Basements & Beards- Analogue Gaming Thread

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

They might be pretty late to the party, but Hasbro wants some of those Marvelbux. It's no coincidence that the trailer comes across as a Fantasy ripoff of Guardians of the Galaxy.

Today, we will have Honor Among Thieves.
Tomorrow, we will have a Drizzt series* and a CalArts cartoon for Stryxhaven.

*) If they can ever figure out how to portray live-action Drow without getting cancelled to hell and back.
I guess they'll copy the 2e look, which requires the least amount of blackface.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Time for some drunk history lession, you wankers.


Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game
#

Back when White Wolf was in its infancy, they for some reason got the license for a Street Fighter RPG.
This was sometime between The New Challengers and Super Turbo, so you had your T. Hawks and Cammies, but neither Akuma nor Super Moves (thoug fan expansion would provide both).
It's a kinda mental IP considering how pretentious White Wolf is, but it kinda works from a gameplay perspective since White Wolf products were always heavy on player character stuff and light on bestiary stuff that was not a vampire/werewolf/mage/gypsy.
So you got a bunch of not-classes in the form of fighting styles representing the various SF2 characters, as well as a bunch of generic fighting styles that tended to be inferior. The various special moves you could buy tended to be generic as well, straight from some SF2 movelist, or strangely enoug some cyborg or acid-spitting bullshit straight out of Mortal Kombat.

This being White Wolf, naturally the balance was a bit arse. There was really never a good reason to be good at both punching and kicking, since they both used different skills. It also didn't help that one of the first expansions graced the tabletop community with the infamous Cartwheel Kick, easily the cheesiest special move in the entire game that let you pull off multiple attacks in a row, all but guaranteeing instant death to anyone you hit at point-blank range.
Ki attacks like your Yoga Flames and Hadokens also tended to be a bit meh, since they used a whole different stat from everything else.

As this was also before any official SF character using a weapon, you get silly situations where setting people on fire with dark ki magic or spitting acid in their faces was considered A-OK, but hitting people with a stick was reserved only for the most illegal of tournaments.

Street Fighter Championchip Edition (or whatever the fuck this was supposed to be called)

A mirage more than anything. Back in the First Age of the OGL, there were plans for a d20-based RPG using the Street Fighter license.
Thankfully, it never saw the light of day.

Thrash

One of the homebrew tabletop RPGs of the early intarwebs, a creation of Ewen Cluney, one of the translators for Maid RPG, the greatest Japanese tabletop RPG that isn't straight-up hentai.
It was sorta a spritual successor of that Street Fighter Storyteller thingy, with additional shit like actual super moves and move customization.
Naturally since this was some homebrew shit, it was even more broken.
So the main idea of combat was that everyone had Action Point, which basically acted as your frame advantage and were spent for both offensive and defensive stuff, while also acting as your initiative.
It didn't take long to notice that the venerable Light Punch was the best move in the game, since any move dealing even a little bit more damage was too innacurate and cost too much Action Points to be worth using.
It became even more obvious when using the official guidelines for creating your own move from scratch, since the Light Punch (wich was free for everyone) turned out to be one of the most expensive moves in the game.
Customization made things even worse, since you could just make a variation of the Light Punch that was even quicker and stronger.
Super moves had some versimilitude treatment, where they were tied to some "rage gauge" that was a derived stat and would actually rise with certain stats. That is until you bought some Dhalsim advantage that tied pulling off super moves to a moderate skill check.
Now most super moves kinda blew. There was some generic modifier to turn anything into a super move, but all it really did was make your move super inaccurate and slow for a real joke of a damage boost. Super combos (aka more Light Punches for the same prize) were a lot better, as was a buff move that doubled your Action Points for even more Light Punches.
Making the Light Punch spam even better were the rules for Soak, which generally boiled down to multiple attacks being better than fewer stronger attacks.

There's an "official" Street Fighter sourcebook, which showcased gamer sins like "Agility A God Stat" (Zangief hat basically no chance of ever hitting Chun-Li) and the absurdity of the soak roll (doing anything but spamming Light Punche was pointless on Zangief, since he'd just reduce everything to 1 point of damage).

Basicaly you'd just make an OP Light Punch variant and then start Atatatat-ing people until they ran out of Action Points to defend you. Unless they were smart enough to buy a defensive move that just lets you defend an unlimited amount of times for a single investment in Action Points.

Fight! The Fighting Game RPG

The most recent entry in the fighting game RPG saga, and dare I say it the best.
There are super moves that are actually super, with no attempt to "explain" them in-universe.
All moves are tied to a level. The higher the level the more shit you an slap on it, but it'll also be harder to execute.
Move levels can be derived from their hypothetical gamepad/joystick input.
There's actual Hit Stun.
Knocked-down blokes are actually untouchabe unless you have a pursuit move like Geese Howard.
You can actuall spam Hadokens since there's no Ki resource like in the above entries.
It doesn't actually matter whether or not you use weapons or not. It's all just part of your move descriptions.
It uses fighting game convention whether or not it might make sense. Why the fuck is there a time limit when you're having some duel to the death in the middle of the woods? 'Cause ya wanna break up the fight with some shittalking.
There's optional combat rules for when you wanna go Final Fight / Dynasty Warriors with mooks and other cannon fodder, or when you prefer fights from that Street Fighter animu movie where special and super moves are a lot more rare, but also more potent.

[mad bum]

Always wanted to play the street fighter tabletop. I remember my brother having the TMNT one and it being good also, and a friend of mine really like the marvel tabletop.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

It's pretty easy getting into it these days since there's a fan-compiled edition including various fixes and additional writeups for official SF characters. It's called the 20th Anniversary Edition 'cause it's roughly on point age wise, and because all sorts of Old World of Darkness lines got a "20th Anniversary Edition" treatment during that period (which were much more well received than the current "5th edition" stuff written by various degenerate nutjobs shitting all over the lore).

That TMNT RPG by Palladium (aka the Rifts guys) is a fun little animal. It predates the iconic cartoon and is probably the licenses offshoot based on the original TMNT comics.
There's a retroclone out there called Mutants in the Now, and Palladium themselves have copy-pasted the mutation rules in After the Bomb (which basically started as an alternative setting for the TMNT RPG) and Heroes Unlimited (their capeshit book).

Marvel Super Heroes is a true cult-classic in the capeshitter RPG circles, and easily the most iconic one that's Marvel-based (though then again no other Marvel-based RPG lasted nearly as long). One of the few RPGs besides D&D to have multiple clones.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

Wizards of the Coast trying to double-down of what made 4th edition fail

So one of the big blunders of D&D 4e was that WotC managed to piss off all but like two 3rd party publishers, triggering the birth of Pathfinder, which would go on to handily win this edition war.
How? Well, they decided to create the GSL (Game System License) instead of continuing the OGL (Open Game License) from 3.X. Aside from being more restrictive in general, the GSL also forced the foolish publisher who signed up to abandon any and all OGL support - because abandoning the lucrative 3.X market in favor of this lukewarm new thing sounds like a great idea.
For extra fun, any changes to the license explicitly apply retroactively, which is always a fun deal to sign up on.

Fast forward to today, and they're effectively trying the same thing, except more sinister.
They're trying to be sneakier this time by calling this the "OGL 1.1", though this harmless-sounding update to the beloved OGL is anything but open. Sign up for it, and you can no longer do anything with 3.X or 5e.
If you're running an Actual Play podcast (shit like Critical Role that brought many newcomers to 5e), you'll also have to pay a fee if you've become too popular. This will totally not cause everyone to jump ship to some retroclone.

Effectively the entire D&D and OGL community is also currently losing their collective marbles over the fear that WotC might be trying to revoke the old OGL, which has so far always been seen as irrevocable by all sides involved. Now they're potentially trying to get rid of the opposition that they helped create and nurture.
Suffice to say people are perturbed. I guess this is what happens if you hire too many people from Microsoft to make your product more profitable.

EDIT: Apparently signing up for OGL 1.1 means that WotC can just copy-paste your content
EDIT: Leaks are floating around, and not only do they want to invalidate previous version of the OGL, but they want to be able to straight-up cancel all of your products if you commit wrongthink

[Kugelfisch]

What does D&D have, besides a brand name, that anyone couldn't just come up with?
That's the part that I'm struggling with. It's just text in a book. It's not like a vidya game engine that's much harder to just make yourself.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

It basically amounts to this:


"Come, friend", WotC said in 2000, "you can take this license here free of charge to make your own compatible products. Heck, you could even make your own fork."
"Sure", they added, "You can't use beholders or mind flayers since we consider them our own property, but you can have owlbears which we originally ripped off from some Japanese toy. Also our racially-coded dragons. And those kobolds that have nothing to do with actual kobolds."

All was well these past decades. They tried to offer you a much shittier license in 2008 in exchange for the amazing old license, but there were no hard feelings if you decided to stick with the good stuff.

But now it is 2023, and suddenly they want to declare that license you've been using for your little portfolio null and void (after you and they have always assumed the license was untouchable and eternal). Will they sue your ass since you've been using slightly-modified passages from D&D's System Reference Document?
But what if you didn't include that license in your products (as some D&D-adjacent stuff has done)? Will they try to sue you if you continue to use "owlbear", "armor class" and "magic missile"?

And what of edge cases like Mongoose Publishing's rendition of Traveller? It has nothing to do with D&D, but did use the OGL to set the groundworks for its 3rd party market, such was their trust in the OGL's reliability.

(Though tbf, they have encouraged or at least tolerated D&D-likes ever since the game existence. The olden days of tabletop RPGs have seen many an RPG that was basically D&D with more or less modifications.)

What does D&D have, besides a brand name, that anyone couldn't just come up with?

How meaningless that name truly is became apparent last edition when they got teabagged by Paizo's Pathfinder.
But WotC of Current Year is obsessed with turning D&D into a lifestyle brand, and to accomplish this they think that they have to close Pandora's Box after 20+ years.
You can also tell they're obsessed over having full control of the brand by how the new OGL explicitly rules out using it for anything that's not a book or a PDF.
They don't want you to make a virtual tabletop solution that could rival their upcoming subscription service (so I guess they might sue Roll20 or something).
They also don't want you to make any video games dervied from D&D (though that's basically limited to Knights of the Chalice and Solasta, unless they want to declare a Jihad on Roguelikes).

Really interesting how WotC will react to this shitstorm, especially since this is just 2 months before that D&D movie which all their hopes and dreams are riding on.

[mad bum]

Solasta

I just beat Solasta recently, game aside I'm not sure how I feel 5E. Some aspects I think are in the right direction, but a lot others are not.

[VoiceOfReasonPast]

It's certainly more streamlined compared to the previous editions, but it might've lost flavor in the process, especially compared to retroclones.
Plus even the "good" art is ridiculously Victorian in its prudishness. Not even barbarians and monks are allowed to show skin.
And if Solasta stuck to the SRD they probably didn't even include the recent stupid shit with every race now having floating stat modifiers instead of having fixed modifiers, because dwarves being tough was apparently racist.


The only functional difference between races in Current 5e and the upcoming One D&D is that they have different traits - and one of them will almost always be Low-Light Vision because of course they keep the tradition of 99% of all non-humans having Low-Light Vision, which is pretty racist towards humans if you ask me.

EDIT: An (imcomplete) list of RPGs that are not D&D-related, but decided to use the OGL anyways:

• Traveller (specifically the 1st edition of the Mongoose fork)
• Cepheus Engine (the fork of Mongoose's above fork, because their 2nd edition also pissed off the 3rd party publishers)
• RuneQuest (specifically that one edition by Mongoose; they really loved themselves some OGL)
• OpenQuest (a fork of the above RuneQuest edition; Mongoose stuff really goes around)
• Fate (from the Sword Lesbian guys)

In hindsight, they should've gone with a Creative Commons License, which most of them are probably busy switching to wether or not WotC decides to make the new OGL 1.1 less dickish.
I guess they used the OGL out of publicity, or because it was seen as the magical "I can copy-paste other games" license.

EDIT II: You know how Kickstarters have become really popular in recent years? WotC has noticed and gotten jelly, 'cause if you use the new OGL 1.1 they demand a cut of your crowdfunding money

[wulfenlord]

Word on the street is it's not jizzards of the coast but the Hasbro jews pulling the strings to somehow stop bleeding money with betting on their D&D / magic the cuckening extended universe somehow being a sleeper hit