So, earlier today I had to put my cat to sleep. I've had him most of my life (he was nearly 16 years old) and I was really attached to him, and though he was old he went from seeming fine to dying of renal failure basically overnight. It was something of a huge shock.
So needless to say I'm a bit of an emotional wreck right now. And not exactly all that with it when it comes to stuff. So yeah, that's why.
Originally posted by PeachWe lost our family dog a few months back, it sucks.
So, earlier today I had to put my cat to sleep. I've had him most of my life (he was nearly 16 years old) and I was really attached to him, and though he was old he went from seeming fine to dying of renal failure basically overnight. It was something of a huge shock.So needless to say I'm a bit of an emotional wreck right now. And not exactly all that with it when it comes to stuff. So yeah, that's why.
I hope you feel better soon hug
I may have laughed manically at the idea of post ROTJ EU being overwritten.
I do wonder what they plan to do with the new trilogy though. They'd need a good reason to not have Luke, Han, Leia and the rest of the main OT cast in it (With exceptions to R2 and C3-PO if they must). It would be so very wrong to recast those characters.
Just talked with thus with my brother., He feels that if any sequel trilogy games are ever made, he'll want to make a still-simpler system (in keeping with how we generally RP these days with as few rules as possible*).
The exception is sabre duelling, which is something that always needs detail.
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* Exept for MERP, which we are going back to due to the advent of The Hobbit, which we play in all its early 80s rules crunch for nostalgia reasons.
You can always simplify. This system is actually of relative medium complexity. The 'Lego' switch was more about making the game more administratively manageable and less exploitable, as was the main issue with frames, force pools and multiple levels of schticks going off all at once (offline, what tended to happen is that some plasyers totally lost track of their frame number and remaining force pool. Online, trying to sync a dozen players at once through frames was just ridiculous. In both cases, strategies to maximise frame use where greatly overpowered). But there is still a lot of rules-based stuff in it, and a lot for people to get used to.
A lot of the work we look at these days come from two systems. The first iscalled 'Gumshoe' and is designed by Robin Las, the same guy who did Feng Shui and is therefore our main inspiration in pushing forward RPing mechanics. Gumshoe does investigation games in the same way that Feng Shui did action movies, and it is not actually game in of itself but a framework to build other games on- for example, a new version of Call of Cthulhu (my broyher's favourite game), called Trail of Cthulhu, was one of the first games to come out under the Gumshoe purview.
The basis of Gumshoe is that FINDING clues is not the interesting part of investigation games, and indeed, having a system for finding clues is a problem because if players fail their rolls, they get no clues and the game stonewalls... as has actually happened both off and online here quite a lot.
Gumeshoe instead relies on these ideas:
1. Players investigating a scene get clues automatically
2. Playerrs are responsible for analysing what the clues mean and where they should therefore look next. This is the stage of investigation that the designer says is the interesting part of mystery games, not the acqusition of the clues in the first place
3. Players do have investigation skills, but they do not work on dice. Instead, having an Investigation skill make you better at that type of investigation, getting you additional clues, and also gives you a pool you can spend per story to get even more when relevant
4. The more clues players can get and make sense of, the better they will do- they may find better ways to defeat an enemy, or be able to get to a potential murder scene before the new victim is killed if they got the information on time...
5... but the players always get, by default, the bare minimum of clues needed for the game to continue.
Taking the random factor out of investigation and making it an analytical exercise for the players simulates investigation style games much better than rolling dice to see if you solve the crime or not.
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The other game is called Wilderness of Mirrors. This is actually a very specific type of RP game with thematic similarities to Paranoia, designed to be played in short sessions. It is a 'Mission:Impossible' style spy simulation game where players plan and execute a mission in one session, with the plan actually being a major part f the gameplay, with the players helping to set how the game will play out as they plan it, with the GM adapting to what the players want to do accordingly. The trick of the game is why the plan goes wrong, which it always does as each player has secret objectives, Paranoia-style; the game becomes about at what points you can trust your comrades.
Because the game is so much about the planning, the actual execution has to be done very quickly so people have a limited time to react. Their approach to action scenes, then, is more where my brother is looking. The actual system will take a little while to explain but the basic thing is that a fight can be resolved with one dice roll, which will decide how well the whole thing went. There are no pools, no hit points, no weapon stats etc.
Now, that system is specifically tied to the way the game is set up, but the theory of having action scenes resolve very quickly like that can actually be very effective.
This is why Duelling is the exception- they demand more detail.