Stargate Rpg
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trancejeremy
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Well, I did write an incredibly long review of it here (50% longer than my much maligned review of it on RPG.net).
http://www.enworld.org/reviews/index.php?sub=yes&where=active&reviewer=trancejeremy&product=SSRGCR
Basically, though, it's good, but surprisingly incomplete for it's size. I've shelved running it for now, but will probably pick it up again when I get some various Spycraft books (most notably the gun book for the many, many guns from the show that aren't in the book) and when the first couple season books are out. And the system lords book.
Part of the problem I had was trying to come up with a theme/plot for a campaign. Not being an expert on the show, I didn't want to come up with a system lord to fight that had already been covered (or will be covered).
http://www.enworld.org/reviews/index.php?sub=yes&where=active&reviewer=trancejeremy&product=SSRGCR
Basically, though, it's good, but surprisingly incomplete for it's size. I've shelved running it for now, but will probably pick it up again when I get some various Spycraft books (most notably the gun book for the many, many guns from the show that aren't in the book) and when the first couple season books are out. And the system lords book.
Part of the problem I had was trying to come up with a theme/plot for a campaign. Not being an expert on the show, I didn't want to come up with a system lord to fight that had already been covered (or will be covered).
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Short Version: While it does have flaws, the book is well worth its price and will serve a GM wanting to run a stargate game well from both a rules perspective and a genre setting perspective.
Longer Version
PRO's
1. Rules wise, this is one of the better iterations of the d20 system. Significant imporvements in terms of actions, feats and skills as well as a wonderful initiative addition stand out. The classes are good and the chargen fairly well developed. Its almost worth the price of the book, this cleaner d20, in itself.
2. Setting background is fabulous. Mostly non-rules yet it takes up about a third of the book. Very informative and useful as both reference and inspiration. Again, alone almost worth the price.
While i list these in brief, these two are big IMO. So, dont let the fact that I spend more bandwidth explaining the cons to give you reasons to believe the cons outweigh the pros.
CONs
1. While the non-mechanics Sg stuff is well done and researched, the mechanics were not. One of the mechanics lead guys admitted he had not seen most of the episodes "by a long shot" and it shows. The initial "in the book" write up of the alien stuff seems more designed to fit a generic scifi "alien stuff is real powerful" thing than to emulate the show. The staff weapons and goa'uld defense shields just did not match the clear evidence in the show. other items such as jaffa armor and naquidah generators were just missing. Some of this is being handled in pre-errata (staff weapon and pdf being almost totally changed) and will be corrected in full in their System lord nook (and in theory posted in an official PDF but that has yet to be seen.)
2. The overall feel and sense of the book is one of a hard-military scifi game. it feels a whole lot more like say a hammer's slammers game or maybe a sgt rock on other planets. There is a lot of very precise rules for gear and equipment and it definitely seems to show its roots in the guns and war crowd. If thats your cup-o-tea, then it will be great. For me, thats not how i see the show, so I need to cut away some of their precision edges.
3. In a couple of cases, they make rather uninspired or just plain silly rules decisions. Uninspired... they use hit points, called wounds and vitality with quite a bit of vaugery about what is a hit and what is a miss and they use an old "standard" autofire mechanic which IMO has only "thats how most games have done it" to go for it. (It definitely doesn't seem to be going to emulate how autofire is portrayed in this show.) Silly... well for all their precision on gear and encumbrance which tells you to track the weight for your jar of face paint and bottle of water purification tablets (listed at 1/2 lb each if i recall on their extensive equipment tables) they also acknowledge as intentional "conceit of the system" they carry over from spycraft. Specifically, ammo has no weight!!! Thats right, campers, if you spend your three gear picks on a jar of face paint, a bottle of water purifying tablets and an assault sling for your P90 (as opposed to a standard sling) you must track that extra weight for encumbrance purposes. However, if you decide to spend those three gear picks on 300 rounds of extra ammo (six clips worth.... tripling your standard ammo loadout) then this extra ammo is no weight at all.
4. A pet peeve of mine is that the book did not include a sample startup scenario. I think such are vital for a game book core book to include because they give newcomers an immediate jumping off point to get an idea about actually playing the game. While it is becoming common for games to no longer include these, its a thing i think needs to be there. Their extensive combat example I think is intended to cover some of this but it is frought with errors.
The "problems" are easy to fix (Well swapping out hit points takes a bit of effort) and relative to the good stuff are not that serious.
As a final summary, i am using their book for my game, with my own house rules to plug the problems, so that should give you a rough notion of my overall feel. it is worth it.
Longer Version
PRO's
1. Rules wise, this is one of the better iterations of the d20 system. Significant imporvements in terms of actions, feats and skills as well as a wonderful initiative addition stand out. The classes are good and the chargen fairly well developed. Its almost worth the price of the book, this cleaner d20, in itself.
2. Setting background is fabulous. Mostly non-rules yet it takes up about a third of the book. Very informative and useful as both reference and inspiration. Again, alone almost worth the price.
While i list these in brief, these two are big IMO. So, dont let the fact that I spend more bandwidth explaining the cons to give you reasons to believe the cons outweigh the pros.
CONs
1. While the non-mechanics Sg stuff is well done and researched, the mechanics were not. One of the mechanics lead guys admitted he had not seen most of the episodes "by a long shot" and it shows. The initial "in the book" write up of the alien stuff seems more designed to fit a generic scifi "alien stuff is real powerful" thing than to emulate the show. The staff weapons and goa'uld defense shields just did not match the clear evidence in the show. other items such as jaffa armor and naquidah generators were just missing. Some of this is being handled in pre-errata (staff weapon and pdf being almost totally changed) and will be corrected in full in their System lord nook (and in theory posted in an official PDF but that has yet to be seen.)
2. The overall feel and sense of the book is one of a hard-military scifi game. it feels a whole lot more like say a hammer's slammers game or maybe a sgt rock on other planets. There is a lot of very precise rules for gear and equipment and it definitely seems to show its roots in the guns and war crowd. If thats your cup-o-tea, then it will be great. For me, thats not how i see the show, so I need to cut away some of their precision edges.
3. In a couple of cases, they make rather uninspired or just plain silly rules decisions. Uninspired... they use hit points, called wounds and vitality with quite a bit of vaugery about what is a hit and what is a miss and they use an old "standard" autofire mechanic which IMO has only "thats how most games have done it" to go for it. (It definitely doesn't seem to be going to emulate how autofire is portrayed in this show.) Silly... well for all their precision on gear and encumbrance which tells you to track the weight for your jar of face paint and bottle of water purification tablets (listed at 1/2 lb each if i recall on their extensive equipment tables) they also acknowledge as intentional "conceit of the system" they carry over from spycraft. Specifically, ammo has no weight!!! Thats right, campers, if you spend your three gear picks on a jar of face paint, a bottle of water purifying tablets and an assault sling for your P90 (as opposed to a standard sling) you must track that extra weight for encumbrance purposes. However, if you decide to spend those three gear picks on 300 rounds of extra ammo (six clips worth.... tripling your standard ammo loadout) then this extra ammo is no weight at all.
4. A pet peeve of mine is that the book did not include a sample startup scenario. I think such are vital for a game book core book to include because they give newcomers an immediate jumping off point to get an idea about actually playing the game. While it is becoming common for games to no longer include these, its a thing i think needs to be there. Their extensive combat example I think is intended to cover some of this but it is frought with errors.
The "problems" are easy to fix (Well swapping out hit points takes a bit of effort) and relative to the good stuff are not that serious.
As a final summary, i am using their book for my game, with my own house rules to plug the problems, so that should give you a rough notion of my overall feel. it is worth it.
swrushing said:
First thing to keep in mind, is that the mechanical system is not "new." It is the same system that AEG made for Spycraft. So a lot of these issues stem from design decisions made a while ago.
HP v VP/W : The AEG system is heroic "cinematic" foritude with some risk of "One shot kills." It is a little more "realistic" then a strict HP system, but that is an argument in itself.
autofire : I am not sure what exactly you are concerned about. I think they are fine. But then I like the "standard autofire rules that all other games use."
equipment : Every system wonks out encumberence. Usualy its best to ignore it, until someone wants to carry a water buffalo in their kit.
None of these are real game breakers, and with the d20 plug-and-play system, it is easy enough to tune how you want your system.
If you are a fan of the show, the non-mechanical information is worth the price of admission. AEG does a very nice job on its licensed products for setting info.
-The Luddite
[/QUOTE]
By the book, using autofire, the player/character decides before shooting to hose down the jaffa (Think daniel in the corridor in the mothership at end of season one when a jaffa turns the corner)... he picks ahead of time how many rounds TO THE ROUND he will expend in this shot. Then he rolls and no matter what happens he stops shooting at precisely that numnber of rounds. So, if after those rounds the jaffa is still standing there, even if he still has bullets left, he just stops shooting. Is this because daniel feels like he should give the jaffa a chance?
Their view is "pick your bullets before hand then roll and see what happens and hope you roll really really well and get multiple hits.
The way autofire hosing him down is represented in the show is that daniel points the gun (its hard to use the word aim for early daniel gunplay) and holds down the trigger watching the bullets bounce all around and off the jaffa and HE KEEPS DOING THIS until either the gun goes empty of the jaffa goes down. There is NO bullet counting. There is no BY CHOICE stopping before the jaffa goes down to give him a chance.
The system I use has the character mark off batches of bullets then roll a result and then keep marking off batches bullets and applying more results until he either runs out or chooses to stop with a random roll to adjust the shots fired (which helps to keep autofire very bullet inefficient.)
This puts the PLAYER decisions and the input he uses to make those decisions ("do i keep firing is judged by whether the guy is still up NOW, not how many bullets i hoped it would take before i started firing") are the same decisions and inputs the CHARACTER has.
Of course, maybe some people think the injured daniel started shooting by thinking "i will fire only 15 bullets and then stop...1..2..3..4..5..." and so would find that an appropriate model.
Edit: Also their autofire combines multiples hits into single damage batches. This means that you get better penetration... 5 hits does 5d10+5 for instance and youn apply armor against that. My system deals the damage in individual increments, so getting 10 P90 rounds to hit the goa'uld defense shield will simply earn you 10 bounces, not a single 10d10+10 applied vs a 40 DR and likely penetration for damage.
Finally, the designers have made posts about how running out of ammo is a significant thing, even commenting that, for instance, making staff weapons not use clips and having unlimited shots would be a gross advantage. From these it would seem inconsistent and illogical and even down right silly to exclude ammo from one of the primary equipment limiting aspects... weight and encumbrance. With ammo being easy to req, 100 rounds per gear pic, a four man team could choose easily to walk in with well over 1000 extra rounds of ammo... all carried at no weight.
Of course, the could have put a lot less emphasis on gear and weights. If they did not weight out everything from pills to flares to weapon slings and used a more abstract system, the ammo thing would not seem as silly.
I only have stargate to go on and so far I would say interms of giving you good references, you are right. I find their "mechanics" of the setting tho (how well do their setting specific rules mesh with the setting) to be very much lacking. It feels like, as you stated above, they stuck too closely to their Spycraft roots and it works very much like making the setting RULES work into the spycraft system than making the spycraft system rules work into the setting.
It did not take me more than a half hour to redo the zat, staff weapon, and karakesh to match the show tho.
I agree this is a root cause, it brings in the whole military scifi feel. That does not however make me dislike the decisions less.Luddite said:
Yup. TO me hit points, or wounds vitality as they call it, don't do guns well. It certainly doesn't seem to do the show well much at all.Luddite said:
My autofire concern is simple, it doesn't work the way autofire does in the show. It presents a completely different set of decisions and timing to the player.Luddite said:
By the book, using autofire, the player/character decides before shooting to hose down the jaffa (Think daniel in the corridor in the mothership at end of season one when a jaffa turns the corner)... he picks ahead of time how many rounds TO THE ROUND he will expend in this shot. Then he rolls and no matter what happens he stops shooting at precisely that numnber of rounds. So, if after those rounds the jaffa is still standing there, even if he still has bullets left, he just stops shooting. Is this because daniel feels like he should give the jaffa a chance?
Their view is "pick your bullets before hand then roll and see what happens and hope you roll really really well and get multiple hits.
The way autofire hosing him down is represented in the show is that daniel points the gun (its hard to use the word aim for early daniel gunplay) and holds down the trigger watching the bullets bounce all around and off the jaffa and HE KEEPS DOING THIS until either the gun goes empty of the jaffa goes down. There is NO bullet counting. There is no BY CHOICE stopping before the jaffa goes down to give him a chance.
The system I use has the character mark off batches of bullets then roll a result and then keep marking off batches bullets and applying more results until he either runs out or chooses to stop with a random roll to adjust the shots fired (which helps to keep autofire very bullet inefficient.)
This puts the PLAYER decisions and the input he uses to make those decisions ("do i keep firing is judged by whether the guy is still up NOW, not how many bullets i hoped it would take before i started firing") are the same decisions and inputs the CHARACTER has.
Of course, maybe some people think the injured daniel started shooting by thinking "i will fire only 15 bullets and then stop...1..2..3..4..5..." and so would find that an appropriate model.
Edit: Also their autofire combines multiples hits into single damage batches. This means that you get better penetration... 5 hits does 5d10+5 for instance and youn apply armor against that. My system deals the damage in individual increments, so getting 10 P90 rounds to hit the goa'uld defense shield will simply earn you 10 bounces, not a single 10d10+10 applied vs a 40 DR and likely penetration for damage.
Well, actually in this system it seems important. First off, from the characters i have generated, the standard sg bundle and even routine gear will push then into medium encumbered. Second, when their system goes to the point of making 1/2 bottles of pills worth including, one would also think that ammo weight, which is much more, would be too.Luddite said:
Finally, the designers have made posts about how running out of ammo is a significant thing, even commenting that, for instance, making staff weapons not use clips and having unlimited shots would be a gross advantage. From these it would seem inconsistent and illogical and even down right silly to exclude ammo from one of the primary equipment limiting aspects... weight and encumbrance. With ammo being easy to req, 100 rounds per gear pic, a four man team could choose easily to walk in with well over 1000 extra rounds of ammo... all carried at no weight.
Of course, the could have put a lot less emphasis on gear and weights. If they did not weight out everything from pills to flares to weapon slings and used a more abstract system, the ammo thing would not seem as silly.
Exactly as i said it. The pros outweigh the cons, even though the cons take a little more space to describe.Luddite said:
Luddite said:
I only have stargate to go on and so far I would say interms of giving you good references, you are right. I find their "mechanics" of the setting tho (how well do their setting specific rules mesh with the setting) to be very much lacking. It feels like, as you stated above, they stuck too closely to their Spycraft roots and it works very much like making the setting RULES work into the spycraft system than making the spycraft system rules work into the setting.
It did not take me more than a half hour to redo the zat, staff weapon, and karakesh to match the show tho.
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Having played it several sessions I can tell you that it is fine system and does catch the general feel of the show.
Since the previous post have covered most of the pros and cons I will give you my groups impressions after playing around 40 hours and three combats. The skill system is well done, but if you are not use to Spycraft watch for all of the seningy bonus. The lanuage skill system takes a lot to get use to.
The combat has more range options but fewer melee as you would expect.
As for as the W/V system, it is the same one from Starwars game and with the action dice system is great. Wounds accure when a threat is roled and an action dice is spent to activate a critical. Then you do damage normaly except that the damage goes to your wounds, by passing the vilality points.
The background system as flavor and varity to the game while giving both the player and GC a tool to develope long term background plots.
Since the previous post have covered most of the pros and cons I will give you my groups impressions after playing around 40 hours and three combats. The skill system is well done, but if you are not use to Spycraft watch for all of the seningy bonus. The lanuage skill system takes a lot to get use to.
The combat has more range options but fewer melee as you would expect.
As for as the W/V system, it is the same one from Starwars game and with the action dice system is great. Wounds accure when a threat is roled and an action dice is spent to activate a critical. Then you do damage normaly except that the damage goes to your wounds, by passing the vilality points.
The background system as flavor and varity to the game while giving both the player and GC a tool to develope long term background plots.
I am currently basing my information on my read of Spycraft a while a go, so I am most likely off. I thought there was some type of "Spray and Pray" method of auto fire in the AEG system.
I have seen the errata versions of the Ga'ould weapons and those looked okay. I don't have my SG-1 book yet to see what the orginals were.
-The Luddite
I have seen the errata versions of the Ga'ould weapons and those looked okay. I don't have my SG-1 book yet to see what the orginals were.
-The Luddite
Mistwell
Crusty Old Meatwad
I have three copies of these books on their way (which cost a BOATLOAD), and I have to say this is the game I am most dreading.
Not because the books will not be good...I have every faith they will be fantastic, and I think AEG always puts a lot of care and attention into their books.
No, I am scared because I will be GM'ing this shipwreck (and I have only GMed D&D, and that only maybe a dozen times total), and almost all my players know the Stargate universe far better than me (to a fanatical degree), and all the players except one have NEVER PLAYED AN RPG IN THEIR LIFE (and the one played it only when he was in high school, over 15 years ago). Half of the players are women, who also insist the game be heavy on RP. The other half will undoubtedly insist on lots of combat.
I'm doomed. Doomed I tell you!
And the fact that this book will not have a sample adventure is just killing me. I need a module. I don't just want a module...this is beyond mere desire...I NEED A FRIGGEN MODULE. I am not experienced enough to run this without one. I do not know the universe enough to run this without one. And I do not have the time to fix those two issues.
Doomed.
Not because the books will not be good...I have every faith they will be fantastic, and I think AEG always puts a lot of care and attention into their books.
No, I am scared because I will be GM'ing this shipwreck (and I have only GMed D&D, and that only maybe a dozen times total), and almost all my players know the Stargate universe far better than me (to a fanatical degree), and all the players except one have NEVER PLAYED AN RPG IN THEIR LIFE (and the one played it only when he was in high school, over 15 years ago). Half of the players are women, who also insist the game be heavy on RP. The other half will undoubtedly insist on lots of combat.
I'm doomed. Doomed I tell you!
And the fact that this book will not have a sample adventure is just killing me. I need a module. I don't just want a module...this is beyond mere desire...I NEED A FRIGGEN MODULE. I am not experienced enough to run this without one. I do not know the universe enough to run this without one. And I do not have the time to fix those two issues.
Doomed.
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Luddite said:
Autofire, the hosing down of one target, i stargate official works like this. before shooting the character chooses the number of three round bursts he will fire. he takes a PENALTY to hit per burst... iirc -1 per burst. yes, this means he is less likely to hit the target than if he fires a burst or a single shot, period.
Then he rolls to hit. If he gets a hit thats great. For every 4 more he makes the to-hit roll by, he gets another hit up toi the number of bursts fired. So, on a really good roll, he can get multiple hits... all he needs to do is roll well enough to get over the -1 or so per burst and then 4 more.
The hits are rolled together, increasing their total damage... their example treats three P90 hits SPECIFICALLY as 3d10+3 and not three 1d10+1 hits. (This brings up the penetration issue.)
They also have rules for hosing down an area, getting a potential one hit on each of several adjacent targets and of course cover fire and such. Those seem to work fine.
Anyway, i have seen there autofire in many other games with various flavors, HERo comes to mind as thats how they handled autofire for what, nearly 20 years for superheros. Like i said, its tried and true, just not particularly reflective of the show's depictions... i just dont see daniel counting bullets when he hosed down that jaffa.
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