[OWDYHI] - Delta Green (New Hotness Edition)

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Neurosis
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[OWDYHI] - Delta Green (New Hotness Edition)

Post by Neurosis »

OWDYHI is a new thing I'm trying to make be a thing on the Den. Like OSSR is an acronym here and everyone knows what a "Drunk Review" is gonna be, and like how the big purple fascists have their "sell me/unsell me" bullshit which is instantly grok'd.

Only time will tell if it becomes a thing. Anyway, it stands for: "Okay, why do y'all hate it?" and is meant to be [Sell Me] only adjusted for the pH of the Den.

In this case, I'm asking about Delta Green. This one.

I backed for $350, I have the Agent's Handbook, I've run a half dozen games, and I think it's purely the tits (awesome). I'm already writing homebrew adventures hoping to sell them to Shane Ivey. So I really quite like this game, but I was pretty invested having given almost $400 to their KS on the fact that they used the band DotHS for their video alone, along with my warm fuzzy memories of old school DG.

So (all together now):

Okay, why do y'all hate it?
Last edited by Neurosis on Fri Sep 09, 2016 5:36 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Is the new edition still using some dude's CoC house rules an engine? I can see how you'd end up there, you're making a cthulhu themed rpg so obviously you play the original cthulhu themed rpg and you have an extensive set of house rules because coc is literally unplayable without them. But just because that's how your heartbreaker started doesn't mean that's an acceptable way for it to end.

This ain't NBC, we don't grade on a curve. You don't get any cookies because you're less unplayable than coc.

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Post by Mask_De_H »

From what I saw of the quick start rules, it's basically a tweaking of the Cosmic Bumfights rules (simpler Madness Meters, no dice tricks).

So it's a hack of a hack of CoC. I don't really give a shit and if you were honest Neurosis, neither do you.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

I think Frank nailed it. It's better to build a better engine from scratch; than to be constantly patching a fundamentally flawed one.
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Post by erik »

Sell Me is so much better than your tortured acronym. Your acronym does not even have less letters in addition to being confusing gibberish. So spoiler alert, it is annoying and useless and won't catch on if there is any justice.

Why in ghost's name do you both claim to be proficient at game design and also need people to explain why something built from CoC has failure hardcoded into its DNA?

Instead of asking people to sell you on something, next time, I challenge you first to lay out what you think is good about a system, and if you can, where you think its weak spots lay.
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Post by Ancient History »

I've written some stuff for Shane Ivey before, although never for Delta Green, but he can't even be fucked to answer me on Facebook so I have no qualms about being blunt on this one.

Delta Green one of those games where the premise is very good - secret government agency investigating the Mythos on the QT! It's from about the same era as the X-Files (which started in '92, DG came along in '97). In fact, the premise is the single selling point of the game. The system and setting development a bit more progressive than Call of Cthulhu, but...and you knew there would be a but...I'm not a huge fan of Dennis Detwiller, Adam Scott Glancy, or John Scott Tynes, who designed the thing. They tend to come up with great concepts and then the execution falters and the result is kind of disappointing. The novels and fiction anthologies are better than the actual game materials, and even then the anthologies vary considerably in quality.

Calling it a "game line" is actually pretty generous: it's eight sourcebooks in 13 years, and that counts the disastrous d20 edition and the compilation of previous sourcebooks. It's really just an extended sideproject that occupies much more conceptual space than the actual wordcount should account for. People who have never read Delta Green can pretty much run a game on their own using their own homebrewed interpretation of the CoC rules once you explain the premise - and, I am convinced, do. When your game hits the point where the actual sourcebooks are secondary to requirements, you're in trouble.

I haven't been paying attention to the kickstarters except when I picked up the latest fiction, but I'd be surprised if they actually had an organized plan for line development.
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Post by Nath »

It's easy to write conspiracy background. With minimal skills, it's trivial to get a write-up that looks great on paper. It's full of mysteries and secrets you uncover as you read them. The problem is, it is hard to write a conspiracy in the foreground of a story. You need to pace how protagonists will uncover those secrets and do so in a way the audience can understand. It is indeed harder to design that in an interactive story. Even more so when the audience is going to expect supernatural elements. And finally, it is going to be a one-shot, because you can get the audience to uncover the same secrets twice.

And Delta Green does not provide any help to pull that out. They had a handful of ideas that I found great... that all took place between 1920 and 1970. NPC and events you are supposed to play with after 1990 are dull. The adventures featured in the book rarely if ever dare to expose major secrets. You're supposed to be running three seasons of X-Files and what they gave you are the script for filler episodes.

Delta Green would need one campaign book for each conspiracy (I guess you could label them "season"). And yes, such campaigns would be damn hard to write. But so far Delta Green is like handing you beautiful pictures from the Everest top and suggesting you should climb it, but then does not even provide a map.
Last edited by Nath on Sat Sep 10, 2016 9:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Longes »

Delta Green's premise of being secret government agents fighting against Cthulhu is actually a total lie. In reality you are low level chumps stuck on the outer level of an illegal terrorist organisation that went rogue ages ago. The actual government conspiracy is Majestic-12, and you are supposed to fight them.
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Post by Ancient History »

Ironically, I really like The Laundry RPG, which actually does allow you to play anti-Mythos spies.
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Post by Username17 »

The Laundry RPG is also based on some dude's Call of Cthulhu house rules, right? I mean, it's a more extensive hack than Delta Green, but it's the same deal.

I genuinely don't understand why people are still releasing games with d100, roll under in the 21st century. I mean, I know why they do it, but I don't know why they do it.

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Post by Red_Rob »

Delta Green is basically CoC, so for a look at the rules side of things you can read the Frank and AH OSSR, which is also worth reading just because, hey, Frank and AH OSSR.

But just for starters, the D100 roll-under base mechanic is terrible. It is more clunky than a D20 (two dice!), adds no appreciable granularity, is awful for simulating difficulty of tasks or degree of success, and makes opposed rolls a nightmare. Just compare it to D20 + modifier roll over, it is worse in every respect. Imagine if D&D tried to go back to THACO after 3rd edition, that is basically what Delta Green is doing sticking with D100 roll-under.
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Post by Ancient History »

FrankTrollman wrote:The Laundry RPG is also based on some dude's Call of Cthulhu house rules, right? I mean, it's a more extensive hack than Delta Green, but it's the same deal.

I genuinely don't understand why people are still releasing games with d100, roll under in the 21st century. I mean, I know why they do it, but I don't know why they do it.

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Oh yeah, totally. It actually gets worse the more CoC stuff they tried to put in for the fans.
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

I never bothered buying the Laundry RPG corebook, but the adventures are pretty good. Just run them in Fate or maybe something shadowrun-derived and spare yourself the headache from using a CoC hack.
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Post by JonSetanta »

Remember Alternity? The awesome-arted scifi game based on AD&D rules? It's like that in comparison.

AKA what Frank said.
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Post by Aryxbez »

I'll humor you Neurosis, and say "OWDYHI", and even consider using it should I ask about a game in the future. In case I forget, if reminded, I'll go back and put it into the title or something.

As Avoraciopoctules and others are saying, really sounds like there's no reason to use the material at all, and just simply port over the idea to a different system like FATE, After Sundown, or other variant of SR-style Dice pool game.

While I never really read Delta Green, always advertised to me as being kinda like Ghostbusters of Cthulhu-monsters, or SWAT meets Cthulhu-mythos. Latest Goosebumps movie made me think it would've made an interesting Delta Green one-shot, where its more high-level as things escalate at the end, calling down your biggest resources available.

Anyway Neurosis, considering how much you've invested into it at this point, I think you could tell us just as well how bad it truly has become.
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Post by Neurosis »

FWIW: I think it's an awesomely good set of house rules for CoC (which I've played very little of) and improves on the core game in every way that matters.
Last edited by Neurosis on Tue Sep 13, 2016 7:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
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Post by Neurosis »

Longes wrote:Delta Green's premise of being secret government agents fighting against Cthulhu is actually a total lie. In reality you are low level chumps stuck on the outer level of an illegal terrorist organisation that went rogue ages ago. The actual government conspiracy is Majestic-12, and you are supposed to fight them.
From a personal conversation with Shane Ivey, the reboot turned this inside out and upside down.
For a minute, I used to be "a guy" in the TTRPG "industry". Now I'm just a nobody. For the most part, it's a relief.
Trank Frollman wrote:One of the reasons we can say insightful things about stuff is that we don't have to pretend to be nice to people. By embracing active aggression, we eliminate much of the passive aggression that so paralyzes things on other gaming forums.
hogarth wrote:As the good book saith, let he who is without boners cast the first stone.
TiaC wrote:I'm not quite sure why this is an argument. (Except that Kaelik is in it, that's a good reason.)
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Post by Longes »

Neurosis wrote:
Longes wrote:Delta Green's premise of being secret government agents fighting against Cthulhu is actually a total lie. In reality you are low level chumps stuck on the outer level of an illegal terrorist organisation that went rogue ages ago. The actual government conspiracy is Majestic-12, and you are supposed to fight them.
From a personal conversation with Shane Ivey, the reboot turned this inside out and upside down.
So you get to play actual X-Files instead of just being some unwitting terrorist dudes?
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Post by Red_Rob »

Well, from listening to some of the seminars they posted talking about it, the idea for the new version of Delta Green is basically that you can play as Majestic agents, but you still get called Delta Green. The way this works is that Majestic gets shut down, but there are now two Delta Greens.

The first is Delta Green come in from the cold - they have been reabsorbed into the government as part of the post-9/11 shakeup and now have official clearance and access to more resources. The downside is you also have to answer to a higher up and file mission reports, so you can't be as reckless and cowboy-ish as has been the norm. Also, sometimes you will be given instructions that make things more hazardous or run counter to your natural inclinations as a player (We want the cult leader alive!) to make your life more interesting.

Alternatively there is also still a remnant of the old underground Delta Green, made up of those agents that refused to become part of an active government agency. They still act pretty much how they always have, convinced that the Government will only screw things up by getting involved. Naturally both groups will come into conflict, old friends are now enemies, yada yada.

Some of the new mechanics do sound interesting. Expanding on the agents personal background by adding emotional "resources" representing aspects of an agents life that can then be burned to prevent san loss sounds like a cool idea. As the agent fights the mythos they slowly lose contact with the things they were fighting to protect in the first place - very thematic, I like it. But tying it to the clunky and outdated D100 system means I would just be looking to bolt similar rules onto a better modern horror system - After Sundown for example.
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Post by Longes »

Red_Rob wrote:Some of the new mechanics do sound interesting. Expanding on the agents personal background by adding emotional "resources" representing aspects of an agents life that can then be burned to prevent san loss sounds like a cool idea. As the agent fights the mythos they slowly lose contact with the things they were fighting to protect in the first place - very thematic, I like it. But tying it to the clunky and outdated D100 system means I would just be looking to bolt similar rules onto a better modern horror system - After Sundown for example.
Pfhahahaha. So the exciting new mechanic they brought is stolen from Night's Black Agents? Glorious!
Last edited by Longes on Wed Sep 14, 2016 5:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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