The most notable ones on my list are Engel (already answered) and Gemini.

As for Dogs:

Dogs in the Vineyard is a game in which the player characters are members of a holy order of gunslinging judges withing the ranks of a psuedo-Mormon faith.  It is set in the old west, mainly in an area where all the communities are part of that faith.

The game is serial - the characters go from town to town.  In each town, they uncover 'sin' and judge it in (and this this bit is important) any way they see as being right.  They have carte blanche within the game.

The GM is strictly instructed never to play god, and to leave all moral judgement in the hands of the PCs; if a player goes "I pray for guidance." the GM might well say "Cool.  You get it.  What does God tell you to do?".  

The conflict system is built so that players usually can succeed, but in many cases, they'll need to decide if they want to go as far as they'll need to in order to do so.  If you can't talk the town grocer into repenting, you may very well be able to beat him into breaking and doing so - but do you want to?

It is, absolutely, a narrow-focus game.  What it does, it does incredibly well.  If you like what it does, it is flat-out awesome.  If you don't like what it does, it sucks so bad that you'll be pissed you spent money on it.

Quote from: ColonelHardissonHaven't heard of Enemy Gods. Have heard of Burning Empires, but have no idea what it is. RPG? Setting? Board game? Card game?

Well, I don't own Enemy Gods, but Jared and John gave me a pretty good rundown. I don't own it yet but may still pick it up one of these days.

The idea is that everyone at the table plays a hero AND a god. The heroes stats are essentially, their favor with each of the gods (of those sitting at the table). And the way these aspects work, you are required to slight one god or the other.

There's two threads in this forum on Burning Empires, and Luke (the author) was commenting in one of them. I'd probably recommend you look there rather than replicate it here. In short, its a SF RPG with more explicit takes on GM and player empowerment and were the players co-design the world setting.

QuoteAlso, my fellows spoke highly of Truth & Justice but I have no idea why I should let it into my current constellation of supers games.

I wrote a review but its at the OTHER place, so I won't link.

Pretty much its a simple superhero game with a DITY concept (Do it yourself) that isn't to say that it doesn't give you tools/rules etc. In fact its very solid for the most part game that ranks traits from Poor -2  to Master +6 (with various +2 ranks along the way). Characters pick IMPORTANT traits to note about themselves from a variety of "schemes" (For example: 5 Good Ranked Traits, 1 Poor Ranked) but you describe/define the traits yourself they can be hobbies, relationships, attributes, skills whatever--from things like Cop, to Swordsmanship to Relationship with Daughter. These traits are (mostly) seperate from powers which are added in another step. Pretty much there are a lot of examples of powers, the game has a lot of idea support for supers (not quite so much on creating adventures as my own.) but that is tied to the damage mechanic--traits in the game are also the "damage track" you can take damage to any attribute and its left for you to explain how and why that trait took damage, and what the fallout from it will be.

For example I can take damage to "relationship with younger sister" normally at Good Rank. Because of the battle that "damaged" the trait I end up being late for a play of his sister wanted him to see--the fallout is that she is less willing to listen to my words and gets into trouble by following my pc when he goes out. or the fallout could be /at/ the play she is kidnapped by a supervillain just at random, or could be the fallout is that she won't cover for me next time with my parents and I have to deal with the consequences.

(The game describes this as adventure hooks but really its a bit more involved  you have to be creative to spin some of them into "adventures" as opposed to mere issues/conflicts you have to resolve.)

The basic mechanics are 2d6+traits (any and all relevant, some stack) to beat flat target numbers or opposed 2d6+trait rolls.

With hero points to help minimize randomness and add some boosts to other things.



It's fun, interesting superhero game, and is in my top three games (just behind my nostalgia favorites MSH and Marvel Saga who are tied for second--and admittedly it may only be nostalgia that keep them in 2 rather than T&J moving up.)


Dogs in the Vinyard is about mormon gunslingers who act as moral police for Mormon settlements in the old west--rooting out "evil and sin" with violence/other tools. The mechanics are die rolling/shifting pretty heavily but I'm not sure beyond that.


Burning Wheel (1E) is a Tolkienesque fantasy game that has very crunchy mechanics for examining a variety of aspects of play from combat with "scripted" play (think Streetfighter RPG but a little more flexible), and instincts/beliefs/social/personal traits mattering to outcomes--it uses some wierd terminology too that clouds the games ease of reading but is fairly well written. I won't play it or DITV (the first is too not my thing, the latter is too crunchy for me)

Quote from: ColonelHardissonIf that's the reference, it was "wheel of fire," which was how Frodo referred to the One Ring.

That could be it. It's a bit of an homage to Tolkien, in any case.

Quote from: Caesar SlaadThere's two threads in this forum on Burning Empires, and Luke (the author) was commenting in one of them. I'd probably recommend you look there rather than replicate it here. In short, its a SF RPG with more explicit takes on GM and player empowerment and were the players co-design the world setting.

OK, thanks for the heads-up. I checked out the thread with the designer's comments. Sounds interesting.

Burning Wheel  -  A general purpose RPG. The default setting is very Toilkenesque high fantasy with relatively frail physical bodies (AKA to some as 'gritty').  However it has rules/guidelines/methods for extending/changing to different settings.  People have used it for a very wide variety of settings and genres. The developer even web published a Dune ripoff extesion and a post-apocolyptic setting. EDIT It is claimed to do Star Wars really well, and I can totally see that.

The magic makes it dangerous to learn spells and difficult to control magic to do exactly what you want it to do. No spell memorization, instead it physically taxes the caster to cast. There is also Emotional magic, which isn't quite as powerful but doesn't have the same drain. Each kind of emotional magic is linked to a race/creature. For humans it is Faith, so you literally pray for miracles.

It has extensive social skills and social 'combat' rules. Great support for adventures that include an intrege/political aspects or sections in them.

Combat is a different beast from D&D initiative system of your turn/my turn. Opponent's actions occur simultaneously, and you script actions out ahead. Also those abstraction of feints, strikes, avoiding, and counterstrikes in D&D are explicitly played out in BW.

Advancement is through use of the skills/stats.  The reward system is called Artha and basically awards for the character acting consistant with the personality you defined for it. Artha has a number of specific uses, but it basically can be thought of tokens for dicing bonuses. It is also effectively required to complete some kinds of advancements.

The rules are somewhat more crunchie than D&D though in someways less burdensome** because there are far less exceptions and special rules. They are fairly homogeneous.  Whole sections are also designed to scale depending on needs of play. For example if you are confronted by a mook you can use the simple martial rules and it is a single opposed rolling. Some one wins, someone gets hurt and loses/concedes.  But against the BBEG where the people at the table feel it is important you break out the detailed combat rules.  It makes it easier to learn the rules is pieces while still playing the game, and it also helps keep the pace of play up.


** EDIT Character generation of PCs is NOT one of those ways in which it is less burdensome. You go a lot faster with a given race once you build 3 or 4 PCs of that race, but even the author apologizes for the page flipping you need to do to look up details on the Lifepaths, Traits, and Skills. However the system is such that this is really a front loading of work to the character generation phase rather than more work than normal.


Burning Empires

An RPG that was extended from Burning Wheel mechanics. The setting is a licensing of Iron Empires. The combat was changed to reflect modern warfare. It is a GM vs. player competative game. It isn't a boardgame or a wargame, but it is closer than your average RPG in that the rules encompass more of the gaming actions of the characters than a lot. This is true of Burning Wheel as well, but Burning Empires takes it a bit further.  As GrimGent mentions there are a couple of threads here about it.

Quote from: KrakaJakI don't know a damn thing about Fudge. Or Traveller. Or... Dog's in the Vineyard. Or True 20/Blue Rose.

True20: http://true20.com/about.php

Blue Rose: http://true20.com/products/product.php?id=8_0_3_0_M

Quote from: KrakaJakI don't know a damn thing about Fudge. Or Traveller. Or... Dog's in the Vineyard. Or True 20/Blue Rose.

I can field some of these:

FUDGE is a somewhat long-in-the-tooth flexible, rules light game. It doesn't have any explicitly defined attributes and skills, relying on the GM to set out the ones (s)he feels are appropriate.

FUDGE uses labels like mediocre, good, excellent, etc., to define how good you are in a given trait, and associates it with the number. This makes for a "ladder" like this:

+3 Superb
+2 Great
+1 Good
 0 Fair
-1 Mediocre
-2 Poor
-3 Terrible

FUDGE's most unique trait is probably its dice, so call "fudge dice". Each is a 6-sided dice with 2 blank faces, 2 "-", and 2 "+". You roll 4 of them, and add them together (+ = +1, - = -1), giving you a bell curve from -4 to +4. To resolve tasks, you add this to the level of the appropriate trait. So, if you have a good strength and a superb level task, you would have to come up with a +2 on the dice to succeed.

FUDGE also had features like a damage track, scaling, and "fudge points".

It's in print, as well as freely downloadable:
http://www.fudgerpg.com/fudge.html
There's a variant called FATE that actually has its own spin on chargen that's pretty nifty. FATE is also a free download:
http://www.faterpg.com/

Traveller

A hard-ish SF game that goes back to the 70s. It has seen several variations and printing since then. ("Classic" Traveller, MegaTraveller, Traveller: The New Error Era, Traveller 4, GURPS Traveller, and Traveller d20).

All versions of Traveller but GURPS feature lifepath chargen (IMO, this makes GURPS Traveller the least Traveller of the bunch), and the classic version even had the capacity to kill your character before you ever played it. For many Traveller players, making a character was part of the fun. Traveller featured many "design sequences" which also provided entertainment for gearhead players.

CT and MT used simple 2d6 + mods > TN type task resolutions, though MTs was much more rigorously defined (and IMO, one of the best task resolution systems out there, even today), wheras CT was fairly ad hoc. Later version used different systems.

The basic traveller scenario usually involved players manning a small starship or otherwise travelling on them, finding odd jobs on various worlds in a primarily human inhabited empire. The first CT books lacked much in the way of setting. Later CT supplements and adventures fleshed out the setting, and now its one of the most thoroughly developed SF settings in existence. The imperium is a bit like a cross between DUNE's empire and the empire of Foundation, though aspects of other 70s SF author show up in many places.

True 20

A stripped down version of d20, supposedly genre independant. Less classes (3 - warrior, expert, adept), less reliance on explicit class abilities, but more feats. Has a skills & feats based magic system and resolves damage with a damage save system instead of HP.

Blue Rose was the setting it was originally developed for, a bit of a fluffy new age fantasy setting (which, except for the gay friendly egalatarian utopia of Aldea seemed pretty similar to a bog standard fantasy setting) inspired by fantasy novels in the "romantic fantasy" genre.

HTH

Quote from: KrakaJakOr Traveller.

Traveller is the first published scifi RPG. Well, unless you count Metamorphosis Alpha - say Traveller is the first space opera RPG published. It's gone through several iterations since it was released in 1977, including a d20 version (often abbreviated T20). The original is often referred to as being composed of LBBs (Little Black Books).

The original system was pretty simple, based on a 2d6 mechanic. The game seemed focused on scouting and mechant missions, based on the adventures released for the game. Succeeding supplements covered mercenaries, starship fleet combat, robots (which took forever to appear in Traveller), various books of ships, pregenerated NPCs and animals, etc. The game is often referred to as being "hard scifi," but that's really a subjective thing, especially in comparison to today's "hard scifi" offerings like Transhuman Space or even Blue Planet.

The default setting for the game is the Imperium, a vast, far-flung empire founded by humans who were transplanted from Earth thousands of years ago. The time is a couple of thousand years in our future. The Imperium has collapsed and rebuilt a few times. It has encountered humans from Earth, who had built an empire of their own. The two went to war, with the Earth humans being the more aggressive. The Imperium eventually won, invading Earth (not a bad thing, overall; Earth's empire had become kinda dickheaded a few centuries in our future). The Imperium can be draconian in its own right - psychic abilities are known (there is, in fact, another human-based empire which is based upon such abilities) but outlawed, and those with them are persecuted (much along the lines of Babylon 5 and its Psi Corps).

There are nonhuman empires - the Aslan (lion-like humanoids, probably inspired by Larry Niven's Kzinti), the Hivers (odd, almost plant-like aliens), Centaurs (called the Kkree or some such), and the Vargr (descended from Earth dogs that were genetically manipulated by a mysterious alien race thousands of years ago). There are plenty of other aliens scattered across the galaxy, but those are the major ones.

And, oh yeah...Traveller became legendary for the possibility - very slight possibility - that your character could die during character creation. This was corrected in the rules pretty quickly, but it inspired a legend that's lasted to this day.

Tell me of this ... Promethean?

Re: Dogs as described by Levi...

any way they see as being right is a bit of a tricky point, or was for me. See, the players have carte blanche over their characters' beliefs and attitudes. The characters are supposed to listen to God, except as Levi describes, each player controls what his character hears. There isn't even a requirement that characters believe at all--a character can quite reasonably be an atheist who somehow ended up in the role.

The conflict system uses freeform traits overlayed on a set of four basic characteristics. So your use of a particular item or trait contributes only as much oomph to winning a conflict as the dice that you've invested in it, and can be brought into play basically through any reasonable description that incorporates it. E.g., "I used to box before I converted 3d8" can easily be used in a fistfight; "Can out-argue the devil 2d10" will require a talking action. Key here is that once you introduce some "attribute" of your character (a trait, characteristic, possession, or relationship--yes, you can have dice representing your relationship to someone involved in the conflict), you roll the dice for it and add them to the dice you already have on the table. You don't roll dice for something that's already been used in that conflict; even if, say, you keep firing the same shotgun, it will only contribute its dice once.

So what do you do with those dice? Basically, when someone wants to make something happen and someone else disagrees, players take turns pushing pairs of dice forward and narrating something they're doing. When you introduce a new element to the conflict, the narration has to incorporate that element. Otherwise, you can say whatever you like. If another character is directly affected by some action, they'll need to "block it" by pushing dice equal to the total of the action--as many dice as necessary. If they can't respond or don't want to (mainly because it would mean "taking the blow", about which in a moment), then they must drop out of the conflict. If all your opposition drops out, then you accomplish your goal in the conflict.

When you block an action using two dice, you nullify it. "I shoot you at point blank range", pushing two dice for a total of 11, is nullified by "I grab your arm and point the gun at the ground before it goes off", pushing two dice for 11 or more. If you respond to an action using three or more dice, though, you stay in the conflict, but the declared action happens and affects you in some way. (You "take the blow".) Not only do you narrate that ("I grab your arm but too late, the gun goes off") but you take "Fallout". I won't go into the details of how Fallout works, but essentially it generates a level of "damage" which is inflicted after the conflict is over and which is commensurate to the most serious type of attack that hit you. Fallout generally means the acquisition or alteration of Traits in whatever manner you think is appropriate based on how the conflict played out; or if it's really bad, it can mean a mortal wound that has a good chance of killing your character.

One thing to note: as long as you're still in a Conflict, you're in. You can keep acting as long as you have dice and don't Give. On the other hand, if someone narrates an action against you that you don't want to have happen, all you have to do is drop out. Don't have the dice to block, but you don't want to get shot? Give. Of course that might mean the other guy wins the Conflict and hangs the little girl as a heretic, but at least your skin is intact, right?

Now as I've described it, the system sounds pretty cool. Where I have had trouble with it is the tension between wanting to bring in the dice for some Trait, and not really feeling like being bothered to find a piece of narration to justify it. Then there's the difficulty I've had coming up with appropriate narration for arguments that drag out. I can clearly win the argument, although I might have to "take the blow" a couple times--which isn't bad at all when you're just fighting with words, in fact it can make you stronger--but I can't as a player think of anything interesting to say beyond what I've already put forth. Not to mention that the content of my argument is little more than a placeholder for the numbers on the dice. I'm thinking that this might improve with player experience. Nevertheless another difficulty is assigning one's own Fallout, since the latter can be positive or negative. Essentially, I find the game requires too many mode switches between seeing things from my character's perspective and making decisions about my character in a more narrative fashion. For the latter to work, I have to care about the narrative, and that is the real rub. I don't. If I were looking for a pleasing or even interesting story about a typical Dogs town, I'm afraid it would involve telling the lot of them to manage their own lives and then going off to San Francisco.

Fudge is probably my favorite RPG of all time. It's my "go-to" game that I'll use for just about any idea I have.

It's rules-light, but also very firmly-rooted in traditional RPG paradigms (characters have attributes, skills, gifts, faults, etc). No "player empowerment" or narrativism or other hippie shit like that. It reminds me of a kind of GURPS or HERO with all the stuff that makes my head hurts and causes me to consult rulebooks mid-game removed.

At the same time, there are no required character traits, so the game has no real bias toward any particular genre or genres. This also allows the GM to further fine-tune complexity. That is, does Sir Bob the Knight have a single Knight skill, or does he have Sword, Lance, Horsemanship, Heraldry, etc.

With no default attributes, skills, magic system and so on specified and a reliance on GM judgement for such things, it's the only game I know of that approaches Amber in terms of absolutely demanding a strong, capable GM. Hell, you can't even play without doing some house ruling first (unless you buy a pre-made Fudge configuration like Deryni or Terra Incognita)!

Plus, the new hardcover edition rocks like crazy, as per my review here: http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/11/11442.phtml

Love it.

Quote from: Elliot WilenEssentially, I find the game requires too many mode switches between seeing things from my character's perspective and making decisions about my character in a more narrative fashion. For the latter to work, I have to care about the narrative, and that is the real rub. I don't..

I had a fairly lengthy discussion with Vincent on RPGnet and it sound like part of his playing experience involves in character (immersive) play and that he, personally, has no trouble context switching quickly between in character and external perspectives.  He also seems to find it much easier than I do to incorporate external decisions and results into the characters minset.  Since he doesn't have a problem switching contexts and such, his game doesn't avoid doing it.

I remember reading an article in Dragon about the game Space Opera.  There were also all those other advertisements in the early Dragon for Fantasy Games Unlimited games.  But, I've never actually seen one of the games from the company, nor have I ever met someone in real life who had been exposed to them (must less owned or played them).

I haven't heard *nothing* about them... but...
Iron Heroes: Reeeeeally curious.
BESM: I'm an anime fan.

truth is, getting my hands on these and a few more d20 games so I could gut them for parts would be nice.