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What Game For Stranger Things?

Started by Batjon, June 06, 2022, 01:28:55 AM

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Batjon

I am trying to decide on a game to use for a Stranger Things inspired campaign. 

I have the choices narrowed down to the following:

Dark Places & Demogorgons
Kids On Bikes
Tales From the Loop

Have any of you all tried these? What do you think?


Omega

Call of Cthulhu would do well for it.
WOD: Innocents can as well. Though may be a bit hard to find.
Torg, not nu-torg, might be adaptable. The rules can be a bit esoteric and its long long out of print.
AD&D can with some tweaking. The fear mechanic from AD&D Conan and the old kids in a haunted house rules from early-ish Dragon magazine. There are probably some more in Dungeon.
Though AD&D's Masque of the Red Death could be adapted to modern times with little hassle. 3e's WW version of Masque might work too. But its alot more hassle possibly. Think the 2e set is still on Drive-thru.

Those are a few that come to mind that I am at least familliar with or have DMed. Masque gets my vote for the easiest to pick up and adapt as needed. Innocents would be a runner up suggestion but slogging through the morass of prose and parsing the system can be a pain if you are not familliar with WODs system and style, and sometimes even if you are. CoC though can get the job done pretty easy and if you can not come by Masque, then CoC is a great fallback.

bromides

Tales from the Loop is already set with strange science stories, so you can capitalize on the world as written, along with published scenarios.

For teens rather than younger children, plus a darker tone, Things from the Flood is also quite good.

Battlemaster

Fuck the fascist right and the fascist left.

HappyDaze

Cinematic Unisystem (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) could work with the teens being White Hats level of power and restricted from taking the overtly supernatural qualities (e.g., Slayer, Vampire, Demon, etc.)

Philotomy Jurament

BRP (Chaosium Basic Roleplaying "Gold Book")
The problem is not that power corrupts, but that the corruptible are irresistibly drawn to the pursuit of power. Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito.

bromides

#7
I'd just add that Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood have rules that are age-appropriate to the characters. For instance, Kids may break down in the Loop, but they can't be killed. (Teens in the Flood can break down and die, and it's supposed to be bad that way.) There are rules to encourage the characters to act in age appropriate ways. Kids in the Loop can be healed by seeking comfort from their guardian or parental figure, where Teens in the Flood are supposed to seek out their own clique/group and commiserate.

While this might go without saying, rules that reinforce character and play are usually signs of good design, IMO.

(LOL. Just reading the Wikipedia entry for Tales from the Loop... One reviewer was butthurt because they mention queerness only 1 time in the entire book, and it's in connection with the Weirdo archetype. LOL.)

Rob Necronomicon

I would go with Tales from the Flood before Tales from the Loop as it's a bit darker.

jhkim

Quote from: Batjon on June 06, 2022, 01:28:55 AM
I am trying to decide on a game to use for a Stranger Things inspired campaign. 

I have the choices narrowed down to the following:

Dark Places & Demogorgons
Kids On Bikes
Tales From the Loop

Have any of you all tried these? What do you think?

I've tried Kids on Bikes once at a convention game, and I found the mechanics to be quite bad. I didn't buy it so I don't have a complete review, but I was very disappointed.

I played Tales from the Loop for a short adventure with my home group a few years ago. It was OK, but we didn't feel inspired to continue with it.

I'd chime in with others that other systems might be good. I loved the Cinematic Unisystem (Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG), and it has good mechanics characters at different power levels - i.e. one or two character who like Eleven has major powers, while others are White Hats who have more Drama Points.

Call of Cthulhu was suggested by others - but it's too lethal, in my opinion, if you're trying to emulate the show at all. Also, the insanity mechanics don't seem to apply well, and it doesn't have options for different power levels of characters.

FingerRod

My experience with Tales from the Loop were similar to jhkim's. We played two or three sessions—and it was OK—but it never caught on.

Interestingly enough, if you want to watch an alleged robot rapist GM a game of Tales, a quick YouTube search came up with...




Batjon

What didn't you like about the mechanics for Kids On Bikes?

Quote from: jhkim on June 06, 2022, 04:41:23 PM
Quote from: Batjon on June 06, 2022, 01:28:55 AM
I am trying to decide on a game to use for a Stranger Things inspired campaign. 

I have the choices narrowed down to the following:

Dark Places & Demogorgons
Kids On Bikes
Tales From the Loop

Have any of you all tried these? What do you think?

I've tried Kids on Bikes once at a convention game, and I found the mechanics to be quite bad. I didn't buy it so I don't have a complete review, but I was very disappointed.

I played Tales from the Loop for a short adventure with my home group a few years ago. It was OK, but we didn't feel inspired to continue with it.

I'd chime in with others that other systems might be good. I loved the Cinematic Unisystem (Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG), and it has good mechanics characters at different power levels - i.e. one or two character who like Eleven has major powers, while others are White Hats who have more Drama Points.

Call of Cthulhu was suggested by others - but it's too lethal, in my opinion, if you're trying to emulate the show at all. Also, the insanity mechanics don't seem to apply well, and it doesn't have options for different power levels of characters.

bromides

Kids on Bikes needs a group because of the way the dice & stats are constructed. The dice checks vary greatly... your stats range from d4 to d20 (and you basically get 1 dice for each of the stats, so d4, d6, d8, etc.) Basically, you're forced into tropes/stereotypes in a way that (for example) Tales from the Loop doesn't. With a required d4 in one of your stats, you have no chance to do anything but watch someone else do the action when your stat isn't involved. Some might see that as brilliant, while others might see that as unnecessary.

You're still playing archetypes in Tales from the Loop (like the Jock kid or the Weirdo), but not to that crazy extent where you're sidelined if you have the wrong archetype.

There's also a section on "Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality" in Kids on Bikes, which doesn't need to be in there. There's an element of "coming of age" in Tales from the Loop, but it's very very small given the age range of your characters and not written as an exploration of childhood sex (as Kids of Bikes may imply based on "comfort" of participants at the tabletop). (The element of sex is larger in Things from the Flood because it's teenagers, ranging up to 18 years old, but also not required... although the world of the Flood is darker and has those elements in it (at times), but more about others doing dangerous things (which your players are trying to correct and make the decaying world right again).)

jhkim

Quote from: Batjon on June 06, 2022, 10:44:32 PM
What didn't you like about the mechanics for Kids On Bikes?

I only played one game three years ago, and I didn't buy or read the book - so take this with a grain of salt. Basically, I didn't feel like it emulated well the different archetypes we were trying for. The system didn't seem to do anything other than be in the way. The standard stat array (d4 worst vs d20 best) didn't seem great to me for the kid archetypes where we're all pretty similar - like in Stranger Things where the main characters are all nerdy boys, and the results were highly swingy where sometimes one kids would do nigh-impossible tasks even for an adult, and other times would fail at basic tasks within their specialty.

Here are two reviews that sound like my impression of the game:

QuoteThe rules also seem extremely underdeveloped, the favourite phrase I see through being "whatever the GM decides". This is how you make a skill check, roll against a difficulty. What difficulty? Meh, whatever the GM decides. What can be done with these attributes, whatever the GM decides.

There are no character progression rules.

Combat is extremely light, to the point where there are no rules on health.

It actually even suggests (or heavily implies) railroading the game and taking the story "in a different direction" if two players do not consent to their characters fighting. It reads as if to say that if one character hits another, and that player says no, then it simply does not happen and is not allowed to happen in the game.

Honestly, most of the book reads like what they;re really trying to say is "we don't want to tell you what to do". Ok, fine in heavily cooperative narrative games, but this is presented as being more than that, when its not. It looks like its trying to provide structure, but then backing out before actually giving you that structure.

I would honestly say at times, reading this book, that the developers seemed to have listed off the elements they think a game system needs, readied chapters for them, and then filled those chapters with the phrase "we don't want to tell you what to do".
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/9m4ews/kids_on_bikes_a_short_review/

QuoteThe base mechanic is only simple in principle. The GM chooses a difficulty from a chart, you roll your attribute die, and you compare the difference between those rolls to a second chart to tell you how well you did. Before I have gotten anywhere, keep in mind that we are already at two charts and a subtraction problem for a roll of a single die, and you'll see where my issues start with this game's rules.

The difficulty chart states that difficulties can be anywhere from 1-20, but this is misleading. Rolling anything above a 6 or so will be nearly impossible for most people. Remember, you will have only two stats high enough to even attempt an 11. You have a single d12 and one for d20, so anything high enough will be explicitly impossible for you. Even at a d12 in an attribute, the second highest that an attribute can be, you have only a 50% chance of success on a difficulty for 6. Why are we telling people that difficulties go as high as 20, where someone with a maximum amount of skill has only a 5% chance of success?

Sure, you can get some extra help via age bonuses or Adversity tokens (which you gain by failing rolls), but with many of those numbers it makes no difference, and getting anything done is nearly impossible. Even the fact that dice explode, allowing you to reroll them if they hit their maximum value, doesn't add much help. As you get to higher dice types the chances of exploding diminish, and succeeding at even moderately difficult tasks remains unlikely.

But once you do make that roll, the problems don't stop. You then compare not your roll but the difference in value between your roll and the difficulty, to a chart. This chart has scaled successes and failures, giving you different results based on how well or poorly you performed. Most of these are pointless or impossible because succeeding by certain amounts is only possible if you have a high stat and managing to explode. Whereas something like Dungeon World, which uses a similar idea, has uniform dice distribution, no difficulty chart, and three possible outcomes (succeed, succeed with a cost, and fail), Kids on Bikes adds far too much granularity to the basic types of roll you will make all the time as you play this game. Because of this granularity, you are left with two unenviable choices: use these charts as written, stopping to make a comparison and hoping that you eventually internalize these unintuitive lists, or ignore completely something the game sells as its core mechanic.
Source: https://gamingtrend.com/feature/reviews/ride-by-this-one-kids-on-bikes-review/

Visitor Q

While Call of Cthulhu wouldn't be an awful choice it's worth noting that thematically Stranger Things is quite a bit more forgiving on the lives and sanity of the main characters. Some kind of Fate Point system like in WFRP or Dark Heresy wouldn't go amiss to balance it out.