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Post by clockworkmonk on Feb 16, 2012 15:53:01 GMT -8
Before starting this convo, I would like to ask if our venerable douchebag overlords have considered a subforum for indie games yet?
Anyway, I'm about this close to buying the Cosmic Patrol PDF. I know it's hard to go wrong for $5, but I still wanted to get others' opinions on it. Hyvemynd has made his passion for the system quite well known, and I have to say that's definitely a contributing factor in my decision.
The default setting looks fun enough--I'd likely be playing a Star Trek- or Futurama-style humor game with it. But is it as robust as other systems in handling long-term campaigns that focus on character skill progression as well as character development? With just five stats, my instinct is to lean toward no, but I'm sure others have a different opinion. Also, has anyone tried modding it for a different setting? Running Harry Potter sounds like a strange but fun exercise in experimentation, but I'd also like to know how well it could handle, say, a traditional swords and sorcery kind of setting or if it should really stick to its sci-fi roots?
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HyveMynd
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Dirty hippie, PbtA, Fate, & Cortex Prime <3er
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Currently Running: The Sprawl
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Post by HyveMynd on Feb 16, 2012 18:51:30 GMT -8
I'll add my voice to the respectful request to create an "Indie Games" subforum.
Yes, everyone knows that I've got a throbbing, turgid hard-on for Cosmic Patrol. But to address your concerns clockworkmonk, there are a few things I don't like about it, or have tweaked a bit in actual play. This turned out to be fairly long, so I suggest you all sit down while I wave my fanboy penis around.
The out-of-the-box pulp sci-fi setting is pretty well fleshed out with a 20-ish page Gazetteer of the solar system that relates the history of the Cosmic Patrol (with a nicely ambiguous timeline) and details all the celestial bodies as well as few other spots of interest around the galaxy. The structure of the Cosmic Patrol organization is described, and there are notes about some of the bigger baddies in the setting. It's a nice starting point that gives players enough information to know how the universe works and provides a lot of scenario hooks, while still leaving a lot of space for people to put their own fingerprints on it if they wish.
The problem with running the setting as is, is that "pulp sci-fi" means many things to many people. There is a lot of space to run around in theme-wise, meaning things can go wildly off course and start to feel disjointed. It's that proverb about too many cooks spoiling the broth. If you plan on running the game with a rotating Lead Narrator, you really need something a bit more concrete to keep everyone on the same page and to make sure the story has a consistant flavor. As I said before, my group ran a Blaxploitation version of it which actually went over really well. Everyone knew the standard tropes of the genre, the clichés, themes, and tired jokes, so everyone was able to stay on track and the whole session felt like a single whole even though each scene was run by a different person.
Now, if you plan on running the game like a traditional RPG with only a single Lead Narrator, then this isn't a problem. The story will always have a consistant feel to it, since only one person is calling the shots and setting the tone. If you're going to let everyone GM though, which I think is really part of the fun of the game, then I would suggest having a stronger flavor that everyone can draw inspiration from. Doing a StarTrek or Futurama humor game sounds perfect, so long as everyone is familiar with those two settings. And honestly, who isn't?
Long term play with character progression? Eh, not so much. This game won't do that mechanically. The authors state that running long, sweeping campaigns is beyond what the system is meant to do. They do offer a suggestion for character advancement where players vote on an MVP at the end of every session, and that player earns a Mission Point. Trading in a certain number of Mission Points allows you to upgrade a die on your character sheet, but that's it. You could come up with rules that allowed characters to obtain a new Special Die to represent them acquiring new skills or knowledge (usually characters only have a single Special Die) but you're not going to get the advancement found in other systems. At best you could probably do a series of linked scenarios with the characters "advancing" by reaching some kind of story goal at the end.
I do think that the basic system is flexible enough to adapt just about any setting with a few tweaks. I haven't had a chance to run it yet (I've got my fingers crossed for this weekend) but I whipped up rules for a Power Rangers style action game complete with giant robots and transforming teenagers. I think it could handle a traditional Sword & Sorcery game, so long as everyone fully realized this would be a rules-light narrative game and not the tactical crunch-fest of D&D.
If you were to run a S&S game though, you'd run into the same melee vs. ranged issue that Savage Worlds has. Cosmic Patrol has one combat stat. One. It doesn't matter if your shooting a bow, swinging a sword, firing a laser pistol, or dropping a rock on someone. All of those actions use the Combat Die. So if someone really wants there to be a difference between a Fighter and a Ranger, they're going to have to do it narratively rather than mechanically. Plus, there's no initiative roll, and there are no maneuvers, feats, or special combat actions to spice up combat. There isn't even a map unless you want to provide one. It's purely narrative. For some players that means they'll try all kinds of crazy stuff that looks awesome because they aren't constrained by rules, but for others it'll mean a lot of "I swing my sword." There's no gear either. Weapons are pretty much divided into light, medium, and heavy and do damage based on their weight class. There's no set armor values, and characters are just assumed to have whatever is appropriate for their character and the story. A combat turn is also a single opposed roll with the winner inflicting damage on the loser. It doesn't matter who the attacker was or what they were doing. Some players really won't like that.
One thing I didn't like about the system was damage and the amount of Armor the characters had. I felt that damage was too low and the characters were too damage resistant. The book says all PCs start with a minimum of 10 Armor points plus a few more based on their other stats. Armor is ablative though, meaning that you mark off Armor pips as characters take damage and only start marking off Health when all the Armor is gone. Combat looked like it would take a long time to resolve with most weapons only doing 2 points of damage. So I tweaked the numbers; weapons became more dangerous and armor dramatically decreased. I wanted characters to be able to kill enemies with a single raygun shot instead of having to hit them a dozen times before dropping them.
Character creation is also a bit wonky. They give you rules for character creation, but none of the sample characters in the book could be built with the rules they've provided. It's not a big deal since this is such a narrative game, but it did bug me. It was easy to solve though. I just gave each character a number of points to spend on their stats, with each point translating to one die face (so a D6 would cost 6 points).
So basically, Cosmic Patrol is great little system that could be used for any genre so long as players don't try to turn it into something it's not. It is a rules-light narrative system that is designed to be lighthearted and fun. It's flexibility is due to the simplicity of the rules, not because it has a rule to cover every possible situation. Giving someone a few extra Armor points, making weapons more or less dangerous, beefing up the baddie's stat dice, and creating special effects on the fly will not break the game. But that's because the only balancer of the system is the fiction and the play group. I would not suggest you play this game with a min-maxer, a Munchkin, or a powergamer because the rules are so easy to twist to your own ends. This game will not replace crunch-heavy games like D&D or GURPS, nor will it scratch the itch of building and leveling up a character with all the little fiddly mechanical bells and whistles that implies. What it does do is allow you to tell a fun story as a group with a few simple rules about task resolution. Try to make it do something else and you'll probably end up being disappointed.
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Post by fray on Feb 17, 2012 9:22:14 GMT -8
Agree on the Indie Games subforum.
I'm about halfway through the book. I LOVE the setting. Reminds me of Danger Patrol too. Cosmic Patrol is on my "To Play/Run" list. (It's a looong list.)
Anyways, I say go pick it up. can't go wrong for $5 really.
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Post by clockworkmonk on Feb 17, 2012 10:31:15 GMT -8
Okay, yeah, so that does sound pretty spectacular, then. So if I'm reading this correctly, the system is most appropriate when used not as a game in which players are meant to advance and become increasingly powerful demi-gods of destruction but rather as an intensely cooperative storytelling vehicle. I've talked to a couple of my friends after reading this advice and it actually seems like you could probably even run a long-ish term "campaign" with it, if you treated it more like a television show or comics rather than an epic movie or novel, i.e. tune in next week to see what crazy stuff our characters get into. So long as the players understand that it's not epic crunch time, and don't mind the lack of real "advancement" like in D&D, it could go on indefinitely?
All right, I'm going to go ahead and buy it tonight. If I hate it, or my frirends hate it, we will know exactly who to blame.
(While it's also been mentioned, what's the difference between Cosmic Patrol and Danger Patrol!?)
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Post by fray on Feb 17, 2012 13:30:16 GMT -8
DP vs CP... DP is free. They're both pulpy sci-fi games. I haven't got through the rules of CP yet to tell you the differences... DP is also a collab story game with the players having control over the narrative. DP is set up like an TV episode and also not for leveling the PCs into gods. My favorite thing about DP is the 'in the last episode' phase of the game, which is the beginning of a session, players describe what was going on with their characters in some dramatic way. The GM then uses those story hooks to make the current game session. Note: the 'last episode' isn't actually the last game session, the players create that 'last episode' on the spot. It is also very light on equipment and such. You take dice and put them into traits, 8 of them, d4 in losest d12 in highest. There are 8 roles a PC can play, very general roles, like Robot, Ghost, Mystic, Warrior. Each role has a talent that spotlights who they are. It's a 35 page pdf with character sheets at the back. 26 pages of rule stuff. DP link: www.dangerpatrol.com/This is also on my To Play/Run list.
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Post by clockworkmonk on Feb 17, 2012 13:39:12 GMT -8
Hm. Sorta looks like you could combine elements from both together ...
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Post by fray on Feb 17, 2012 15:11:35 GMT -8
Yep, I agree. I'll probably do that when the time comes.
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HyveMynd
Supporter
Dirty hippie, PbtA, Fate, & Cortex Prime <3er
Posts: 2,273
Preferred Game Systems: PbtA, Cortex Plus, Fate, Ubiquity
Currently Playing: Monsterhearts 2
Currently Running: The Sprawl
Favorite Species of Monkey: None
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Post by HyveMynd on Feb 17, 2012 19:28:45 GMT -8
You're absolutely right about running a longer campaign with Cosmic Patrol if you do it like a TV series or comicbook, clockworkmonk. It's the story that advances, not the characters. So long as everyone knows that then yeah, you could conceivably play a really, really long multi-session game of it. Doing that makes me think of the first three Indiana Jones movies. Indy doesn't get better as the films go on. His skills don't increase from one movie to the next. It's just the story and situation that changes.
The rules actually give you a simple way to string adventures together called Tags. Tags are short, usually one or two word descriptors attached to things, people and places, that are meant to give suggestions about what could be going on with this story element or what could happen next. Let's say your group just finished dealing with some Cometarians baddies in the last adventure and you don't know what to do with them next. Well, Pluto has the tag 'Cometarians', so you could send them to Pluto and continue the Cometarian theme. It's just a simple way to draw common threads between separate sessions, especially if different people are starting off as the Lead Narrator.
Like fray, I also really like the "Previously on Danger Patrol..." phase, and think that could work really well in Cosmic Patrol. The players each make up a story about what happened to their character recently, which the GM can then mine for ideas to use during the session. It's kind of like a mini-sandbox; the players are giving hints about things they'd like to see or what they think would be cool for their character, and you're weaving it back into the story. Of course it requires the LN or GM to think on their feet a lot, but that's part of the fun of GMing, right?
Besides being free, another difference between Cosmic Patrol and Danger Patrol is that the GM doesn't roll any dice in Danger Patrol. Any failure on a die roll in Danger Patrol results in "Danger!" that the GM can use to introduce complications, raise Threat levels, or inflict damage on PCs. The players can add more dice to a roll to represent the use of equipment or skills. Adding more dice means a bigger effect if you succeed but results in more Danger if you don't, so the game has a nice push your luck feel to it.
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