Matts Rp Idea Storage thread.

Hornet wrote:

I am still into the idea of an L5R campaign. If you can't be bothered running the social death match style just run it as a feudal style campaign.
I would be up for the cyber punk styling of shadow run too. So let me know when you are ready.

I am cool to run a WOD game if any one is up for it.

I'm not apposed to L5R the game, i have just realized that the social deathmatch will require incredibly proactive players which i have an extremely limited # of.

You're right and as limited as my time is, Caitlin is cutting me a lot more slack lately with my nerd time. I would be up for that little extra character driven scenario. That how ever is a pipe dream as not everyone is as down with the reishiki and proprietary ways of the Samurai class as I am. Too many would want more killin'.

My money would always be on L5R but as I said I would support something like shadow run just as much. It would be good for a change.

If you were to go Shadow run how would you run it? What does Shadowrun play like again? Is it GURPS or similar? I did look through the books at yours recently but I forget.

Also if not the social death match what would the setting be? Timeline, rules and clan and class limitations?

shadowrun plays like a near future oceans 11 with cyber ware and magic. Apart from that no not like gurps it runs on a dice pool system with number of success vs tn kind of thing.

I am giving a lot of thought to doing a vote for my next game tho, I'm interested to see what would win. But the deadlands is far from finished so that doesn't matter yet.

Quote :

Also if not the social death match what would the setting be? Timeline, rules and clan and class limitations?

not sure, haven't thought that far ahead.

Matt wrote:

But the deadlands is far from finished so that doesn't matter yet.

Good cause I'm liking the new style of DMing. I hope everyone gets on board with sorting their own story arcs out so it fits together and no one is dicking around looking for the quest giver.

Ordered a copy of this today, giant robots anyone?

Ok just chucking a couple more things on the pile so i don't forget them.

Here are a couple of setting ideas i liked from rpg.net.

The Long Stair

Dark Works

have a look, tell me if anything interests you.

Future Matt, hear these words and comprehend them;

PRE FABRICATED SETTINGS!

Full of rail roading and all settings MUST be chosen from D&D!

I'm confused are you saying there is a problem with our current campaign?

I wasn't doing anything I was wondering if Matt was saying that he is upset with the current campaign.

no it was a note for my future self... that's what i use this thread for, storing ideas and remembering things.

JD was just being a smart ass i assumed?!?

Ok I have been putting in a lot of thought about where to go with the Power and Gavin game and I wanted to post some of my musing up here.
I will prefix this post with the following statement:

I AM NOT TERMINATING THIS GAME!

I forget some times that people take my posts too seriously and treat them as gospel rather than what they actually are… which is ..er… brain farts…about stuff.

Ok so without further ado;          Power and Gavin – Things I would do differently in hindsight.


GURPS is not a good system for me as a GM – Mechanically GURPS is beautiful system, its mentality seems to be “Here I am in all my glory, take from me the bits you want and need, ignore the rest, I will still work perfectly!”  Which is true.  The problem is as a GM it means you have to sift through everything and single out the parts you do want.  I am not a massive fan of sifting through the rules or “Crunch” as it’s commonly referred to.  GURPS needs you to want to do that unless you are running the most basic GUPRS Lite games.

Also in GURPS you can build literally everything.  There are countless building blocks that can be repurposed in millions of different ways.  The problem is you HAVE to build EVERYTHING!  From creatures to npcs, weapons, gear, everything!  Sure there are plenty of generic guidelines but if you want things outside generic they need to be built.  You can search around online and in books for various pre-made things, evaluate them for suitability for your game, retool them as needed.  But once again this isn’t something I enjoy and it tends to put me off doing session prep for a lot of elements of the game because of it.  As a GM I seem to prefer being handed a bag of pre made tools finding interesting uses for them, rather than building my own tools from the ground up.  


GURPS + Supers was a bad choice, period – GURPS has an amazing amount of options for building super powered characters, but as a GM running a supers game in GURPS you need a good understanding of the system and you also need to build good guidelines to help your players build suitable characters for the game you intend to run. 

I didn’t do this.

I probably didn’t have enough GURPS experience to handle this and I probably still don’t.  The way I did do it was a massive mistake.  For my players who don’t love the “crunch” in games and don’t enjoy tweaking and creating character builds the GRUPS system as we are using it is overly complicated and counterproductive to fun.  And for my players who do enjoy the crunch, the plethora of options presented to them was almost suffocating.  It was like sitting in a maths methods class all over again; ask a question as simple as “how do I eat an apple” and getting 40 different solutions thrust upon you.  Then like any experienced “crunch” monkey the weight of indecision comes crashing down, am I making the right choices? Am I spending my points efficiently? Is this worth taking?  Should I have taken one of the millions of things I didn’t take?  You end up crushed under and endless pile of options.
I think basically if I wanted to use GURPS I shouldn’t have gone open slather supers, but I will expand on this later.


Homebrew setting vs pre-made setting – It was silly to go with a homebrew setting as yet unconstructed.  There are thousands of wonderfully created settings out there with tons of information about them readily available.  My players could have sated their thirst for information about the world in which their characters lived by simply picking up a book or doing a web search.  Instead when they need to know something about the world they have to ask me, there are a lot of these questions for good reason.  They are in charge of a realm; their decisions will matter and have lasting effect.  It only makes sense that they would want to know as much as they could prior to making a call.  My imagination is not what it used to be and my free time no longer as plentiful.  It would have been much wiser to use a pre made world where the basics were already fleshed out and easily available, and work within those constraints.
I was thinking that a group world building exercise would be fun in a live game and it probably would, if the game wasn’t so politically driven.


I should have picked a system better suited for the game – I picked GURPS because of how well it could do supers.  I thought when I made this choice that the supers part would be the most important part of the game, it’s really not though.  I should have picked a system which was well suited for larger scale warfare, politics and realm building, a system which had a simple but interesting way of handling those elements.  In future If I try a similar thing again I might try the system Adventurer Conqueror King, it seems to be built for this type of things while being wrapped around an interesting AD&D style rule system.


Combat isn’t fun – I don’t think we have had an entertaining combat in this game as yet, with exception of maybe the first battle in the first session (those are always enjoyable though because of all the shiny new toys to try.)  The main reason for this is the varying combat power level differences between characters.  It’s hard to build a combat encounter that is equally challenging and interesting for the whole party, which is a shame because a good group combat can be a lot of fun.  I have been trying to figure ways around this; first I considered building individual elements into each combat to challenge each individual character.  But the problem with that strategy is that it relies on the specific character only taking on their pre-determined “opponent”.  If character X took on character Y’s opponent they may find it way to easy and face roll it without any challenge, where character Z may be left facing X’s opponent and be unable to do anything against it, only to be knocked out of the combat quickly.   I could ensure that each character was correctly railroaded into combat with the pre-selected opponent but I don’t think this would be overly fun in the long run.  The beginning of each fight eventually breaking down into each player trying to quickly determining which opponent was set up for them. 

I am going to try adding more non-combat related goals into combat encounters as a way of making things more interesting.  The problem with this approach is that the game is sandbox in nature and I can never be sure how anything will progress in the session or how the players will approach any encounter.  I just have to focus on making a bunch of vague scenarios and retooling them to fit situations as required.

It is also currently difficult to add basic encounters.  For example; Party runs into a group of enemy troops on the wrong side of the border.  They are out in the middle of nowhere; it is basically a straight up fight.  At the moment my best option is to tell the players their characters easily win the fight and move on with the game.  A fight like this will undoubtedly be a victory for the players, playing the battle out is unlikely to be overly entertaining and it will cost session time.  Honestly, unless the enemy unit is built for “tank busting” the best option for the PC’s is to send Rock Biter in to mop them up.  Most non hero troops are unlikely to pose even the slightest risk to him and his regeneration ability means it is unlikely to even cost any in game resources (like HP).
I had hoped to make combats interesting with cinematic combats between the PC’s and NPC heroes but so far they haven’t gone as planned.  They generally end up like wet fish slapping competitions because the NPC’s need to be built to survive the first round damage barrage the PC’s throw at them but they can’t hit to hard for fear of insta-killing one of the PC’s.

Ehh I’m not even sure I’m expressing myself right here, maybe I will come back to my issues with combat another day.  I think in essence it boils down to how I set up the GURPS+SUPERS character building options.

Ehh that’s enough for today, any input would be appreciated and helpful for the future of the game.

Cont.. from above

I shouldn't have started the PC's as lords like i did - I should have run half a dozen sessions to let the PC's get comfortable in the world, build a basic understanding of things, attain some contacts and find their place in things.  Instead i dropped a bunch of clueless alien PC's into the middle of an unknown situation and made them fumble around looking for some firm ground to stand on.  The players found their feet in the end but it meant that the first 4 sessions or so were very unproductive as far as the realm control section of the game went.  

It also made it a lot more difficult for players who aren't as strong at thinking on their feet.  If i had have spent the first few sessions easing them into the water it probably would have worked out better in the long run.

Today i learned that Deadlands Noir is a thing.

On an unrelated note, i am going to make a quick list of games i have aquired recently or have on order. Just so you guys can eye ball some of them, see if they interest you for the future.

The ACK's game is kicking along well so it will be a while before any of them get used but its always good to sow the seeds early so you can harvest well in the years to come.

Stuff:
Dungeon World
Shadowrun 5e
Nemenera
Deadlands Noir
Mouse Guard
L5R 5e
Iron Kingdoms
BattleTech

There are some games i have been thinking about picking up as well:
Changling
Only War

If there are any other games you have an interest in feel free to post them

Mouse Guard? WTF?

Hornet wrote:

Mouse Guard? WTF?

Its a fairly solid game. Interesting engine, unique approach to story telling.

i have been reading through shadowrun 5ed.
so far it seems to be written well to prevent conflict in perception of rules.

its taking me some time to read but the second read through should be faster and the third faster again.

i swear i will read it three times before i ask to join.

My hard copy just arrived at milsims on the weekend so i might actually start reading it.

Matt wrote:

Today i learned that Deadlands Noir is a thing.

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG


that GIF sums it up perfectly matt, could not have put it better.

Just put an order in for Eclipse Phase. First Sci Fi in a long time i have read that really felt futuristic. Interesting concepts and setting. If anybody wants a read let me know and i will chuck it in the dropbox.

http://www.godwars2.org/SavageWorlds/rules_edges.html

Ref for later

Hey people,

I was thinking about pre-ordering the game Mutant: Year 0. But seeing as how the set costs a solid hundi (including postage) i figured i would see if anybody was actually interested in playing it.

Here is a link to a bit of an intro/example of play.

Does this game interest anybody?