Minor game stuff from around the web for commentary...

[TiaC]

So there's going to be a Schlock Mercenary RPG. The design blog is up at http://schlocktroops.com./. I'm not sure what I think so far. It looks pretty rules-lite. Base resolution mechanic is 3d6+Skill vs. TN with the complication that one of those d6 is special and if it's the highest one you draw a card as a complication. It's high-leathality, but advancement mainly happens by upgrades for the company so your new character won't be much worse.

[ishy]

First thing I clicked on:

Alan[/url]]One of the biggest innovations (yes, I’m gonna toot our own horn here) in Planet Mercenary: The Roleplaying Game, is what we have titled: “The Ablative Meat Shield” rule. The idea revolves around one that, while your characters are the title characters in a show, the real star is the mercenary charter as a whole. It’s not just you, or your friends in the command staff, but the grunts, the support team, the mechanics. It’s everyone. This rule helps you tell their stories.

The rule reads as follows:

“When you are hit by an attack, you may spend a RiPP (Role Play Point) to have the damage be dealt to a grunt near you. This can take the effect of you ducking behind the grunt, pulling them in the way, the grunt leaping heroically to take the blow, or plain old bad luck. The grunt absorbs ALL the damage from the hit and you take none. Now, the Game Chief (GM) will hand you a 3×5 note card (or similar thing). On this note card, write the grunt’s name. Next, write down three things about the grunt. Make ‘em personal and real. Talk about family, or past experiences, or dreams, or likes, dislikes, and more.

Hand that card back to the Game Chief. Excellent. Now, you know that RiPP token you spent? The Game Chief is gonna flip it. Good luck.”

It’s pretty cool, and it really helps the players fill out their NPCS and members of their charter during play.

The addition to the rule in the Game Chief section reads as follows:

“Ok, so you know that RiPP you’re flipping for the Ablative Meat Shield rule? Heads, the grunt lives. Give their card some sort of marking (a check, whatever) and then save their card. They’ll come up again. Tails? The grunt dies. Tear the card in half in front of the player, and gruesomely describe how their actions killed that grunt. Ooh. Mean.

As the grunts survive, players can use already existing grunts to take the hits for them. No reason not to.

In addition, if a player character dies, they can choose to play an existing grunt as their new character. Follow the normal character creation rules, but for each time the grunt has survived the ablative meat shield rule, the new characters gets +10 character creation points. That means, if they survive 5 times, they DOUBLE their starting points. And you, the Game Chief get the benefit of a character with some sort of backstory with the charter, probably a few grudges, and some real scars.

Very cool.”

Many of you have played Traveller or something similar , where character creation involves detailing your whole life story. That’s a lot of fun, and playing that level of detailed character is fun. However, it’s time consuming. This rule allows us to tell the story of the grunts and others in snapshots, brief moments of heroism, life or death terror, and some laughs. It leads to great stories, real attachment to some of the NPCS.

Since it is a mercenary high-lethality game I assume it has quite a bit of combat.

So one of their unique selling points is that quite often you have to make up and write down a new and original backstory for a random character, which might be killed instantly or become a future player character.
This huge time sink is there because creating a backstory out of combat is too time consuming.....

To top it all off, if your RNG is good enough, your new character is two times as powerful as the other PCs. Fuck this game.

[rampaging-poet]

That and they advertise fast-paced combat while having a rule that introduces on-the-fly complications just over a quarter of the time.

Honestly, I'd have people come up with ~3 "ablative meat" characters before play begins, and my very first house-rule would be writing DECEASED on the card instead of tearing it up so to build up a library of stock characters for other games or in case of duplication gate shenanigans or whatever. This is a setting that posits relatively easy (though maybe not cheap?) resurrection as long as the head is reasonably intact, so I'm not calling anyone "lost forever" as soon as they catch a stray bullet.

Giving the NPCs a fixed survival rate also makes investing heavily in a single NPC a bad deal. Calling in a brand-new meatshield risks nothing but they time you put into them. Calling in an existing meatshield risks every previous success. Given they refer their rules-light game as "high-trust" instead, I bet the expectation is that the GM will just tell you Big McLargeHuge with 40 skill points is the only ablative meat around if you try to keep introducing new characters to protect your existing high-skill ablative meat.

Then again, if it really is a high-lethality system with much more advancement for the company the problem then power now/later trades or imbalances in character power might quickly sort themselves out. Especially if advancing the company has more effect on bringing in new characters than leveling them does, it's possible that over the course of a campaign under-performing characters will naturally die and be replaced by better ones. Then again, that's pretty close to the Gygaxian view of sequential character creation: if you roll the dice long enough, eventually one of your characters won't suck.

[Orion]

Honestly, I'd have people come up with ~3 "ablative meat" characters before play begins.

I'm not sure about this. I don't think it achieves their goal of creating emotional poignancy. The character you write in the moment has emotional relevance to you because you just wrote it. I imagine that most players would verbally tell the group what they were writing as they came up with it, which gets everyone to buy in. If the details of each grunt were written by each player at home, then unless you stop to read the card out, the other player's will never know or care. Also, many people will blow off the homework assignment, and do worse writing than they would have done at the table.

However, I agree with you that the rule as written slows things down like crazy, and that's because three facts is way too many. You should either ask the player to write ONE fact, or -- and this is my favorite -- asks every player OTHER THAN the one invoking the meat to contribute one detail.

Given they refer their rules-light game as "high-trust" instead, I bet the expectation is that the GM will just tell you Big McLargeHuge with 40 skill points is the only ablative meat around if you try to keep introducing new characters to protect your existing high-skill ablative meat.

I don't see why this would be the case. New meatshield generation is self-limited by players' willingness to put in the effort. Players will risk their existing meat by default because it's easier than writing more. If they players get sufficiently attached to a sidekick who survived 5 suicide saves that they're willing to keep inventing new characters to keep them alive, I don't see what MC would want to bust up that dynamic.

[Blasted]

The thing is that the idea of a hardcore, high risk game with lots of player death is completely outside of the comic experience. The comic itself has many repeating characters, very few of whom have died. Even the repeating grunts rarely die. While a gritty, dark emotion driven game may work for a generic mercs game, it's not at all in the schlock style which is a high adventure space opera.

[TiaC]

It is definitely "anyone can die" but you're right that it's not "everyone dies". I mean, everyone does die, but their medicine is so advanced that it really doesn't stick.

[ishy]

Oh wow, the default initiative rules in the Schlock Mercenary RPG.

Whoever talks first, goes first.

One thing I don’t get about the initiative system: how does it handle multiple rounds of combat? Does everyone need to act once before “whoever pipes up first” determines who acts in the next round? Or could someone go twice if another player isn’t paying enough attention (or is too indecisive) to say what they’re doing?

There are two options. Everyone goes and then you do it over again or you just leave it chaotic and make them work for it.

I prefer the second. You say something, we resolve it and I make you count to (Stat number) before you can say something else. It keeps it fun and engaging, and it’s been well received.

[TheFlatline]

Considering that real time board games like Space Alert revolve around the idea that 5 people all trying to talk at once is fucking chaos and impossible to coordinate, I'm going to go with pants-on-head retarded.

[TiaC]

In a recent Q&A, he said that they will have at least 3 other initiative rules. It looks like it will be a decently modular game. I anticipate that no two games will play the same.

[rampaging-poet]

I think the idea is to capture the chaos of a real battle where quick thinking and reaction times are more important than the ability to take ten minutes to work out the optimal solution. As a tabletop game mechanic, it commits two cardinal sins:

(1) It relies on player skill more than character skill in ways that under-represent the character's abilities. Actual space mercenaries should be better at making quick decisions under fire than the average TTRPG player (or worse, the average new player). A race to the first word system ensures that characters will never be better than their players in some very specific ways.

(2) It doesn't work. In real life when two soldiers decide to fire their guns at the same time they just fire. In a table-top roleplaying game, time stops while the MC asks everyone to repeat themselves one at a time so he can make sense of what everyone actually said. That, or someone talks louder than everyone else and the MC has to ask the quieter people to re-state their actions. Initiative will therefore be in MC-fiat order for anyone with similar reaction times - at which point it may as well be in MC-fiat order anyway. Even Savage World's crazy deck initiative that involves shuffling cards every round is a better system.

[RelentlessImp]

Especially if advancing the company has more effect on bringing in new characters than leveling them does, it's possible that over the course of a campaign under-performing characters will naturally die and be replaced by better ones.

This is pretty much how it works in the comic. Between the ongoing soldier boosts race, equipment, ship... see the stretch where the company worked for Petey, the characters were more or less interchangeable and died a lot but their equipment and surgical facilities were top notch so almost nobody died permanently.

The thing is, basing an RPG on something that has main characters out front and center (Schlock, Tagon, Doctor Bunnigus, Reverend Theo) means people expect to get to play characters like that - and the rules, at the outset, don't lend to playing those types of characters. Oh well.

[Longes]

Will Wheaton playing Dread

[Longes]

Dread seems like total bullshit, worse than just playing Munchausen.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Dread is basically not a game. You 'take pulls' to 'do dangerous things,' but what you are entitled to attempt with a pull is straight-up fiat. I have seen a Dread MC call for multiple pulls to successfully open a window (under threat, but still). It is better than Bear World in that the results of a pull are somewhat prenegotiated and any bears are supposed to have been decided on ahead of time rather than existing in a quantum state, although the distinction can be somewhat fine from a player perspective, especially when dealing with homebrew horror monsters.

The Jenga mechanic is, I think, a cool tension-building gimmick, but basically an alpha test. You need to be able to reset the tower without it falling, just like tension actually non-fatally resets sometimes in horror stories; the alternate dice-stacking mechanic the game mentions allows for easier and also partial resets, so you should probably use that instead of the Jenga. Also, the game needs some kind of non-tower mechanics, probably starting with a fucking turn system so that people can act under time pressure in something resembling a fair way. Characters also need to be actually mechanically distinguished in some way; as it is, the relative capabilities of a dumb jock and a skinny nerd are entirely MC feels-based. This would presumably include mechanics for doing non-dangerous things, even if it's just a Puppetland-style list of 'cans' and 'cannots.'

[Kaelik]

So how often in Dread does someone just declare they need to do something that isn't a big deal, and the MC gives them a pull, and then they just fucking slap the tower to reset it?

[angelfromanotherpin]

You don't take pulls to do things that don't have possible death as a result. Those are resolved by MC fellatio.

[Longes]

You don't take pulls to do things that don't have possible death as a result. Those are resolved by MC fellatio.

I guess Will Wheaton is running the game wrong then. They are pulling to do first aid on an NPC, to wave flares at the plane, to use the radio, etc.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I can't watch the video on my crappy connection at work, but death can almost always be a possible result. If the monster is lurking nearby they can jump out and get you, or you can do some fragility of human life shit where a PC could set themselves on fire with a flare or electrocute themselves with the radio, or whatever.

[Red_Rob]

Now I want to play Paranoia using the Dread tower - make the players pull for everything you'd normally call a skill check for and then try to explain how persuading the old lady or unlocking the stuck cupboard lead to your clones violent death.

[Longes]

Will Wheaton explains the rules of his new game

[silva]

Dont open here, weirdly.

Could you resume for us ? Whats is it about ? Does it do something original ?

[Longes]

Dont open here, weirdly.

Could you resume for us ? Whats is it about ? Does it do something original ?

He gives a very short overview. Apparently it's a Dragon Age RPG hack, which sucks. The setting lost me almost instantly, when first I saw lizardmen with plazmaguns fighting elves with spears, and then "sky fell down". What the fuck does the "sky fell down" mean?

[RelentlessImp]

Chicken Little was right, that's what.

[Prak]

When does he stop explaining basic RPG shit and start describing Titangrave specifically?

[Longes]

When does he stop explaining basic RPG shit and start describing Titangrave specifically?

He doesn't really explain the mechaincs. TL;DR is "you roll some dice and add an attribute modifer". He didn't mention skills. From what I've seen, it's a modified Dragon Age RPG by Green Ronin, so read that for reference.