Someone explain 'Torg' to me.

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Lago_AM3P
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Someone explain 'Torg' to me.

Post by Lago_AM3P »

Where I hang out, this game is all the rage.

Sane people have expressed a lot of love for it, but I still have various misgivings (mostly about the way the 'card' system works).

Could someone break this down for me?
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Josh_Kablack
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Re: Someone explain 'Torg' to me.

Post by Josh_Kablack »

Okay, around here the guy who ran Torg was really kinda lame as a GM, and it happened a long time ago, so my knowledge of the game is woefully incomplete and compounded by a fuzzy memory.

With that said:

Torg is a game about the Possibility Wars. There are multiple realities which have invaded our reality and the exist overlapping it. The average person just accepts their reality and doesn't even notice if it shifts. Due to some conceit I don't recall, PCs in Torg are largely immune to this effect and realize what's going on. The term was "Possibility-Rated characters", that much I remember.

Each of the invading realities is loosely based on a different genre of movie (Horror, Prehistoric, Sci-Fi, Egyptian) and you can play natives of those realities who are working against the villans of their settings.

IIRC, any time you rolled a "1" you would "disconnect" if you were doing something out of genre for the setting you were in. Disconnect meant to lose touch with your old reality and be subsumed by the operational paradigm of the new one, in effect becoming useless and dazed for at least the rest of the adventure. This resulted in really high PC loss rates in some realities.

Everybody played with a hand of cards which could be played for various benefits. The only really memorable one was the Martyr card where you got to sacrifice your character for automatic party success in a scene. This card would often get horded for weeks. Of course the GM got to draw cards and use them as setbacks. The cards were also used for "dramatic skill resolution" which was a neat idea but in practice worked something like: "This scene will last until you draw a royal flush, so just forget about the techie taking out the force field before you beat all the guards anyways"

Torg had some cinematic elements that were sorely lacking from other games of its era, and I do mean to dig up a used copy sometime and give it a closer look.
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