Quote from: RPGPundit;416544Hmm.. its never been my favorite kind of genre.  I would say that the closest things I've ran to it are Unknown Armies, Over the Edge, Amber, or Call of Cthulhu, and none of those are, I think, quite what the OP meant.

RPGpundit

The only literature I have read and enjoyed that has been labeled Urban Fantasy would be the 'Twenty Palaces' series by Harry Connolly. If a game were ever to be created from this setting it would totally be a Unknown Armies+Call of Cthulhu mash-up.

-Hans

Welcome, Hans.

I would use Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes, and bring in magic and supernatural creatures from Tunnels and Trolls.

Quote from: hanszurcher;416567The only literature I have read and enjoyed that has been labeled Urban Fantasy would be the 'Twenty Palaces' series by Harry Connolly. If a game were ever to be created from this setting it would totally be a Unknown Armies+Call of Cthulhu mash-up.

-Hans

I'd never heard of 'Twenty Palaces' before you mentioned it but it looks pretty cool... I jumped over to Amazon and ordered the first two books.
Thanks for that.

Quote from: GrimGent;416508Sorry, but I don't buy for a moment that the White Wolf crowd in general suffers from some greater collective tendency to ignore the shortcomings in their favourite systems than any other section of the gaming populace. "WW games don't really have proper rules 'cause it's all just meant to be roleplayed" is the kind of a comment that I'm used to seeing on D&D boards from posters whose familiarity with the subject is limited to secondhand hearsay, not hearing from anyone who actually plays them, and the notion of people pretending to play specific RPGs in order not to have fun but to feel superior didn't sound credible even back in Pundit's old rants about "Swine."

Well, you need to get out more. Because that is the apologetics from Whte Wolf's own forums. As someone who has played and run a lot of White Wolf games and participated in a lot of White Wolf discussion and listened to not a small number of White Wolf designers - yes, they know their system sucks. We know the system sucks. You're supposed to look past that, and there is a lot of cool ideas and a neat setting full of awesome stuff to convince you to do so. But the system really is shit on toast, and always has been. It was a shitty rip off of 1st edition Shadowrun in 1991, and it's a pale replacement for 4th edition Shadowrun now. And White Wolf players acknowledge and accept this. And they play the game in spite of the lousy ruleset.

QuoteNot to mention that I've been running various WoD titles on and off since the first edition of Mage: The Ascension, and make it a policy never to fudge the rules arbitrarily.

OK, now I know you're just fucking with me, because Mage is all about fudging things. Do you let people transmute cubic meters of the floor into equal masses of solid elemental nitrogen at room temperature? If not, why not? If you do, how much damage does the near instantaneous endothermic expansion do?

You seem to be convinced that I am somehow cherry picking the worst things that White Wolf did. I'm not. If I was, I would be talking about their truly regrettable and offensive decisions like printing World of Darkness: Gypsy (would actually have been less offensive had they made World of Darkness: The Jew instead), or their decision to make having sex with dogs a major plot and character development point (and no, not hyper intelligent talking dogs like Goofy or Scooby Doo, that would have just been Furry, they were talking about actual normal dogs that you were supposed to be fucking). But indeed, while those lapses in judgement were indeed appalling at the time and still stomach churning in retrospect, they aren't particularly relevant. We ignore the "Pygmy" entry in the AD&D Monster Manual these days too.

White Wolf makes bad crunch and good fluff. It has ever been such. It's why they fill their writing staff with people who are literature majors and stuff instead of engineers. White Wolf, from the beginning has sold themselves as an alternative to worrying about whether the rules are good. And unsurprisingly, their rules aren't good. That's not why we like them.

I'm not "picking on" White Wolf when I say that their rules are shitty. That is me, as a fan admitting what everyone who has ever been in any way introspective about the World of Darkness has always known: that the rules are not even mediocre. They are bad. And to play the game, it is best to ignore many of them.

However, I do have to give special props to the old Mind's Eye Theatre rules. Those aren't everyone's cup of tea, and they get pretty slow when everyone on both sides of a conflict has a lot of special abilities, but they really work. It's rules light, it's props light, you can play it effectively while standing up in the dark and drinking a cup of coffee and holding a pet rat. I know, I've done it. It really is one of the better LARP systems out there. Hell, it's better as a game than any of their actual table top offerings have been. The new MET, with the cards and shit, is garbage.

QuoteAs for dismissing the combat as "sum your pile of dice and compare to the other side's pile of dice, bigger pile wins", that's not only inaccurate (as combat rolls aren't contested), but purely a matter of preference. What exactly would render it inferior to any other kind of a simple one-roll resolution mechanic, except a personal distaste for dice pools?

Are you seriously defending nWoD combat? nWoD combat is bad by design. As explained by the designer. It makes extremely minimal allowance for toughness, or dodging, or really any ability at all that effectively enhances survivability. Personally, I loves me dice pools. I have written multiple games that use dice pools. But nWoD combines the to-hit and damage equation into a single dice pool and then outputs a linear result. Each hit in the pool is a wound level. So not only is there no real difference between someone using a large and inaccurate weapon versus a smaller and more accurate weapon (something even 4th edition D&D can do), there isn't even any difference between one very skilled combatants and two random dudes off the street. Two dice pools that are half the size do exactly as much damage as one dice pool that is twice as big.

And that's one of the many reasons that Dominate is so much better as a "combat" discipline than Celerity or Vigor. Having an extra pile of dice is ridiculously superior to any bonus dice you could possibly have. Heck, a kindergarten full of kids with bb guns is an unbeatable threat in that game, simply because enough bullshit dice pools is still indistinguishable from a single massive dice pool that will one-shot your entire coterie.

QuoteIn fact, could you come up with a single practical example of a situation in play that can't be resolved "without resorting to magical princess dressup teaparty"?

I wasn't going to bring up Mage, because that is cheating. However, you brought it up Let's take the Matter sphere. Before we get into using Matter and Prime to "Create" materials or Matter and Life to "animate" materials" or Matter and Spirit to animate materials differently, let's just talk about a single, low level ability: transforming some matter into other matter. Now you are supposedly limited in that you can't change the temperature, the mass, or the state of matter. But you can change its elemental composition to something else. Anything else. Now as it happens, you are usually surrounded by gas at all times because you are breathing something and you are usually standing on something as well, so there is probably some solid available for use as well.

Do you know what happens to room temperature and pressure gaseous iron? Like, immediately? Obviously, the writers of Mage have no idea, and probably never passed even highschool chemistry or physics, which is one of the reasons that they made a game that was in essence a long anti-science tirade. It's an exothermic contraction. A very fast one actually. What would you do in that situation if sleepers could or could not see that happen? Keep in mind, this is a very low level sphere use, and the resultant thunder clap is created by entirely natural processes requiring no input of power from the mage at all. And indeed, the only reason it is happening at all is because materials are suddenly far outside their normal conditions on a heating curve - and that is caused by a supposed limitation of magic. Making stable materials that would neither explode nor implode requires more power and Forces. But of course, if mass destruction is your goal, why is that a limitation?

-Frank

Quote from: GrimGent;416560I once ran an intro scenario for OtE in which the PCs ended up spending a night at the port of Skylla during their Mediterranean cruise, facing various creatures and figures from Greek mythology but none of the regular Al Amarjan conspiracies.

Sounds very cool and very Over The Edgy. OtE would probably be my go to system for urban fantasy or maybe Unknown Armies.

Quote from: RPGPundit;416544Hmm.. its never been my favorite kind of genre.  I would say that the closest things I've ran to it are Unknown Armies, Over the Edge, Amber, or Call of Cthulhu, and none of those are, I think, quite what the OP meant.

RPGpundit

At the core of it the definition's in the title - it's fantasy in an urban setting (and often definition stretched to be fantasy in any modern setting). So while CoC and UA might be considered horror rather than fantasy, they're in more-or-less the ballpark, even if they're not hitting the mainstream of what most people would assume by the genre titles.

The three big pillars of modern Urban Fantasy would probably be the Dresden Files, the Sookie Stackhouse books (True Blood), and the Anita Blake series. In practise the Dresden Files are actually a massive outlier themselves, but they're big enough sellers to be seen as a big part of the genre now I'd say.

I'd say Charles de Lint would be my biggest influence, followed closely by Dresden Files. I don't care for Anita Blake or Sookie at all.

Quote from: danbuter;416780I don't care for Anita Blake at all.

Hot vampire and werewolf sex, what's not to like?  I only read one book though, Anita may have moved on to fucking Cthulhu or zombies for all I know.

Any of these:

WoD

Unisystem

Cortex

Quote from: Benoist;416576Welcome, Hans.

Thanks for helping me feel at home.


I was just cleaning some of my shelves and discovered Dreaming Cities: Tri-Stat Urban Fantasy Genre.

Forgot I had it. Never played it. However, if you are into Tri-Stat I see Amazon Marketplace has a few new copies for sale at under $10.


-Hans