Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 30, 2022, 05:05:26 PM
I'm an evangelist for the obscure Feed rpg written by a lapsed VtM player funded through kickstarter back in 2013.

Feed dispenses with all the stupid shit and says "hey, you don't have to play in somebody else's sandbox. You can make your own settings. Here's some tools to help you with that." The rules seem to be pretty standard 2010s rules lite dice pool whatever, and it fully expects groups to wing it most of the time to the point where it includes detailed guidelines for ignoring the rules. The toolkit parts are nowhere as extensive as Night's Black Agents (which I also adore), but it was written by one guy as an experiment on kickstarter and he hasn't provided further support so...

Not that I've ever had any success with the evangelism bit. It doesn't have any community that I'm aware of since the author doesn't promote it because real life, and it's impossible to convince people to try it since D&D sucks up most gamers anyhow and the WoD fans are too fanatical. I've encountered at most like two other WoD apostates who have displayed any interest in the game. Pity.

Heard good things about Feed but never had a group to try it myself. It reminds me of Undying a bit, in the sense it's an attempt to do Vampire with less clutter and more substance, if that makes sense.

Quote from: Itachi on January 31, 2022, 10:36:24 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 30, 2022, 05:05:26 PM
I'm an evangelist for the obscure Feed rpg written by a lapsed VtM player funded through kickstarter back in 2013.

Feed dispenses with all the stupid shit and says "hey, you don't have to play in somebody else's sandbox. You can make your own settings. Here's some tools to help you with that." The rules seem to be pretty standard 2010s rules lite dice pool whatever, and it fully expects groups to wing it most of the time to the point where it includes detailed guidelines for ignoring the rules. The toolkit parts are nowhere as extensive as Night's Black Agents (which I also adore), but it was written by one guy as an experiment on kickstarter and he hasn't provided further support so...

Not that I've ever had any success with the evangelism bit. It doesn't have any community that I'm aware of since the author doesn't promote it because real life, and it's impossible to convince people to try it since D&D sucks up most gamers anyhow and the WoD fans are too fanatical. I've encountered at most like two other WoD apostates who have displayed any interest in the game. Pity.

Heard good things about Feed but never had a group to try it myself. It reminds me of Undying a bit, in the sense it's an attempt to do Vampire with less clutter and more substance, if that makes sense.

Yeah. Very abstracted rules lite systems intended to carry the themes without worrying about the nitty gritty. These are pretty common since the 2010s at least.

The two are similar in that sense, altho they have different intentions. Undying focuses on being a monstrous schemer, whereas Feed focuses on the schism between the vampire's competing natures. I prefer Feed because it's designed to be flexible and let groups invent their own settings with their own themes.

As someone who fell out of love with WoD, I find Feed especially appealing because it solves a number of longstanding issues I've had with WoD. Namely that clunky transhumanism bugbear: in WoD you can maintain both high humanity and a laundry list of superpowers; the "paths of whatever I was gonna do anyway" especially exemplify this. In Feed, the rules are abstractly structured so that as the character becomes more vampiric they literally replace human traits with vampiric ones. The character develops superpowers and connections that are statistically better than human traits, but at the cost of becoming steadily unable function like a normal person and becoming steadily less able to resist vampiric instincts when they come up. The process is unrelated to any kind of moral framework: you lose human traits by "alienating" them and then replace them with vampiric ones. E.g. you ruin your relationship with your girlfriend by pursuing your hunger, then you replace that connection with a vampiric one.

The sample settings are great too. One of them, "Dance Macabre", focuses on how vampirism sucks by designing its strain to be more of a curse than a blessing: their vampiric traits aren't blatantly supernatural and they don't even have fangs to help them feed. Another, "Los Satanicos," lets you play as stereotypical evil b-movie vampires and human traits are valued only as a cover to conceal your activities from the muggles. It's easy to create your own settings, or adapt other works of fiction. I've done a few conversions on my blog.

It's also released under a creative commons license, though I'm not aware of any third party supplements. I'm currently working on a hack designed to represent werewolves in a somewhat similar fashion, but with an emphasis on (hopefully) balancing the dual natures to better reflect the (admittedly sparse) tropes of werewolf fiction. You could represent Nightlife-style pain-eating werewolves in Feed, but that would be a variation of vampirism rather than an exploration of lycanthropy as a separate concept. I eventually want to do the same for other kinds of monsters like wizards, ghosts, fairies, and frankensteins.

I appreciate all the Savage Worlds mentions on the first few pages; I think it's a flawed system. Even in the new version, the Shaken rules are basically unfun as written, and that the raise mechanic artificially cuts things off at +1d6. I also disagree that it's truly generic; it's an action-adventure system at heart, with the Indiana Jones theme practically baked into die explosions, and to get it to do other things you have to over-compensate. However, these are admittedly the attitudes of a perennial nitpick with over 300 sessions in the system. It generally does D20-like gameplay better than most D20 systems do; the step dice downshift the arithmetic, so you have most rolls fall in the comfortable single digit arithmetic range, with a few critical hits which are obviously worth the extra effort going beyond that.

It's also one of the few systems I have ever played which lets you memorize most of character creation. I have played multiple campaigns where we used raw memory and only consulted the Wiki for Edges and Hindrances, and the GM provided a list of equipment. The ability to play a kinda crunchy game almost completely off-book is a massively underrated feature. SW is the system which fits what 95% of groups want 95% of the time if you can get over how much PEG relies on Bennies to cover for the occasional bad design decision or math hiccup.

On GURPS: my only experience with it is when I was in highschool I tried to use it to make a Final Fantasy VIII conversion. It did not go well; junctioning broke or ground down practically every system I tried, and I think fully custom is the only real way to go.

I never see anyone actually using GURPS, anymore. I think GURPS is a lesson that RPGs can, in fact, become obsolete. Ultimately, the newest version of GURPS predates smartphones, so it has zero design allowances for how much smartphones can drain player attention spans. I do notice that 5E's release corresponded in time with when I stopped seeing GURPS in the wild, but I think it was functionally obsolete before then. 5E pushed it off the table, and the fact it's obsolete prevented it from ever coming back.

Other systems I think need more discussion:

Feng Shui. This is more from the aesthetic presentation of the rules than anything else. The mechanics are unique, but time consuming for my tastes; 2d6 with Boxcar rules actually produces a lot of explosions and arithmetic, so I don't think this system has aged gracefully into the post-Smartphone universe. But describing the shot clock as camera shots adds a significant amount to the experience.

Cortex. I have only gotten two chances to play Cortex, so take this opinion with a pinch of flaky salt. I love the pool mechanic and think it has the best potential power-to-weight of any RPG currently on the market. The only thing which is remotely close is Genesys, and it's not really fair to compare a custom dice system with a standard polyhedral one. The key word in that is "potential." I don't think either of these games capitalize on all this potential, but Cortex especially suffers from missed potential because of it's narrative gameplay style. I think the reliance on plot points--which is part of the core mechanic--bakes a certain metagaminess into the game something akin to Savage Worlds' problem with over-reliance on Bennies. If the mechanic were altered to be crunchy and less reliant on plot points, I think we'd have something truly special, but as is, we have a near miss.

Quote from: Fheredin on January 31, 2022, 11:18:44 AM
I appreciate all the Savage Worlds mentions on the first few pages; I think it's a flawed system. Even in the new version, the Shaken rules are basically unfun as written, and that the raise mechanic artificially cuts things off at +1d6. I also disagree that it's truly generic; it's an action-adventure system at heart, with the Indiana Jones theme practically baked into die explosions, and to get it to do other things you have to over-compensate. However, these are admittedly the attitudes of a perennial nitpick with over 300 sessions in the system. It generally does D20-like gameplay better than most D20 systems do; the step dice downshift the arithmetic, so you have most rolls fall in the comfortable single digit arithmetic range, with a few critical hits which are obviously worth the extra effort going beyond that.

It's also one of the few systems I have ever played which lets you memorize most of character creation. I have played multiple campaigns where we used raw memory and only consulted the Wiki for Edges and Hindrances, and the GM provided a list of equipment. The ability to play a kinda crunchy game almost completely off-book is a massively underrated feature. SW is the system which fits what 95% of groups want 95% of the time if you can get over how much PEG relies on Bennies to cover for the occasional bad design decision or math hiccup.

I would not argue with you on any of this. Any level of real disagreement properly falls into the "personal taste" zone that is probably less than a hair's width. I'm sure we both would agree that any actual disagreement about the system could be houseruled with zero effort.

Quote from: Fheredin on January 31, 2022, 11:18:44 AMOn GURPS: my only experience with it is when I was in highschool I tried to use it to make a Final Fantasy VIII conversion. It did not go well; junctioning broke or ground down practically every system I tried, and I think fully custom is the only real way to go.

I never see anyone actually using GURPS, anymore. I think GURPS is a lesson that RPGs can, in fact, become obsolete. Ultimately, the newest version of GURPS predates smartphones, so it has zero design allowances for how much smartphones can drain player attention spans. I do notice that 5E's release corresponded in time with when I stopped seeing GURPS in the wild, but I think it was functionally obsolete before then. 5E pushed it off the table, and the fact it's obsolete prevented it from ever coming back.

Yeah I suspect it would take a real GURPS evangelist to bring GURPS back to the gaming consciousness it once "enjoyed". I think SJG has other business priorities, and the fact is, as it was then, D&D rules the roost.

Quote from: Fheredin on January 31, 2022, 11:18:44 AMOther systems I think need more discussion:

Feng Shui. This is more from the aesthetic presentation of the rules than anything else. The mechanics are unique, but time consuming for my tastes; 2d6 with Boxcar rules actually produces a lot of explosions and arithmetic, so I don't think this system has aged gracefully into the post-Smartphone universe. But describing the shot clock as camera shots adds a significant amount to the experience.

Cortex. I have only gotten two chances to play Cortex, so take this opinion with a pinch of flaky salt. I love the pool mechanic and think it has the best potential power-to-weight of any RPG currently on the market. The only thing which is remotely close is Genesys, and it's not really fair to compare a custom dice system with a standard polyhedral one. The key word in that is "potential." I don't think either of these games capitalize on all this potential, but Cortex especially suffers from missed potential because of it's narrative gameplay style. I think the reliance on plot points--which is part of the core mechanic--bakes a certain metagaminess into the game something akin to Savage Worlds' problem with over-reliance on Bennies. If the mechanic were altered to be crunchy and less reliant on plot points, I think we'd have something truly special, but as is, we have a near miss.

Feng Shui is a system everyone ranted about in the 90's and 00's, but I never knew a single person that played it. There were always recommendations on forums for it - no one really advocated for it much.

Cortex... I gave it a shot, I can't recall the exact mechanics of how it worked, I just remember going through this phase of looking for a new system and I ran through FATE, Fudge, Cortex all around the same time. None of them stuck at all. Oddly I played in Deadlands, and Savage Worlds conquered my gaming table with vengeance.

Quote from: tenbones on January 31, 2022, 02:53:43 PM

Quote from: Fheredin on January 31, 2022, 11:18:44 AMOther systems I think need more discussion:

Feng Shui. This is more from the aesthetic presentation of the rules than anything else. The mechanics are unique, but time consuming for my tastes; 2d6 with Boxcar rules actually produces a lot of explosions and arithmetic, so I don't think this system has aged gracefully into the post-Smartphone universe. But describing the shot clock as camera shots adds a significant amount to the experience.

Cortex. I have only gotten two chances to play Cortex, so take this opinion with a pinch of flaky salt. I love the pool mechanic and think it has the best potential power-to-weight of any RPG currently on the market. The only thing which is remotely close is Genesys, and it's not really fair to compare a custom dice system with a standard polyhedral one. The key word in that is "potential." I don't think either of these games capitalize on all this potential, but Cortex especially suffers from missed potential because of it's narrative gameplay style. I think the reliance on plot points--which is part of the core mechanic--bakes a certain metagaminess into the game something akin to Savage Worlds' problem with over-reliance on Bennies. If the mechanic were altered to be crunchy and less reliant on plot points, I think we'd have something truly special, but as is, we have a near miss.

Feng Shui is a system everyone ranted about in the 90's and 00's, but I never knew a single person that played it. There were always recommendations on forums for it - no one really advocated for it much.

Cortex... I gave it a shot, I can't recall the exact mechanics of how it worked, I just remember going through this phase of looking for a new system and I ran through FATE, Fudge, Cortex all around the same time. None of them stuck at all. Oddly I played in Deadlands, and Savage Worlds conquered my gaming table with vengeance.

Bear in mind that these days I've migrated almost entirely to homebrewing material, so I don't necessarily judge systems for raw quality, so much as parts I can steal. This isn't exactly an actual play opinion that you should go play something so much as a source for inspiration.

I can totally see Savage Worlds wrecking most other systems in an actual play head-to-head matchup. It's a fast and optimized modern system which very few systems can keep up with. In fact, looking back on my commentary on GURPS, it probably makes just as much sense to say Savage Worlds ate GURPS's marketshare. To perform well in the matchup, a system needs to be decently fast and optimized...and have a beast of a killer feature.

However, I should explain my relationship to both SW and Cortex.

Cortex (Prime) works by having a poll of 3 (or 4) dice representing stats in a roll. When you roll, you add your 2 best dice. If any of the dice roll a 1, you get a Spoiler and the GM can give you a Plot Point in exchange for creating a complication. Later on, you can spend the plot point to add a die to another roll, or add all 3 dice together. I like how this system is loose. It does everything it can to make roleplaying your character and min-maxing a roll indistinguishable, and gives you a lot more space for nuance than "roll X dice when using Y skill." There's some space for customization and freedom when setting up a roll, which is actually very unusual.

I dislike it's dependency on complications and plot points.

I was toying with Savage Worlds some years ago, and started using the Wild Die to reflect second skills involved in the roll instead of doing two separate rolls. When I found Cortex, I realized that it was the system I was building, and that the way to improve Cortex would be to flip it upside down and count successes rather than sum dice instead of relying on plot points to produce a sum. 

I get that.

I've got about two entirely different homebrewed systems in various stages of completion I'm always tinkering with but I never feel they're ready for prime-time.

As much as I love Savage Worlds, I look at it as a singular channel of ideas, I like it's abstract concepts, not necessarily its task-resolution systems. I mean it uses playing cards and poker-chips for God's sake. While yes, I totally unabashedly use them, I look at them like I look at FFG's funky dice in their Star Wars games - I keep them there, and use them nowhere else.

But! The abstractions of Savage Worlds sing to me. HOW they use their derived stats, HOW they use scaling success, HOW they are able to scale the assumption of Power to CRAZY levels while keeping the numbers low and playable without breaking the flow of the game is truly remarkable.

And it's caused me to reflect deeply on my own homebrews. What I don't need are the mechanics, I don't *want* Bennies, Fate dice or flippity-floppity Dice to be rolled for the sake of rolling more dice. Used to smooth out probability curves? Fine. But I don't need or want gimmicks in my own designs.

I've been eyeballing importing those concepts into a Talislanta like system (which is not to far from standard Talislanta) as a universal system. The issue is scaling. But I may have solved that.

Another longterm project has been trying to rehab MSH. That is a little trickier - but it has some glorious mechanics that you see echoed in 2e Gamma World with it's Column Shift percentile mechanics that make for BLISTERING powerful scaling mechanics. Sticking the landing of the design is the issue.

USR (U)nbelievably (S)imple (R)oleplaying
Created by Scott Malthouse. He has written for Tunnels & Trolls and this original creation, this generic, rules-lite system has surprising granularity withing the simple set up.

Hey. I love GURPS 4e!! I'm currently running a bi-weekly game. :-D

I also dig Savage Worlds, but trying to make a high-powered urban fantasy port from an IP has proved... difficult. I feel like a little more granularity would help, but it's a nitpick. Overall, it's fun to GM and with those Fantasy Add-Ons I can tune up Powers and Arcane Backgrounds to taste.

D6 is cool, but it desperately needs an update and standardization. Also, in Star Wars the bash-fest back-and-forth that seemed to go on forever was a problem. A SWADE combat is likely NOT going to drudge on and on...

I find it hard to get too evangelical about any game other than the ones I have created. I am biased that way. Also, I think I suffer from the same problems many players do... its hard to get players to try new things. My gaming buddies are open to new ideas but they don't have much time... We mostly play D&D 5e. It can be hard to get people committed to anything other than a one-shot, and even then that is when the scheduled GM has to cancel, or one of the key players cancel. 

That said some of the older systems that I love and wish I could play more: Savage Worlds, Dungeon Worlds, Risus.

For D&D, I really like Eberron.
For Savage Worlds, I fucking love Day after Ragnorok. It's an awesome
Post-Apocalyptic/ alternate history/ modern fantasy setting that doesn't get nearly enough love IMO.

Quote from: trechriron on February 03, 2022, 10:02:27 PM
Hey. I love GURPS 4e!! I'm currently running a bi-weekly game. :-D

You've been a unicorn for some time already. This seals it.

Quote from: trechriron on February 03, 2022, 10:02:27 PMI also dig Savage Worlds, but trying to make a high-powered urban fantasy port from an IP has proved... difficult. I feel like a little more granularity would help, but it's a nitpick. Overall, it's fun to GM and with those Fantasy Add-Ons I can tune up Powers and Arcane Backgrounds to taste.

Agreed. Granularity is sketchy (but not impossible) with SWADE. It becomes part of the requirement that you as a GM will do all the fine-tuning. There has only been one Savage Worlds setting I didn't have to tweak (to varying degrees, and always in adding a little granularity) - and that's Rifts.

Quote from: trechriron on February 03, 2022, 10:02:27 PMD6 is cool, but it desperately needs an update and standardization. Also, in Star Wars the bash-fest back-and-forth that seemed to go on forever was a problem. A SWADE combat is likely NOT going to drudge on and on...

Agreed. I'm confident a D6 refluff and streamlining could really make it shine again. But I'm not the guy to do it. I have too many irons in the fire as it is, heh. My SWADE combats are pretty brutally fast, rarely lasting more than a few rounds unless chases or lots of tactical movement is required.

I run GURPS lots.  And in a wide range of settings.  I've long maintained that SJG has failed to give GURPS the kind of support it needs to thrive in the market and they've argued back that they have cases of unsold books in the warehouse and micro transaction pdfs are the way of the future because they make money.

Part of the problem is that people don't associate GURPS with the tight core game, instead seeing the bloated, over built templates in fourth edition and thinking of it as homework the rpg.

Steve Jackson Games has done a number of one book Powered By GURPS games: World War II, Vorkosigian, Girl Genius, Myth, Disc World, and Hell Boy before he was a movie.  They haven't done as well as hoped.

I have long maintained that an official, free, GURPS Lite Fantasy supplement would do a great deal to promote GURPS and undermine the impression that it's over complex.

GURPS just needs more YouTube channels is all. Build it, and they will come.

Quote from: tenbones on January 28, 2022, 02:37:02 PM
GURPS is starting to get rare to see out in the wild.

I rarely hear of people running it anymore. I have friends that are total GURPS Evangelists, but even they don't run it much.

   It NEEDS evangelists, IMO SW does not.  It is a pretty easy sell to a person who has played games, or a person who has never played a table top RPG. 

Quote from: David Johansen on February 04, 2022, 02:52:39 PM
I run GURPS lots.  And in a wide range of settings.  I've long maintained that SJG has failed to give GURPS the kind of support it needs to thrive in the market and they've argued back that they have cases of unsold books in the warehouse and micro transaction pdfs are the way of the future because they make money.

Part of the problem is that people don't associate GURPS with the tight core game, instead seeing the bloated, over built templates in fourth edition and thinking of it as homework the rpg.

Steve Jackson Games has done a number of one book Powered By GURPS games: World War II, Vorkosigian, Girl Genius, Myth, Disc World, and Hell Boy before he was a movie.  They haven't done as well as hoped.

I have long maintained that an official, free, GURPS Lite Fantasy supplement would do a great deal to promote GURPS and undermine the impression that it's over complex.

  I agree with that about the lite Fantasy Supplement.  I also have to face the reality Munchkin cards are in Target.  If SJG is moving Munchkin cards at what is essentially a grocery store, I have a feeling his desire to mess with books and a game system like GURPS might be limited to him playing the game himself and letting a few guys write digital stuff to sell for 7-8 bucks.