Clup into the Blobtrix

June 16, 2023 6:14 AM

A sludge clapper never chubs a bubble, or at least that's what I'd murm if these keeblies scruffed a skimple a sun in their ivies. Zee Bashew is back, with a cartoon depicting every crunchy dystopian RPG.
posted by JHarris (20 comments total)

Not just the dystopian ones. Numenera continues to very carefully cross reference to books and pages that no longer fucking exist rather than just reiterating the important bits.

The blobtrix sounds dope though.
posted by abulafa at 6:24 AM on June 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

Honestly, these days, if a game has more than 3 pages on combat, equipment lists, or money tracking, I have serious reservations. Also, if the mechanics require math beyond easy addition and subtraction, it’s probably not for me.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:41 AM on June 16, 2023

It's a bunch of years after the war and everything is different.
posted by mittens at 6:44 AM on June 16, 2023 [6 favorites]

Perfect: "Because this game was written by a failed novelist who has tricked you into reading his microfiction."
posted by kaibutsu at 6:55 AM on June 16, 2023 [18 favorites]

I just want a rules set for walking around worrying about artificial consciousness in the incessant rain. Rickety multi-ethnic shantytown selling knockoff hi-tech a bonus, but not necessary.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:07 AM on June 16, 2023 [9 favorites]

What you have to understand is NewTHAC0 has a real component and an imaginary component...
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:12 AM on June 16, 2023 [11 favorites]

That's all very droll, but I gotta go reserve the name Hallelujah Jack on all social media. I may be gone for some time.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:25 AM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

So about a year ago my half-decade long Vampire: The Masquerade campaign had just wrapped up and the group was looking to play something new. My friend offered to run something for us which was exciting because it meant for the first time in many years I would not be running a game*.

He decided he would run something sci-fi and asked each of us to bring a suggestion and we would all choose from those selections together. One of the players offered up that whatever we chose, he would like it to be something elegant, rules light and simple. Yes, we all agreed, we wanted elegant, rules light and simple.

I cannot tell you how we went from that Point A to our arrival at the Point B of playing fucking ECLIPSE PHASE but here we somehow are.

I’m enjoying the game but really. “Elegant, rules light and simple” to Eclipse Phase. Jesus.

* This is either a bold-faced lie or at best a gross distortion of the truth; when I learned that my friend would be running the game I took it as an opportunity to start running TWO new games for different groups because I am an idiot who must always be running something.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 7:34 AM on June 16, 2023 [6 favorites]

Honestly, these days, if a game has more than 3 pages on combat, equipment lists, or money tracking, I have serious reservations. Also, if the mechanics require math beyond easy addition and subtraction, it’s probably not for me.

So, I'm guessing that you've played any Palladium game, then.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:36 AM on June 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

Oh, Eclipse Phase… really interesting world, but a pointlessly complicated game system that regularly gets in the way of telling interesting stories.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:41 AM on June 16, 2023

I just want a rules set for walking around worrying about artificial consciousness in the incessant rain.

Got you covered.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 11:42 AM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Zee Bashew doesn't release videos too often these days, but he always hits it out of the park. Take a moment to appreciate all the little details of this: his face when he sees the Kickstarter, the slightly poop-like aspect of the box left on his doorstep, the care into which he does the gritty voice acting, his character stumbling over the game's joyfully made-up pseudo-Nadsat terminology, and the game's title, "Skad-i Sprinter," being, when you think about it, a clear reference to Shadowrun... that's a lot of care put into a 3 1/2-minute animation.
posted by JHarris at 6:52 PM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

What you have to understand is NewTHAC0 has a real component and an imaginary component...

This is so delightful a concept that I refuse to believe that it hasn’t been developed, probably at cal tech.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 8:58 PM on June 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ah, Eclipse Phase 2e with its nine-stage combat rounds. We did an episode of our podcast [name redacted due to modesty] on it recently, and my co-hosts were into it and I really wasn't. Great background, something for everyone, and mechanics which also have something for everything and it is Too Much. I noped out of running friends through the introductory adventure because I simply couldn't remember enough of the system. Thanks, but I'll stick to Dread.
posted by Hogshead at 8:56 AM on June 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

And for those who think THAC0 was too complicated, let me introduce you to this system for calibrating a D&D foe's danger level, created by future head of TSR UK Don Turnbull, and published in White Dwarf magazine, the Monstermark. Do scan through to the second page of the linked PDF and bear in mind: this was completely seriously intended as a system that people should actually use.
posted by Hogshead at 9:03 AM on June 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

That may be, but it's still an interesting article! I kind of want to work out a spreadsheet to rate monsters for me automatically (which I've done for 5E monsters, to make improvised monsters a lot easier to figure CR for).
posted by JHarris at 9:40 AM on June 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

The excess of microfiction compared to mechanics is why I noped out of the revamp of World of Darkness books a while back. (Have they gotten better since I walked away? Maybe. I don't know. Because I walked away.) I literally could not tell what was unreliable narrator text from actual information about the setting and often I could not even pick out game mechanic information from either of those two. Reading through the book made me feel like a squirmy freshman wanting to raise my hand to ask "Excuse me, Professor, but is this going to be on the test?" The reason for this, apparently, was because it was important for the books to "set the mood." To this, I ask: when was the last time you paused a game session to pull out the rule book because someone at the table had a question about the mood?
posted by Karmakaze at 9:35 AM on June 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

man, the last time I tried to play World of Darkness was a Mage game at a convention with a bunch of folks who had been memorizing WoD microfiction for the last twenty years.... srsly, no game should turn on the surprise of upending the expectations set by the Lasombra clan book in 1998.

I got really bored and noped out about 4 hours into a scheduled 8 hour game, which is a shame because I love Mage, outside all of the microfiction cruft.
posted by kaibutsu at 5:37 AM on June 22, 2023

I love Mage, outside all of the microfiction cruft.

As a thirty year player of World of Darkness games of all stripes I would like to suggest that anyone calling that vast swamp of lore "microfiction" is grossly abusing the "micro" part of the term.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 11:19 AM on June 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

Zee Bashew published a new video like 10 minutes ago about old-time wargamers, called What's a Grognard?.
posted by JHarris at 5:14 AM on June 23, 2023 [1 favorite]