draft prospectus

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm not familiar enough with any of those to get a clear sense of what you're describing; I don't think I've even heard of the first two before now. It sounds as if you're talking about "caper" scenarios, and after the difficulties of Fixers I'm a bit cautious about those; I don't think I have personal experience with one that ran well and was sustainable. From some of Kromm's lj posts it sounds as if he does this sort of thing, but I'm not sure how to define a formula for it. What exactly would you do if you were going to GM that sort of game?

Yes, they're capers, those two and several of the others as well. "Die Hard" is more reactive in nature. A single PC (although it could be a small party) finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and decides to be pro-active about thing, because one or more Dependents is in danger.

I know you had problems, in that campaign of yours, with player skill-based planning, which you expected your players to spend a lot of time, on, and which they in fact consented to do (since preusmably they read your prospectus before casting their votes), but then it turned out that several of them didn't want to spend a lot of time on planning and do the plans in a player skill-based way.

What I'd do wouldn't be so different from how GURPS Action does it. In there, you can make a caper/heist/infilstration/tactical plan (you can't, AFAIK, do a long con, but my hunch is that all it takes to expand GURPS Action, to also be able to cover that, is a single slightly long Pyramid article, obviously taking cues from GURPS Social Engineering), which gives a bonus on many skill rolls during the actual adventure, a bonus that serves to offset the generic difficulty bonus abbreviated BAD.

E.g. in GURPS Action, if you're trying to infiltrate a very difficult facility, BAD is very big, like -7, but if you're just trying to burgle a local mom-and-pop store, BAD might be -1 or even -0. Making a good plan, using a variety of character skills, can offset BAD, making the adventure overall easier.

The thing I'd do slightly differently, probably, is that I'd base the planning more on active scouting and information gathering. GURPS Action had some of that already, but I might do more than its baseline. Not as something the player characters have to do, but as something they'll want to do, and of course based on character skill.

Such scouting and other prep work then gives a bonus to the final Planning roll, usually Plan: Heist or Plan: Con, or even Strategy or Tactics if it is more military in nature. Think of it as fractional modifiers. If you scout a little bit here, you get a +0.5 bonus to effective skill. If you do social engineering on this company, which contracts with your target, you might get a bonus of +1.5 or +2 or even +2.5 to effective skill. It all adds up.

The effect of the final Planning roll then gives what is quite similar to a number of levels of GURPS' Gizmo advantage. Plan Points, that are for the entire party to use, and can be spent to declare, during play "my character (or the party, collectively) anticipated that, and therefore did X and Y and Z (i.e. retroactively)".

One possible use is similar to Gizmo, "I anticipated that this complication would arise, and therefore I went and bought this item, which I have in my pocket". Others can be more like prepared actions or contingencies. Placing a recordig device, and setting it to activate wih a timing device, at just the right place and with just the right timing, so that you manage to catch the egomanical bad guy during his gloating phase.

Dependig on plausiblity, each such usage costs 1 Plan Points, or a few Plan Points, or many Plan Points.

Plausility can be influenced by many factors, including character skill (if a particular character is a wizard with electronics and surviallance and media, then it becomes more plausible to have set up the recording device) and on tech level (at a lower TL, recording time may be limited, while here in fairly late TL8, you can have gigabytes of storage space on a tiny data card, so it's possible to just est up your camera and mic to record over a span of 6 or 8 hours, making exact timing much less crucial. May also depend on other traits of the character, varous Flaws he has (mental disads) that can make some anticipations less likely (Overconfidence springs to mind - I imagine in general, overconfident people make poor planners, while other Flaws will only make some types of anticipations less plausible).

Ideally, in addition to the entire PC party having a collective Plan, individual PCs should also be able to develop their own lesser Plans, and so have persnal Plan Points that only they can use. The imagined situation, here, is a single PC, possibly a genius. who thinks the other PCs in the party are dumb, and that their Plan is dumb, so he makes his own Plan, one that synergizes with theirs (or - even more complicated - does not synergize perfectly because he's actually a traitor, pursuing a goal different from theirs). But I'm not actually sure how feasible it is to design for that, and in the end, the collective Plan is most important.

My thinking is that, by doing it that way, it should be possible to handle exciting and complex capers, including paramilitary ones and even long cons, in a fairly by-the-seats-of-the-pants fashion, while still allowing very smart or superbly skilled player characters to shine. And without involving player skill. And without spending an entire session on planning first.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

'Heat' was a good flick.

Fantastic movie! I like it a lot, although I like "Ronin" even more. That's my all-time favourite movie. "Heat" can also be a good study example for a modern campaign with more-or-less action'ish flavour. In both movies, Robert de Niro plays a smart and cautious character who thinks ahead.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I've seen both Chinese wuxia and Japanese chambara, but I'm not quite sure how I'd turn either into a game. Any thoughts?

Maybe BESM would be good for that?

[SCAR]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm not familiar enough with any of those to get a clear sense of what you're describing; I don't think I've even heard of the first two before now. It sounds as if you're talking about "caper" scenarios, and after the difficulties of Fixers I'm a bit cautious about those; I don't think I have personal experience with one that ran well and was sustainable. From some of Kromm's lj posts it sounds as if he does this sort of thing, but I'm not sure how to define a formula for it. What exactly would you do if you were going to GM that sort of game?

Bill Stoddard

A variant format for such a game would be Leverage.
There is a Leverage RPG produce by MWP using their Cortex Plus sytem; or use GURPS Action, and the 'I've Got A Great Idea' (Angles) and/or 'Fortunately, I Saw This Coming' (Foresight) articles from Pyramid #3/53: Action

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by whswhs

By the way, Peter, I did specify what systems I thought of for each proposal. Do you have preferences among them? Just idly curious. . . .

Actually no, I don't. Perhaps surprisingly.

All 3 systems you mentioned, GURPS, BESM and World of Darkness, are systems I might be willing to play (although not GM - there's a reason I design my own system(s)).

Albeit with a disclaimer, for too-early editions. You'd have to pay me a genuine salary to be a player in a GURPS 3rd Edition campaign. Revised or not. BESM2 looks good, BESM3 is probably good. I don't know anything about BESM1 so I'd have to read it first, see if it passes muster. But it probably wouldn't.

WoD is a system I know very little about. The only full-size Storyteller system book I've ever read is Adventure! I'm sure if you go back far enough, Storyteller 1st Edition probably, there'll be too many design bugs for me to be able to stomach it. Later editions, I'd have to ask around whether the rules falls on the stupid or playable side of the fence, but I'm convinced that at some point, some edition, they start falling on the playable side.

Generally I'm very wary of GMs who don't update to the latest edition of their system of choice. GURPS 3rd Edition stinks terribly. Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition unRevised is just a lot more stupid than the Revised Edition (often called 3.5), while 4th and 5th Edition are sufficiently different animals that it makes perfect sense to not update to those (to stick with 3.5, or with 4E) due to personal preferences about what kind of game you want to GM.

Shadowrun is a good example. 4th Edition is just so much better than 3rd. I've never read 5th (I believe it's out now) and it may or may not involve several serious improvements, but 3rd Edition is just clearly inferior to 4th, for instance in terms of character creation (my pet peeve, as most of you know already), or the way the magic system can handle a variety of traditions instead of coming with only 2 hardwired ones and if you want to create your own variant tradition you'll have to take out a toolbox and work against the structure of the system.

If you mentioned a 4th system, then I overlooked it in my skim re-read.

As for the campaigns subjects, none of them sound particularly interesting, but several of them are mildly so. I never read your descriptions with the mindset of a potential player, so can't comment on that, but my inclination would be to gravitate towards the one that allows for the widest variety of player character concepts (without going Supers, I don't like Supers much, but in theory I might want to play a Batman type in a campaign where the other PCs have superpowers, as long as my character is on par with theirs - part of the way to bring him up "to par" could be some kind of Plannning system, emulating the CrazyPrepared trope of Batman's genius ability to anticipate complications, enemy actions and so forth).

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

All 3 systems you mentioned, GURPS, BESM and World of Darkness, are systems I might be willing to play (although not GM - there's a reason I design my own system(s)).

Albeit with a disclaimer, for too-early editions. You'd have to pay me a genuine salary to be a player in a GURPS 3rd Edition campaign. Revised or not. BESM2 looks good, BESM3 is probably good. I don't know anything about BESM1 so I'd have to read it first, see if it passes muster. But it probably wouldn't.

For GURPS I would use 4/e. For BESM I would use 2/e; I've seen 3/e, but I don't like the presentation as well. For WoD, I massively prefer classic WoD to the current version, largely because the current version has stripped out as much as possible of the sensawunda, but also because I don't like the mechanics as well; but also in this case I like the treatment of low-end magic in Sorcerer.

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Well, with two more people, the pattern shifts perceptibly. Fronteira is still the only campaign that everyone would be willing to play in. Three of you don't like it much—dcarson, shrubbery, and John—and the only campaign all three of them like is Tapestry. Scar could be in either Fronteira or Tapestry.

Bill Stoddard

[Adina]

OK, I'll play.

___ Eloi. Near future social science fiction.

One.

___ Fronteira. Science fiction noir.

Three.

___ Shadowlands. Postapocalyptic dark fantasy.

Three.

___ Tapestry. Historical fantasy.

Three.

___ World Class. Superhero drama.

Zero.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by whswhs

For GURPS I would use 4/e. For BESM I would use 2/e; I've seen 3/e, but I don't like the presentation as well. For WoD, I massively prefer classic WoD to the current version, largely because the current version has stripped out as much as possible of the sensawunda, but also because I don't like the mechanics as well; but also in this case I like the treatment of low-end magic in Sorcerer.

Aren't there several version of classic WoD? Ae you using the 1st edition of classic WoD, or a later edition?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Aren't there several version of classic WoD? Ae you using the 1st edition of classic WoD, or a later edition?

There's a major discontinuity at "new" WoD, far larger than the changes between editions of the "old" WoD games. And with the "old" games, the editions are of the individual games, not of the rules system or the world: the rules were never fully coordinated across the games.

"New WoD" started being published in 2004, with the core rulebook, and Vampire: the Requiem, followed by Werewolf; the Forsaken and Mage: the Awakening. While the rules system is much better organised, the atmosphere and backstory of the setting was changed drastically. The Wikipedia page seems to give a reasonable account of what happened.

My impression of it on reading the core book and the new Mage was that it was all determinedly constructed to try to produce the designer's exact idea of what the game should be, and if this wasn't to your taste, that was your fault for failing to comprehend their brilliance. Since none of the WoD games I have played in were remotely as depressing and doom-laden as the designers seemed to consider desirable, the idea of having that enforced by the rule system wasn't attractive.

This seems to have been a reasonably common opinion, since everyone I know who plays White Wolf games has stayed with "old" WoD.