Ok on a quick re-skim of the rules, its better than the beta version I read a couple years ago BUT
It’s essentially Shadow of the Demon Lord mashed together with Blades in the Dark without much insight into how the two sources of rules work. It ends up being kind of a mix of too-crunchy and too-loose.
There’s a lot (a LOT) of bookkeeping in this game even in the more freeformy section and the basic dice rolling action feels too barebones to give a good sense of individuality to each player character when they’re not in the mech. Whereas the mech combat is essentially a d20 miniatures minigame.
All this is to say that its one of the better comprehensive (meaning not a sad mecha jam game) mecha rpgs out there but I still don’t think there has been a good mecha rpg.
finally got to play a session of ryuutama!
we started the sample scenario that’s in the book, playing through the first part of it. i wasn’t sure how people would react to a non-violent story where they help a child goblin find its lost earring, but they seemed to have fun and get into the setting. and part two’s going to have some combat anyway.
there was only me gm-ing and two players, so we eschewed some mechanics like journal writing and map drawing. i really hope i can play with a bigger group someday!
I’m reading Blades in Dark and the death metaphysics are basically Death Stranding:
It’s said that the cataclysm that shattered the earth, banished the sun, and turned the seas to black ink was caused by a sorcerer who consorted with demons and tore down the Gates of Death. But who believes such ancient tales? Whatever the truth of it, one thing is certain: when a body dies, its spirit does not disperse as they once did long ago. It becomes a ghost: a spectral entity composed of electroplasmic vapors. It usually takes between one to three days for a ghost to become free of the corpse. It is then free to wander the world, consumed by darker and darker urges until it goes entirely mad and monstrous. Ghosts have been a plague upon the world for nearly 1,000 years. Every community has developed methods for dealing with them, and Doskvol is no different.
What’s up with Zweihander and how did it get into the chain bookstores?
Also does anyone have any favorite GURPS supplements. I picked up the base rules and the Prisoner book a bit back and my the DM of my current D&D group is looking to take a break. I thought I might try something super weird (or run that Wendy’s game).
GURPS is already super weird. I remember a lunchtime session at uni where one player worked out the collections of perks for a 1st level ninja to overcome pretty much every called shot penalty and spent every combat saying, “I hit him… in the brain”
GURPS is kind of a bad game? Like it’s really complicated to very little benefit, character creation takes forever and is badly balanced in not fun ways, and the rules don’t really lend themselves to doing anything well besides like, really generic fantasy that’s way more complicated.
It would also be super awful for the prisoner. Like one of the worst systems I could even imagine for the prisoner.
Like, what sort of weird game do you want to run? Like what kind of narrative/world are we talking about here?
GURPS is good for reading detailed setting books and terrible to actually play (which is astounding because The Fantasy Trip, from which GURPS derived, is a stone cold classic of elegant mechanics)
If you spend hours and hours and understand the system inside and out, you can pare down the rules to just the parts of gurps that originated in Car Wars and the Fantasy Trip and have a decent RPG.
GURPs is great for character creation, and so makes for a great 1-session superhero game where you spend the whole time building characters
we did a great League of Extraordinary Gentleman game in GURPs where I worked out how to defeat polio by dumping all my points in robot legs and 12 dice of kick damage
right like the appeal of gurps is firmly in a 90s tastic lonely fun ‘hunting for the right combo of advantages and disadvantages’ kind of thing and even then its so bland and mathy and ironically constraining that its still been outshone by other systems like the One Roll Engine. (building superheroes in Wild Talents 2e is more fun than in any other system and it doubles as actually fun to play as well)
Like the first example in the book is a character that can “Suppress nuclear fusion”, essentially letting them turn off the sun at will. The game has clear guidelines on how to build all the most bizarre stuff.
PS if you want to run or play in a heist game, I can’t recommend Blades in the Dark enough
Its basically solved the ‘team doing heists’ scenario and the design is very modular so its super easy to export some of the best features back into dnd or whatever other system you like. I’ve been using Clocks in the background (and, occasionally, foreground) of no rangers allowed for years now. The rest of the book has so many solid techniques for how to manage a city-based game, how to deal with dozens of different factions all vying for their own goals, how to structure downtime, heists, and planning, etc.
After being the GM in one campaign and a player in two other campaigns (though these two were games based on BitD and not the core game itself) I do not think it is without flaws anymore but what it does, it does very well.
At its worst, the game can bog down into the same flaw all trad-ish games have, scraping for every possible advantage or modifier on every roll, slowing the whole thing down. There’s a good set of both GM and player techniques to avoid this worst case scenario but its not foolproof.
Devil’s Bargains are a genius piece of tech and it is to my shame I haven’t put it into no rangers allowed yet as a way to get advantage and inspiration. I might even try to sneak flashbacks into D&D with a simple “spend your inspiration to flashback to an action you wanted to do before the current situation” houserule.
Eventually, it wound up transpiring that it is a campaign for two. My friend is gamely running a campaign for the only two players that could actually commit.
My character is an innocuous-looking Regular Dude whose strongest trait is being strangely forgettable. My partner in crime is a crocodilian cyborg who mainly wants to eat and/or fuck most things and my charcter is stringing him along on his adventures with the promise that he will eventually get to eat and/or fuck him.
The other player has sort of a lolrandom sense of humor and keeps suggesting ridiculous things that the GM goes along with so it’s been pretty funny being the straight man of the duo, although if we were using D&D alignments we’re both definitely chaotic neutral.
The GM did ask us a few questions that I think might lead to interesting character developments because, technically, the bodies we inhabit right now just happen to be our current sleeves – is this who we really both are?
I like it. Honestly if it’s just an excuse for three guys to adlib a bunch of stupid stuff around a table I could think of worse ways to spend my time.
Despite having extremely limited knowledge of the show, I’ve now played through most of that Rick and Morty D&D starter adventure. It’s pretty fun—there’s a lot of goofy rooms and it fits in pretty well with the wacky stuff I remember from April issues of Dragon, the weirder entries in those 2nd edition encyclopedias of magic items, and adventures like Dungeonland and Greyhawk.
We’re using it to give our DM a vacation after over a year of near weekly(!) sessions. I think I’m going to take over next to run the Wendy’s RPG.