How about these systems?

[Captain_Bleach]

So I am kind of burned out on the d20 system, so I want to hear your opinions on these RPG systems.

d6 system; West End Games; the same company that made the non-d20 version of the Star Wars RPG. They have expanded into other settings as well, such as d6 Fantasy, d6 Space, and d6 Adventure. Is the system chock full of rules, streamlined, or something in between? Is the combat grim and gritty, over the top dynamic action, or something in between?

Lord of the Rings RPG/Star Trek RPG; Decipher; I do not know the name of the system, but I am a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien's and Gene Roddenberry's creations. So how are the RPGs and game system?

Shadowrun RPG; Catalyst Game Labs;

Call of Cthulhu RPG; Chaosium;

[RandomCasualty]

1184726324[/unixtime]]
d6 system; West End Games; the same company that made the non-d20 version of the Star Wars RPG. They have expanded into other settings as well, such as d6 Fantasy, d6 Space, and d6 Adventure. Is the system chock full of rules, streamlined, or something in between? Is the combat grim and gritty, over the top dynamic action, or something in between?

It's a pretty cool system, and one with probably the best extra actions mechanic I've seen in a system. Basically it works on an attack roll versus defense roll paradigm, which is kinda nice because it means you can take on a bunch of mooks. YOu do however have a chance of botching which means that even the most powerful character is somewhat vulnerable.

the main problem with this system is the damage soaking, as a character with armor and a high strength score is virtually untouchable.

Also, most of the D6 offshoots (like d6 fantasy) are do it yourself, meaning that there's no real magic system per se.

Still, I think the D6 system has potential.

Shadowrun RPG; Catalyst Game Labs;

A real solid game system. It has some flaws, which I'm sure Frank is much more suited to explain, but overall, it works out well. The largest downside is that it's not easily portable. The balance of the system really breaks down if you take it out of its setting.

You really can't easily run pure fantasy shadowrun for instance.

Call of Cthulhu RPG; Chaosium;

From what I know, it's d100 based, and generally isn't very well balanced or very logical and leads to a lot of stupid shit. However, I've never actually played it so I'm just repeating what I've heard from people, but this one doesn't seem too popular really.

[erik]

1184737450[/unixtime]]

1184726324[/unixtime]]

Call of Cthulhu RPG; Chaosium;

From what I know, it's d100 based, and generally isn't very well balanced or very logical and leads to a lot of stupid shit. However, I've never actually played it so I'm just repeating what I've heard from people, but this one doesn't seem too popular really.

I have played call of cthulu, and its system is shit.

They do simulate rather well the feeling of not being able to do anything reliably. If you want to play as a bunch of useless inept mooks, it's top notch.

[cthulhu]

The original Choasium system seems to be a bit, you know, ginger beer from my experience.

[AlphaNerd]

d6 system; West End Games; the same company that made the non-d20 version of the Star Wars RPG. They have expanded into other settings as well, such as d6 Fantasy, d6 Space, and d6 Adventure. Is the system chock full of rules, streamlined, or something in between? Is the combat grim and gritty, over the top dynamic action, or something in between?

I'm in the process of reading the d6 Fantasy book, and it looks pretty decent. The list of skills is a bit long, but everyone gets a couple of dice in everything from their skills. The multi-action metric is pretty straight-forward, but I think overall the balance is a little off, especially with regard to damage, but I haven't played it yet, so I can't verify it.

There is a different metric for advancing a character than for rolling up a character initially, but that's easily fixed.

Some of the advantages/disadvantages don't scale linearlly at all. The easiest way to balance this is to make having a supercool friend come with a superenemy. Or just recost things in a reasonable way.

Overall, I think it lends itself to a more freeform game than D&D, but that may be my lack of fully reading the sourcebook. At the very least, the spread of numbers isn't going to be as high as in d20, and the RNG won't be as much of a problem.

Oh, and the way they prevent you from advancing one of your skills up to crazytown is that they limit your advancement to one pip per adventure.

[Username17]

Star Trek RPG; Decipher;

I really wanted to like this game system. Unfortunately, here's the basic breakdown:

You roll 2d6 (6s explode). Then you either add really huge piles of bonuses, or you don't. If your combined total is 20+, you get to do awesome feats of startrek badassery. Otherwise you don't.

So pretty much any task is pretty well known as to whether you're going to pass or fail. To get a high-end result when you aren't a trained engineer you'd have to roll a 6 followed by a 6 followed by a 6 - that kind of shit happens, but not often enough that you care. If you are a trained engineer you have a +6 from your skill, and a +3 from your special feat thing and literally a +10 or +15 from having the right kind of equipment - and you take that 2d6 roll and you make it your bitch.

And every character is hyper-specialized. Like seriously, there are like 5 skills that you need to be an engineer. There are a like number of skills you need to operate a ship. Close combat? Espionage? Same deal. Basically, your character can't be O'Brien or Picard. If he's good at anything, that's the only thing he's good at. If you try to make them generalize to anyreasonable degree they end up like Voyager characters where they can't do anything awesome under any circumstances.

So the game could be played if you each player was running like 3 or 4 characters. But it still really wouldn't do what you wanted it to do. You don't end up having Federation awesome guys - you end up playing a cast of one dimensional characters.

Also, the ship design system is non-functional. Any portion of a ship costs literally millions of times more latinum than the sum total of equipment your team will ever have or use.

Call of Cthulhu RPG; Chaosium;

The old Chaosium CoC ran off the justifiably maligned Palladium engine which also brought us TMNT and Rifts. It's not a good system. The genre is story-centered to the point where you can run it in virtually any system capable of handling modernity at all, so that's not a super big problem, but it's still annoying.

The key is that the players are small and weak and easily frightened and the bad guys are inexplicable and vast and creepy and only peripherally interacted with. So really you don't strictly speaking need a game system. Still, running it in virtually any other system would be preferable.

Although interestingly enough, running it out of d20 modern is in many ways even worse than running it in old Chaosium. D20 doesn't handle modernity at all well.

Shadowrun RPG; Catalyst Game Labs;

I am an author of some Catalyst Game Labs material. I can gripe about rules inconsistencies in the upcoming Augmentation (like: why the fvck is the Move by Wire System so fvcking worthless in the new edition?). But while I can lay it down on a page by page basis which rules are inconsistent or bad, the fact is that the overall system is quite good (which is why I write for it).

I don't enitrely agree that Shadowrun can't be taken out of its context and played in a different one - although that accusation is close enough to true for all cases that I can understand standing by it. Shadowrun is locked into the human mileu - as soon as you bring in mice or space dragons the game system loses coping mechanisms and stops making sense. Furthermore, game balance is very fragile as regards super science and magic, so ham handedly removing one or the other causes the game to spin out of control.

But the game handles wandering around the street doing detective work pretty well. So if you took it out of genre to modern, near future, or even early 20th century detective stories (or Lovecraftian horror even), it would work fine. You just can't do it half way. You can't let hackers and technomancers run rampant in a magic free world and you can't let the players bring conjuring to the table without drone weapon platforms and thermoptic camouflage. Going straight street level modern works fine even if the supernatural elements are there - so long as the PCs aren't the ones doing it.

-Username17

[Captain_Bleach]

1184788710[/unixtime]]
I really wanted to like this game system. Unfortunately, here's the basic breakdown:

You roll 2d6 (6s explode). Then you either add really huge piles of bonuses, or you don't. If your combined total is 20+, you get to do awesome feats of startrek badassery. Otherwise you don't.

So pretty much any task is pretty well known as to whether you're going to pass or fail. To get a high-end result when you aren't a trained engineer you'd have to roll a 6 followed by a 6 followed by a 6 - that kind of shit happens, but not often enough that you care. If you are a trained engineer you have a +6 from your skill, and a +3 from your special feat thing and literally a +10 or +15 from having the right kind of equipment - and you take that 2d6 roll and you make it your bitch.

And every character is hyper-specialized. Like seriously, there are like 5 skills that you need to be an engineer. There are a like number of skills you need to operate a ship. Close combat? Espionage? Same deal. Basically, your character can't be O'Brien or Picard. If he's good at anything, that's the only thing he's good at. If you try to make them generalize to anyreasonable degree they end up like Voyager characters where they can't do anything awesome under any circumstances.

So the game could be played if you each player was running like 3 or 4 characters. But it still really wouldn't do what you wanted it to do. You don't end up having Federation awesome guys - you end up playing a cast of one dimensional characters.

Also, the ship design system is non-functional. Any portion of a ship costs literally millions of times more latinum than the sum total of equipment your team will ever have or use.



-Username17

How about the Lord of the Rings RPG that uses the same game system? Is it any different?

[Username17]

There is a very thorough review of Decipher's LotR game Here.

Having played through some of the Star Trek game it was based upon, I can tell you that the statements sound extremely plausible. Especially the complaint about character generation being unclear. Seriously, many of the steps of character generation were mentioned only in the rules for that particular step - ths without actually reading the whole book there are a lot of steps to making your character that you won't know about (and the sections aren't even in order, so you have to remember "wait... didn't the section on jobs tell me that I was supposed to go back and select one of them at this point?)

-Username17

[josephbt]

Having played Decipher LotR, i think i can say that it sucked.
My problems(most are the same as in the review):
1) Character generation - too long, one whole session.
2) Edges - rule. At the beginig, grab all the flaws you can, so that you can have a gazillion of edges.
3) Combat is horrible - i made a halfling archer that could get a +11 score anytime he took a shot. So orcs always got full damage(12) or ignored armor. Most of the party did something like this. The problem is - orcs got 10 wounds and 5 levels of such wounds. The first combat was against 6 orcs, we were a party of 4. Everybody was filling orcs with arrows, swords and lightnings, but they wouldn't go down. We barely survived. Later, the DM found a rule that says that he can give random mooks only 1 health level so that they go down easy. But still, dying is very probbable.
4) Healing - the party took a crapload of damage. The healing took 2 months. Bollocks.
5) Lack of any sort of guidelines regarding adventures - the DM was a bit stumped. Was it supposed to be epic? Or random? Or what?

The play was 3 sessions long, then we stoped. Nobody was having fun with the system or the setting.

[Captain_Bleach]

Alright, so the only good systems that were presented (by your standards) are Shadowrun and d6 Fantasy/Adventure.etc.

[rapanui]

Funny, about 3 months back I tried a forum game using Shadowrun for survival horror. Unfortunately, the GM bailed on the game before we'd attacked our first zombie. Pity.

[virgil]

FUDGE is a reasonable resolution system and base mechanic to use, as long as you're willing to come up with the rest on your own.

I still feel that MnM (and 2nd edition was an improvement) is a good system for the genre, even if it's got the d20 'round its neck (not that I consider that base a bad thing).

Yes, it's freeform and has the point potential for some of the most disgustingly powerful things you've ever seen. But it openly admits this and forces the DM to be there for character creation to enforce balance. The only flaw is that the book doesn't discuss this as much as it should, and nor does it detail the little things to watch out for, but I readily found articles online detailing red.

[Captain_Bleach]

What is your opinion on the Legend of the Five Rings RPG, set in Rokugan, a setting based off of mythical Japan?

[Catharz]

1185075426[/unixtime]]What is your opinion on the Legend of the Five Rings RPG, set in Rokugan, a setting based off of mythical Japan?

There's mythical and then there's mythical...

[Captain_Bleach]

1185083117[/unixtime]]

1185075426[/unixtime]]What is your opinion on the Legend of the Five Rings RPG, set in Rokugan, a setting based off of mythical Japan?

There's mythical and then there's mythical...

Please explain.

[Catharz]

Well, there's Mythical Japan as in Japanese myths, and then there's Mythical Japan as in American myths.

[Modesitt]

HERO's an excellent system. It's also a VERY complex system, but it's still a system that's worth looking into.

[Username17]

I am a biased judge as far as L5R goes - having Alderac Entertainment Group cut my head off and put it on a pole symbolically didn't really improve diplomatic relations between us. That being said, L5R is actually a worse system for running Rokugan than d20 is. You're literally better off using the Oriental Adventures book for 3rd edition than trying to make a run with their "pile of d10s" crap.

---

HERO system is an interesting case. It's really not very good at what the designers want it to be - a universal role playing game that encompasses all genres. But as a Superheroics game it is second to none. It blows Mutants & Masterminds, Silver Age Sentinels, Marvel Heroes, and anything else you want to talk about right out of the water. Nothing else even comes close.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1185210498[/unixtime]]I am a biased judge as far as L5R goes - having Alderac Entertainment Group cut my head off and put it on a pole symbolically didn't really improve diplomatic relations between us.

What's this?

[Username17]

1185212837[/unixtime]]

1185210498[/unixtime]]I am a biased judge as far as L5R goes - having Alderac Entertainment Group cut my head off and put it on a pole symbolically didn't really improve diplomatic relations between us.

What's this?

I used to be big into L5R. I wrote stories for it and was a total fanboy. I had a crushingly dominant Crab deck design. My stories brought the Crab into an alliance with the Ratlings (later renamed the Nezumi). A Deadlands card got made with my face on it (Tombstone Frank). And then... I found a hole in the rules of the L5R card game. A really, really big one.

See the rules for card "traits" held that every word on the card was a trait. That meant that, for example, every character with a bonus for fighting shadowlands creatures was a shadowlands creature. Every character unable to use items was themselves an item who could be brought out cheaply with an artificer.

And so on and so on. The implications were very massive, and extricating the card game from this morass was not simple. I made a list of proposals for an alternate rule set.

And AEG's response was to:

• Ban me from their rules discussion list forever.
  
• Use my suggestions in the next rule revision without attribution.
  
• Chop the head off of "Tombstone Frank" and put it on a stick.

Ahh... very mature.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1185216314[/unixtime]]
[*] Chop the head off of "Tombstone Frank" and put it on a stick.[/list]

Was this a card or what?

[Captain_Bleach]

1185216314[/unixtime]]
[*] Chop the head off of "Tombstone Frank" and put it on a stick.[/list]


-Username17

Oh Frank, what is it with game companies?

[Crissa]

I had a Magic deck that made black critters than killed a non-black creature upon summons then kill themselves... Ahh, good times.

They changed the rules, later, with stacking and getting rid of interrupts, le sigh.

-Crissa

[Captain_Bleach]

Let's talk FATAL :ugone2far:
Now, when I first heard of FATAL, everybody made a big hubbub about it. Of course, in the philosophy of selfless promotion, any publicity is good publicity. When I so much as tried to read the rules, I could not get through even 1/10th of the book before losing interest amongst the myriad of rules that would hardly ever come up in game ("Elves fart 3d10 times a day) or did not necessarily make sense. (Alchemy's only function is to turn lead into gold, nothing else.) I just could not read through it before closing the file and saying "Even though he tried, he is still a long ways away before making an RPG that could hold the interest of someone other than the most patient and rules-savvy of gamers." But enough of my opinion, what do you guys think of the game?

[Catharz]

FATAL is a troll.