Quote from: Last KnightThis intrigues me, and I shall download and consume.

Thanks for the interest, I hope that a|state Lite has something of interest for you. Man, I really should think about updating that thing to streamline it a bit.

Cheers
Malcolm

Quote from: Malcolm CraigThanks for the interest, I hope that a|state Lite has something of interest for you. Man, I really should think about updating that thing to streamline it a bit.

Cheers
Malcolm

Ghaa! Don't touch it, Malcolm! The last time someone "streamlined" a game I liked "a bit" was Rich Parkinson with Terran Story, and I've never seen it again! :O

-clash

Quote from: flyingmiceGhaa! Don't touch it, Malcolm! The last time someone "streamlined" a game I liked "a bit" was Rich Parkinson with Terran Story, and I've never seen it again! :O

-clash

Hey Clash,

Not the main game, just the 'lite' download version. It could probably do with a little spring clean, maybe replace a couple of areas with others from the books and so forth. A change of clothes, rather than plastic surgery.

Cheers
Malcolm

Quote from: Malcolm CraigHey Clash,

Not the main game, just the 'lite' download version. It could probably do with a little spring clean, maybe replace a couple of areas with others from the books and so forth. A change of clothes, rather than plastic surgery.

Cheers
Malcolm

OK, I guess... I'll let you!

-clash

Quote from: Kyle AaronI'm not sure myself.

The setting is a big city with lots of canals, and trains throughout the city. There exist firearms, basically they're muskets - though some use electricity as a sparker. But there's also some sort of computer system.

My impression is that there's a high tech upper class, and a low tech lower class, without anyone much in the middle class. The poshes make it cyberish, and the dregs make it Dickensian - a big and dirty city with lots of poverty.

Pretty much. The middle classes get conventional, modern-day firearms instead of the crappy flintlocks and muskets you guys had, and the upper classes get power armour and gauss rifles and nanotech and gene-meddling. There's a range of computing technologies, ranging from clunky mechanical computers to the sort of electronic computers we are used to to nanotechnological mechanical computers.

The interesting decision they make, for a cyberpunkish game, is that there's no internet, per se - there's so many competing and secretive corporations and struggling almost-governments in the city that everyone's computers runs  on entirely different, proprietary protocols, making internet communications more different. There is a data network, and if you're beaming a message from one corporate computer to a computer on the same corporation's network, it'll probably get there instantaneously. If you're sending a message from a corporate computer to some lonely hacker's difference engine in the slums, then it might go through a ridiculously convoluted route to get there, and might get transcribed by hand or transferred via carrier pigeon at some point.

The big thrust of the setting is that there's a massive, yawning gulf between the rich and poor, and that difference is expressed in part in the tech level. It's actually quite effective, from a roleplaying perspective: as players, we might end up overlooking the fact that our characters are living in a crappy house, eating crappy food and sleeping on a crappy bed, but if we see that there's only crappy tech available (at least on the open market) in our character's neighbourhood while in poshtown they have AIs, genetic longevity treatments and superweapons that drives the point home.

Quote from: Malcolm CraigYou'd be amazed (nor not) how often the half brick in a sock comes up in a|state. I'm glad you had an enjoyable time with the game and thanks for taking the time to talk about it as well.

Yes, the system itself is a fairly standard percentile-based one and, as a few people have pointed out in a variety of other places, it's not without its flaws. Then again, it is functional. Certainly, there are things that I did then that I would do now and character creation does take a fair bit of time to get through (and, yes, there are probably a few opportunities for min-maxing mixed in there).

TBH, I think (and I believe I've told you before) that far and away the biggest draw of A|State is the setting, as opposed to the system. I really appreciate the fact that system statistics aren't integrated with the setting material, actually - it means I get to choose whether the Shifted are terrifying monsters or sad, mad, fragile ghosts, it means I get to decide whether specific NPCs are major threats to the PCs' well-being or chumps they can push around.

You could, in fact, take the "Freeport" route with it and simply support it as a systemless setting, and perhaps issue guidelines for using it with various systems. The Mongoose Runequest OGL and SRD could be used to produce something which looks almost exactly like the current system, you could throw in a guide for using a system like the one in Cold City if you wanted a story-game angle on the setting, D20 could be an excellent fit ("I'm a 10th level Ghostfighter/5th level Flowghost!")...