What ROLE-PLAYING have you been doing?

My bi-weekly Call of Cthulhu campaign has been going on for over three years now. More than 25% of the time, we end up playing boardgames or just canceling, because I currently have two reliable players and four unreliable players. I've been running various adventures in Arkham Country, because Keith Herber did such an excellent job on those source books, and there are many published scenarios set there. I would like to run Masks of Nyarlathotep for this group, but I am waiting for the long-delayed publication of the Masks of Nyarlathotep companion. Otherwise, it would take a fair amount of research to fill out the details, in case my players wander off track.

Played 2 Indie games over the weekend. Can't recall the name of the one, I will track it down. Both were pretty awesome.

Fiasco was the first we plaed. It is like making a Cohen Brothers movie, or Snach, something in those molds. Very neat game. Took some wierd turns that I was not in love with but overall my favorite indie rpg to date.

More on the other game in a bit.

I think that I completely loathe Shadowrun with an unending hate.

The system is painfully slow involving 4-5 rolls of a bucket of dice for each attack, compounded with the Runequest II problem of phased rounds with some characters able to act MANY more times per round than others.

Pile onto that a buckets of everything mythology piled in a big steaming heap on top of a dated 80's view of futuristic technology. Then scatter the rules all over a couple of White Wolfs (an official RPG Unit!) worth of sourcebooks.

I just want to see it burn.

hey, i never noticed this thread before!

Ok um... Ken was a sailor stuck in the shower and I was a firefighter

Black Barney wrote:

hey, i never noticed this thread before!

I'll dig it up every 4-5 months when I actually get a chance to play an RPG.

moofrank wrote:

I think that I completely loathe Shadowrun with an unending hate.

The system is painfully slow involving 4-5 rolls of a bucket of dice for each attack, compounded with the Runequest II problem of phased rounds with some characters able to act MANY more times per round than others.

Pile onto that a buckets of everything mythology piled in a big steaming heap on top of a dated 80's view of futuristic technology. Then scatter the rules all over a couple of White Wolfs (an official RPG Unit!) worth of sourcebooks.

I just want to see it burn.

I refused to even try Shadowrun, because I despised the way they took cyberpunk ideas and merged them with generic D&D stereotypes. Bleah. I was a fan of the Cyberpunk rpg, though that game had its own flaws. Pretty much any straight science-fiction rpg without psionics comes down to who has the best gear.

Ya'll are just haters.

That sad fact is that shadowrun does cyberpunk better than cyberpunk did (or cyberspace or gurps cyberpunk..ect) I tried them all. Frank has a point that it is a bit dicey- but that is a p[ro for me not a con. I love picking up a big handful of dice and laying the slapdown.

Steve"Cyberjunkie"Avery

No idea that Shadowrun was so divisive. I tend to enjoy playing/running indie games. Soliphist is a fun game as is Universalis.

But if everyone had the same taste, life would be dull.

Holy shit, I'm with Avery on something!

Shadowrun with a fantastectomy was a better Cyberpunk than CP2020.

It was a decent enough game even with all that crap in there if you wanted to just go with it.

I never played 4e (or even 3e), but I read the 4e rules and really liked what they'd done.

Dunno. I might like Eclipse Phase (more S/F /horror) far better. I also remember liking SLA Industries, but cannot remember much about it.

I don't recall SLA as being even remotely playable. It was an awesome sourcebook, though.

I pondered coming out of RPG retirement with SR4e, but never quite got there.

moofrank wrote:

Dunno. I might like Eclipse Phase (more S/F /horror) far better. I also remember liking SLA Industries, but cannot remember much about it.

I love SLA industries. One of the most interesting storylines out there. I need to play it again soon.

As for Shadowrun, you guys are all high, it was a great gaming experience. CP and CP2020 were also good, but Shadowrun will always have a soft spot.

Another setting I really liked was Fading Suns. A way to get the "Dune" feel.

But for now, I'm digging Dark Heresy. We'll see how it holds up over time.

I ran a twisted version of the One Roll Engine (Godlike, Monsters and Other Childish Things....). The system is cinematic, and it also forces the case for having everyone declare actions before rolling. And then everyone rolls together. The one roll dice pool determines EVERYTHING in the round. Action order, damage, location, dodging and blocking.

It has some weird twists that enforce teamwork as well. We had one played take on a giant spider with the power of ball bearings named with the 13-letter word "Dingleberries", while his friend in wolf form distracted the spider by running around and nipping at its legs. It was a freaking deadly spider, but it didn't have a chance against the power of the mighty Dingleberries.

I've also become fascinated with the RPGs of Herbie Brennan. He did three: Man Myth & Magic, Timeship, and Monster Horrorshow.

He isn't a gamer. He did do a number of Fighting Fantasy style gamebooks, and a lot of children's literature.

Timeship is a mess. Designed for newbie rpg players, it is practically drowned in weird New Age stuff, psychotically random character ideas and just weirdness.

Man, Myth, and Magic is a little more traditional, although it is entirely likely that you will create an unplayable character. The game careens in weird, unpredictable ways that MAKE me want to run it. Characters are completely random, and based on "historical" nationalities. African Witch Doctor, a Roman Centurion, Taoist Monk in a party together investigating the ruins of Pompeii.

The magic system involves burning experience points to fuel spells.

The adventures are the magic here. They take place in historical settings, Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, Londinium, and link to form a fairly lengthy campaign. With the crazy in full force. Short dungeon crawls, magical forests. Instant-kill, no-save deathtraps.

The weakness is combat. Work out your percentile modifiers, roll over your skill and the difference becomes damage points. Players have 200 or so HP. You can also target an area and each area can only take so much damage before being severed. It is cute, but it looks as if it takes too many rolls to really hurt something.

After a year of owning the book, I finally got to play INSPECTRES last night, and it was fucking INCREDIBLE. Perfect system for a Ghostbusters game.

This is a very, very different game, and if you're playing with people who can't pull out of the standard D&D approach to RPGs, it's not going to work. The GM is really there just as a mediator, as the players pretty much have full control of where the story goes. Lucky for me, I got players who could do that and they understood the GB style humor to boot.

I'm sure it won't strike gold everytime, but the one game last night was by far the best RPG experience I've ever had.