SF RPGs?

General questions, debates, and rants about RPGs

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Post by Grek »

hogarth wrote:I have some fondness for the Ringworld RPG because of the setting. And in terms of computer RPGs I liked KotOR and Mass Effect well enough.
There's a Ringword RPG? Is it any good?
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Post by name_here »

Going by the SomethingAwful FATAL and Friends review, every discussion of any CthulhuTech book gets hung up on the rape. Probably because there's a lot of it.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

There is more than that. The "more" is also bad. Starting to write new thread, will probably post it some time after I eat dinner.
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Post by fectin »

I forgot my favorite sci-fi game of all: Danger Patrol!

It's a step up from beer and pretzels, but not a big step, and it's made for zero prep work.
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Post by John Magnum »

Ctech is a pretty huge pile of awful. Since I am generally amused by the W40k 'verse, to me Ctech is substantially less playable than FFG's W40k RPGs. Really.
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Post by Red Lantern »

Aryxbez wrote:
Red Lantern wrote:I heard on another forum people discussed some SFRPGs here.
If I may ask, what forum was this that directed you here, never entirely sure how well known the Gaming Den actually is.
Heard reffs to "denners" on therpgsite. I heard they talked SF games here.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Avoraciopoctules wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:Still waiting on that anatomy of failed design post though. Most discussions of the game elsewhere get to Damnation View and then get hung up on all the rape.
You know what? Fine. Akula may have forgotten the nightmare, but I still have the Cthulhutech book collecting dust in the loft. When I get home from work, I'll dig it out.
And here. You. GO: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53782
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Red Lantern wrote:
Aryxbez wrote:
Red Lantern wrote:I heard on another forum people discussed some SFRPGs here.
If I may ask, what forum was this that directed you here, never entirely sure how well known the Gaming Den actually is.
Heard reffs to "denners" on therpgsite. I heard they talked SF games here.
Have some links, yo:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52446
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53698
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53747
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53692
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=49130
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53576
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Post by Username17 »

If you want spaceships and ship engineers, the gaming world is pretty thin. There's a fair crop of stuff for Cyberpunk and there's quite a bit of things for Post-apocalypse (especially if you are OK with the conceits of the early 80s). But there aren't a lot of space ship centric games.

You got a couple versions of Star Trek. You have the old FASA version (if you can find it), and the Decipher Star Trek. These are both great sources of Star Trek source material (original series for the FASA one, and TNG/DS9 for the Decipher version). They both suffer, however, from being terrible as games. Playing a game in the Star Trek universe is something I personally want to do, and to do that I would grab a bunch of the Decipher books and write up a conversion to an entirely new game system. The idea of even attempting Star Trek without a robust diplomacy minigame is just so fucking weird to me.

You have Traveler. This is the go-to Science Fiction RPG because it was the first and it has so many editions that you can always find one. The actual rules problems with Traveler are highly dependent on which version you get - but classic Traveler is really blatantly based on 1970s design. You have the classic six stats (modified to have new names), even though I still can't name a character in faction who is "strong" and not "enduring" or vice versa. A major theme to the game is that you have a Social Standing attribute, but you live in a setting that has no communications at all. And you're supposed to go to new worlds all the time. How your Social Standing is supposed to stay with you and not wash off with every hyperjump is beyond understanding.

You have the various FATE hacks. Diaspora is the one people usually fap to, but there's also Starblazer Adventures that takes a less "serious" tone. These are very close to simply not having rules at all and playing storytime theater in space.

And then of course, there's a lot of Space Fantasy that looks like there are space ships when you look at the cover, but then you realize it's just a skin - and a pretty thin skin at that. And you're actually still just running around with a sword chopping up orcs - but there are nominally spaceships in the background. Dark Heresy, Star Wars, Buck Rogers, and so on and so on.

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Post by Koumei »

Rifts added some stuff for actual space ship ownership and battle. It's as retarded as everything else in Rifts is (so some PCs will need to randomly earn the hundreds of millions of credits to buy a ship, others just "Start with their own spaceship they "will never sell" - the same way that "Juicers and crazies never get bionics, fuck you!"). Yes, there are spaceship cannons that deal 1d6x1000 MD and other such stupidity.

There is nothing interesting added by the space combat thing. It's the same as any other kind of combat, except you're assumed to be moving somewhere as well.

IIRC Rogue Trader has an actual space combat system, but what you have to remember is that the space ships have cathedrals on top and can be big enough to have actual small towns inside them, and that you can't enter superduperfastymodespace, some ships can just enter the Warp, at which point the MC randomly decides how you all die or where (and when) you emerge. There is nothing interesting about it, and space battles would feel more like naval battles.

I can definitely see fans of sci-fi wanting space ships, and to have these space ships shooting at each other while travelling really fast. In the vast majority of cases, they're going to be let down.
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Post by Korwin »

Anyone who got an look at the Honor Harrington RPG?
I think its in the Teststadium. Apparently its based on WEG's d6-System?
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Post by erik »

Battle Stations is another SF game that can be used to do roleplaying with space battles. I started to write up a description but I recalled I have done so a few times already so I'll pull out the googling of this site with me mentioning Battle Stations since 2006.

[edit:]
(I will add I was wrong to say that 'Battle Stations isn't a roleplaying game, but it can be adapted into one' in an earlier thread. It is an RPG, just with a pretty limited set of conflict resolution engines (i.e. only 4 skills).
Last edited by erik on Tue Nov 06, 2012 11:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Korwin wrote:Anyone who got an look at the Honor Harrington RPG?
I think its in the Teststadium. Apparently its based on WEG's d6-System?
The Honor Harrington RPG has been in the process of being written for something like four years and still doesn't even have a slot on the AdAstra products page. They are still flacking their Honorverse table top space combat tactical simulator (itself a hack of their Attack Vector: Tactical game).

As of December 2008, it was supposed to be a WEG d6 engine port. But I am pretty sure that everyone who holds their breath for it to come out is going to turn blue and die.

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Post by hogarth »

Grek wrote:
hogarth wrote:I have some fondness for the Ringworld RPG because of the setting. And in terms of computer RPGs I liked KotOR and Mass Effect well enough.
There's a Ringword RPG? Is it any good?
It used the Chaosium BRP system. So the system was pretty crappy, although it avoided some of the excessive lethality of Call of Cthulhu (say) by giving the PCs access to impact armor and lasers and hypersonic flycycles whereas the natives have access to animal hides and knives and firearms.

The setting material was very good, though; it was obviously put together with a lot of care and attention to detail.
Last edited by hogarth on Tue Nov 06, 2012 12:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Wesley Street »

Aryxbez wrote:As for CthulhuTech, I was going to play in a game of that years back, never got off the ground, how does that game fair? I recall it being rather badly designed, and maybe something about getting a mecha being impossible, magic taking forever or some such. Also, could you explain the shadowrun bit?
My experience with CthulhuTech is based on running a six-month campaign, not sitting down the rule books and dissecting the minutia.

The Good

The 'poker' system was very easy to teach to new gamers, of which I had two, and the other two players had no issue with it. With maybe a couple of exceptions, integrity scale combat (mecha) was identical to vitality scale (fleshy people). I was a little surprised that mech combat warranted its own chapter as the only (aggravating) difference was in how the system handled dog fighting. It suggested using a trigonometry formula to which I said, "fuck that," and used +/- elevation + distance and it worked fine.

There are a variety of mechs divided among human, Nazzadi, Migou, and Esoteric Order of Dagon designs. With the exception of the Brushfire Nazzadi mech which was way out of kilter, I didn't run into balance issues.

Magic is ritual based and only requires ranks in the occult in order to use. Unfortunately it's not effective in an on-the-fly sort of way and mishaps lead to very bad things. There's no suggested 'magician' build in the rule book and I believe this was intentional.

The setting does a good job of incorporating two completely disparate cultural phenomena, Cthulhian horror and Japanese anime, and fuses them successfully together. The improbable giant robots that weeaboos wank over are driven by D-cell engines powered by madness inducing 'non-Euclidean geometries' which give the pilots the ability to 'sense' their vehicles like they were an extension of their bodies.

The setting splat books are thematic and provide enough interesting material to keep the game engaging without overloading players and GMs in unnecessary fluff.

The Ugly

The core book alone offers three styles of play: mech driver, foot soldier/government agent, or Tager. Splat books include Migou PC, Dhoanoid PC, and cultist PC campaign options. None of these play styles work together and it gives the rule set a serious lack of focus. Don't look for anything innovative in the rules because it doesn't exist.

The system makes no attempt to hide its source material - the Migou invaders created attractive humanoid foot soldiers called the Nazzadi who turned on their masters and joined the humans (Zentradi/Robotech), the Earth Government has developed a series of quasi-sapient biomechanical robots called Engels which are of extradimensional origin (Neon Genesis Evangelion), a secret society of humans have bonded with cosmic entities to form hybrid shapeshifters known as Tagers who, in turn, fight a shadow war against an evil corporation run by shapeshifters known as Dhoanoids (Bio Booster Armor Guyver/Zoanoids), albino children and teenagers have developed telekinetic abilities (Akira), etc. You can take this as either tongue-in-cheek homage or blatant rip-off and either view is acceptable.

There's a lot of rape imagery in this game. A lot. Deep Ones rape human women to create Hybrids. Cultists rape sex slaves to build up mystical energies. Or simply just because. One adventure plot in the minor cults source book revolves around a PC being captured and tortured among rape and torture victims.

As would be expected fear and insanity tests are a constant thing but failure in the midst of a firefight leaves the PC useless for almost the entire encounter.

The big plot books are useless. Half of the book is trite material like what's fashionable in 208x, the other half are adventure frameworks that consist of one railroad after the other. GMs are better served writing their own material to fit their own campaigns that trying to adapt this stuff.

The writing is very amateurish in places. The tone is extremely casual for a technical rule book, run on sentences are everywhere, and there are a lot of rookie writing mistakes such as mixing "baited breath" for "bated breath."

There's a bestiary but it's limited to critters specifically mentioned in the Cthulhian mythos. As a result there's little variety and no guidance on how to create your own monsters.

Overall

This isn't a great game. It needs a lot of sanding and polishing and a better editor. But it's a good one despite the flaws I mentioned above, especially if you want a 'lite' system. The combat system flows quickly, you aren't bogged down in Battletech-style minutiae, and my group found it a lot of fun.
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Post by Hicks »

I'm a real big fan of mongoose Traveler. Space opera is my first and greatest love, and as of yet nobody has done it as good as Traveler. Yes, there are problems: the universe is unfair and bigger than you, so there is nothing but DM pity and the random encounter tables (which are quite good) to stop you from encountering a multi-kiloton navy destroyer/cruiser; character creation is just a bit more complex than necessary for how deadly the game is; there are no rules for damaging objects softer than spaceship hulls, the official stance is an admonishment to "wing it"; and Meson anything is retardedly broke and the navy has multi-kiloton destroyers/cruisers packed to the thrust-plates with them.

I still like and recommend the game.
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Post by Wesley Street »

When we're talking about Traveler are we referring to the core rule set or the OT Universe? I haven't played Babylon 5, Hammer's Slammers, or Judge Dread, or even the OTU, but 2300AD scales the OTT space opera shenanigans way, way back. Friendly lion aliens aren't a thing and space combat in 2300AD is submarine warfare-style.
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Post by Red Lantern »

FrankTrollman wrote:If you want spaceships and ship engineers, the gaming world is pretty thin. There's a fair crop of stuff for Cyberpunk and there's quite a bit of things for Post-apocalypse (especially if you are OK with the conceits of the early 80s). But there aren't a lot of space ship centric games.



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If you're willing to learn the EABA system "Fires of Heaven" has the best SFRPG level ship construction, operation and combat system ever. It's a RPG centered system that still goes into a lot of detail about ships, their construction, operation, combat, etc.
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Post by K »

FrankTrollman wrote:
You got a couple versions of Star Trek. You have the old FASA version (if you can find it), and the Decipher Star Trek. These are both great sources of Star Trek source material (original series for the FASA one, and TNG/DS9 for the Decipher version). They both suffer, however, from being terrible as games.
I played a Star Treck game as one of my first RPGs and all I remember was that I tried to make a young and hip Noonien Soong (the creator of Commander Data) and almost immediately found out that putting all your skills in cybernetics meant that you sucked at operating starships.

The starship combat was also terrible and seemed to involve a lot more math than a bunch of high school honors students were willing to do.
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Post by CCarter »

hogarth wrote: It used the Chaosium BRP system. So the system was pretty crappy, although it avoided some of the excessive lethality of Call of Cthulhu (say) by giving the PCs access to impact armor and lasers and hypersonic flycycles whereas the natives have access to animal hides and knives and firearms.

The setting material was very good, though; it was obviously put together with a lot of care and attention to detail.
I played a couple of sessions of this years ago; the major system quirk I remember is that you roll starting age randomly and then get skill points based on age, which is about as balanced as taking D&D PCs and using d10 to generate their starting level.
I had a 17yo with maybe 80% or so total to add to skills, while there were other people who were century or so old and were dumping that many percentiles into Sewing because they had no idea what to do with all their points...That was using the reduced starting age optional rule, too.
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Post by kzt »

Korwin wrote:Anyone who got an look at the Honor Harrington RPG?
I think its in the Teststadium. Apparently its based on WEG's d6-System?
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Post by ModelCitizen »

Aside from the Mythos stuff, CthulhuTech sounds like Trinity with more rape.

Actually I don't think anyone's talked about Trinity yet. Has anyone here even played it besides me? I only have vague memories of it from high school. The two things I remember are (1) pick Electrokinesis or Telepathy, and (2) learn the metaplot in advance so you can shoot any NPC who starts talking about it.
Last edited by ModelCitizen on Wed Nov 07, 2012 1:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by hogarth »

CCarter wrote:
hogarth wrote: It used the Chaosium BRP system. So the system was pretty crappy, although it avoided some of the excessive lethality of Call of Cthulhu (say) by giving the PCs access to impact armor and lasers and hypersonic flycycles whereas the natives have access to animal hides and knives and firearms.

The setting material was very good, though; it was obviously put together with a lot of care and attention to detail.
I played a couple of sessions of this years ago; the major system quirk I remember is that you roll starting age randomly and then get skill points based on age, which is about as balanced as taking D&D PCs and using d10 to generate their starting level.
I had a 17yo with maybe 80% or so total to add to skills, while there were other people who were century or so old and were dumping that many percentiles into Sewing because they had no idea what to do with all their points...That was using the reduced starting age optional rule, too.
Oh yeah, the skill system was hilariously unbalanced because your number of "job" skill points was linearly dependent on your age above maturity which could be between 0 and 450ish (for a really old human)!

But like I said, it doesn't really matter if you're working under the assumption that you're so much more incredibly advanced than the locals anyways. E.g. my laser skill doesn't have to be very good if I can shoot you from several kilometers away and my knowledge skills don't have to be very good if I can just ask the ship's computer to look something up.
Last edited by hogarth on Wed Nov 07, 2012 3:17 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Hicks »

Casting Animate Thread.

Rogue Trader, Dark Heresy's more powerful brother, was pretty cool; and in the same vein Dungeons the Dragoning 40,000 7th Edition has space ships too, and has so much retarded awesome poured into it that it goes from bad to good to worse and back to OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAAAAAAAAND over 9,001 times; so bad it's good, like Rifts but more coherent and free and lacking homoeroticly named, author fetished power-armor.

Damn, do I want to play that game.
Last edited by Hicks on Sun Jan 06, 2013 7:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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