Two games, one genre: Star Wars

As the current Noghri Death Squad series draws to a close, let's look at some Star Wars games.

Despite not being a massive Star Wars fan, I've played a few Star Wars games.  The first one was d6 Star Wars (which I think is officially called Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game) and second was Star Wars: Saga Edition.  But since I only played a couple of sessions of each (I was more of an occasional cameo in that group that a regular player, due to living in a different town) I don't remember enough about them to say anything particularly useful.

More recently, I've tried a couple more.

Savage Star Wars

I can't tell you which of the many fan-made Star Wars conversions of Savage Worlds we were playing.  What I can tell you is that despite a sterling effort not to make Jedis overpowered, all but one of us ended up playing them anyway (although that was partly a side effect of the campaign brief).

If I ever want to know if a system is prone to being min-maxed there's one guy in the home group I can count on.  I forget what type of alien he was playing.  All I remember is that he took so many abilities/drawbacks/whatever Savage Worlds calls them that affected his movement speed that he could barely move.  Fortunately, as a Jedi, he was able to force push himself around significantly faster than he could walk.

I had a lot of fun with this campaign, and was pretty sad when it stopped.  A big part of that was the character I'd created.  Min-maxing issues aside, the options presented were very helpful to me, not a massive Star Wars nerd, in creating an interesting character.  While it was years ago now, I still have fond memories of Tamaga, my Twi'Lek former slave, who'd accidentally killed her owner because she didn't know blasters has a kill setting as well as stun, and couldn't read the switch on the blaster because her owner hadn't allowed her to learn to read.

The Savage Worlds rules themselves, however, I don't feel added much.  They're functional, because Savage Worlds is a perfectly reasonable generic system, but unless you're particularly keen on it, there's no real reason to pick this particular version of Star Wars.

Star Wars: Edge of the Empire (Fantasy Flight Games)

This is a game I absolutely should not like.

It's got a setting that's so big and complicated that I feel completely lost in it.  It's got a ton of splatbooks, and massive lists of aliens with completely meaningless (to me) names.  The character sheets go on for several pages.  It uses my least favourite dice mechanic, dice pools.  And not just any dice pools, it's the weird narrative dice that nobody liked in Warhammer FRP 3e.  It only needs a ton of marginally different types of equipment to...oh look, it's got that too.

It's like someone tried to shove all my least favourite RPG things into one massive bloated monstrosity.  And somehow came out with a really enjoyable game.

Zatti, my constantly stressed out Noghri thief, might not be as conceptually well realised as Tamaga, but the game mechanics are somehow serving to build her story as the game progresses.  I doubt she's in any way an optimised character build, but I feel like she's got her place in the group all the same.

Part of what's making it work, I think, is the restrictions the GM has put on us.  Obviously the group is mostly Noghris.  He's also restricted which books we can use for buying equipment, which as someone whose head explodes when faced with the Cyberpunk 2020 Chromebooks (and not just because of the cover art) I really appreciate.  He knew the story he wanted to tell, and set things up to make it work.

EotE can do pretty much anything, which could lead to trying to do everything.  But so long as you know what you want to do, and can keep focused on that, you can be reasonably confident it'll do it.

Conclusion

Edge of the Empire is the first game that's really made me feel excited and enthusiastic about playing Star Wars.  Being a massive Star Wars nerd probably helps if you're the GM, but as a player, the system will lead you through it.  It may be huge and complicated, but somehow actually playing it isn't hard.  I thoroughly recommend this game.

Two games, one genre: Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk as a genre seems to come and go in popularity.  Right now it's firmly on the way up, with recent adaptations like Ready Player One and Altered Carbon, and the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 video game, which I will absolutely be playing.  So it's not surprising that more cyberpunk RPGs are appearing, although as yet I haven't played many.

Cyberpunk 2020

The second edition of the original cyberpunk RPG and apparently the only one people still actually play, this game is intended to let you play characters who've walked straight out of a William Gibson novel.  The world is detailed and evocative, and the gear list includes pretty much anything you could want to carry or implant.

It's brilliant, and it's no surprise people are still playing it now.  But, as I said after I played Shadowrun for the first time, it's no surprise it's nowhere near as popular as Shadowrun.  Because this game has aged spectacularly badly.

The combat system, Friday Night Firefight, is apparently one of the most realistic systems out there for modern combat, using actual FBI data on gunshot injuries as the basis for damage levels.  Gunfights have the potential to be extremely dangerous, and getting shot in the head without a helmet is pretty much a death sentence.  Sounds good in principle, but in practice it means abandoning the principle of style over substance that's supposed to define cyberpunk as everyone either cowers in the face of danger or tools up to the max.  And while the rules for armour and armour stacking might be realistic, they are absolutely not easy to understand.  I've given up trying.  I just make sure the GM knows what armour I've got, and refuse to engage beyond marking off however many hit points I'm told to.  And I'm not stupid, or even particularly stubborn - I just can't get my head round this insanely complex system when all I want to do is wear cool cybernetics and destroy corporations.

Which brings me onto gear.  Between the original rulebook and the giant pile of Chromebook expansions, there's a vast amount of gear available to a Cyberpunk 2020 character.  And in a more narrative based system this could be amazing.  Of course you'd consider getting the smart mirror shades instead of the smart goggles, even though they have fewer add-on slots and cost more, because they look cool and it's your signature style.  But in the heavily stats and rules based world of early 90s RPGs, that just doesn't fly.

It gets even worse when you get to the cyberwear, because at that point you aren't just paying money, you're paying humanity.

My first Cyberpunk 2020 character was a Rockerboy.  I wanted to give her a ton of cool looking implants, but once she'd got skinweave, a nu-throat and tech hair, she'd already lost enough humanity that adding many more implants was going to start tanking her empathy score.  And with the rockerboy being Cyberpunk 2020's biggest face class, she really needed a decent empathy stat.

My second character was a Solo.  This time I was going full min-max, with the empathy stat being the 'how much cyberwear can I fit in without going insane?' stat.  She was tooled up with muscle and bone lace, corvette legs and mono wolvers.  Her empathy was tanked - down to 4 by the end of the game, I think.  But all her cyberwear was 100% practical, fully devoted to making her better in a gunfight.  Read about Cyberpunk 2020 and there's all this cool stuff about creative uses of various implants - things like using implanted video screens to disorient your opponent - but I couldn't use anything like that because I'd rolled so much humanity loss on the practical gear there was no room left for anything imaginative.

In short, while the game wants you to be able to play cool William Gibson style protagonists, the rules constantly hinder your ability to do that.

The character classes are also a problem.  Some of them, like the Cop and the Corporate, leave me wondering what on earth these respectable people with proper jobs are doing hanging around with a bunch of street punks.  Fixers make far more sense as NPCs than as PCs.  Netrunners are so badly designed most GMs won't even let you play them, as they're basically playing a whole different game to the rest of the party.  Media and Rockerboy can both work as face classes but you've really got to design the campaign around them.  There are some solid options in the Solo and the Med-Tech but overall if you're trying to create a coherent team it's just a mess.

As a 30 year old futuristic game, it's unsurprising the whole thing is smothered in zeerust.  This isn't all bad.  There is a certain charm to playing in the 80s version of the future, where phones are huge and wifi barely exists and somehow the only music is hair metal.  But if you want to play a modern cyberpunk game, you're going to have to do some major updates to make the setting feel like the actual future.

So it should be obvious that the only reason I play this game is because I love cyberpunk as a genre so damn much I'll put up with this game's many drawbacks to make it happen.  However, there is one thing that Cyberpunk 2020 does absolutely brilliantly.  The life path.

Sometimes my characters show up with fully formed backstories.  More often, they don't.  But in Cyberpunk 2020 you can grab your dice and generate yourself a full character background, detailing their origins, family status, siblings, sense of style, and significant life events from the age of 16.

Which meant that Requiem, the solo I mentioned above, wasn't just a practically tooled up solo.  She was the child of Hispanic gang members who sent her away at a young age for her own protection.  Scarred by this, she grew up eschewing human company beyond befriending members of law enforcement for her own protection and training in combat.  Embracing this background meant that even with the game's rules constantly getting in the way, I had a well realised and unique character to play, and I still have happy memories of the strange tale of love and obsession that played out in that game.

I suspect Cyberpunk 2020 holds out more due to nostalgia than anything else, and while I'm interested to see if the new Cyberpunk Red rules fix any of the enormous problems, I'm not holding my breath.  But the life path generator?  I'd use that any time.

The Sprawl

I immediately loved The Sprawl, because this Powered By The Apocalypse game strips away so much of what I don't like about Cyberpunk 2020.  No spending ages trawling through Chromebooks to try to work out what equipment you're going to have - your playbook gives you a few options to pick from, and you decide for yourself which corporation's branding is on your gear.  No concerns about tanking your empathy - your cyberwear comes with other, more narratively interesting drawbacks.  Combat is the usual PBTA combat - fast and narrative driven.  And with the game only a few years old, there's nothing dated here, although at the same time there's nothing to stop you playing it in the 80s future if that's what your group enjoys.

Digging a bit deeper though, I still found problems, and one of them is the playbooks.  The Sprawl could really have done with taking less inspiration from Cyberpunk 2020 here.

The Media character is still here, as the Reporter, and once again doesn't really fit in unless you structure the campaign around them.  The Rockerboy is also back, as the Pusher, and has the same issue.  The Fixer, again, makes a better NPC.  What the game really could do with instead of these is a solid Face class like Shadowrun has.

Over-specialisation might be a theme, in fact.  The Hacker is a vast improvement on the Netrunner, but in the game we played the Tech was able to do plenty of hacking without dominating the session and still having other options.  The Driver doesn't have the flexibility of Shadowrun's Rigger.

There are some solid options in the Infiltrator, Soldier and Tech, but overall a smaller number of more flexible playbooks would make for a better game.

I also wasn't entirely sold on the planning and action phases.  While I can see that the planning phase that consists pretty much entirely of making some dice rolls to acquire the Gear and Intel currencies is intended to prevent the game turning into a strategic planning meeting, the way Shadowrun seems prone to doing, it's difficult to get your head around as it doesn't seem to involve any actual roleplay, and isn't that why we're all here with our pencils and dice?  The way Blades in the Dark handles this with flashbacks is in my opinion a much better way to avoid extended planning sessions.

All the same, a well run game of The Sprawl can easily hit all the cyberpunk notes and tell a fun story without the rules getting in the way too much.  It brings some of the Cyberpunk 2020 nostalgia with significantly less mathematics to work out if you're dead or not.  A lot of love has been put into this game.  It's just not as good as it could be.

Conclusion

I love cyberpunk enough to overlook the flaws with both these systems, and would enthusiastically sign up to play The Sprawl if I saw it offered at a convention.  What I'd actually recommend though...

There's not a huge amount of cyberpunk games out there.  I've never played Corporation or GURPS Cyberpunk (although I am familiar with the story of how the latter was the target of a Secret Service raid, and if that's not a plot hook I don't know what is.) The only other game I've played is Shadowrun, and while I'm not personally a fan, if you don't have the same, "Ew, you got elves in my dystopia" reaction to the urban fantasy elements of Shadowrun, it's a better game than both of these.

But the cyberpunk game I really want, the one that I hope is going to fix everything that's wrong with every other cyberpunk game I've encountered, is Null Vector.  It's the cyberpunk hack of Blades in the Dark that everyone and their dice have been waiting for since 2015.  It was apparently in alpha at the end of 2018, and according to people who can see the backer-only kickstarter updates there's going to be a preview available in November.

While I've had a bunch of fun with PBTA games, for mission-based gaming I've found the Forged in the Dark system to be absolutely superior, and I can only hope that John Harper won't keep us all waiting too much longer.

But that life path generator?  Still gold.  Use it.

Two games, one genre: Supervillains

My experience of playing superhero games has been limited to two one-shots, and by coincidence, both of them involved playing supervillains called in to save the world, Suicide Squad style.

Necessary Evil (Savage Worlds)

when the GM described the setting to me, I was instantly smitten.  Due to an enormous miscalculation, every superhero in the world has been killed by an alien invasion, and the only people left with the superpowers needed to take on the aliens are supervillains.

And it makes complete sense.  Supervillains aren't exactly the kind of people to quietly sit down and behave themselves when a powerful authority tells them to.  The PCs are one of a number of independent cells recruited by Doctor Destruction, the world's greatest villain, who resents the aliens taking over the world because that's his job, dammit.

The GM helped me with my character, since I'd never done a superhero game before.  With his help, I came up with Ice Queen.  She was a beauty pageant contestant, aiming to become the next Miss World.  To raise her public profile she went hiking in the Himalayas, where she fell down a crevasse and was presumed dead.  However, she survived, and was nursed back to health by Buddhist monks.  When she left and returned to America she discovered that they'd held the contest without her, at which point she tracked down the winner at a show, froze everyone solid with her new ice powers, and stole the beauty queen's crown, which she has worn ever since.

(I would like to clarify that this was all years before Frozen came out.)

Teamed up with a particularly disgusting rubbish-themed villain who once buried the whole of Los Angeles in trash, a walking liability called Captain Collateral and another villain who's name sadly escapes me, we set out to start the fight against the alien menace.

It should be obvious that I adore this setting.  It's a fun variation on superheroes, and the character options have been well thought out to cater to villains rather than just reproducing standard superhero stuff (for example, one of the disadvantages you can take is 'gloating'.)

Adventures are more along the espionage/sabotage line than conventional superheroics, which works well for a team of dodgy types with their own agendas all wanting to cause trouble.

Where I felt it fell down slightly was with the Savage Worlds system.  It took a lot of my character creation points to get the ranged ice powers I wanted, and then I rarely actually managed to do anything with them as I kept failing the attack rolls necessary to actually use them.

I would absolutely play in this setting again, but unless you're already a Savage Worlds enthusiast, I don't think there's enough in the book itself to justify buying ite.  I had fun in the game, but never quite felt properly supervillainous.

Excision (Groundhoggoth)

Once again going to the other end of the scale, Excision is the most rules-light system I've ever played, involving no dice and no character sheet - just a set of index cards with your powers on.

In simple terms, you play a card and succeed.  To get a card back, you have to fail.  (There's more to it, but not that much more.)  It's incredibly simple, but results in pretty cinematic stuff where the players are powerful when they need to be but are looking for opportunities for an entertaining failure to get some cards back.

As far as I can tell, this system was created for doing secret agents type games, but as Necessary Evil demonstrates, espionage type missions work well with the 'supervillains save the world' concept.

My contribution to our little suicide squad was Acid, whose superpower was the ability to secrete large amounts of acid through her skin.  Her drawback was constant heartburn from the small amounts of acid she couldn't stop secreting.  She was one of those characters who reveals themselves as you play.  She was terrible, I realised as she prepared to torture our antagonist, but she hadn't always been that way.  It was the inhumane conditions required to imprison her for her relatively minor crimes that had turned her into what she was.

I enjoyed this game so much that I wrote up the session afterwards.  Read it here.

This game was firmly at the grimdark end of the scale (with Necessary Evil sitting more at the four colour heroes end) but I suppose there's no reason it couldn't have been colourful if we'd wanted to play it that way.

While some guidance on powers might be useful, the absolutely flexibility resulted in everyone being able to play the villain they wanted, and no dice meant no feeling like a rubbish villain.  We succeeded when we needed to.  When we failed, we failed spectacularly.

Conclusion

While Necessary Evil benefited from a more guided approach to character creation, actually playing the game was more enjoyable in Excision.

I don't know what else you could play this style of game in.  Excision works if everyone's down with a storytelling approach but some groups want more crunch.  I'm not sure a conventional superheroes game would be an ideal choice, as while supervillains are superficially similar, they really don't work the same way.  I wonder what else is out there?

Two games, one genre: Steampunk

There don't seem to be a huge number of steampunk RPGs out there.  Amongst the big names there's GURPS Steampunk, because there's GURPS everything, and there are steampunk settings for D&D and Pathfinder.  But I've never played any of those.  What I have played is two very different steampunk games, and they make an interesting comparison.

Victoriana (Cubicle 7)

If you want to run games set in the Victorian era, you could do a lot worse than picking up Victoriana.  When it comes to period flavour I've never seen anything that compares.  It's full of interesting details, and also has a set of excellent supplements that are worth picking up even if you aren't running the core system.

The game is set in an alternate history 1856, in a world filled with both technology and magic.  Airships and steam carriages abound, while elves, dwarves and trolls walk the streets.  If it's sounding like a Victorian version of Shadowrun, that's because that's exactly how it started out - the steampunk to Shadowrun's take on cyberpunk.

If you've read my post on Shadowrun you won't be surprised that I'm not a fan of the elves part.  Fortunately that's actually pretty easy to ditch if that's not what you're into.  I was in the GM's chair for this game, and briefed the players that I was going for a style of game closer to the Robert Downey Jr Sherlock Holmes movies, except where magic is still real.  If they wanted the special abilities of the various non-human options they could still have them - they'd just be unusually tall/short humans.

All this worked for me as the Victorian era is full of tales of magic, fairies, monsters and ghosts, but with thoroughly human protagonists.  I could relate to this, even with the added steam tech elements.

And even if you're playing stock Victoriana, elves and all, species is a pretty insignificant element compared with what really mattered in Victorian Britain - class.  The game does a decent job of explaining why some upper class lord is hanging out with a lower class guttersnipe, and giving reasons why the former can't just endlessly bankroll the latter.

Character creation (at least in 2nd ed, the one I've played) is a fairly standard affair of attributes, skills and special abilities, plus the ever-enjoyable option of taking disadvantages for extra points.  One player in the group made up a dodgy lower class hustler type, and took the 'good twin' disadvantage, meaning I had a lovely time coming up with an NPC who looked a lot like him, had a very similar name, and kept going around doing good deeds and being philanthropic in a way that was constantly causing trouble for the PC.

The wide range of options meant we got a good selection of interesting characters.  One player chose to play one of the pre-gens from the book, but still managed to tie it in to another PC (I have fond memories of Aunty and Nephipoos).  Another player sunk a bunch of points into being good at art, which seemed like an odd choice at first, but it rapidly turned out that having a pre-Raphaelite artist on the team was immensely valuable.  So much so that when I ran the second campaign, and Mr Waterhouse's player was no longer available, I kept him around as an NPC for all those occasions when the players urgently needed his skills.

My only non-elf-based criticism of Victoriana is that I found the rules generally, and the combat system in particular, a bit clunky.  I'm used to the smooth running combat of D&D and Pathfinder, and the weird way Victoriana handled it didn't gel for me.  In terms of rules they might have done better to use something simpler and more cinematic - I can see something like Fate, or even Shadowrun being a solid choice.  I know there's a third edition out now, so I can hope that they've made improvements.  (And I'm glad to see 3rd ed is compatible with the 2nd ed supplements I already own, should I decide to pick it up some time.  Those supplements are really good.)

And at the other end of the scale...

The Code of Steam and Steel (Simon Burley Productions)

I've only played this game once, at a convention, but it's rather fresher in my memory than Victoriana.

Where Victoriana does a bunch of work creating a complex and coherent setting and detailed character creation, this rules-light game assumes you already know what steampunk looks like.  You simply decide which particular flavour of steampunk you're playing (hard sci-fi, science fantasy, etc.), come up with a character concept, assign a few numbers and you're good to go.  Combat is fast and cinematic, and uncomplicated enough that all the important rules fit down the side of the character sheet.

(The same ruleset also has superhero, sci-fi and fantasy variants, because fundamentally it's an action adventure system and the setting you put on top is just the flavour.)

What it doesn't have is the vast breadth of setting information and inspiration.  If the players all know steampunk and Victorian Britain well that's not a problem, but I can't imagine my Victoriana players coming up with the same incredible bunch of characters using this system as they did with the Victoriana character creation rules.

Conclusion

I recommend both these games.  They do different things, and they do those things well.

For a convention one-shot I'd pick The Code of Steam and Steel every time.  It's fast, easy to understand, and allows for people creating their own characters at the table in a way I'd never want to attempt with Victoriana, although I'd miss the kind of inspired characters you get with Victoriana.

If I run a steampunk campaign some time it's probably going to be in Victoriana, because of the wealth of background information and detailed character creation, although I'll be complaining about the combat system the whole time.

Maybe there's some way I can combine the two?