I just wanted to extend a welcome to all new posters coming here from the design column for Heroes of the New Wave, at http://new-wave.blogspot.com

Discussion for each weekly entry will be held on this forum. Feel free to start your own threads--I'll be doing my best to keep up with all of them, and answering what questions I can.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Designer (and Forum Moderator),

GMS

Cool. I'm looking forward to joining in on these discussions -- I'm a child of the '80s myself.

(Though I was also a geek, and thus not nearly as well-informed as you might expect of a teenager at that time....)

Congratulations on the new start. I'll keep an eye on this column.

Chees,
Marc

Just the idea is cool. Then again, I grew up with cheesy sci fi flicks on Saturday afternoon and devoured most of the ERB ouvre. (There was even a time when I thought Robert E. Howard a fine writer*.:))

In my considered opinion it's about damn time we got back to adventures and story lines. I'm sick of the 'RPG as wargame' paradigm. TSR failed not because people got sick of 'story', TSR failed because they wound up producing crap.

So good luck with the beast.

And remember, "Many men smoke, but Fu Manchu."


*Then again, in a past life I knew Robert. Stereotypical closet homosexual if you ask me. Most everything he did was an attempt to deny his nature. I think the closest Howard ever came to putting himself on paper, as he saw himself, was Solomon Kane. Conan was Bob as he thought he should be.

I'm just jazzed by what sounds like, in essence, the "Buckaroo Banzai" RPG.

xiombarg wrote: I'm just jazzed by what sounds like, in essence, the "Buckaroo Banzai" RPG.

Jason L Blair wrote:

xiombarg wrote: I'm just jazzed by what sounds like, in essence, the "Buckaroo Banzai" RPG.

*ahem*hrm*ahem*

Um. No...Gareth would never dream of doing that...;)

Dude!

Totally tubular concept!

- ready to surf this wave TB

After reading the first entry in the Design Journal I have a suggestion. Since the figuring of the target number for skills uses multiplication why not include a table in the back of the book near the character sheet. I mean every folder I ever owned during school in the 80's had one in them. Only this one would need to go from 1 to 20 instead of the usual 1 to 10.

Just a thought.

peteramthor wrote: After reading the first entry in the Design Journal I have a suggestion. Since the figuring of the target number for skills uses multiplication why not include a table in the back of the book near the character sheet. I mean every folder I ever owned during school in the 80's had one in them. Only this one would need to go from 1 to 20 instead of the usual 1 to 10.

Just a thought.

Suggestion for a really simple degrees-of-success mechanic, too:

Get less than half your target number: Exceptional success (something cool or unusual).
Get less than 10% your target number: Critical success.
Roll 100: Critical failure, regardless of target number.

You should also have a Drama Point mechanic... howzabout:

Plot Twist Points (aka PTPs): Pulp heroes never just fail by sheepishly falling on their face (unless they're the Comic Relief in which case the failure probably doesn't matter much)--they fail in ways that send the adventure off in a whole new direction. So if you fail at something, you can spend a Plot Twist Point to convert it into a "skewed" success -- you'll either nominally succeed at what you were doing, but it will turn out to have prices you didn't expect --

(GM: "As the flames run along the ceiling beams, the drug dealer on the balcony draws back his knife, PCP-crazed glow in his eyes...."
Jake Barton, Trucker Vice-Cop: "I shoot him right between the eyes! (rolls) 97. Frick. Okay, uh, Plot Twist Point!"
GM: "Your foot shoots out from under you just as you pull the trigger; the bullet goes awry and smacks a burning support beam right amidships... and with a vast creaking and groaning crash, the entire balcony collapses, burying the dealer in a mass of flames."
JB: "WOOHOO!"
GM: "It also buries the door leading out."
JB: "Crap.")

-- or your failure will turn out to be more beneficial to you down the road than you might expect -- after all, if Han Solo had never failed that sneak-up roll on the stormtrooper in RoTJ, the Rebels would never have made contact with the Ewoks and the Emperor's plan would have worked....

Stephen wrote:
Plot Twist Points (aka PTPs): Pulp heroes never just fail by sheepishly falling on their face (unless they're the Comic Relief in which case the failure probably doesn't matter much)--they fail in ways that send the adventure off in a whole new direction. So if you fail at something, you can spend a Plot Twist Point to convert it into a "skewed" success -- you'll either nominally succeed at what you were doing, but it will turn out to have prices you didn't expect--

Stephen wrote: Suggestion for a really simple degrees-of-success mechanic, too:

Get less than half your target number: Exceptional success (something cool or unusual).
Get less than 10% your target number: Critical success.
Roll 100: Critical failure, regardless of target number.

Jeff Klein wrote:

Stephen wrote: Suggestion for a really simple degrees-of-success mechanic, too:

Get less than half your target number: Exceptional success (something cool or unusual).
Get less than 10% your target number: Critical success.
Roll 100: Critical failure, regardless of target number.

IIRC that is the James Bond result table.

Hi,

In your example you talk about a 'difficulty number', which is used as a multiplier to calculate the chance of success. So the lower the value of Difficulty is, the harder it is to perform the task.

This could lead to confusion. Wouldn't it be better to rename this term from 'Difficulty number' to 'Chance multiplier' or such?

(In JB007 the term used for this parameter was 'Ease Factor'.)

Cheers,
Marc

godfather punk wrote: In your example you talk about a 'difficulty number', which is used as a multiplier to calculate the chance of success. So the lower the value of Difficulty is, the harder it is to perform the task. This could lead to confusion. Wouldn't it be better to rename this term from 'Difficulty number' to 'Chance multiplier' or such?

(In JB007 the term used for this parameter was 'Ease Factor'.)

Ya know, that's a really good point. I hadn't considered that, but it is a little bit counter-intuitive.

I'll have to give that terminology some thought...whereas I like Stephen's "First Rate" suggestion, as a HUGE Napoleonics fan, I'm afraid that for me, Rates will always refer to the different classes of sailing vessels and their armaments. :)

GMS

What about First-Class, Second-Class, Third-Class etc?

I'd actually originally thought of this, but nobody ever uses the phrases "seventh-class feat" or "tenth-class feat". "Rate" seems to be far more commonly used for numbers above three.

There's also "rank", "order", "water" as possibilities, but those don't quite fit a pulp/80s sensibility, terminology-wise.

I love the idea, actually I had discussed this with my pulp gamers, that the pulps were contemporary stories when they were written.

I joined this board to try to dissuade you from using multiplication during the game (mathmatically challenged), but the idea of having a multiplication table on the character sheet is a great idea!

All the best on your new game!

gamerguy wrote: I love the idea, actually I had discussed this with my pulp gamers, that the pulps were contemporary stories when they were written.

I joined this board to try to dissuade you from using multiplication during the game (mathmatically challenged), but the idea of having a multiplication table on the character sheet is a great idea!

All the best on your new game!

I don't regularly migrate over here but I wondered what the New Wave was... then I realized it was refering to my favorite type of music.
Seems like a really neat concept, though I wonder if it could be expanded out to do less '80's pulp and more into the Weird Science/Real Genius type of adventures.
But again, great concept. While I am not a child of the '80s, I was born 1984 so I missed it by being a little kid with no awareness of anything outside preschool, I always felt some odd connection to New Wave culture- I love the music, the movies, and if I could find a members only jacket I would so totally wear it. I put up a fight when mom threatened to throw out an old jacket covered with spangles she wore once during the decade (I won, and wore it for spirit day at school).
So I'm an child of the 80s, spiritually, I guess. Weird.