Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Jumpstart for Cyberpunk RED

Everything old is new again. The marketing machine for the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 video game is revving up, which is good news for us TTRPGers -- because it means a new Cyberpunk game from R. Talsorian.

I picked up the first Cyberpunk RPG when it first came up (this one was the boxed set with the 3 books, including Friday Night Firefight), and I continued collecting well into the Cyberpunk 2020 setting as well.

My preference was always for straight Cyberpunk with occasional forays into dark fantasy elements somehow interwoven into the techno-freakish future of Night City. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed playing Shadowrun a lot. However, the cyberpunk feel was always strongest for me in the world of Arasaka, Militech, and Trauma Team.

Also, I'm also tickled to see what's happened to some of the characters featured in the various iterations of the setting (Johnny Silverhand, Alt, Rache Bartmoss, etc.) as they've aged into this future.

Still reading through the Jumpstart Kit, but it's definitely bringing back that initial excitement of the first set of Cyberpunk.

UPDATE: Unboxing Video

Want to see what comes in the Jumpstart Kit? Check out the video below, from R. Talsorian:

Thursday, August 15, 2019

Campaign Frame: Future Earth-641 (part 01)

My past posts regarding Earth-641 were various pieces of an aggregate world that tried to pull together two major comic book universes (DC & Marvel) along with bits of others into a single kitchen sink setting.

However, the recent news concerning the Legion of Super-Heroes and the future of DC Comics has begun my creative wheels spinning for the setting in a new direction.

Future Earth-641

Directly inspired by the reports and press releases regarding the (as of this post date) upcoming Legion of Super-Heroes: Millenium, I've turned my thoughts toward the idea of creating a similar future of Earth-641 for the kind of galaxy-spanning super-heroic adventure that I like.
 
At the center of the campaign would be an organization not unlike the LSH, or perhaps a future incarnation of the Justice League, that would grant opportunities for super-heroic gaming like:
  • a high-tech home base
  • interstellar legitimacy as a legal entity
  • organization-wide gear and vehicles
  • coordination with interstellar peacekeeping organizations
  • reasons to have characters with a variety of powers and backgrounds
  • reasons to break into teams and follow different plots and plot threads
  • options to play multiple characters as those threads unfold
  • lots of myriad corners of the galaxy to explore -- with different challenges and antagonists to encounter and overcome
Furthermore, the planned storyline seems to allow for the various futures of DC to be unified, meaning it could be mined to allow for the ff. to all exist in the same 'verse:
  • OMAC
  • Batman Beyond
  • Kamandi
  • Tommy Tomorrow
To which I would gleefully add in my version:
So, those are the broad strokes. Let's see if I can figure out more ways into the setting and the overall campaign frame to flesh it out.

Monday, August 12, 2019

In Search Of... My Ideal Super-hero RPG (Part 01)

Despite my clear preference for various editions of Champions / Hero System for super-heroic gaming, I've never really stopped looking for several ideal systems. It's a big topic, and I've not mind-mapped this all out, so if this seems a bit scatterbrained, bear with me.

Why I like Champions

1. I like granularity of the system.

While DC Heroes / MEGS is a fine system, especially with the logarithmic progression of the APs and the use of benchmarks to help streamline play, I always felt that it needed a smidge more granularity to address issues like Batman's strength on the lower end, and the huge ranges that begin appearing beyond the double-digit values.

I also enjoy having a wide variety of skills, especially Professional Skills and Knowledge Skills, that can cover very specific skill-sets. Penalty Skill Levels that allow you to ignore very specific (character history-based) penalties.

I also love being able to create one-shot powers (important to character concept) that may be extremely cheap, and almost never used -- but do add the overall concept just by their presence.

2. I like the flexibility of the system.

I've written about how you can build "exactly the character you want" in the past, and it's one of the things that are regularly commented on about the system.

In particular, the highlights include:

  • being able to load up on a variety of Professional Skills and Knowledge Skill Levels (so you're familiar with theoretical and practical aspects of something you purport to be an expert on); 
  • playing with special effects and power advantages like (variable special effect, variable limitation, and variable advantage) to milk the utility of a certain kind of defined power;
  • covering science fiction, fantasy, and super-heroic tropes with a single, unified powers and skills system

3. I like the open-endedness of the system

While you can gauge power levels based on the active points, real points, and total points in powers, characteristics, and abilities, there's no real limit on them (except for arbitrary, and usually negotiable ones, based on the campaign).

I don't really like the idea of having a fixed range of power ranks (which is where clever systems like Mutants & Masterminds and even the classic TSR MSH RPG get docked some points in my mental tallies), and like being able to have someone (hero or villain) occasionally become more powerful/more skillful than the most powerful/skillful hero or villain in the course of the story.


4. I like having more than one way to achieve a specific end goal

More than a statement on how a given special effect can be build using the powers system in a variety of ways -- this refers to the various options for tactics, maneuvers, and teamwork can help a super-heroic group take down (or at the very least, thwart) a super-villain team. Power levels aren't the only thing to keep in mind when approaching challenges: creativity and working together cleverly can often defeat the most powerful villain, or stop their current plans for world domination / destruction.

The new breed of games

That being said, there are a variety of game systems out there that are certainly advancing the 'tech' of super-heroic RPGing, and it's time to take a look at them to see how they're addressing not just the simulation of the physics engine of the setting, but also the story-telling tropes that are prevalent in the genre.

That being said, I'll also look at ways to tweak these -- as was done in Fuzion, with dials and switches, to fine-tune the flavor of super-heroic genre being emulated.

Next: I'll start off with two of the games that I've been reading off-and-on over the past decade: Mutants & Masterminds, and Icons!