I was in a Torg game for about three years, ending a year ago.

The world never made any sense to me -- how is any sort of commerce or warfare between zones supposed to happen if a third to a half of normal people vanish when crossing a boundary? How are any of the developed world still not starving to death when the heart and guts have been cut out of the world economy? Nevertheless, I was willing to play along for the social outlet and the sense of adventure.

Unfortunately, the GM had ... failings. (And thus provided the impetus to run my own non-Torg game.) We got into trying to stop or contain the demon realm but kept being sent on red herring side quests ("stop this Nile prince from getting the Widget of Zarathustra"), which turned into dungeoncrawls. And our patrons never gave us any kind of support. And the GM never used any real-world resources -- when we went to Russia, I was the one who looked up a map of Yakutsk and told him where the airbase was.

My character was a patriotic American who just wanted his world back. As far as I could tell, the metaplot was supposed to show America fighting back against the other realities by mastering the superscience itself, but unfortunately, our Seattle-soft-lefty GM had decided that now-President John Ashcroft would use the disaster to turn Amerikkka into a fascist state, so all of America's triumphs were presented as evil. Oh, and the character's home town (Los Angeles) was destroyed.

And even though we were supposed to be a superpowered elite team, we had no effect on the world whatsoever. (The tyranny of the metaplot again, I suppose.) If the game had gone on much longer, my character would have probably become an alcoholic and spent all his time in bed with a bottle of scotch.

Oh, and the (original) system made no sense. Highly-skilled operators still get catastrophic critical failures 5% of the time? I'm sorry, but guns just don't jam that often. And the magic system was way overpowered -- completely unbalanced against the miracles system, not to mention mere guns and skills. On the other hand, the cards were kind of cool.

I can see a bunch of neat setting elements that I could have stolen for a, say, GURPS game, but, wow, I would have modified the hell out of them first.

I dug the setting. The game itself didn't really appeal to me. Well, actually, I did like the cosm rules/axiom levels.

The setting books varied in quality. They weren't well-organized, and the organization of each one was different from the others. The actual content was usually pretty good. Orrorsh had some of the best atmosphere. The Living Land sourcebook was my least favorite, and had some embarrassingly bad art in it. Overall, the sourcebooks could have been better had they

Tharkold was one of my favorite realms. I'd like to have seen more about the Tharkold homeworld. It seemed like a kick-ass setting just on its own.

I thought the metaplot was an interesting concept for its time.

QuoteActually, crocodiles are pretty easy to taunt.

Hmmm.

I want to make a Steve Irwin joke.

'Goddam Approved Action whore - GM got pissed when he tried it on the stingray though!'

Quote from: Abyssal MawThe 'subtle' weakness was something called the glass-ninja effect. You could create a character that was so dextrous, he was almost impossible to hit. However, if he ever did get hit, he would be automatically dead.

Thats a real flaw, right there.

What are you talking about?  That's how I live my life in a nutshell.

!i!

I really liked the Torg system.  I even did a Robotech/Macross II conversion that I really thought worked.  However, my players never could get into the cards and really didn't like it.

I thought the background was goofy.  Maybe it was because of the heavy focus placed on the Living Land.  I thought the Living Land was outright stupid.  The Nile Empire and Ororrsh (or whatever) were close seconds for the worst ones.  Yet, those were the ones that everything seemed to focus on.  I thought the Cyberpapacy was the coolest cosm, but it always seemed to be a mere sidestop on the way to something happening in one of the trinity of boring realms.

Rifts came out around the same time as Torg.  I've always felt that Torg had the system while Rifts had the setting.  Rifts just kind of dumped everything into a pot and stirred vigorously, so you could focus on exactly the bits you liked.  Torg tried to compartmentalize everything and the writers seemed to have a fetish for the stuff which my group just didn't find interesting at all.

There's a Torg 2nd edition coming.  I probably won't be on board for that one.  Had it been d6, I probably would have picked it up.

Torg gave us the Cyberpapacy, and for that shall always be remembered with some fondness.  However, the game quickly became "The Nile Empire Action Hour!" coupled with "Orrorsh Eats Your Soul" with a side order of "Terminator vs. Alien" (Tharkold).  The Living Land had so much hate that it got kicked within a year or so, Nippon never fared well, and Aysle lived up to its name- more or less.  Then the demirealms got into the game, and things went stupid from there.