 PM
Arm wrestling, like regular wrestling, involves - or can involve - technique as well as raw strength.Isn't that technique part of the strength stat though? I thought it was (and I know it is in my homebrew system) although I don't have rules in front of me to make sure. But it makes sense, the techniques a character knows are pretty consistent, they aren't going to randomly select good or bad form each time.

Knaight
2018-01-21, 08:00 PM
Yup! Just like I'm going to win every direct contest of height against my sister, who is an inch shorter than me. I've never seen two people who've gone at an arm-wrestle multiple times come up with different results each time, FWIW.

I have; I've even been one of those people.

Beyond that, there's also the matter of how strength is distributed - two people with the same overall strength might still not have the same strength in the specific relevant muscles. For instance, there are people I can reliably beat at arm wrestling right arm to right arm where I reliably lose arm wrestling left arm to left arm, and vice versa.

Quertus
2018-01-21, 10:41 PM
I have; I've even been one of those people.

Beyond that, there's also the matter of how strength is distributed - two people with the same overall strength might still not have the same strength in the specific relevant muscles. For instance, there are people I can reliably beat at arm wrestling right arm to right arm where I reliably lose arm wrestling left arm to left arm, and vice versa.

Yes, based on luck, skill, diet, exertion, etc, you can have variable victors in an arm wrestling contest.

The question is, can you do so when their "strength scores" are noticeably different?

The answer, again, is yes, especially in both are unskilled, and are, indeed, randomly selecting good and bad techniques, not realizing that technique matters.

Jormengand
2018-01-22, 06:41 AM
I have; I've even been one of those people.

Congrats! You have the exact same strength score as the person you were up against.



More to the point, while 3.5 is somewhat simulationist (to the effect that your action in the game represents a specific action for the character and produces results which mostly follow from that: the example I like to use of non-simulationist games is the current edition of Warhammer 40,000, where - unlike previous editions - flamers and subterrainean explosions work fine on flyers and you can't shoot the drugged-up maniac with a poisonous knife gauntlet thing because the completely invisible anti-mage is half an inch closer to you [even if the invisible guy is in close combat with someone else]. D&D 3.5 at least tries to make consequences follow from the relevant actions) it's not actually meant to be world simulator, because otherwise you end up with "Whatever FATAL would look like if it really were realistic*."

It's a game about fighting flying lizards made of fire and suspension of disbelief in subterrainean prisons which exist because the Dee Em says they do; it's not designed for faithfully determining who wins an arm wrestle.

*Yes, probably even including the horrible sex stuff, because, well, have you met some of the horrible people who exist in real life?

calam
2018-01-23, 12:36 AM
The worst RPG I enjoy is probably first edition Dark Heresy. Its the first 40k tabletop RPG and it shows. Its d100 system assumes you get a +10 for a typical challenge which means that a starting player will have at best a 50/50 chance of dealing with a problem they specialize in on the first try which is compounded by the lack of clear description on what happens during failure besides the specific examples that usually which usually cause a penalty if you are off by more than 30. This is usually not being able to try the test again which means things like basic repairs have a 30% chance of destroying the object. Its even worse for long term healing where if you get 30 off or more you hurt your patient by your failure divided by 10 making if far safer to let soldiers have sown wounds open to the air then subject them to risky things like cleaning.

The economics are the worst part of the game since for some reason your characters who are agents of the inquisition are expected to buy all their stuff. This would be bad enough but your pay is terrible so if a guardsman loses their default lasgun it costs a month and a half of wages to buy one. This is compounded by the fact that the adventure paths tend to only give you equipment if its absolutely necessary like spacesuits if you're going through a vacuum or explosives because you have to destroy a machine but won't give you supplies to take care of things like heavily armored enemies at low level so if your GM plays it by the book you can be forced to fight enemies that won't be hurt by your attacks 60% of the time.

These problems would be more minor if the game focused on investigation over combat but it probably is as optimized for non combat as D&D is if not less since all you have is the ability to directly roll skills against difficulty levels. No investigation paths, involved interrogation rules or anything of the sort.

Part of the reason I like it anyway is due to the classic concept of art through adversity. We have a lot of fun establishing black markets to fence enemy gear so we can buy medical supplies and grenades and works the low level of competence into the game by likening ourselves to canaries in coal mines where its only considered a real problem if we die and playing the lack of support as the inefficiencies of the Imperium's bureaucracy.

Grod_The_Giant
2018-01-23, 07:27 AM
likening ourselves to canaries in coal mines where its only considered a real problem if we die and playing the lack of support as the inefficiencies of the Imperium's bureaucracy.
I'm not too familiar with the assorted Warhammer lines, but isn't that basically the entire point of Dark Heresy?

calam
2018-01-23, 10:44 AM
I'm not too familiar with the assorted Warhammer lines, but isn't that basically the entire point of Dark Heresy?

Looking at the dark heresy mechanics it does seems so but looking at 2nd edition where there's some rules for inquisitors making sure your cover isn't blown, you don't have to pay for your equipment and that in the wargame acolytes are considered elites who have statlines similar to storm-troopers in some editions I think they greatly exaggerated the incompetence that the acolytes show.

Sinewmire
2018-01-23, 10:52 AM
The worst RPG I enjoy is probably first edition Dark Heresy. Its the first 40k tabletop RPG and it shows. Its d100 system assumes you get a +10 for a typical challenge which means that a starting player will have at best a 50/50 chance of dealing with a problem they specialize in on the first try which is compounded by the lack of clear description on what happens during failure besides the specific examples that usually which usually cause a penalty if you are off by more than 30. This is usually not being able to try the test again which means things like basic repairs have a 30% chance of destroying the object. Its even worse for long term healing where if you get 30 off or more you hurt your patient by your failure divided by 10 making if far safer to let soldiers have sown wounds open to the air then subject them to risky things like cleaning.

etc.etc.

Part of the reason I like it anyway is due to the classic concept of art through adversity. We have a lot of fun establishing black markets to fence enemy gear so we can buy medical supplies and grenades and works the low level of competence into the game by likening ourselves to canaries in coal mines where its only considered a real problem if we die and playing the lack of support as the inefficiencies of the Imperium's bureaucracy.

I completely agree. Once you give up your expectation of being able to succeed first time it's fine - in movies the hero and villain usually trade shots for a while before anyone's hurt.

It also feels *so* good later on when you're single handedly taking out threats that would have been nigh impossible at early levels, whilst at the same time, nothing is ever trivial - an acolyte at high level can still be killed by some punk getting a lucky shot with an autogun.

I played a single noir-style DH campaign on-and-off for about 10 years, taking our characters from 1st level to Ascenscion, and the roleplay was *very* rewarding.

I agree about the clumsy economy rules (cheap rotgut alchohol by the bottle costs 10 times more than your monthly salary? eh?) and the labyrinthine layout (grapple - see grappling - see grappled - page number is wrong, there's nothing grapple related here!), and the wierd combat stuff that needed to be errata'd (can you use a pistol in full auto in combat? how does that work? What if you have multiple attacks?).

I still say Deathwatch was worse. It had the same rules, but the car-crash had a super-charged engine and some fancy bodywork. The rules bloated even further, and your weapons were rolling an extra 3 dice on average! What was creaky in DH1 was tearing off the chassis in DW.

I still love them both, and play them whenever I get the chance - I'm running a DW one-shot in a fortnight.

Tanarii
2018-01-23, 12:26 PM
The worst RPG I enjoy is probably first edition Dark Heresy. Its the first 40k tabletop RPG and it shows. Its d100 system assumes you get a +10 for a typical challenge which means that a starting player will have at best a 50/50 chance of dealing with a problem they specialize in on the first try which is compounded by the lack of clear description on what happens during failure besides the specific examples that usually which usually cause a penalty if you are off by more than 30. This is usually not being able to try the test again which means things like basic repairs have a 30% chance of destroying the object. Its even worse for long term healing where if you get 30 off or more you hurt your patient by your failure divided by 10 making if far safer to let soldiers have sown wounds open to the air then subject them to risky things like cleaning.This is a general problem for RPGs where skill scales from very low to very high, and checks are made for basic functioning. It works okay if checks are very specifically only to do things that "have a chance of failure", and it works great if they're only to do very exceptional things. It completely fails if it's like AD&D 1e or BECMI Thief skills, which weren't sufficiently explained as being "exceptional" and not "basic functioning", or in some cases WERE explicitly explained as "basic functioning", thus making them useless at low levels in the vast majority of games, and ruling out anyone else from trying the "basic functioning" version of the task at all. Classic example is the advanced Thief skills of Hide in Shadows (disappear into the very shadows) and Move Silently (make zero noise) vs the anyone skills of hiding behind something or moving quietly.

The "only roll if there's a chance of failure" thing was very clearly stated in the Game Mastering section of some of the later W40k FRP products, like Only War. And then, of course, the more detailed skill and combat rules completely ignored that and had skill checks for basic functioning things riddled throughout.

calam
2018-01-23, 03:16 PM
I completely agree. Once you give up your expectation of being able to succeed first time it's fine - in movies the hero and villain usually trade shots for a while before anyone's hurt.

It also feels *so* good later on when you're single handedly taking out threats that would have been nigh impossible at early levels, whilst at the same time, nothing is ever trivial - an acolyte at high level can still be killed by some punk getting a lucky shot with an autogun.

I played a single noir-style DH campaign on-and-off for about 10 years, taking our characters from 1st level to Ascenscion, and the roleplay was *very* rewarding.

I agree about the clumsy economy rules (cheap rotgut alchohol by the bottle costs 10 times more than your monthly salary? eh?) and the labyrinthine layout (grapple - see grappling - see grappled - page number is wrong, there's nothing grapple related here!), and the wierd combat stuff that needed to be errata'd (can you use a pistol in full auto in combat? how does that work? What if you have multiple attacks?).

I still say Deathwatch was worse. It had the same rules, but the car-crash had a super-charged engine and some fancy bodywork. The rules bloated even further, and your weapons were rolling an extra 3 dice on average! What was creaky in DH1 was tearing off the chassis in DW.

I still love them both, and play them whenever I get the chance - I'm running a DW one-shot in a fortnight.

Yeah, Deathwatch is pretty bad but they did errata the weapon damage and I give it a higher score because it feels like playing space marines more than Dark Heresy feels like playing Inquisition.

JBPuffin
2018-01-24, 04:10 AM
More to the point, while 3.5 is somewhat simulationist...it's not actually meant to be world simulator, because otherwise you end up with "Whatever FATAL would look like if it really were realistic."

It's a game about fighting flying lizards made of fire and suspension of disbelief in subterranean prisons which exist because the Dee Em says they do; it's not designed for faithfully determining who wins an arm wrestle.

Can I sig this? It almost perfectly captures my thoughts on RPG realism :smallbiggrin:

Jormengand
2018-01-24, 06:10 AM
Can I sig this? It almost perfectly captures my thoughts on RPG realism :smallbiggrin:

Sure, go ahead. :smallsmile:

Joe the Rat
2018-01-24, 11:47 AM
Rolemaster, at least in the Rolemaster Lite form used in Middle-Earth Role-Playing. A rule system that almost tells you how to do things that you can almost succeed at that almost works with the setting lore. But what lore! It's one of the few games where humans have the most diverse race/culture stats, features, bonuses, and languages.

Also, death shrews.

Come for the setting, stay for the critical hit tables.