tomes
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Posts: 1,438
Currently Running: Dungeon World, hippie games, Fallout Shelter RPG hack
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Post by tomes on Aug 16, 2018 20:24:21 GMT -8
I played a Cortex game recently, and although I recognize that it's much more crunchy of a system than I desire, it's also one that I think would work relatively well once the players know how to navigate it. It definitely leans a bit more of a trad system as far as the amount of things to pull together, though, and that breaks a lot of the appeal for me personally. But if I had to game in a system that had that level of mechanics, I sort of feel like it might be the best one (?)
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Post by HourEleven on Aug 16, 2018 21:11:43 GMT -8
tomes so much of the crunch is completely optional pieces the gm plugs in to get a specific feeling into the game. I ran a Cortex game that used two categories (so you only ever rolled two dice- one category was the fate accelerated approaches, the other was interesting facts about your characters past) against a difficulty chosen by gm based on difficulty of the task. No doom pool, no effect dice, just ablative hit points, no spoiler complications, no SFX, no gear, that’s all optional.
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tomes
Supporter
Hello madness
Posts: 1,438
Currently Running: Dungeon World, hippie games, Fallout Shelter RPG hack
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Post by tomes on Aug 16, 2018 21:38:25 GMT -8
tomes so much of the crunch is completely optional pieces the gm plugs in to get a specific feeling into the game. I ran a Cortex game that used two categories (so you only ever rolled two dice- one category was the fate accelerated approaches, the other was interesting facts about your characters past) against a difficulty chosen by gm based on difficulty of the task. No doom pool, no effect dice, just ablative hit points, no spoiler complications, no SFX, no gear, that’s all optional. Gotta admit, that sounds pretty tight. Will have to explore more...
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2018 4:04:01 GMT -8
Agreed, I think it gets unfairly dismissed by a lot of people because it has tended towards licensed properties in the past. Was that the system that they used for Marvel? Honestly if it is I don't remember much except just hating the system.... Yeah, Marvel was the Heroic flavour and got very mixed reception. I think part of that was how it approached Super Heroes, it included a lot of comic book elements that put people off - for example forcing characters apart or bringing them together unexpectedly. IIRC the GM could even end a scene part way through with a sufficient roll on the doom pool. So the players might be left in the same situation as a read of a comic - they know for example the PCs were victorious but don't reveal how the villain escaped until later etc. Personally I like the look of it (have only read it, never had a chance to play) but I can fully understand why some people don't especially if they were expecting a traditional supers games.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 17, 2018 4:11:00 GMT -8
I'm loving the system so far. Combat seems a little slow, but I think that is because we are new and talking through it every time we make a dice pool so listeners can hear. It's very exciting through and I really like how the dice pools are based on character/player choice in some ways. Interesting, haven't listened to it (I find I can only keep up with 1AP at a time and my loyalty lies with the Inukai) so am wondering which options you have in play. I found Action (Firefly) relatively quick as you typically only have a small number of dice and the approach is the most traditional. The Drama variant of Smallville was a lot slower as pools could be more complex and resolution was a ratching back and forth where your pool could change with each roll until one person failed.
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Post by HourEleven on Aug 17, 2018 6:04:52 GMT -8
Marvel Heroic also threw people off because every other super hero game worked by building your powers like LEGO (this range, this effect, this duration, do the numbers, points balance it all) ala Hero system or mutants and masterminds. Here was a game where your powers were narrative not mechanical. So the lack of a phone book sized menu of power attributes combined with a poor explanation of “if your character can throw a car, then they can throw a car, what’s so hard about that?” Really disrupted the expected.
Smallville (Cortex drama) did the same thing with social interactions. The fact that 3 characters having an argument in a coffee house could play out mechanically like a DND boss fight really shook some foundations and didn’t have the meta level of explanation in the core book to really introduce such a curve ball.
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Post by ericfromnj on Aug 17, 2018 6:29:58 GMT -8
Was that the system that they used for Marvel? Honestly if it is I don't remember much except just hating the system.... Yeah, Marvel was the Heroic flavour and got very mixed reception. I think part of that was how it approached Super Heroes, it included a lot of comic book elements that put people off - for example forcing characters apart or bringing them together unexpectedly. IIRC the GM could even end a scene part way through with a sufficient roll on the doom pool. So the players might be left in the same situation as a read of a comic - they know for example the PCs were victorious but don't reveal how the villain escaped until later etc. Personally I like the look of it (have only read it, never had a chance to play) but I can fully understand why some people don't especially if they were expecting a traditional supers games. I wasn’t quite expecting a traditional supers game. It’s just I learn games by reading them then running one shots for my friends and I remember just not liking the whole building dice pool aspects of the game. Now if I am hearing correctly and that cortex games play a little differently I may have to give it another shot. Hell it took me 3 different PbtA games to find one I found appealing (and the first two were run by good GMs too).
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Post by HourEleven on Aug 17, 2018 6:43:40 GMT -8
The thing with Cortex is that the core of the system is a couple thematically relevant groups of attributes (could be skills, friends, approaches, stats, careers, equipment, whatever, doesn’t matter) rated at different dice size and when you roll you get to pick one thing from each group to build your pool (in a traditional arrangement, stat + skill + weapon; d8+d6+d6) and try to hit a TN. Everything else is toolkit.
The different styles people refer to (heroic, drama, action, etc) are just arrangements of the other bells and whistles to focus on specific play styles. Heroic is focused on big people doing big things with big impact and the whole system reinforces that. Drama is focused on social interaction with incredibly high stakes (your relationships and personal values are what you roll in place of your strength and your weapon). Action is focused on incredible capable people accomplishing a task (instead of individual skills you have these huge broad roles which encompass all the awesome things this character is a master of). Same core mechanic, but tailored to emphasize different types of games.
When prime gets released it will have a “default” arrangement that can be played out of the box like a traditional game, and then it will have the tool kit book with all the possible extra dials and switches that change the feel and focus and pacing.
Personally, I think when too many switches are set to ON, Cortex becomes very game-y. Some people like that, some don’t, but how many mechanics are in play is also part of the customization.
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fredrix
Master Douchebag
Posts: 2,142
Preferred Game Systems: Fate, L5R, Pendragon, Gumshoe, Feng Shui
Currently Playing: Pendragon, Song of Ice and Fire, L5R, Feng Shui, Traveller
Currently Running: Fate, Coriolis, Nights Black Agents
Favorite Species of Monkey: 1970's NTV, dubbed by the BBC (though The Water Margin beats it)
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Post by fredrix on Aug 17, 2018 6:57:50 GMT -8
The thing that pissed me off in Firefly (another Cortex plus variant) was not just the players but the GM had to build a dice pool every time the players wanted to do a thing. Grrrr
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Post by HourEleven on Aug 17, 2018 7:02:21 GMT -8
The thing that pissed me off in Firefly (another Cortex plus variant) was not just the players but the GM had to build a dice pool every time the players wanted to do a thing. Grrrr A lot of people love the randomizer for difficulty, I always use static. It’s faster and gives me more control as a GM.
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Post by Kimi on Aug 17, 2018 15:00:43 GMT -8
Yeah, Marvel was the Heroic flavour and got very mixed reception. I think part of that was how it approached Super Heroes, it included a lot of comic book elements that put people off - for example forcing characters apart or bringing them together unexpectedly. IIRC the GM could even end a scene part way through with a sufficient roll on the doom pool. So the players might be left in the same situation as a read of a comic - they know for example the PCs were victorious but don't reveal how the villain escaped until later etc. Personally I like the look of it (have only read it, never had a chance to play) but I can fully understand why some people don't especially if they were expecting a traditional supers games. I wasn’t quite expecting a traditional supers game. It’s just I learn games by reading them then running one shots for my friends and I remember just not liking the whole building dice pool aspects of the game. Now if I am hearing correctly and that cortex games play a little differently I may have to give it another shot. Hell it took me 3 different PbtA games to find one I found appealing (and the first two were run by good GMs too). I haven't played other Cortex systems, but the dice pool mechanic is still definitely there. I don't know how/if it's been changed but it seems very neat to me. I can build my dice pool how I want based on certain criteria. For example, if I'm trying to save some I can choose to use my Duty or Justice dice in the pool, but if it's Simon (my character's love interest... well one of them...) I also have the option of using my Love dice instead. The Love dice is lower so I have more of a chance to fail. That's cool! I can decide if my character would be cool and calculating, or if maybe she's too personally involved and might mess up. I can see that it would not be a great system for power gamers, but I like how I can impact my %chance to match the RP.
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Post by ericfromnj on Aug 29, 2018 15:36:03 GMT -8
I wasn’t quite expecting a traditional supers game. It’s just I learn games by reading them then running one shots for my friends and I remember just not liking the whole building dice pool aspects of the game. Now if I am hearing correctly and that cortex games play a little differently I may have to give it another shot. Hell it took me 3 different PbtA games to find one I found appealing (and the first two were run by good GMs too). I haven't played other Cortex systems, but the dice pool mechanic is still definitely there. I don't know how/if it's been changed but it seems very neat to me. I can build my dice pool how I want based on certain criteria. For example, if I'm trying to save some I can choose to use my Duty or Justice dice in the pool, but if it's Simon (my character's love interest... well one of them...) I also have the option of using my Love dice instead. The Love dice is lower so I have more of a chance to fail. That's cool! I can decide if my character would be cool and calculating, or if maybe she's too personally involved and might mess up. I can see that it would not be a great system for power gamers, but I like how I can impact my %chance to match the RP. Heh. I am definitely not in the power gamer category, though normally I am the GM and I look at system that make me want to run them. To be honest I don't understand how Cortex is a narrative system when it is so - crunchy - when compared to things like games running the Apocalypse engine. It's the same reason I hate Fate, because that system is too crunchy to be a narrative system I can enjoy. Of course it took me playing 2 PbtA engine games and listening to an AP until I got that engine and started running it (I loved the Masks AP and run a monthly Masks game now), so I am listening to the one shot of Cortex Prime to see what I am missing. However, I tried reading the Marvel cortex book again and realized part of the problem. I hate the way the book is laid out. It refers to rules 30 pages later when talking about how to play the game nstead of laying things out in a logical order. It's confusing as hell. Is Cortex Prime any better?
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Post by azhreivep on Aug 29, 2018 23:12:04 GMT -8
Oh man. I love the Marvel Heroic RPG, but I can one hundred percent agree with you about the book. It's nowhere near as bad as the Revised Third Edition of Legend of the Five Rings (my personal favorite ediiton), though. I can only imagine they deliberately made the layout as unintuitive as possible just to force you to read everything ... repeatedly ... until you memorize it, because god damn do you not want to have to reference it on the fly. Nothing is bundled together in any logical fashion, and nothing is named what you think it is in the index.
... White wolf is bad about that last one, too. When they bother to include an index and remember to put the actual page number in. And get the number right.
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Post by HourEleven on Aug 30, 2018 7:38:09 GMT -8
All of Margaret Weis Productions books are poorly structured for learning the systems. Cam’s new layout for Prime is muuuuch better.
The narrative structure of Cortex is definitely different from other games. Each roll does A LOT of work. It guides whole sections of story that follow it and only runs as smoothly as everyone’s familiarity with the rules. It’s a stunted start and stop if everyone’s puzzling it out (much like FFGs fancy dice until everyone knows automatically what the symbols mean). But basically each roll sets up the next portion of story telling. It’s probably easiest to see in Smallville where a roll comes in an RP conversation (like a “sounds like ______ move” moment in PtBA) and then dictates the turn the RP takes as power and advantages shift.
It’s definitely an acquired taste, but with players who know the system (who can build a pool quickly and interpret it smoothly), it’s not as crunchy as it reads.
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fredrix
Master Douchebag
Posts: 2,142
Preferred Game Systems: Fate, L5R, Pendragon, Gumshoe, Feng Shui
Currently Playing: Pendragon, Song of Ice and Fire, L5R, Feng Shui, Traveller
Currently Running: Fate, Coriolis, Nights Black Agents
Favorite Species of Monkey: 1970's NTV, dubbed by the BBC (though The Water Margin beats it)
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Post by fredrix on Aug 30, 2018 7:46:07 GMT -8
All of Margaret Weis Productions books are poorly structured for learning the systems. Cam’s new layout for Prime is muuuuch better. Though I agree, I think what they tried in Firefly (introducing rules with synopses of each episode) was a brave idea, which might have worked to bring non-RPG playing Browcoats into the hobby.
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