Search results

I think a lot of the early World of Darkness games fit this description. Vampire as you mentioned, but also Wraith, which had a ton of cool concepts, but it was still a trad game with trad mechanics and pacing, and no real sense of what PCs should be doing, so you just kind of fell into gloomy...

This is an interesting concern, and it could very well turn out to be valid. Your observation about the lack of RP in MMOs is pretty chilling. I remember finally jumping into EVE Online and being horrified when I found out that RP was largely ridiculed, except among the faction that were all...

Both the rules and the setting would need an update, but Mayfair's Underground had some cool ideas.

I used Mongoose Traveller to run a homebrew SF game for a couple years, and it was great. Some of the most streamlined, competent SF rules around, especially if you mostly avoid ship combat and stick to a few adjacent tech levels. Edit: I forgot, I also used a very weird ancient Rome supplement...

True, Industrial Magical Revolution doesn't give you much in the way of opportunities to overthrow the oligarchy. But that's more related to your thread about game mechanics for social realism, right? At the very least, though, I like that IMR doesn't beat around the bush or glorify the wealthy...

I meant that it gives clear guidelines for how players can interact with the process, if they want to, which also reinforce how corrupt and sexist it is. It's not a riveting or original section, necessarily, but there's neat stuff throughout the book. If you avert an apocalypse you roll a d20...

Magical Industrial Revolution is, as usual for Skerples, a damned delight. So many excellent tables, and sections like this that cut to the chase while providing clear social commentary: GETTING ELECTED Only men can be elected to Parliament. In a...

Individual actions are definitely a major factor (hard to avoid that in an RPG, as opposed to a boardgame) but like most FitD games almost everything you do is about improving or worsening relationships with the setting's many factions. So to increase your Tier and continue advancing your corner...

Red Markets doesn't have mechanics for societal change, but it's the most directly anti-capitalist game I've read. Zombies are a threat, but it's the human system that incentivizes (forces?) you to leave protective enclaves and scavenge for goods, getting paid paltry amounts by the...

The Arc Dream crew talk pretty openly about their politics, but also about the fact that it's basically a game about the war on terror, and not in a good way. It's not a situation where you need to read the tea leaves and wonder what they're up to. They chat about it in livestreams. Hell, their...

I played a Technocracy one-shot recently and...it was uncomfortable. Like, you're the coppiest of all possible cops, the literal status quo hunting down "reality deviants." That sucks!

I don't think any of us who've pointed to Delta Green as an example of playing the bad guys are necessarily saying that you're playing clear-cut, moustache-twirling villains. But it definitely up-ends a lot of common tropes—in basically any other story where unsanctioned federal agents are not...

Thanks for laying this out. It sounds like a great framework, and a lot more manageable than the default approach in Galaxies in Peril. I was asking in part because I'm about to start a Star Wars campaign using Scum and Villainy, and I'm trying to figure out what to potentially tweak to keep...

Galaxies of Peril was exactly the kind of thing I was wondering about, as far as FitD and location-restrictions go. Can I ask how you handled it?

Quick tangent: For those who've played Blades in the Dark, I'm curious whether you think the overall Forged in the Dark approach pretty much requires a setting that's similarly bounded or contained? Most FitD games seem to stick to a pretty specific location (even Band of Blades, which allows...

I run a lot of urban fantasy, in part because I like being able to research a real-world city or neighborhood, and use either current or period maps, including blueprints and similar layouts for famous buildings. But for older (real-world) city info and maps I often wind up digging through old...

iirc, when you have to surrender your character for traitorous reasons the GM can also hand you an NPC to play. But also I think we've established that, for whatever reason, you guys were going unreasonably hard with the direct PvP slaughter that early in the adventure. Hard to really account...

I gushed about it in a previous post, but everyone should do themselves the favor of checking out the Monster Overhaul campaign page. It's such a great and utility-focused book. But way better written than that would imply. Also, Apocalypse Keys. Boy howdy. Really, really cool new iteration of...

Handwringing over what is and isn't this or that aside, rappelling into a thread just to say you reject the entire premise of a game because you don't care for its setting is a special kind of threadcrapping. Anyway, congrats, you've derailed things nicely.

Well, you did come into this thread specifically trashing the Alien setting as not SF, and then getting into all manner of no-true-Scotsman discussion of how various other settings are or aren't some version of hard, soft SF, etc., none of which is relevant to the Alien RPG. So maybe don't be...