Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

[Thomas Shey]

I'm feeling more than a bit seen.

 

[Ryujin]

In practice, Agility was stronger than Toughness in the old Torg most of the time anyway, as you were more likely to run into things with heavy punch than high accuracy, so it was one of the few games where avoidance based defense was the more reliable one. I can't speak intelligibly about Eternity as I never got into it.

It took me a while but I eventually clued into "Aggressive Defence" with my Elven Monk. Things got rather interesting after that. The incident I mentioned previously, involving the security guards with SMGs, was before then and was pretty much 7-8 rounds of Full Defence while burning cards and Possibilities.

I have all of the game books for TORG: Eternity, but have never played. I was in for the Kickstarters and their eventual self-releases.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It took me a while but I eventually clued into "Aggressive Defence" with my Elven Monk. Things got rather interesting after that. The incident I mentioned previously, involving the security guards with SMGs, was before then and was pretty much 7-8 rounds of Full Defence while burning cards and Possibilities.

I have all of the game books for TORG: Eternity, but have never played. I was in for the Kickstarters and their eventual self-releases.

Well, that wasn't a small element anyway; Agility effected both offense and defense so over and above the benefit of it to avoid being hit, it was also a significant offense booster. Its not been an uncommon design issue across games, especially of that period that the dexterity equivalent is, if not a god, at least a powerful archon (and one of the reasons its hard to build attributes to a unitary cost in build systems; you're much better off if you don't want to peel of elements of some of them to have attributes have different costs).

 

[Staffan]

I have all of the game books for TORG: Eternity, but have never played. I was in for the Kickstarters and their eventual self-releases.

Same, mostly. We ran two of the adventures from Day One, and then one of my players decided he didn't like how your character could arbitrarily completely change. I tried explaining that it was a special thing with these adventures (where you start playing an Ord but likely will have a Moment of Crisis pretty soon, which sometimes just makes you cooler but in other cases changes you pretty radically if you transform at the same time) but he had already made up his mind.

In retrospect, I think T:E might have overdone the bleakness just a little bit, with both the Cyberpapacy, Pan-Pacifica, and Orrorsh, as well as parts of Tharkold, being really oppressive cosms.

 

[Staffan]

Well, that wasn't a small element anyway; Agility effected both offense and defense so over and above the benefit of it to avoid being hit, it was also a significant offense booster. Its not been an uncommon design issue across games, especially of that period that the dexterity equivalent is, if not a god, at least a powerful archon (and one of the reasons its hard to build attributes to a unitary cost in build systems; you're much better off if you don't want to peel of elements of some of them to have attributes have different costs).

I think Masterbook recognized some of this at least, with TORG's Dexterity being split into Dexterity for precision and Agility for whole-body stuff. At least that's a mild nerf to ranged, as it means they use different defensive and offensive stats.

 

[Ryujin]

Same, mostly. We ran two of the adventures from Day One, and then one of my players decided he didn't like how your character could arbitrarily completely change. I tried explaining that it was a special thing with these adventures (where you start playing an Ord but likely will have a Moment of Crisis pretty soon, which sometimes just makes you cooler but in other cases changes you pretty radically if you transform at the same time) but he had already made up his mind.

In retrospect, I think T:E might have overdone the bleakness just a little bit, with both the Cyberpapacy, Pan-Pacifica, and Orrorsh, as well as parts of Tharkold, being really oppressive cosms.

Interesting that you refer to Tharkold, the realm in which humans are literally enslaved, as having parts of it be bleak

I've never been a fan of Orrorsh. Probably because I like to play my characters for a while rather than having to make one up every time I play, because the previous one died.

I've never played an adventure in which the character has the moment of crisis in TORG. That would have been interesting. My characters were always natives of their home Cosm, rather than being transformed.

 

[Deset Gled]

The discussion is great. But is there a reason it's here instead of in a TORG thread?

 

[Mad_Jack]

TORG always seemed like a really cool idea to me in theory, but I never got into it. Playing cavemen and giant stompy robots in the same party always seemed like a nightmare to balance out...

Meanwhile, out in the real world...

LADY, PUT THE DAMN PHONE DOWN!!!

About an hour ago, this woman pushing a stroller walked right out between two parked cars in the supermarket parking lot and straight into my path without looking up from her phone at all. The two of them are alive solely because I made the correct split-second analysis of the situation and accelerated in order to swerve past them, rather than slamming on the brakes - and screeching to a dead stop ten feet after I'd run them over. I'm damn lucky I managed not to plow into the back of one of the cars in the row.
I was about to go chase her down and have a few heated words with her, but by the time I'd found a parking spot, two random little old grandmother types who'd seen what happened were already loudly tearing a strip off of each side of her for it...

(Okay, breathe, Jack, breathe... in and out...in and out...)

Right. This is me not launching into a 50,000 word rant about the state of humanity these days.

 

[overgeeked]

TORG always seemed like a really cool idea to me in theory, but I never got into it. Playing cavemen and giant stompy robots in the same party always seemed like a nightmare to balance out...

Those kinds of things work a treat in lighter games. Even something as crunchy as Marvel Heroic Roleplaying managed to make Black Widow and Thor roughly on par.

 

[Ryujin]

TORG always seemed like a really cool idea to me in theory, but I never got into it. Playing cavemen and giant stompy robots in the same party always seemed like a nightmare to balance out...

I would say that TORG tends to do the balancing better than Rifts, for example.

Meanwhile, out in the real world...

LADY, PUT THE DAMN PHONE DOWN!!!

About an hour ago, this woman pushing a stroller walked right out between two parked cars in the supermarket parking lot and straight into my path without looking up from her phone at all. The two of them are alive solely because I made the correct split-second analysis of the situation and accelerated in order to swerve past them, rather than slamming on the brakes - and screeching to a dead stop ten feet after I'd run them over. I'm damn lucky I managed not to plow into the back of one of the cars in the row.
I was about to go chase her down and have a few heated words with her, but by the time I'd found a parking spot, two random little old grandmother types who'd seen what happened were already loudly tearing a strip off of each side of her for it...

(Okay, breathe, Jack, breathe... in and out...in and out...)

Right. This is me not launching into a 50,000 word rant about the state of humanity these days.

One of my friends swore that he could commit legal mass murder in downtown Toronto, in broad daylight, just by starting to make a crossing against a light and then pulling his foot back, instead. The lemmings would just walk right out into traffic.