The Gaming Den

Alright, so I'm looking for a new system to run a game in. D&D (and the d20 system in general) has its charms, but it also has glaring problems and has been played heavily in my local group for the last few years. I'm looking for something new. Something different. Something I can spend all these gosh-darned bookstore gift certificates that I'm bound to misplace within the month (got them Christmas, in case you're wondering) on.

I grab Shadowrun 4th edition (plus Arsenal). I liked the novels and SNES game (I describe it to my friends as "One man... In one bathrobe... against the WORLD!"), and I've heard some nice things about it. There's even an awesome houserule thread here that improves the matrix-based aspects of the game. But there's a problem. I could play a shadowrunner, but I have difficulty with the types of NPCs I'd need to create and play in a shadowrun game. I've got a campaign's worth of premade modules and a few novels for personality building blocks, but the idea of running a game doesn't strongly appeal to me. I don't find the setting inspiring, and I expect that I'd run the factions in a way that wouldn't fit well.

This is a bit disappointing. However, around the same time, I look at a book a friend brought over once or twice before, but I was always too busy to really read. CthulhuTech. A combination of Lovecraftian cosmic horror and giant robot anime as an RPG. I find it intriguing. I borrow the the main and companion books. This setting captures my imagination. It delves into realms I have never really explored in depth before and uses a system entirely new to me. The writing style fits perfectly (My opinion. This is a bit subjective, I think) and I can empathize with the characters I see in the examples and short fiction. I want to GM a game and see how my outward spiral method of world building and "stay two steps ahead" style of storytelling fare in such a world. I want to learn a new system which requires that I discard my preconceptions in order to understand it. It seems that I have found my RPG and setting.

Now that I have skimmed through the books, read a few sections in detail, and mentioned the RPG to a few friends, I check it out online. There's some interesting tidbits of information to be found in reviews and summaries, plus an active forum on the official website. I see some houserules and fan creations. Now I am in the process of slowly assimilating the rules and looking for worrisome mechanical areas.

Have any of you encountered this game before? What are your opinions on it? What about the default setting? Are there any problems with the "poker dice" RNG?

What is the "poker dice" RNG?

In Framewerk, you use d10s and usually want to roll high.

To determine the random element of a check, roll a number of d10s equal to your rank in the skill. Take the highest number you rolled OR if you rolled multiples of the same number, you can add them together and take the result if it's higher OR if you roll a straight (3 or more numbers in a row, like 4, 5, 6) you can add the numbers that make up the straight together and take the result if it is higher. You critically succeed if you beat a DC by 10 or more and you critically fail if you roll half or more ones.

Sounds hard to calculate odds for, hard to teach, and unnecessarily hard to use.

Also it looks like you can critically succeed and fail at the same time.

In all, it sounds terrible.

I think the critical failure overrides the critical success. Good thing there's auto-success rules (take 7 on something simple and/or routine), or I could see some odd auto-fails cropping up.

One issue I've seen mentioned in a houserule list: The critical failure rate jumps up when you take your second rank in a skill.

It looks like most of the crazy "poker" rules make you more likely to succeed, even at the seemingly impossible, with more dice (more dice = more chances to roll multiples of a number and the ability to roll longer straights). That's not necessarily bad in and of itself, but it seems like an odd mechanic for a game of Lovecraftian horror.

Lovecraftian horror spliced with giant robot anime. The Esoteric Order of Dagon is back. This time the Deep Ones have powered armor. A quote from the section on jumping: "As an homage to the anime element of CthulhuTech, Characters can jump farther than they would in the real world."

EDIT: Another note. Characters get Drama Points, which are a lot like d20 action points that refresh on a per-session (per-"episode" using their terminology) basis.

The setting concept sounds stupid, so stupid that its badass.

The RNG does sound pretty horrible. People I play poker with have trouble enough recognising poker hands with actual cards. I think its excessively complex and will be slower than Shadowrun/WW style dice pools for no real benefit.

Might still take a look though, the setting does sound badass.

I have played the system. It is crap. The setting is entertaining if you like shout-outs to old action anime and/or annoying if you like Lovecraftian fiction. The poker dice RNG is indeed unnecessarily aggravating.

My old pet peeve of 'flat cost during chargen and scaled cost afterward' makes an appearance. My new pet peeve of referring to numerical ratings by words only (Novice, Student, etc.) is also in effect.

The game is poorly balanced in some ways, but mostly it's bad at getting the different character types to work together in one campaign.

Just a pretty large FYI, the SNES "version" of Shadowrun is as much Shadowrun as Blizzard's World of Warcraft is Dungeons and Dragons.

It's heavily inspired, but very much nothing like it.

The Sega Genesis game was a lot more like Shadowrun. As in, they actually attempted and succeeded to let the player actually play Shadowrun.

The SNES game was a cyber-punk game with the SR name, and some elements put into it. I couldn't stand playing it after the first few parts, while the genesis game I kept playing for a long time, and only had some trouble near the end that kept me from meeting some dragon in a cave and finishing the game.

Draco_Argentum wrote:The setting concept sounds stupid, so stupid that its badass.

I think it's retro stupid, to be precise.

Judging__Eagle wrote:Just a pretty large FYI, the SNES "version" of Shadowrun is as much Shadowrun as Blizzard's World of Warcraft is Dungeons and Dragons.

It's heavily inspired, but very much nothing like it.

The Sega Genesis game was a lot more like Shadowrun. As in, they actually attempted and succeeded to let the player actually play Shadowrun.

The SNES game was a cyber-punk game with the SR name, and some elements put into it. I couldn't stand playing it after the first few parts, while the genesis game I kept playing for a long time, and only had some trouble near the end that kept me from meeting some dragon in a cave and finishing the game.

I've played both games, and the departures from the setting were part of the charm. Sort of like how I derive hours of entertainment from watching Guardsmen easily defeating Space Marines in Dawn of War. A ways into the game, my character was rapidly sniping enemies out of windows with a shotgun using his wired reflexes after casting Armor on himself.

Also:

EDITED due to "no outside links" policy: http://zanyvgquotes.com/shadowrun/index.html

IGTN wrote:Sounds hard to calculate odds for, hard to teach, and unnecessarily hard to use.

Yeah my thinking exactly. You really don't want your players looking for straights and pairs in the dice to make calculations harder and longer. It just seems like one of those methods of making the mechanics unnaturally complex to try to hide the game's math and prevent people from running probabilities.

Cthulhutech dice roller:
http://www.voidstate.com/rpg/cthulhutech/roller.php

I don't know what Dawn of War you're playing, but Guard don't beat Spess Mahrines 'easily' in the computer game. In fact, Guard are one of the weakest armies in DOW last I checked. Marines are still one of the best, and the "max reinforced tactical squad rush" is still a great tactic against most races.

Guard can beat SM on the table top if you mass on Lascannons and Pie Plates though, but hat's a matter of army selection.

Unless you're talking about playing skirmishes on easy; at which point orks with infinite free slugga boys can macro to death most enemies under a non-stopping tsumani of green and axes. Orks are also a pretty weak army unless you're rushing the enemy very early. Guard are weak early on, and need tons of micro to keep enemies from engaging your front line squads in melee.

Of course, my skirmish play is scant at best, and I don't regularly beat the computer on Harder.

Sorry for the off topic post.

Judging__Eagle wrote:I don't know what Dawn of War you're playing, but Guard don't beat Spess Mahrines 'easily' in the computer game. In fact, Guard are one of the weakest armies in DOW last I checked. Marines are still one of the best, and the "max reinforced tactical squad rush" is still a great tactic against most races.

Guard can beat SM on the table top if you mass on Lascannons and Pie Plates though, but hat's a matter of army selection.

Unless you're talking about playing skirmishes on easy; at which point orks with infinite free slugga boys can macro to death most enemies under a non-stopping tsumani of green and axes. Orks are also a pretty weak army unless you're rushing the enemy very early. Guard are weak early on, and need tons of micro to keep enemies from engaging your front line squads in melee.

Of course, my skirmish play is scant at best, and I don't regularly beat the computer on Harder.

Sorry for the off topic post.

Soulstorm in Campaign mode, "medium" difficulty (playing as IG). Generally, an upgraded group of Guardsmen will beat a group of Space Marines fairly easily. Your command squad is generally better than other heroes when reinforced as well. I wouldn't know about how IG fare in skirmishes or tabletop play.

With regards to tangency, no problem. I have a bit of interest in Warp Cult, and DoW could be handy for resolving large-scale battles. Information on this subject is useful as well.

Update:

I've only run a few sessions so far (d20 is still taking up most of the group's time), and most of that has been Magical Tea Party. Eclipse Phase looks like an interesting alternative, but it isn't out yet.

I have been referred to an interesting alternative RNG in the second book. You use cards instead of dice, and there's very little new that needs to be learned. Players are given hands of cards (they can see the numbers on each, but the rest of the group doesn't) and then pick and choose from them when they want to determine their "rolls" for an action. (you get new cards when you spend ones from your hand, so you should always have the same number of cards.)

I currently plan to run a game where most of the PCs are amnesiac shapeshifting monsters. This may give me a chance to bring out the concept of giving Mythos monsters Insanity when the world turns out to be dramatically more dull and banal than they expected.

I still have very good reasons to hate this system with the fiery fury of a thousand burning suns. But that RNG at least washes out to wound that the regular dice system rips in my brain.

To whoever said that it's hard to work everyone into the same campaign:

I don't think your intended to work everyone into the same campaign. If I ever run the system I intend to just tell the players to either make all mecha or non mecha characters, and even then I might split the non mecha characters into tagers or non tagers.

The game doesn't look like it's meant to support every character type in the same campaign.

What I'm really curious about though is how combat plays out. I can't get a feel for it's lethality and such just by glancing at the system.

Yes, but you can't have mecha in an engel (look at us, we rip evangelion off!) game. Because they are better. You can't play powered armor in a mecha game. Because they die in two hits if they are lucky. Mecha pilots who are tagers are skill better than you. And the psionics have less interaction with the core mechanics then the DnD system. And magic is so slow that you will never have influence on any reasonable story. And you have to read each skill to know what it actually does. The rules are suck and fail and the designers should be shot for the stillborn monstrosity that they have inflicted on the world.

There are things in Cthulhutech that hurt. Here's an example:

You know what? There are so many things in Cthulhutech fluff and mechanics that hurt if you don't turn your brain off first that Akula and I am seriously considering writing an Anatomy of Failed Design article on on it. The only problem is, one of us is terminally lazy when it comes to frivolous stuff and the other isn't very vitriolic. But the last 2 splatbooks might be crossing the line enough to make us do it anyway.

I was thinking that Cthulhutech had a vaguely interesting premise, and that even if the mechanics turned out dubious, I could lift lots of flavor for my own work. But this is seriously filled with enough terrible ideas that I might be better off never having actually read the book in the first place and making up everything from scratch. I heard that the people behind this did work on Shadowrun. That's not especially surprising if I assume that they were behind very specific aspects of it. I'd probably be willing to trade a copy of Damnation View for a Runner's Companion.

Damnation View is offensively bad. Unlike Runner's companion, the rules are alright; there aren't any. But the fluff is so awful that it reading it is like choking on a smoothy of shit and stupid, while you eat a heavily frosted ass-shaped cake.

Cthulhutech is currently published by Catalyst Game Labs, the same people who are currently driving Shadowrun off a cliff (was Mongoose before they dropped the license last year). But the Cthulhutech books are written by Mathew Grau, who used to do work on In Nomine and Shattered Dreams, which is I would guess why things seem a might incoherent.

-Username17

I have a theory. If someone writes RPG material for a living, rather than as a hobby or a side job, I should be automatically more suspicious of it. This means that they probably couldn't get a job doing something that paid better or did more for society.

This is a very tentative theory, but the cynical part of my mind gets more confidence with every Cthulhutech book released.