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Post by pax on Apr 26, 2011 18:25:31 GMT -5
*steals Pax's direction providing role and sets off to make skill-based, freeform system with totally customizable abilities, [...] Actually, the IP I have my eye on, is Shadowrun. Which, I must hasten to point out, is absolutely NOTHING like the p.o.s. PC game that bore (and soiled) the Shadowrun name and logo. I would have most missions generated somewhat procedurally - based on the skills you and your team-mates had available right then and there. There's still be specific-story-arc missions available, of course. But the majority of the "levelling treadmill" would entail entirely "on the spot" generated missions. The way it would work is, you'd assembleyour team first, then log in to the in-game networks to "look for work". The missions offered to you would all be based on what your team composition was at that time. So if you have a balanced party, with one or two combat specialists, a stealthy guy, a computer specialist, and a spell-thrower ... you'd get pretty normal, balanced, "typical" shadowrun jobs. If your team was nothing but "stealthy guys", though? You'd get missions that involved a LOT of sneaking, but not so much on the "big combat" stuff, nor the magical and computer-intrusion stuff. Flipside, if you assemble a team of Troll street-samurai wearing heavy armor and packing miniguns? Expect to be hired to go win a war, somewhere. The is because, in-setting ... you try to hire the people who can get the job done. You DON'T just "take the first warm body to show up". So, why would you hire "Collateral Damage, Inc." (the trolls with miniguns) to do a job that required subtlety and stealth, but minimal or no shooting? (The answer is, of course, "you wouldn't" ...) Aside from that? I'd try to keep the mechanics pretty close to the PnP rules. Oh, not an exact copy, no (an MMO wouldn't allow you enough time to decide when and how to burn Edge, for example). But your character sheet should look pretty much the same; character creation should work pretty much the same. And so should character advancement! A ton of the work would go into making sure the ambient environments looked and sounded right, and were populated with NPCs that behaved in believable ways. And to allow for any sort of playstyle. Even, in fact, to have much of the environment (at least temporarily) destructible. Hey, blowing off the back half of a building, as a distraction so you can escape with the cargo you were sent to steal? Yeah, I've done that, in a PnP game. "Collateral Damage, Inc." was what our group really came to be called. In a decade, there's a decent chance that the general populace will move past MMOs as a pastime. Maybe they are being rushed because they may go out of style before breaking even. We are dealing with tastes more jaded than the days of EQ, Ultima Oniline, and Meridian. IMO, extremely unlikely.
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Post by visionstorm on Apr 26, 2011 19:22:36 GMT -5
Damn that was a good game with some interesting ideas. I never got to play Shadowrun much (could not get enough people interested at the time--too many other games in my gaming circle, plus too many D&Ders that couldn't grasp anything that deviated too much from D&D mechanics), but I got a lot of ideas and/or inspiration out of it for my own games, house rules and home grown systems from it. I liked the whole modern to near-future cybernetic age with sword & sorcery mixed in setting. I also liked the fact that it had a skill based magic system (I despised D&D's spell slot/memorization system) and that everything was based around skills. I consider skills to be the ultimate way to implement EVERYTHING, because everythig a character can do is ultimately as skill, even combat. I always felt that D&D wasted too much effort making up separate systems for every other type of ability--combat, "arcane" magic, "divine" magic, "psionic" magic (which they claimed was not "magic", but ultimately, we're just talking about a bunch of sub-classes of mystical abilities), "thieving skills" (untill 3rd Ed system--which was really 4th Ed if you counted D&D Basic, but I digress), practical skills, etc. Of the ideas you mentioned, I really liked the notion of missions specific to your character's skills. I liked them for two reasons: 1) It makes no sense for you to pick a mission if it requires skills you don't have (or aren't particularly good at) in order to successfully accomplish it 2) I hate the fact that EVERY SINGLE (well, not every single, but most of them ) computer "RPG" is based entirely around senseless hack-n-slash. Whatever happened to some good sneaking around missions? How about hacking into a computer to steal some corporate data (using actual skills, not like in CO, where my D&Dish dark elf witch from a medieval era world can readily hack into a computer just because the mission calls for it)? What about a social driven mission where you have to persuade a political figure to join your cause through actual diplomacy skills? Etc. A mission system like that could provide a lot of alternatives and could appeal to many play styles. It would also add a lot of variety I see missing in MMO's. There's too many cookie cutter "kill this", "grab this", "interact with that" missions and they're all based around simplistic tasks that take no player skill or character skill either--since a lot of times characters don't even need to have any actual skills to perform the tasks the mission calls for (even if such task would normally require training). With a mission systm like this if you have a group of grunts just let them go on a killing spree. If your group is into something more subtle you could throw in a stealth or diplomacy mission. Creative and technical types may get crafting missions to gather components and build stuff for a particular purpose. And some missions, may even call for mixed types, where characters with different skills are needed to accomplish the greater goal.
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Post by pax on Apr 26, 2011 20:15:54 GMT -5
[...] (untill 3rd Ed system--which was really 4th Ed if you counted D&D Basic, but I digress) [...] Actually, no. First we had Chainmail, and then the "Original" D&D,or "OD&D. After that, the family tree (shrub?) branched - on one branch, you had Basic/Expert/Master/Companion (which became the D&D Rules Cyclopedia). On the other branch, you had AD&D (which became 2E, and then 3E, and then 3.5E, and then - sadly, IMO - 4E). The two were parallel, and "kissing cousins" right after the initial split, but they were not iterations of the same game. AD&D was being written at the same time that Basic/Expert were being written. They'd've been published simultaneously too, except AD&D took more writing time to be complete, so it got published a little bit later. /pedant Not just your own character, but the whole team. Also, with Shadowrun ... there are usually multiple ways to accomplish the same goal. "Get in th building" can involve sneaking in (stealth), or killing the guard(s) with silenced weapons (combat), or charming/conning your way past (social). Or it can involve hacking in to the right system(s), and aving UPS deliver you. ^_^ ... Or maybe, you steal a fire truck, and trigger a false fire alarm (a la Mission Impossible).
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Post by AngelOfCaine on Apr 26, 2011 20:48:16 GMT -5
I actually have two pieces of D&D memorabilia. A pink d20 from the original boxed set (it's so old it's a 20 sided marble now, no edges). And the 1st ED PHB (it's cover is so old, i glued the first April Fools Edition cover from Dragon Magazine. The "Goblin's and Ghoulies" one?)
Ah, good times...
On Shadowrun. Anything past 3rd ED is crap ;D
That is all... 'Caine
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Post by pax on Apr 26, 2011 21:22:55 GMT -5
Anything past 3rd ED is crap ;D I cannot agree. 4E did several things right, that 3E couldn't manage to get done at all: (a) Made initiative fair, even for the unaugmented. No longer does the unaugmented mage discover that the whole fight is completely over, before their first-round initiative ever comes up. (b) Matrix specialists are no longer an entirely separate campaign. This is a BIG one! I managed, once, to run a game session with simultaneous meat-world and matrix "action sequence" ... held the players' rapt attention, segued smoothly back and forth between each subgroup, andmade each party's actions relevant to the OTHER group. And it was absolutely, flat-on-my-back exhausting. I had to call off the next session, because I was so burnt out from that one session, I hadn't been able to prepare a single thing. (c) Riggers no longer sit outside, in the van, not really part of the action. Now, they're out in the thick of it, right with the rest of the party (including, per (b) above, the matrix guy). Those three improvements are very significant, IMO.
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Post by melkathi on Apr 27, 2011 4:08:49 GMT -5
I always wanted to play Shadowrun... Either a Decker or a Cat Shaman. Cat Shamans seem like purrfect fun, driving the rest of the party crazy
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Post by pax on Apr 27, 2011 10:37:19 GMT -5
Oh, I've had so many characters over the years ... so many of them VERY cool (IMO) ... For example: "Trojan" (real name Troy something-or-other), 2E. Troll legbreaker. Built to have the maximum BOD possible, as well as tons of armor; literally, "mobile cover", able to bounce anything that wasn't a threat to at least a light tank. The first scene, I wasn't part of the team yet, and they mistook me for the enemy. A player (who apologised OOC, in an aside) decided to unload a full Long Burst - that's twelve or fifteen rounds - of APDS (Armor-piercing, Discarding Sabot) ammunition from a light machine gun.
All he did was give Trojan a bruise, and prompt him to look up at the window the guy fired from, and say "You and me, we're gonna have WORDS", before crossing the street and entering the building.
It was a chatroom-based game, but, I would have paid GOOD money to see the look on his face, just then. Or better, when I kicked in the door, and his buddy (a Physical Adept - think "magical martial-arts master") literally bounced off of me, and I then put two rounds into him ... folding him up like a wet rag.
(They were nonlethal rounds, though - as I told him in a /whisper. Trojan was a legbreaker, NOT an axe-murderer.)
...
good times, man. good times.
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Post by eleric on Apr 27, 2011 13:21:44 GMT -5
[...] (untill 3rd Ed system--which was really 4th Ed if you counted D&D Basic, but I digress) [...] Actually, no. First we had Chainmail, and then the "Original" D&D,or "OD&D. After that, the family tree (shrub?) branched - on one branch, you had Basic/Expert/Companion/Master/Immortals (which became the D&D Rules Cyclopedia). On the other branch, you had AD&D (which became 2E, and then 3E, and then 3.5E, and then - sadly, IMO - 4E). The two were parallel, and "kissing cousins" right after the initial split, but they were not iterations of the same game. AD&D was being written at the same time that Basic/Expert were being written. They'd've been published simultaneously too, except AD&D took more writing time to be complete, so it got published a little bit later. /pedant Sorry, had to fix this...was bugging me. ;D I owned both at the time and remember trying to keep the boxes in mint condition just in case I ever wanted to sell them. I must say I agree that 4th ed. Shadowrun is decent and seems to get more of the players in on the action. Being an old Cyberpunk player, I loved Shadowrun.
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Post by calsetes on Apr 27, 2011 13:34:00 GMT -5
I personally would have loved to play a pen-and-paper RP game with anyone, ANYONE, that would ease someone like me into it, but I would have seriously slaughtered my entire family to play Shadowrun.
I could see mixing the Matrix and Reality portions in specific circumstances - you have a hacker (deckers, I think?) going through the Matrix unlocking doors for the assault team to get through, while the assault team is fighting their way through the lab, or factory, or whatever, and you have another two guys guarding the decker while he's hacking.
Or at least, I'd do it like that, what with my understanding of how Sega Genesis and SNES Shadowrun was, coupled with the fact "it was like D&D." I'd try to work both in whenever I could - giant robot attacking the group? Someone protects the decker, while he hacks the robot's defensive protocols, and while the group uses the split-second of time their defenses are down to attack the guy. I like stuff like that, but you could probably only use it so many times before it becomes cliche.
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Post by pax on Apr 27, 2011 14:08:38 GMT -5
Sorry, had to fix this...was bugging me. ;D I owned both at the time and remember trying to keep the boxes in mint condition just in case I ever wanted to sell them. It's all good; I never followed the Basic line past Expert, myself; I jumped over to AD&D pretty quick. I'd only ask that you highlight edits like that in color; I spent five minutes trying to figure out WHAT you'd fixed. I never got to actually play CuperPunk. Did try CyberPace, which used a lightened-up version of the SpaceMaster/RoleMaster rules.
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Post by pax on Apr 27, 2011 14:15:36 GMT -5
I could see mixing the Matrix and Reality portions in specific circumstances - you have a hacker (deckers, I think?) [...] Used to be. Now, they're Hackers again. (Or Technomancers, but they requires a fair bit of in-setting backstory to explain.) Conceptually, yes. In practise, pre-4E? No. Time runs differently in the Matrix, compared to the real world - IIRC, by a factor of TEN. So the hacker/decker/whoever would get TEN TURNS, then everyone else one each. Lather, rinse, repeat. 4E is better, though - the time-scales are matched 1:1, and often, the hacker needs to get up wihtin a dozenmeters or more of the door he wants to hack into. Or better, the sneak-and-stealth guy carries a microtransmitter on the end of a fiber-optic line, aneaks up to the door/camera/whatever, and waits until the hacker gives the "all-clear". That way, TWO characters get to materially contribute to ONE action. In 3E? The decker was probably fifty miles away, in a cheap hotel room, the whole time.
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Post by calsetes on Apr 27, 2011 14:24:40 GMT -5
Ah, ok. Like I said, my experience with Shadowrun was limited to "Hey, I'm gonna run up to this vid-phone thing and randomly poke around in the Matrix, maybe steal some data to sell to a random guy! Neat!" Then promptly being told the data's worthless. Good times.
Probably a good thing nobody ever let me play with them. I'd have a tendancy to want to say "screw the rulebooks, here's how we're running things," and only use those things as a starting point.
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Post by visionstorm on Apr 27, 2011 14:26:14 GMT -5
Actually, no. First we had Chainmail, and then the "Original" D&D,or "OD&D. After that, the family tree (shrub?) branched - on one branch, you had Basic/Expert/Companion/Master/Immortals (which became the D&D Rules Cyclopedia). On the other branch, you had AD&D (which became 2E, and then 3E, and then 3.5E, and then - sadly, IMO - 4E). The two were parallel, and "kissing cousins" right after the initial split, but they were not iterations of the same game. AD&D was being written at the same time that Basic/Expert were being written. They'd've been published simultaneously too, except AD&D took more writing time to be complete, so it got published a little bit later. /pedant Sorry, had to fix this...was bugging me. ;D I owned both at the time and remember trying to keep the boxes in mint condition just in case I ever wanted to sell them. I must say I agree that 4th ed. Shadowrun is decent and seems to get more of the players in on the action. Being an old Cyberpunk player, I loved Shadowrun. Another awesome PnP game, and one I had the opportunity to play a bit more often than I did Shadowrun (though, I kinda liked what I read in Shadowrun's rule books better--by the way I only ever read/played Shadowrun 2nd Ed.). I also got plenty of ideas from Cyberpunk, and loved the die + modifier vs. target difficult number mechanic--one of the first (if not THE first) games I ever saw using it, and since that moment on what I came to consider the optimal way to handle task resolution in any PnP RPG, which I eventually came to use almost exclusively in my own homegrown systems. I strongly believe that part of the success of D&D 3rd Ed. (I stand corrected by Pax on the edition issue, by the way ) was due to implementing this task resultion mechanic to their own d20 system (not saying they took the idea from Cyberpunk, but that they use essentially the same mechanic, only with a d20 while Cyberpunk used a d10). I personally would have loved to play a pen-and-paper RP game with anyone, ANYONE, that would ease someone like me into it, but I would have seriously slaughtered my entire family to play Shadowrun. I don't believe such drastic measures would have been necessary, although I get what you mean ;D I could see mixing the Matrix and Reality portions in specific circumstances - you have a hacker (deckers, I think?) going through the Matrix unlocking doors for the assault team to get through, while the assault team is fighting their way through the lab, or factory, or whatever, and you have another two guys guarding the decker while he's hacking. Or at least, I'd do it like that, what with my understanding of how Sega Genesis and SNES Shadowrun was, coupled with the fact "it was like D&D." I'd try to work both in whenever I could - giant robot attacking the group? Someone protects the decker, while he hacks the robot's defensive protocols, and while the group uses the split-second of time their defenses are down to attack the guy. I like stuff like that, but you could probably only use it so many times before it becomes cliche. Oh yeah, and as I understand it (I didn't personally get to play much in this kind of scenario as my practical experiences with Shadowrun where kinda limited), deckers would basically move around the Matrix pretty much the same way a character would in a game map during a regular adventure, only this would take place in a digital world using avatars to move around, which made it more interesting than a bunch of D&D fighters protecting a rogue while the rogue tried to disarm a trap and pick a lock (with a single task resolution roll for each--10 round duration each time, while the player stood around bored as the fighters paricipated in the actual action in the scene).
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Post by eleric on Apr 27, 2011 21:28:33 GMT -5
It's all good; I never followed the Basic line past Expert, myself; I jumped over to AD&D pretty quick. I'd only ask that you highlight edits like that in color; I spent five minutes trying to figure out WHAT you'd fixed. Sorry about that, I hit italic as I was in a hurry posting while queries ran... I never got to actually play CuperPunk. Did try CyberPace, which used a lightened-up version of the SpaceMaster/RoleMaster rules. Closest to RoleMaster I got was MERP. Cyberpunk got me hooked on the whole cyborg hacking the web thing. Loved the ruleset to a point. Creating a character was the best I've seen in a very long time. Especially if you were running the game. Character creation gave you all KINDS of plot hooks to run with. D&D 3.5 is my current and only D&D I'll play. I have 4th as I got the boxed set for a steal (20$ go me! ;D) and after trying it out I realized it was an mmo in pnp format..
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Post by pax on Apr 27, 2011 21:39:53 GMT -5
My issues with 4E are that they OVER-simplified too much. Now, as with 1E, "a thief is a thief is a thief" - there just isn't much distinction between, say, an "Artful Dodger" sort of thief (extreme pickpocket, not a wholelot else), or a catburglar (good stealth, climbing, and lockpicking), or a tomb-delver (good Search, Open Lock, and Disable Device skills). Whereas, for me, the new D&D is Pathfinger, and "3.75E". Some SENSIBLE simplifications (Hide and Move Silently merged into just "stealth", for example), without overdoing it. For character creation, I quickly grew fond of the setup for the third edition of Mechwarrior; the semi-optional "life experience" tables let you construct a very, very believable backstory - a bit of a gamble either way, but always producing a skeleton you could hang a good, convincing backstory on.
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