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    2. Kairos
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    K
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    Posts made by Kairos

    • RE: Suitable system for a gritty fantasy game

      If one likes the Earthdawn setting, though, and wants it with a tad less crunch there's the recent Earthdawn Age of Legends edition/port (found here: http://www.vagrantworkshop.com/index.php?categoryid=29) which is based on Fudge rather than whatever FASA calls their system. The die roll resolution is a bit... unique. But it's pretty accessible all things considered.

      Otherwise, have you heard of 'Children of the Sun'? It's another one that's a bit difficult to get ahold of other than from out of print books vendors and the default setting isn't really fantasy (it's self described as 'Dieselpunk') but the system is both pretty scaleable and probably pretty well workable in a MUSH environment.

      posted in Mildly Constructive
      K
      Kairos
    • RE: All Original Supers Game

      @Collective

      I definitely agree with you that slowing down MU combat is problematic. In any rules system no matter how rules lite it may be adjudicating combat is almost always the most complex portion of those rules simply because of the number of 'moving pieces' to consider.

      That said, I would like to observe that even in systemless MU's - I did play on one superhero MU that was pretty much entirely consent based - combat is a slow thing. My experiences both with that and with tabletop RP lead me to believe that it's a function of both the potential stakes and the fact you're using your poses to account for seconds or at most minutes of action in most cases. A lot happens in a very short period of IC time which means that a lot of OOC time is spent figuring out and describing what happens even when there are no dice to be seen.

      Long story short, combat in any kind of RP setting is pretty much always going to be one of the slowest activities anyone engages in and the best ways to speed it up - at least in my opinion, take it for what it's worth - are narrative and not mechanical. Make sure everyone is clear what is going on, who is aware of what and what the possibilities are. Also, you know, prompt people for their actions before they need to pose (if you're using a system of any kind that requires rolls or non-narrative player input) and know when the fight has accomplished it's narrative purpose be that to establish a level of danger, to show off how badass the heroes are or to acquire or prevent something and be ready to end it.

      posted in Mildly Constructive
      K
      Kairos
    • RE: Good Comics for People Who Don't Like Comics?

      Fables, which has been mentioned before, is quite good. I'll second that. I've heard good things about Saga as well but can't speak from experience.

      posted in Tastes Less Game'y
      K
      Kairos
    • RE: All Original Supers Game

      @Lithium The system is clunky, yeah. But it's got a lot of good ideas and I am a fan way of the way it classifies heroes broadly enough for similar classes to have pretty wildly different implementations. The list of powers - particularly with the extra powers sourcebooks - is pretty darn long even if some of them are a bit on the silly side (but then, some comics super hero powers are a bit on the silly side) and you're never really at risk for someone rewriting your game reality with any of it. And you're right, the random roll tables can be quite fun (and being a Palladium game, there are a lot of tables you can use).

      Plus if folks wanted to go full original game rather than an original heroes game based on Marvel or DC, Heroes Unlimited does have some nice sourcebooks full of setting and characters to use as NPCs. So not all bad by a country mile, just, you know, an old system with all of the problems that old systems have.

      posted in Mildly Constructive
      K
      Kairos
    • RE: NO-GO IPs for MU*

      Palladium Games and particularly Kevin Simbieda used to have a reputation for being pretty unfriendly to derivative uses of their work but I don't know that MU*'s ever really came up on their radar/concerned them. After all there were several Rifts MUSHes a bit back and while I don't know, I've never heard in my various internet trawlings of them being told to shut down.

      posted in Mildly Constructive
      K
      Kairos
    • RE: All Original Supers Game

      Venture city is a good one, and a decent setting too if you want to bother to go pick it up.

      There's a game on DriveThruRPG called 'Base Raiders' about a world where all the superheroes and villains mysteriously vanished leaving all their secret lairs scattered around the world which people and organizations are now searching for and raiding - creating new supers in the process sometimes. I have no idea what the game itself is like - don't own it, never read it, only saw it once on a list of things and read the description - but as a concept it sounds amusing enough. It might even work if someone wanted the framework of an existing comic universe -say Marvel or DC - but didn't want to deal with any of the FC's. (I realize that for people who like to play Marvel and DC the FC's are often a big part of the draw but it's a thought).

      Also on the list of DriveThruRPG is great, and so is Fate, there's Jadepunk which is a bit more Wuxia than Superhero but stripped of it's setting the system could also probably be used to support super heroics of varying kinds (I still think Venture City is probably a better bet, but this one runs on FAE instead of Fate Core so it's simpler in some ways)

      I suppose if someone really wanted to power a game off of Heroes Unlimited you could... but as much as I have enjoyed playing that game tabletop I'd still be very hesitant to unleash Palladium's Percentile/D20 hybrid on a MUSH. Or a group of people larger than 6, really.

      posted in Mildly Constructive
      K
      Kairos
    • RE: We Need a Game Set In the Roman Empire.

      Just gonna leave this here: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/144754/Eagle-Eyes--A-World-of-Adventure-for-Fate-Core

      It's free. It may or may not help.

      posted in Mildly Constructive
      K
      Kairos
    • RE: Dresden Files Accelerated: Enough impetus for a new DF game?

      My limited skim-through of the latest DFAE version and my only slightly more thorough read of the version before that did lead me to believe that it was much more MUSH-able than the DFRPG. Don't get me wrong, the DFRPG is a great table top game and in it's base form certainly isn't any more complicated than comparable WoD titles (at least in my opinion) which folks use in MUSH environments all the time but it's based on an older, much less streamlined (and heavily modified) version of Fate. (Fate... 3.0 I think?). Fate Core and Fate Accelerated (upon which DFAE is built) are more polished and I think it's safe to say the Evil Hat folks learned a thing or two about how much crunch you really need for magic.

      DFAE is a lot more flexible and a lot less crunchy. I'm sure that'll be a draw to some and a drawback to others, but I personally like what Evil Hat did with it. For what it's worth I believe that the Darkspires folks had been considering moving to it - though I have no idea at all what the outcome of those discussions was. I haven't played there in some time.

      posted in Mildly Constructive
      K
      Kairos
    • RE: Star Wars: Insurgency

      Well, since you put it up for comment...

      Every ship has:

      Name - This is Star Wars. The name of your ship //matters//. Some might be Millennium Falcon, some might be the TIE Fighter TI-87Z. Each has a different impression based on the culture.

      High Concept - 'Old Freighter Retrofit Continually'

      One Aspect per Crew (PC or Droid) - This aspect is tied to the specific crew member, applies only when they are on board, and if they stop being crew, goes away. New crew add new aspect. Hire a cook? The 'Well Fed' aspect might be added. Who cares if a ship is Well Fed? Believe me I can think of situations I might invoke Well Fed to get something cool.

      Systems (ship skills) - and the PC skills that affect their efficiency:

      Hull (Mechanics)
      Weapons (Mechanics, Shoot)
      Engines (Mechanics, Pilot)
      Shields (Slicing, Mechanics)
      Sensors (Slicing, Pilot)
      Comm Relay (Slicing)

      A skill line/tree/pyramid is as good a way for representing ship functions as any, really, so I think that should work just fine. You may, however, find that you need to modify how you represent them if the way players/characters interact with the ships changes. (More on that in a moment.)

      Hull, Shields and Sensors will all have stress tracks. (Why sensors? A slicer can use the relay to put out crazy stuff to jam your signal) Damage done does shields until its gone, then hull, and once its gone, everyone better get their ass to an escape pod. Once Sensor Stress is gone, hit the FTL and get the hell out of there in a random direction.

      Point of curiosity: What's the thought behind a sensor stress track? From your basic write up it looks like you're looking to represent things like jamming progress with it (with, presumably, consequences inflicted being something along the lines of 'sensors jammed', 'no communications' and similar?). It may be helpful to consider how. such damage is counteracted. With shields and hull damage the answer is generally 'reroute power / perform repair actions' to both remove stress and initiate consequence recovery. For counter jamming kind of things, that might possibly be less immediate than you want, especially if using standard consequence rules.

      I might suggest looking at representing this kind of thing with aspects created via the create an advantage action since this would allow ships with counter jamming personnel and equipment to remove the negative 'status effects' in a manner that doesn't require consequence recovery. Additionally, as a lore matter if I'm remembering my Star Wars fu correctly by this point in 'history' navicomps and astromechs are the primary way of calculating hyperspace jumps in most places as opposed to the much older hyperspace beacon networks and that misjumps are generally a result of either not doing the calculations (jumping too quickly) or sustaining physical damage to those components.

      Anyway, something to consider. The way you've got it should work just fine in my opinion, just wanted to present some options.

      Ships get 2 refresh per refresh used to buy the ship: refresh can buy stunts or extras.

      The 'system pyramid' is capped at +1 the refresh cost of the ship.

      A common basic frighter might have for 1 point, might have:
      +2 Engines
      +1 Hull, Relay

      An effective, 2 cost cool ship might have:
      +3 Weapons
      +2 Shields, Engines
      +1 Hull, Sensors, Relay

      It might be more crunch than you want but you might also consider capping the amount of refresh / the skill pyramid by its class or size or something similar. A given hull will only take so much tweaking and modification before there's just no more room / the engines aren't powerful enough / you've essentially rebuilt the whole thing into something else. Could be that's actually too 'simulation-y', since the point of going with Fate is generally to reduce crunch, but again, it's a thought.

      Big glaring hole: Exactly how 'PC skills affect ship systems in their efficiency'. I haven't even really gotten to that stage of deciding yet. I have this vague idea that the player rolls the appropriate skill and it adds a bonus like, Shifts (success over difficulty) / 2, to ship skill. But that's so off the cuff, whoa.

      This would be the big one to consider. How your characters interact with the ship will determine in large part what you need to represent on the ship mechanically. Off the top of my head I have a couple of suggestions. The simplest one that comes to mind is to use a ship's skills as a 'cap' on the relevant player skills. So you have an X-Wing pilot, for example, with a piloting skill of +4. That's great in his X-Wing which has an engines rating of +4, but stick him in a freighter with engines of +2 and he's not going to be able to use his skill to it's full potential. He's limited by the quality of the equipment he has. Conversely a farm boy whose only flight experience is in T-16's may have a piloting skill of +3. He can use all of that skill when he gets his shot at glory flying an X-Wing but he can't use the ship to it's full potential because he's just not quite that good.

      Though, you know, your mileage with farm boys turned rebel pilots may vary.

      If you really want a crewman to be able to improve the ship's performance, you might allow crewmen using a system at which their relevant skill is better than the ship's rating to either create advantages related to pushing the performance or to gain a +1 synergy bonus (similar to the 'teamwork' bonus given in some combined rolls). So in this case, a rebel pilot flying an X-Wing with engines at +4 and a piloting skill at +4 is using it to it's maximum potential. A pilot flying at +5 can push his system's performance because he's just that good, and gain a +1 synergy bonus to the roll, effectively letting him use his whole skill. A mythical pilot flying at +6 (if such a thing exists) is still only rolling at +5. He's got the same ability to push his ship to the limits, but in this case his ships' limits are holding him back. There's only so much the tech can do for him, despite his incredibly high level of skill.

      You might consider also using a 'traits' system (ala Transhumanity's Fate) to append and clarify the ship's basic aspect. If you don't have access to that book or haven't read it, Traits are 'sub-aspects' that are attached to a given aspect and are invoked and compelled via that aspect, but serve as justification for doing things related to that trait. So you might give our example X-Wing a High Concept 'Red Squadron X-Wing' with the traits 'Starfighter', 'Maneuverable' and 'Hyperdrive'. Those traits all 'live on' the High Concept aspect and serve to justify things like flying through Beggars Canyon (because 'Starfighter' tells me it's small and 'Maneuverable' says it should be able to do this) whilst 'Hyperdrive' serves as justification for long range travel but can //also// be compelled (via the parent aspect) for it to break down or get damaged and strand the pilot. Again, this might be more crunch than you're looking for, but it's a suggestion.

      Finally you'll need to decide how and when characters can make ships do things. I'm a big fan of Aether Sea's 'stations' mechanic for this. A ship has so many stations and those stations do specific things. A piloting station lets a crewman make piloting rolls and move the ship. A weapons station lets a crewman make attacks and so on and so forth. I am personally a fan of this because, one, it allows for another level of differentiation between ships and two it allows you to express certain concepts mechanically provided you have enough people. (Also I suppose, three, it gives players clear indications of how to use all those shiny stats the ship has).

      So for example we have a highly modified YT-1300 freighter with big engines and some guns. It has 2 pilot stations, two gun stations, an electronic warfare station and perhaps one or two others. So in a given round of conflict it can move twice (or make two piloting rolls), shoot twice and jam someone's comms but only if it has at least five crew. If's being piloted by only one person... well it can move once. It's a big ship and even in the cockpit leaning over to flick that navicomp switch by the copilot's chair is a pain.

      Anyway, slightly ramble-y there. Looks like you've got a solid foundation and some good ideas about how to proceed. Hope this wall of text was helpful in some way, if only to get you thinking 'no really, I don't like those ideas and these are the reasons'.

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      K
      Kairos
    • RE: Star Wars: Insurgency

      @ixokai

      There's a lot of good ideas out there to steal. I may not be pointing you at anything you haven't found already, but http://www.faterpg.com/licensing/licensing-fate-cc-by/ has a repository of 'System Resource Documents' which have a lot of good stuff in them. SRD's are bare-bones, no fluff rules documents from various FATE resources that Evil Hat has licensed for public general use (the details of how to make use of that license are on that page but the short version is 'you have to credit them for their work'). The ease of legal use is one of the reasons I'm a big fan of FATE Core and Evil Hat in general.

      DriveThruRPG also has a bunch of fate supplements available on 'Pay What You Want'. Not sure how many of them might be helpful but they're handy to pick through. There's also a bunch of more traditional offerings (ie, ones you have to pay for) that have ideas. If anyone on your team is up to spending the money, I'd recommend Transhumanity's Fate (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/176939/Eclipse-Phase-Transhumanitys-Fate?sorttest=true&filters=0_0_44284_0_0) and Jadepunk (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/127543/Jadepunk-Tales-From-Kausao-City?filters=0_0_44284_0_0) for general ideas stealing, but your mileage may vary.

      Also, the Fate System Toolkit (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/119385/Fate-System-Toolkit?sorttest=true&filters=0_0_44284_0_0) is available for pay what you want pricing and I've found that one pretty handy in my own fate hacking efforts.

      Again, apologies if I'm mentioning things you already know about. Good luck with your systems building!

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      K
      Kairos
    • RE: Star Wars: Insurgency

      Hello there @ixokai

      On an (almost) totally unrelated note you might check out the Fate World 'Aeather Sea' (found here: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/139872/Aether-Sea--A-World-of-Adventure-for-Fate-Core . It's free. Well, it's 'Pay What You Want') for some quick and dirty vehicle rules that could be used for ships. Also the 'Camelot Trigger' setting whose rules are designed more for mecha but could also be used for ships (Found here: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/119384/Fate-Worlds-Worlds-in-Shadow . It's less free. But fun anyway).

      Could be that you've already thought out how you want to handle it but as a fate fan I thought I'd toss those out there in case you hadn't heard of them and in case you didn't already have that stuff established.

      Best of luck!

      posted in Adver-tis-ments
      K
      Kairos
    • RE: Justanothername's Playlist

      I think you left out Palpatine on CoMux (be it ever so briefly). That said, it's Marik. Nice to see you and I thought you were plenty memorable.

      posted in A Shout in the Dark
      K
      Kairos
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