GODLIKE: Any good?

[Modoc]

I have been itching for some type of military RPG. In another thread someone suggested that I investigate GODLIKE, It seems like a great little system with some additional material that has been published. There game's website also offers lots of free information. The game's forum on the company website doesn't see much traffic; this leads me to believe that the game is not very popular. Am I wrong?

My question is is the game any good?
Anyone know of an GODLIKE PBP games?
Any Interest here for a GODLIKE PBP game?

 

[Stormborn]

I had it and sold it a while back. Never played it. Interesting setting, but the mechanics felt off. I have read it described as "Eggs with Hammers" - basically that you could have this super powerful characters that could do all of this stuff but couldn't really take a hit from another character with powers. If I had run the game I would have put some serious effort into fixing that aspect of it. However, more likely I would have just run the game with a d20 based system and used the setting.

 

[Modoc]

I did see at the company's website that there is a D20 OGL ruleset for the game.

 

[Odhanan]

I too am VERY interested in GODLIKE's system at least. The setting looks cool too, obviously, but I ran a sort of fantasy Viking mythology game set in Midgard with Rune-based magic using the World of Darkness rules and am searching for something similar, yet, more in tune with the idea of rune casting in my mind.

This looks like it could be it. The idea of doubles, triples etc. with "height" and "width" of rolls is really cool. I just wonder if the math behind work, as in "probabilities of success vs. failures, intensity of successes for which probability," and so on.

 

[Karl Green]

I am not a big fan of the One-Roll-Engine myself... you roll once for your Initiative, hit location and damage. Character Creation is kind of cool and all, but the way Hard work means that you alway shot for the head which is really weird to me. See, you roll a number of D10 for your dice-poll in Godlike. You want matching pairs, and the more you get the better. Hard Dice are not rolled, as they are always 10's (and generally the higher the set of pairs that you roll, the better), and in Hit Location a 10 is the Head. So, when you roll, it seems you always can "shot" for the head. You don't have to accept those pairs, if you have something better, but Hard Dice are expensive, so you are going to want to use them.

Anyway, the setting is pretty interesting and I like the idea of how powers work, etc. I am just not sold on the system (and we have never played it so I might be totally wrong on how the feel really would work)

 

[SWBaxter]

The game's forum on the company website doesn't see much traffic; this leads me to believe that the game is not very popular. Am I wrong?

It's reasonably popular as small-market/indie games go. I don't think it was ever intended as a line with an open-ended lifespan, they've put out more than enough material for most campaigns. I think a fair amount of the playerbase have moved on to Wild Talents, which takes the same system and background and advances the timeline to the modern day.

My question is is the game any good?

The One Roll Engine is a pretty cool rules system, and works well for the relatively gritty atmosphere in Godlike. It's obviously got a winner of a setting if you're any kind of WWII buff. I think it's probably better for limited campaigns (such as a D-Day scenario) rather than doing the full war, but YMMV.

Anyone know of an GODLIKE PBP games?

rpg.net would probably be the best place to look, I'm not into PBP myself so can't help you much there.

 

[HeapThaumaturgist]

I've got GODLIKE.

Setting? Awesomesauce. It's very interesting, flavorful, and gripping ... but it's hard to really mess up WWII, in some ways.

Mechanics? Crap.

The One-Roll idea is elegant, simple, and quite interesting to read. At the table, the four groups I've tried it for, all thought it was crap. Everybody is rolling piles of dice and trying to figure out what the turn order resolves to ... some powers are obviously better than others, etc etc.

To some extent it is fun, and certainly playable, but not for much more than one-shots. Lethality is appropriately extreme, so without some sort of powerful soak ability your tricked out hero is as likely to get torn in half by an MG42 as the fifteen grunts trailing behind you.

Which is awesome and setting-appropriate and fitting with the tone and flavor.

But relatively unawesome in any kind of game you want continuing characters in. It seems to rapidly devolve into "What Interesting Way Can I Get My Character Horribly Maimed?" Much like CoC and insanity.

The stress mechanic is relatively awesome (Cool), and plays well with the system. I built one character that was a dead-eye shot with super-Cool who was just an inhuman killing machine. Which tended to play out better than any other character concept (I.E. instead of going for "Super Hero" and getting opened to horrible maiming and death when I tried to bust out the "Super Hero" factor, I just made a preternaturally effective SOLDIER and played him like any other guy in WWII ... just ... better. Which worked out too well, since it left guys with super strength and bullet proof pantaloons feeling overshadowed by John Q. Grunt who happened to shoot well and wasn't afraid to die.)

On the whole I'm not disappointed I bought the book. I've run several great one-shot adventures with it and the read was worth the cover price (marked down). For a similar genre game where folks want to keep their characters through several arcs, my group has used Blood And Vigilance on top of d20Modern in the past, and just used the genre information from GODLIKE.

Oh ... there's one mechanic in there I DID love and thought about trying to incorporate elsewhere.

The super-powers function, basically, on the BELIEF that their super powers will work. Characters can then bid points of belief to try and shout down or suppress other super powers in their LoS. "I believe I'm better than you." And, of course, if you LOSE after pitting so much of your self-belief into the fight, you become weaker and could possibly stop believing you have powers at all ... and then really lose them.

--fje

 

[Arrgh! Mark!]

I pretty much agree with HEAP. The setting is entirely awesome, well crafted, and while I don't have wild talents (Sold out or something... darn it) I have to disagree with the notion that it is only a single game setting, simply because my players were scrambling for more.


Issues:

1. Combat works fine in small team scenarios if you think about how to describe combat. Describing it as a turn basis doesn't work, really; having people sit around the table in the right order is the only way. Have a group of bad guys and things get hectic fast and the major issue is more along the lines of "So.. you got three width.. you actually shot this guy before another character moved, which means his action, which he has already states, didn't happen?"

It's not really so bad as that, but when squads or what not are involved that sort of thing can happen.

2. WW2 first, superheroes second. Making that mistake in game means dead characters. The way I got around that was to force all players to create subtle powers; no big blasty rays. Watching Band of Brothers is neccesary; make the PC's a squad of infantry with some special powers - they really feel like it's more WW2 that way.

I didn't have that problem with the Ubermench mind you.

3. WW2 first, superheroes second. You lose the point of the game if you have the heroes flying around punching each other with light blasts; you must show the theme and feel of WW2.

While our First Australian Talent Group was just realising it had powers, they were also quintessentially Aussie - the hardbitten Sarge who survived Gallipoli, the sydney-sider ex-burglar, the 15 year old farmboy with a gun from woolongong, the port melbourne labour voter and the pretentious sydney artist who got into it because he couldn't afford to live on art. My players went and found old photos of soldiers to show their PC faces and really got into it.

"Troupe" play is neccesary. The fellow who played Sarge also had about six other, more expendable characters who bit the dust - none overly characterised, but good to inherit a bullet meant for Sarge for instance.

4. Adventures: One of the issues my PC's had is that they were often having just as much fun whinging about the chlorinated tea I forced them to gulp down (With actual strong tea in game) and talking to other soldiers as when they were dealing with German patrols. GODLIKE can be a campaign but only if other soldiers are accesible and there are issues to deal with there as well as on the front line. These issues, like helping a nervous soldier, or consoling a husband who's wife left him are just as important to the war as the killing ze Germans. (Africa conflict.)



Sorry, I got carried away. GODLIKE rocks; with a few rules additions (and some of the extra rules on the site) and smart thinking, Players can really have fun.


EDIT: Not six at the one time. Six characters who died.

 

[Modoc]

Thanks for all the comments.

I can see both the pros and cons of the GODLIKE system that everyone is presenting. With that said, Is there other good WWII era RPGs?

 

[Woas]

I ran a few sessions game of GODLIKE a couple years ago. I actually just ran it straight WW2 without the superpowers/talents. Actually thats not really true. What we did was made the talents more mundane things the particular soldiers were just really good at. The person playing the medic for example had a "really good medical background" and could perform medical treatment good and fast to commrades. Another took a trait that translated into being dead-on with throwing gernades, always going where he needed them and being able to bankshot them into hard places, etc. I think he stuffed one down a Panzer tank barrel at one point...

Anyway, we wanted to play a WW2 RPG that was fast passed and really simulated the chaos and speed of combat that is WW2. We originally were thinking d20 modern. But that has the trappings of D&D where combat tends to move slowly both in real time and through a narrative sense with people moving in 6 second burst, etc. So GODLIKE looked like the system to use and we tried it out. Rolling all those d10s seemed cool too. The sound of them clattering on the table was like the sound of automatic machine gun fire Unfortunetly like others have mentioned so far, the game ends up getting bogged down in terms of looking up where people hit, who actually went first and other such time wasters which really killed the high-stakes mood as people were calling off numbers, taking time scanning through their mess o' d10s for matches and figuring things out.

In the end we gave it up to go back to a D&D game or something... some splat book probably came out, a new feat/class/PrC/spell caught someones attention and GODLIKE was forgotten. Just recently I discovered the free game Wushu on the net. And to be honest, if I were to play another WW2 RPG, I would use Wushu to really get the action right.