Science Fiction RPG Preferences and the Genre Umbrella

[K]

I tried to read the EABA-Lite rules, but I got a terminal case of glazed-eyes.

The system is probably fine, but it's not intuitive at all with the notation and various chart-style notations and I couldn't wrap my head around how the game would play.

The Fires of Heaven fluff I saw was pretty basic, but nothing that grabbed me and demanded attention. Definitely not money.

Then I read some old Rifts books and realized that bad rules can be in a fun game as long as reading them is easy.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So you're criticizing something you know nothing about then. You lost me when you admitted that.

Look, at this day and age a game can introduce certain roleplaying tropes and design paradigms that are so a priori bad that there's no need to give it a chance. Sometimes we don't even need to empirically prove that it's bad -- a simple deductive analysis was sufficient to tear down skill challenges and treasure parcels without even getting gaming reports for instance.

A 'one size fits all' system is going to be KNOWN to bad without me even looking at it. It's just not goddamn possible to have a game with sensible math operations, a reasonable amount of writing (two prerequisites any game must have, full stop), and able to adequately cover a wide range of genres.

If you want something more modern than GURPs or HERO, here's something more up your alley: Exalted and d20 Modern. Both systems tried to adapt a game engine that was meant for another system and both failed miserably at balance and emulating the basic feel of the system. There's nothing tragic about a modern VAH-ish urban fantasy completely failing to mesh with a game engine designed for melee combat with exponential power scaling. The tragedy is that they didn't realize that the game was doomed from the started.

[Red Lantern]

Well, some people fell a universal system can't work, others think it can. I'm in the latter camp.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Well, some people fell a universal system can't work, others think it can. I'm in the latter camp.

Universal systems simply can't work without either leaning heavily on emergent fiat or clobbering other genres/playstyles. You will either run against a cognitive limit or a mathematical limit.

For an example of what I'm talking about, let's take an action movie like Game of Death. The climax of the movie is Bruce Lee climbing a pagoda and fighting steadily stronger opponents. Previously, he had fought against motorcycle mooks who while not complete chaff weren't exactly challenging. While all of Bruce Lee's opponents have a noticeably different skill level they're still normal-ass human beings. That's a fair design goal for a game to achieve.

But say that you ALSO wanted your system to model the adventure in Yu Yu Hakusho where you had people fighting the Four Saint Beasts. All of them are in the same ballpark but still have noticeable difference in base difficulty. So fighting Genbu feels easier than fighting Byakko. But they're not normal-ass human beings; they're superpowered monsters who do things like create duplicates of themselves and survive being chucked into lava.

To implement these two types of game experiences you have two options.

[*] The first is that you clobber the difference in ability between the lower-powered members of the spectrum. At most they have a couple of points difference in attack bonus or feats. This keeps the math and ability gain of the game sensible but it causes the individual opponents in the Game of Death final fight to feel samey and unremarkable. Which is what made d20 Modern suck anus. And that's the best case scenario; you can do a total 4E D&D and make fighting Genbu feel like fighting Kareem.

[*] The second is that you explode the mathematically granularity of the system of the system and carefully map values to their expected range of play. This will allow you to have a game experience where a 2nd level character can definitely feel large and distinct differences from fighting Kareem and the judo guy and from fighting Genbu and Byakko. But you've necessarily made the math completely unworkable for humans to use. Even if you meticulously jiggle the numbers to make sure that they're balanced (which no game has ever gotten right) you end up with bullshit like quadruple-digit subtraction and calculating Gaussians to determine whether this new expansion option will break the game.

Even if you do everything else in the game right, you HAVE to do one of those two things if your system is really supposed to be universal. Thus your game is absolutely forced to suck from the outset.

[Lago PARANOIA]

And that's not the only problem. Even for games that are able to mathematically handle the difference in genres, you're still stuck with the Star Wars vs. Star Trek problem.

Here's what I'm talking about: to a layman Star Wars and Star Trek ship combat should seem like a natural fit. They're roughly at the same technology level, are in the same ballpark for power level even when you through the Force powers in, and so-on. But in reality they're probably the most incompatible systems imaginable.

Star Wars space combat is resolved by your physical reflexes, the quality of your ship, and how good your weapons are. Star Trek space combat is solved by scientific consensus and crazy Scooby-Doo plans like using replicators to create mines and trapping enemy ships in illusions.

It should already be obvious that Han Solo and Spock simply cannot even fight each other without the battle being a total clusterfuck. Hell, that can't even operate on the same team without one person stepping on the toes of the other. And even if it were possible the things that Han Solo's player wants out of space battles (action) is not going to be the same thing that Spocks wants out of space battles (puzzle-solving). So you end up necessarily boring or disengaging one or more players.

And this isn't even getting into the problem of word bloat. The amount of material that's been written for Star Trek and Star Wars is immense. Just writing an RPG for one of these games is a Herculean undertaking that is going to require a lot of cutting. Imagine the amount of trees you're going to have to kill just to get enough rules to individually satisfy Spock, Han Solo, and Ciaphas Cain.

[fbmf]

FWIW, its been established the 1701-D could take an ISD hands down. Laser blasts can't get through the Enterprise's shields.

They are not the same tech level.

Game On,
fbmf

[Lago PARANOIA]

You know what I mean.

[John Magnum]

The two settings have a pretty similar level of technological development. Massive fleets of spaceships, permanent offworld human habitation, a mixture of nebulous "energy weapons" and missiles, etc.

The fact that Star Trek distinguishes between two kinds of energy weapons, one of which can penetrate Star Trek energy shields and one of which can't, happens to call the weaker of the two "lasers", and Star Wars happens to call its common form of energy weaponry "lasers" doesn't mean that Star Wars is at a lower "tech level" than Star Trek.

There's not some level of technological and structural engineering level achieved in Star Wars and achieved and surpassed in Star Trek. There's a coincidence of made-up technobabble nomenclature.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Can we save Star Trek vs. Star Wars for a different friggin' thread?

Here, let me bump up an older one. It even has fucking WH40K thrown into the mix, too. Really get your inner nerd on.

I'm not trying to do the classic debate here; my point is that the games have two incompatible playspaces despite being on the RNG with each other. The point is that it's totally possible for game paradigms to be mathematically and game balanced yet step on each others' dicks so much that the whole is weaker than the sum of its parts.

[Koumei]

Here, let me bump up an older one. It even has fucking WH40K thrown into the mix, too. Really get your inner nerd on.

Yeah, but does it have Vandread and Nadesico? How about Doctor Who?

[Username17]

Well, some people fell a universal system can't work, others think it can. I'm in the latter camp.

It can't work. Let's consider several protagonists:

• Robin Hood
• Wonder Woman
• Aladdin
• Daffy Duck
• RoboCop

Now let's consider a villainous obstacle like RoboCop's own ED 209. It has two miniguns on gyroscopic mounts and is absolute going to hit our protagnoist with a couple hundred bullets as soon as the elevator doors open. What happens to each protagonist within the conceits of each expected story's idiom? What outputs could a single game system possibly give that would satisfy all five of those expectations?

-Username17

[Red Lantern]

Well, some people fell a universal system can't work, others think it can. I'm in the latter camp.

It can't work. Let's consider several protagonists:

• Robin Hood
• Wonder Woman
• Aladdin
• Daffy Duck
• RoboCop

Now let's consider a villainous obstacle like RoboCop's own ED 209. It has two miniguns on gyroscopic mounts and is absolute going to hit our protagnoist with a couple hundred bullets as soon as the elevator doors open. What happens to each protagonist within the conceits of each expected story's idiom? What outputs could a single game system possibly give that would satisfy all five of those expectations?

-Username17

You're making a couple mistakes there, troll man, and let me try to explain them:

You are saying one system can't handle all genres. Well, you're using examples of mixing genres to prove your point, but that's not proving that a RPG system cannot handle multiple genres, it's proving you can't mix certain genres and have things work.

Star trek vs. star wars does not work. The physics are too different, the technologies are too different, etc. It's not the fault of any RPG system that the two genre's can't be merged into a single storyline, it's the fault of the two genres.

EABA, gurps, hero, etc can all handle star trek OR star wars. NOTHING can handle star trek and star wars at the same time.

But a good universal system can handle either genre.

What I think you're using to denounce universal systems is "I can't see how one system can have tings from two completely incompatible universes in the same game right." That's because you can't match up two completely different universes in anything without it creating a total mess. It does not mean that a universal RPG system can't handle all genres.

In tolkien a bid red dragon s a horrible monster than only a great epic hero can slay. In traveller a great big red dragon is a nuisance that a low level grunt can take out with a missile launcher or a fusion gun, it's not the fault of any system trying to put elements of tolkien and traveller together that it doesn't work, it's the fault of whoever thought such a mishmash could work that's to blame. There are plenty of systems that can and do handle both traveller type settings and tolkien type settings fine.

If someone tried to write a comic, novel or movie combining radically different genres it would not work very well, it doesn't mean comics, books and movies can;t represent any and all genres, it means some genres can;t be mixed. Same with game systems and universal game systems work fine as long as you don;t try to do the impossible with them.

[Red Lantern]

Well, some people fell a universal system can't work, others think it can. I'm in the latter camp.

Universal systems simply can't work without either leaning heavily on emergent fiat or clobbering other genres/playstyles. You will either run against a cognitive limit or a mathematical limit.

For an example of what I'm talking about, let's take an action movie like Game of Death. The climax of the movie is Bruce Lee climbing a pagoda and fighting steadily stronger opponents. Previously, he had fought against motorcycle mooks who while not complete chaff weren't exactly challenging. While all of Bruce Lee's opponents have a noticeably different skill level they're still normal-ass human beings. That's a fair design goal for a game to achieve.

But say that you ALSO wanted your system to model the adventure in Yu Yu Hakusho where you had people fighting the Four Saint Beasts. All of them are in the same ballpark but still have noticeable difference in base difficulty. So fighting Genbu feels easier than fighting Byakko. But they're not normal-ass human beings; they're superpowered monsters who do things like create duplicates of themselves and survive being chucked into lava.

To implement these two types of game experiences you have two options.

[*] The first is that you clobber the difference in ability between the lower-powered members of the spectrum. At most they have a couple of points difference in attack bonus or feats. This keeps the math and ability gain of the game sensible but it causes the individual opponents in the Game of Death final fight to feel samey and unremarkable. Which is what made d20 Modern suck anus. And that's the best case scenario; you can do a total 4E D&D and make fighting Genbu feel like fighting Kareem.

[*] The second is that you explode the mathematically granularity of the system of the system and carefully map values to their expected range of play. This will allow you to have a game experience where a 2nd level character can definitely feel large and distinct differences from fighting Kareem and the judo guy and from fighting Genbu and Byakko. But you've necessarily made the math completely unworkable for humans to use. Even if you meticulously jiggle the numbers to make sure that they're balanced (which no game has ever gotten right) you end up with bullshit like quadruple-digit subtraction and calculating Gaussians to determine whether this new expansion option will break the game.

Even if you do everything else in the game right, you HAVE to do one of those two things if your system is really supposed to be universal. Thus your game is absolutely forced to suck from the outset.

No, you don't have to do either of those things. Just run a genre as it's presented instead of trying to mix up genres that don;t and can't work together.

I don;t know what you're talking about above, the setting and characters are not familiar to me, but it's like trying to cross star trek and star wars, it doesn't work in ANY genre and the fact a RPG system can't make an unworkable situation work doesnt make the system bad. A system like EABA or gurps can run star trek, star wars, LotR, etc, fine. it's can't make a mishmash that can't work in any medium work.

[Red Lantern]

Well, some people fell a universal system can't work, others think it can. I'm in the latter camp.

It can't work. Let's consider several protagonists:

• Robin Hood
• Wonder Woman
• Aladdin
• Daffy Duck
• RoboCop

Now let's consider a villainous obstacle like RoboCop's own ED 209. It has two miniguns on gyroscopic mounts and is absolute going to hit our protagnoist with a couple hundred bullets as soon as the elevator doors open. What happens to each protagonist within the conceits of each expected story's idiom? What outputs could a single game system possibly give that would satisfy all five of those expectations?

-Username17

Wonder woman does not and cannot exist in the robocop universe, hence she can't fight the ed 209. You're trying to mix things that can't be mixed and then saying because a universal RPG system can't make it work the system is bad. Wrong.

If you forced wonder woman into the robocop universe she'd eat ed 209's for breakfast as she comes from a universe where super powers exist and the ed 209 doesn't.

The point of a universal system like EABA or gurps is that it can simulate any genre. It cannot make an unworkable genre mixup work, and nothing can.

I suppose you could have a case of robin hood vs. an ed 209. Ok, if the 209 has to go into the forest after robin hood it has a problem as hood knows the forest and might be able to exploit the 209's limited intelligence and maneuverability. If the 209 hits hood with it's weapons, hood's dead. if hood can get the 209 to blunder into a trap or fall down on uneven ground it's screwed. Hell, the 209 got stuck in a manhole in a city where it was supposedly programmed to operate.

[Username17]

Wonder woman does not and cannot exist in the robocop universe, hence she can't fight the ed 209. You're trying to mix things that can't be mixed and then saying because a universal RPG system can't make it work the system is bad. Wrong.

If you forced wonder woman into the robocop universe she'd eat ed 209's for breakfast as she comes from a universe where super powers exist and the ed 209 doesn't.

That is 100% horseshit. Wonder Woman is not going to fight ED 209 because the RoboCop/Superhero comic franchise was Marvel and Wonder Woman is a DC character.


But in an RPG, minor limits like the Marvel/DC divide don't count for shit because table games do not respect intellectual property or corporate brand identity. But in any case, whether ED 209 specifically can potentially meet any of those characters or not isn't even important. He can, by the way, but the key is that in any case high velocity machine guns are a thing that all five protagonists may have to deal with under various circumstances.

Now the correct answers for what happens when each character gets hosed down by high velocity machine gun fire are:

• Robin Hood - He dies. Also, the player has to make a new character.
• Wonder Woman - She is hurt and pushed backwards, but after bracing herself she can push forward against the bullet stream.
• Aladdin - He dies. However, he lives in a world where his allies can grant wishes and travel through time, so being killed is just a loss of resources and a puzzle to be solved.
• Daffy Duck - he just stands there and is apparently unharmed. The next time he drinks some water he leaks like a sieve.
• RoboCop - he is severely injured and parts fall off of him, but he keeps fighting.

These are not the same results. But they are the same action that is being resolved. More importantly, these are not results that differ based on one character having a larger numeric value in their defense attribute than another. They are outputs of what is obviously and necessarily a different action resolution system.

The Daffy Duck response to machine gun fire is not something that would have happened to Robin Hood if he had rolled better or the machine gunner had rolled worse. It is simply a blatantly different way of conceptualizing "damage" and translating the concept into game mechanics. It is not possible to make a single task resolution system that outputs Daffy Duck and Robin Hood getting shot full of bullets and reacting in a way that is genre appropriate for each character. There are no theoretical numbers you could input into your system that would do that, and there's no reason to because the genres are completely separate and you can just play different games for each.

-Username17

[tussock]

Hmm. So in GURPS 4, our big bad shoots the PCs.
[*]PC #1 is a 200 point medieval forester-warrior wearing leather armour. Fucking basket-weaver. He dies and everyone tells him to please have some bullet resistance next time.
[*]PC #2 has an active personal projectile immunity, burning fatigue with a knockback cost saver, so lives but has to do something fairly quickly or run out of juice.
[*]PC #3 has some big points in allies and extra lives which he handwaves into respawning his dead character after the fight. All his XP goes into replacing the extra lives and so the character never develops.
[*]PC #4 is unkillable, it's only 250 points. Actual useful skills are lacking, and he's full of crappy disadvantages to boot. Cosmetically a cartoon duck.
[*]PC #5 has a fuck-ton of partly-ablative DR paid for with the big mental disadvantages he's buying off through the game.

Now, none of those things are much like any of the stated characters, none of them will feel right, but you can do similar things to what those characters do using a typical 1000-page universal system. It helps if everyone knows what the damage limits and social structures are you're going to face, Robin Hood just doesn't survive modern police methods, let alone grimdark future ones.


tl;dr, I'm agreeing with Frank in spirit, while also agreeing with a modified version of what he's disagreeing with. You can do anything with GURPS, it will just always "feel" like you're playing in a gritty-action-movie-level milieu, even if you're an unkillable cartoon.

[sabs]

Even if it wasn't universal. That system is terrible. An amateur and an elite pc are on the same range. 3 to 18 +1(2)
The only difference is that the elite character probably will roll the top of that range most of the time. It has variable difficulty, including difficulties that are above the range any character can reach without dm fiat modifiers and the whole non combat system is I rolled an 18 what can I con the gm into letting me do.

The cost of more dice is exponentially higher, but the net effect is very minimal.

5d6+1 is not very different than 7d6+1 but those 2 extra dice cost a fortune.

[Lago PARANOIA]

No, you don't have to do either of those things. Just run a genre as it's presented instead of trying to mix up genres that don;t and can't work together.

Look, I'm making these two claims about universal systems. To meet the design goal of a system that, say, can run WH40K/ST/SW/Outlaw Star depending on the whims of the group, these two things are necessarily true. No matter how hard you try your game ends up doing this. These are consequences as fundamental to the conceptualization of universal game systems as 'gravitational force is always attractive' or 'monetarism needs a central bank in order to function at all'.

• You end up clobbering genre differences and/or exploding the math. As talked about before.
• Someone is going to want to play Han Solo and someone is going to want to play Spock. They can't play together. What is going to happen is that someone shows up to the table with a Mal-clone suited for playing in Firefly and someone else shows up with a Creed-clone suitable for playing in WH40K. So then you either have to tell the player who wants to run Mal to make a new character or Creed to make a new character.
  
  The only way out of caveat #2 is to announce ahead of time that you're running a SF-game suitable for, say, Mass Effect and that you have veto power over character concepts that don't interact with the playspace. If you're going to do that for every game... why not just have a different game?

Universal game systems have other axiomatic problems associated with them. But those two are sufficient for me to say that the system will not work and cannot be made to work.

[Fuchs]

The only way out of caveat #2 is to announce ahead of time that you're running a SF-game suitable for, say, Mass Effect and that you have veto power over character concepts that don't interact with the playspace. If you're going to do that for every game... why not just have a different game?

Whenever I start a Shadowrun game, I have to set the expected powerlevel and theme as well, or I have to veto one character when one player brings a BTL-addict street rat with a baseball bat and a knive ready to struggle with disaeased rats for scraps from Soyburger World and the other brings a cybered up former spec force soldier ready to break into Ares' main office.

[Lago PARANOIA]

It's one thing to declare that for this game droids and Jedi aren't allowed archetypes in your Star Wars game. It's another thing to have to declare that superscience doctors, psykers, magical samurai, and mech pilots aren't allowed for your Trek Wars 40K game. The former is a mark of a GM trying to do something a little different with an otherwise functional system, the latter is the mark of a system that cannot meet its design goals right out of the gate.

[Red Lantern]

Here's a quote from Greg Porter, designer of EABA:

As the designer of EABA, I think that regardless of how maligned they might be, generic systems will continue to exist and prosper for reasons of simple economics. A game company is going to have problems coming up with a brand-new genre-centric rpg system for every new release. Having a core system lets them concentrate on new gameworlds, not the painfully tedious process of coming up with a new way to model the physics, techno-babble or social constructs of a particular setting.

That said, I think that a system designed around a particular genre is going to give the best results for that genre, especially for narrow genres. If I was going to play Arthurian Britain, something like Pendragon would be at the top of my list. I can't imagine playing a Paranoia-type setting without using Paranoia as the system. Despite my own lofty opinion of my talent, I think it unlikely that EABA would do a better job in these genres than those systems do.

No one game, whether generic or specific, is going to be all things to all people (even if EABA is an acronym for "end all be all" . Otherwise there would only be one game and we would all be playing it.

Greg Porter
BTRC games

[Red Lantern]

Even if it wasn't universal. That system is terrible. An amateur and an elite pc are on the same range. 3 to 18 +1(2)
The only difference is that the elite character probably will roll the top of that range most of the time. It has variable difficulty, including difficulties that are above the range any character can reach without dm fiat modifiers and the whole non combat system is I rolled an 18 what can I con the gm into letting me do.

The cost of more dice is exponentially higher, but the net effect is very minimal.

5d6+1 is not very different than 7d6+1 but those 2 extra dice cost a fortune.

Wrong. An epic character can have the "larger than life" trait, which lets him keep MORE than his best 3 dice, so even one level or LtL would make a person have a result range of 4-24(+1 or 2).

[Artless]

Why would I ever play using a universal system that flat out admits to not being able to handle a genre better than other games designed specifically for that genre? You yourself have intoned that universal systems are unable to handle grab-bag games with characters from every corner of media, so what possible use is there in making a system that tries to cover bases that have already been covered better by other systems? You are admitting failure when you imply that a universal system is supposed to be used to model a specific genre when you use it because they are, definitionally, not.

Universal systems are the result of profoundly misguided notions of the capability of the core mechanic to flex itself. That a resolution mechanic is able to put out results at all is not an indicator that you can go ahead and make it into a game. What matters is if that mechanic accurately reflects what you want it to do. And by and large, universal systems have proven themselves to be unable prove their mechanics do that in even the most basic of tests.

[K]

I must say that my brief review of space games revealed to me that most are super boring to read (Traveller, I'm looking at you), but Rifts is still fun to read because it's crazy-go-nuts.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Are there any decent RPGs for emulating a space shmup? A universe where highly skilled fighter pilots go up against fleets of drone ships and gigantic unwieldy doomsday weapons with glowing weak points? Somebody mentioned Star Fox earlier, but there's a bunch of 2D games that do similar stuff.

I suppose ease of death would be the big obstacle. You'd need character backups or really generous luck mechanics for things to play out in a nontedious fashion.