Joshua Dyal said:
Hmmm... more props for the SFRPG than I expected. In the past, I've generally seen a pretty mixed reaction to the game. What books are out for that, other than the main one, anyway? I don't need tons of setting, obviously -- just rules.
The one I'd recommend is the Players Guide; it has the "build-your-own" Backgrounds of Animal Hybrid, Cyborg and Elemental, which lets you accomodate a wider variety of stuff; it also has an extra style or two (Savate and Ninjitsu, IIRC). Generally its new maneuvers are better than the others; although I'd be careful, as SF didn't get as rigorous playtesting as some of the others beyond the core rules. Contenders has a few new styles (not very balanced), and Secrets of Shadoloo has Muay Thai, Ler Drit and Spanish Ninjitsu among other things.
Mixed reviews for the game are inevitable, but if you're seriously interested in representing the modern-pulp, lotsa-action style of the fighting games, it does that very well. It isn't a game for more sophisticated and subtle genres, but it never claimed to be.
Ethan, I'm curious what adapting for DarkStalkers you'd have to do. Since the Darkstalkers games played so similarly to SF (especially the earlier incarnations of each, before they got all kinds of isms the grooves and whatnot) I wouldn't think too much more than wacky supernatural backgrounds would be required.
Yeah, I was thinking something along the lines of a Darkstalkers Background that would work like the ones in the PG; you can substitute your Darkstalkers dots for Focus and all that, like cyborgs do. Of course, I would see it as the more dots you had, the more inhuman you looked, but the problem with that is that some relatively human-looking guys like Dmitri and Morrigan are pretty powerful Darkstalkers in canon. So there's a wrinkle.
Apart from that, it'd basically be trying to figure out some new maneuvers, and figuring how to link them into a style. You can build Raptor relatively easily with Kabaddi, for instance (extensible limbs, teleporting; check!), and there are easy things like Morrigan using a fireball or Talbain getting a flash kick, but some of the maneuvers are pretty singular (Raptor's rib-impale throw, Rikuo's sonic attack, etc.). Of course, you can build starting-level Darkstalkers with what's in the main book pretty easily, as long as you don't get too ambitious with what they can do.
Rob Hatch (former Vampire developer, Aberrant mastermind) and I kicked around a lot of ways to expand the Darkstalkers universe with even more 'stalkers from around the world — a djinn in Iran, a headless horseman in upstate New York, a banshee in Ireland, etc. It made me really sad that the RPG never did well enough to write a Darkstalkers expansion; I'd have loved to give that a go!
Still, it sounds like there are plenty of other options; I second Jhamin's suggestion that Hero works well for this. It's complicated to learn, but agreeably non-lethal, and the "build anything" design principle really makes any character concept frightfully easy.
Good luck with the game! I wish the local gaming population around here was more accepting of the genre (including my wife); I hope you have better luck than me!
