damerell | (no subject)

Just looks kinda like an expansion pack for Teenagers From Outer Space, which used to be just kind of a wacky teen sci-fi comedy game until they realized they could sell a lot more copies if they made it explicitly a wacky teen sci-fi ANIME comedy game...

Big Eyes, Small Mouth did have the "ciute and fuzzy cockfighting seizure monsters" supplement.

From the industry that brought you "VIOLENCE" - more games which should at most only be played ironically!

On balance I think I prefer Violence. At least we aren't expected to like the PCs.

Heavens! Does this mean that all players essentially run the same character?

I want to say "no, they just all do the same job", just like people who explore dungeons aren't all the same character [1], but in practice I suspect they fall into a few obvious categories - one will be needlessly genki, one cartoon-violent, one shy and submissive, one a creepily sexualised prepubescent, and one will have huge breasts which will be the funniest things in the world because as we all know huge breasts are inherently amusing.

I hate fanboys way too much given that I am one.

[1] unless you are 14-yo munchkins and/or play one of those White Wolf games where instead of character classes you have character classes with personality stereotypes and how did anyone see Vampire as a leap forward, anyway?

and how did anyone see Vampire as a leap forward, anyway

I guess I could try to gove an answer, maybe (and I ain't even a Vampire - The Masturbation player). It had, for its time, some fresh mechanics, although they were, shall we say, not NEARLY as flawless as some say.

In particular the first edition has the neat property that increased skill increases the odds of a critical failure.

I think all variants of the StoryTeller system does. CthulhuTECH has the interesting property that exactly half of your skill increases will (almost) double your chance of a critical failure.

In one of my (yet-to-be-finished) pen&paper RPGs, there's a dice pool system that doesn't have that drawback. It may have others, but as far as I can tell it makes you more likely to succeed as your dice pool expands. It does, however, not HAVE ctiticals of any kind (although, in general, failure will lead to a MASSIVE loss of hit points and maybe death, so I guess all failures are critical in that sense).

Nope. Revised Storyteller has botches on at least one 1 and no successes, and also fixed target numbers (otherwise botches still become more likely with more dice if the target number is high enough), and the new system's got "dramatic failures" but nothing tells me what the mechanic is there.

Aha! They've actually run the numbers, then! CthulhuTECH has botches if "half or more of your d10 (rounded up) is 1", so going from d10 to 2d10 takes crits from 10% to 19% (similarly for each odd n to n+1 dice).

I obviously half-remembered this conversation because I just read CthulhuTech and had a look-see for this post to mention it as a followup to our conversation about Vampire.

The CT system does better than that; a Critical Failure can also be a success. With enough dice, a Critical Failure can even also be a Critical Success.

They seem to have been inspired by Vampire's wrong-headedness all over the shop: a wanky name for the gamesmaster, five levels of skill proficiency agonisingly described for each skill in case you haven't caught on that 1 is minimal proficiency and 5 is superb (and, ha, some bags on the side for skills that don't work like that), each character has two descriptive words (in this case a Virtue and Flaw that are _totally disconnected_ from the formal advantages and disadvantages system), general aura of teenage emo...

... and frankly they seem to have missed the point completely. A mashup of everything from Lovecraft to _Evangelion_ is going to be extremely hard to take seriously, so why try? If you want Call of Cthulhu, try Call of Cthulhu - the whole lingering menace and hopelessness is a lot easier to convey if you don't have giant robots! I wanted _Gekiganger III_ and the big C whaling the crap out of each other with beam sabres.

I've just worked out why you hate Vampire so much. When we played we never made it to any significant amount of dice-rolling...

Also:

The very easy to learn rules-light system ... will have you playing the game with friends only fifteen minutes after opening the book.

Only if you can resist the temptation to read all the WORDS in it first.

I think I'm more confused than anything. If the players have these powers...? I'm trying to sort out what kinds of baddies they might encounter...yeah, confused.

Also annoyed about apparent gender stuff. Because of course the maids are girls and the Master is a boy.

Ludicrous OTT anime baddies, I think.

And, ah, it's a direct rip on maid anime. I don't think it was ever going to be anything except all traditional gender roles. Even when anime's good it's generally kind of sexist and when it's unashamed fanboy pandering like maid shows...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Cough! Splutter! Choke!
OMG I just HAVE to play that! :) It needs to be LRPed. :)

Just when you thought the whole maid genre had run out of steam...