Comments on: I WAS A GOBLIN: Encyclopaedia Goblinica

By: Al Ewing

Al Ewing — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 16:28:11 +0000

I’ve always been desperate to play Marvel Heroes but unfortunately the only roleplaying people I know are eternally stuck in a game of Emo Werewolf Wank or whatever it’s called. And now they all live in Scotland, presumably to better pretend to be a werewolf.

By: Alan

Alan — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 13:19:07 +0000

GOLDEN HEROES - that was the one! i remember playing that. not a lot of fun. I LIKED the “rationale” bit! I had “Neutrino Man” who was brillyunt, though he kept falling through the floor.

Also, look what’s on my clipboard…

stereolab are really good!!!
– The Lex

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 13:13:48 +0000

This is sort of what I feared wd happen if Toon was ever played. :(

By: Martin Skidmore

Martin Skidmore — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 13:04:20 +0000

I played Toon once with too large a group of people, one of whom was a very serious gamer who kept moaning that we were messing about and not playing it properly, which seemed a particularly good case of point-missing.

By: CarsmileSteve

CarsmileSteve — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 12:49:57 +0000

the Judge Dredd system was heavily based on warhammer/WFRP in terms of its stats and stuff.

i also owned toon, but never played it.

GOLDEN HEROES was GW’s own superhero game and had an horrendous character generation system which took hours and hours becuase you had to work out WHY yr hero had this entirely random set of characteristics…

does anyone want a 3,000 point goblin and orc army, by the way?

By: Pete Baran

Pete Baran — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 09:59:46 +0000

That was part of the journey between roleplaying with wargaming stats (the earlier games - D&D nicely sidestepped by being too basic sometimes) and some of the later games. The arc was the early games quite simple, but often boiled down to fighting. Middle games turned into rule fests, as the idea of more tables to show what happens when you fall from great heights meant better storytelling. And then they realised storytelling breaks all the rules and so had to be factored in (Fate Points or Hero Points type systems). And Ghostbusters of course where anything goes.

Another nice thing with licensed games was you could work out if the game was good by seeing if something which happened in the comic / tv show etc COULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN IN THE GAME. Answer was often no.

*Also I played Judge Dredd and we used ricochet bullets to shoot people hiding round a corner, using Mega City One logik that hiding round a corner = up to no good = guilty).

By: pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør

pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 09:51:35 +0000

presumably part of the deep point in these games is to set up possible situations where wee david the hobbit with his CHARISMA POINTS 1 and his SLINGSHOT can in fact unexpectedly beat goliath the necromancer CHARISMA POINTS 1000000 and MAGICKAL PANZER TANK WITH DALEK KNOBS ON

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 09:34:54 +0000

I think this was at the root of some people’s distaste for the Marvel game - it laid out in no uncertain terms that the Hulk was stronger than the Thing, etc.

By: Pete Baran

Pete Baran — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 09:25:50 +0000

The best thing about licensed games in the 1980’s was that it was pre-the interweb, so sourcebooks on the game became your one stop shop for finding out about tricky old continuity and backstory you never knew. The Dr Who one was quite poor at this, as it was written by Americans thus priviliging the Tom Baker years rotten, and being sniffy about Colin Baker cos they hadn’t seen his episodes yet.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 09:12:00 +0000

Ha ha ha. Readers of LJ community diggerdydum may soon find themselves reminicising about Dr Who vidgames sooner than they expected.

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 19:55:57 +0000

Yeah my experience with the Dredd game scared me off things like the Who one.

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 19:53:48 +0000

Also missing here: The Dr Who RPG! It could have been our GM, but it was really unplayable. I forget anything about the system, except that the TARDIS had a cyberbomb in its complement, which put paid to a lot of scenarios.

I also vaguely recall playing an (old skool) Star Trek RPG - but that might have been my StarFleet Battles playing friends on overdrive. If you are very lucky I might write about SFB.

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 19:39:18 +0000

I never owned or played Paranoia! I had a friend who owned it but we never got round to doing anything.

(A lot of these I only played once. I owned about half of them: one of the perennial evils of gaming was buying games that you never played.)

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 19:01:31 +0000

Wot no Paranoia?

By: alex

alex — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 18:40:45 +0000

OMG. It’s like looking into a deep dark well, and recognising that my former life lies at the bottom of it.