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What is the most complex TTRPG of all time?
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<blockquote data-quote="Tantavalist" data-source="post: 8418365" data-attributes="member: 7030056"><p>There's a lot of mentions of Leading Edge Games products- Pheonix Command and the "Simpler" derivatives like Living Steel and Aliens. But there were more games released than that. I owned a copy of "Bram Stoker's Dracula", the licensed RPG of the 90s movie of the same name. It was a Victorian version of Hunter: the Vigil or Night's Black Agents, only it used the same "Simplified" version of the Pheonix Command rules as Aliens.</p><p></p><p>This worked exactly as well as you might expect. Combat was just as long, drawn out and torturous as in the other LEG games but you then had vampire powers thrown in. How this was handled seemed to boil down to the same process as the other games exactly as if attacking a human- after which you looked at the vampire modifiers and stated "but because this is a vampire your attack does nothing".</p><p></p><p>LEG also produced another licensed RPG based on the movie "The Lawnmower Man". It uses the same system. I haven't owned it so I can't comment on how it played but between my experience with Aliens and Dracula I suspect it's not great. That- and as anyone who remembers the movie must agree, the concept doesn't seem to lend itself well to a long-term RPG campaign.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Back in the 80s/90s there seemed to be a lot of small-press games where people tried to "Fix" RPGs by making them super-realistic, especially when it came to guns. Even when they succeeded the result was generally not worth the effort. Pheonix Command is the most famous and most complex, but I have to mention the BTRC game TimeLords and Fringeworthy by Tri Tac Games as examples of this that I've owned. Both actually had decent campaign concepts that I've run successfully with different systems; and both had most of the rulebook crammed with detailed rules and tables that were physically painful to try and run at the table.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Although... Given we're now on the other side of the millennium, I have to wonder what Pheonix Command and the like would play like if someone just set up an app for a VTT to do all the calculations. Maybe if the maths and tables were automated the realism might start to feel worth it?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Tantavalist, post: 8418365, member: 7030056"] There's a lot of mentions of Leading Edge Games products- Pheonix Command and the "Simpler" derivatives like Living Steel and Aliens. But there were more games released than that. I owned a copy of "Bram Stoker's Dracula", the licensed RPG of the 90s movie of the same name. It was a Victorian version of Hunter: the Vigil or Night's Black Agents, only it used the same "Simplified" version of the Pheonix Command rules as Aliens. This worked exactly as well as you might expect. Combat was just as long, drawn out and torturous as in the other LEG games but you then had vampire powers thrown in. How this was handled seemed to boil down to the same process as the other games exactly as if attacking a human- after which you looked at the vampire modifiers and stated "but because this is a vampire your attack does nothing". LEG also produced another licensed RPG based on the movie "The Lawnmower Man". It uses the same system. I haven't owned it so I can't comment on how it played but between my experience with Aliens and Dracula I suspect it's not great. That- and as anyone who remembers the movie must agree, the concept doesn't seem to lend itself well to a long-term RPG campaign. Back in the 80s/90s there seemed to be a lot of small-press games where people tried to "Fix" RPGs by making them super-realistic, especially when it came to guns. Even when they succeeded the result was generally not worth the effort. Pheonix Command is the most famous and most complex, but I have to mention the BTRC game TimeLords and Fringeworthy by Tri Tac Games as examples of this that I've owned. Both actually had decent campaign concepts that I've run successfully with different systems; and both had most of the rulebook crammed with detailed rules and tables that were physically painful to try and run at the table. Although... Given we're now on the other side of the millennium, I have to wonder what Pheonix Command and the like would play like if someone just set up an app for a VTT to do all the calculations. Maybe if the maths and tables were automated the realism might start to feel worth it? [/QUOTE]
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