Or at least it was supposed to be a quick fix, this thing took about two weeks more than I originally wanted to get it out. You can get it in Mediafire and 4shared colors.
Here is a similarly-quick-except-not-really list of changes.
General Changes:
-Multiple layout and redacting improvements throughout the entire book.
-Slightly friendlier for IRL use.
Introduction:
-Added distinction between Base Mechanics and Derived Mechanics to the Glossary.
Character Creation:
-Switched Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better with Come at Me Bro and modified them both accordingly.
-Buffed Got your Back and Rally the Troops.
Gear Construction:
-Base Mechanics lowered for all Chassis types.
-TRC buffed by fixing a typo.
-Protective Barriers buffed with improved damage reduction.
-Multiple Terrain Adaptability Upgrades can now be active during one Turn.
-Anti-Gravity lost the defensive feature and now allows shooting through enemy defensive formations.
-Battlefield Commander now provides the benefits of the new Cooperate Action.
-Potential Upgrades buffed.
-Telescopic Sights buffed for Missile use and adapted to new Range rules.
-Challenger buffed substantially with a pair of replacement abilities to compensate for the changes to Engage.
-Dogfighter buffed under new rules for Range.
-Mobile Sniper replaced with Sharpshooter, which increases Range.
-Clarified what happens regarding energy and threshold with transforming mecha.
-Teamwork Upgrades buffed with additional functionality, but cannot be used during Duels.
-Modified a ton of Weapons to work under the new rules for Range, and applied a general rebalance.
-Fixed typos in the statistics for several premade Gears and updated them.
Playing the Game:
-The way Ranges work has been changed from the ground up, as follows: All Weapons have a listed minimum and maximum Range in Zones, and can be used Post movement as normal if said Move is towards the target - circling a target in Range 1 is acceptable as well. Certain Weapons have the 'Mobile' special trait, enabling them to be used when moving in any direction.
-Assist Action slightly buffed.
-Boost lets you spend 1 Energy to move 1 additional Zone if you're moving forward.
-Cooperate no longer allows free use of Genre Powers, instead it allows a selection of utility abilities and sometimes grants a temporary genre point.
-Engage now adds Tension like all Offensive Actions.
-Halt Action nerfed.
-Genre Points are now resetted back to three at the end of every Episode Arc.
Running the Show:
-Mooks no longer have reduced Evasion and Armor.
-Fixed the wording of Beam Reflector and Damage Sponge.
-Added 'All Become One' an Exceptional Aptitude-like Upgrade for Aberrant Weapons.
-Fixed typos in the statistics for several premade Gears and updated them.
A quick aside, while it is friendlier for IRL use (There's a table of contents instead of reliance on bookmarks, for example) it is still not what I would call optimum for printing (The A5 size will make you want to kill me, and I'd rather you didn't do that) I know I promised something you can print properly but it honestly has proven slower than I'd like to admit for a variety of reasons, just hang in there for the time being.
Now back to business, while technically quite a bit has changed it mostly revolves around one or two key changes that just had a lot of reach, the game mostly plays the same... Key word being "Mostly". The changes written like this are the really big ones. Subtle isn't it? The game should flow a lot faster now, playing defensively is still viable but no longer grinds the game down to a halt.
A thing that maybe you were expecting but isn't there is the so called "Movement Stat" change, I know that people asked for this and I tried to incorporate it in various forms, but it never turned out in a way that I could be satisfied with. To be honest, I see it as inflating numbers for the sake of fluff and it is my personal choice not to sacrifice gameplay for that.
The way I see it, everyone having different movement speeds by default encourages kiting way more than I'm comfortable with. Other games can get away with that - conflict at a smaller scale does not take place in endless featureless plains and characters don't always have access to their mounts, Mecha don't really suffer either restriction. It is still easily controlled by a GM savvy with Terrain rules and you can just tell people not to try and abuse the system, but I'd rather not push more work on the GM by default nor have to make game balance hinge on the social contract.
As for why is the default movement speed still a lousy one... well, every Zone is meant to be meaningful, you don't need to rush past seven Zones to represent you're really fast, you only need two. That single patch of Difficult Terrain is not a puddle in the ground but a whole river, and so on. Maybe it encourages small-scale battles too much, but I'd rather not inflate numbers if it is not going to achieve much other than make the math in your head more complicated.
That said, I can be wrong, and I would really like to give people what they want without making a mess of the game in the process, so I will remain on the lookout for a way to do this. That brings me to the next point, which is that everything is on a trial basis - If the Short/Medium/Long/Extreme Distance system was nixed because it didn't work as intended, then so can the rest. If people are too squishy and Genre spam is too prominent, both of these and any new changes made can go the way of the dodo.
Good luck and have fun.
February 12, 2012
January 15, 2012
Fomenting Party Interactivity
While we're still on the subject of GGG plays, I want to touch on the game's subtheme of inter-party interactivity. Groups of PCs that interact a lot with each other are great fun. Why that is fun is something several hundred words could be written about, but let us for the time being summarize it saying that anything you do involving friends is fun, with the added benefit of making the GM's work easier by rousing folks to create their own content to keep themselves entertained.
Is there something wrong with playing individually? Certainly not, and any ensemble cast is going to have people whose goals and motivations take them in a direction the rest of the group will not see themselves involved in. That said, every GM has had to deal with a separated party at some point and let us just say that it is not an ideal situation.There are many ways to deal with this, but none of them are perfect, and thus the less it happens the better. Plus, parties that don't do much together beyond making robots blow up are missing a ton of chances to roleplay - the GM can never come up with content that is as rich as what the entire group can put out together.
Slice of life elements through episodic gameplay are encouraged so that the party is close, but not only that is simply not everyone's cup of tea, oftentimes it simply won't be enough on its own. Unless the players all sit down to make a party that works together well, they run the risk of a segregated group that wants to do their own thing leaving everyone else outside of it.
Roleplaying Games should encourage the type of game they want people to play through mechanics, and GGG at the very least provides incentives for party interactivity (though not necessarily unity) through its rules. A Dramatic Typecast will make people more powerful for roleplaying with the rest of the group, either for their mutual benefit or by causing conflict. Some of the most powerful Genre Powers are those that benefit other PCs or that benefit the entire group - Helping people bond simply by the fact that PC A saved PC B's life thanks to Not so Fast. The Teamwork subset of Upgrades are some of the strongest in the game, providing ludicrous benefits at a price. And so on.
I'm trying to get the point across in these posts relatively fast while the game is still fresh and as time goes on, I will be glazing less over the details. For the time being, I hope these simple overviews suffice for anyone who has doubts over how to run or play.
Is there something wrong with playing individually? Certainly not, and any ensemble cast is going to have people whose goals and motivations take them in a direction the rest of the group will not see themselves involved in. That said, every GM has had to deal with a separated party at some point and let us just say that it is not an ideal situation.There are many ways to deal with this, but none of them are perfect, and thus the less it happens the better. Plus, parties that don't do much together beyond making robots blow up are missing a ton of chances to roleplay - the GM can never come up with content that is as rich as what the entire group can put out together.
Slice of life elements through episodic gameplay are encouraged so that the party is close, but not only that is simply not everyone's cup of tea, oftentimes it simply won't be enough on its own. Unless the players all sit down to make a party that works together well, they run the risk of a segregated group that wants to do their own thing leaving everyone else outside of it.
Roleplaying Games should encourage the type of game they want people to play through mechanics, and GGG at the very least provides incentives for party interactivity (though not necessarily unity) through its rules. A Dramatic Typecast will make people more powerful for roleplaying with the rest of the group, either for their mutual benefit or by causing conflict. Some of the most powerful Genre Powers are those that benefit other PCs or that benefit the entire group - Helping people bond simply by the fact that PC A saved PC B's life thanks to Not so Fast. The Teamwork subset of Upgrades are some of the strongest in the game, providing ludicrous benefits at a price. And so on.
I'm trying to get the point across in these posts relatively fast while the game is still fresh and as time goes on, I will be glazing less over the details. For the time being, I hope these simple overviews suffice for anyone who has doubts over how to run or play.
January 8, 2012
Moving Along
While I change a few things here and there to GGG, fixing a few problems that slipped past and adding elements that were requested, I figure I should drop a few choice words about the game. Beyond the generic rambling about roleplaying games and the basic rules of the game and whatnot in the book proper.
For the most part I want to address how GGG plays (or how it was designed to be played) as that is a matter that I have been asked about a few times. Giant Guardian Generation proper is, much like its most obvious inspiration, a mash up of existing roleplaying systems, taking inspiration from mechanics, gameplay elements, and design principles from all kinds of sources - enough that going into them would require a blog post of its own.
Let's cut to the chase: GGG is an episodic mecha game much in the style of Mecha anime where every episode either has a new gimmicky enemy (the so-called 'Monsters of the Week') or one skirmish against multiple enemies, usually recurring ones (much in the style of Yoshiyuki Tomino's series, of which the most known is the Gundam franchise), often whatever it is that happened during battle would be related to events in the lives of the protagonists and serve as a way to develop them as characters.
One example would be a character fearful of spiders who has to do battle with a giant spider-like alien to protect his hometown, you could also have two pilots with opposite personalities who do not get along at all having to use teamwork in order to beat a stronger foe and begrudgingly accepting the other, or even a young teenager in love who finds that their sweetheart was an enemy this time all along.
Now what makes watching a TV show fun (or reading a book, or what have you) is not the same as what makes playing a game fun. Some things are fun to experience passively, but prove to be annoying when done in an interactive medium - the example given in the book is about developing enemy NPCs, and how they can't afford to have entire scenes about themselves simply because that is time in which the PCs are stacking up towers of dice and playing with their phones, because they are not actually playing the game.
We can take one thing from episodic fiction though: Episodes of GGG are meant to give the PCs a chance to roleplay their Themes either during an Intermission or during an Operation - sometimes both. Any excuse to gather the group together will do (such as those from the d100 Table in the GM's Section) and from there, the GM is to provide content uniquely suited to the PCs, preferably involving multiple characters each time.
Then come the battles. You know, the ones with the robots? Before this game started to be about all that pretentious stuff regarding storytelling and characterization? Yeah, those. The easiest of battles should be the Operations during the early Episodes, requiring no more than one or at most two Genre per PC to pull a victory and increasing in difficulty gradually until the end of the Episode Arc, which should leave them empty of points or close to it. Repeat every Arc until the world has been saved or your equivalent ending has been achieved.
This is what it boils down to in theory. Again, shaking things up is recommended, not just to keep things exciting but also to make them suit the individual group's own style best. Variety is the spice of life and all that.
For the most part I want to address how GGG plays (or how it was designed to be played) as that is a matter that I have been asked about a few times. Giant Guardian Generation proper is, much like its most obvious inspiration, a mash up of existing roleplaying systems, taking inspiration from mechanics, gameplay elements, and design principles from all kinds of sources - enough that going into them would require a blog post of its own.
Let's cut to the chase: GGG is an episodic mecha game much in the style of Mecha anime where every episode either has a new gimmicky enemy (the so-called 'Monsters of the Week') or one skirmish against multiple enemies, usually recurring ones (much in the style of Yoshiyuki Tomino's series, of which the most known is the Gundam franchise), often whatever it is that happened during battle would be related to events in the lives of the protagonists and serve as a way to develop them as characters.
One example would be a character fearful of spiders who has to do battle with a giant spider-like alien to protect his hometown, you could also have two pilots with opposite personalities who do not get along at all having to use teamwork in order to beat a stronger foe and begrudgingly accepting the other, or even a young teenager in love who finds that their sweetheart was an enemy this time all along.
Now what makes watching a TV show fun (or reading a book, or what have you) is not the same as what makes playing a game fun. Some things are fun to experience passively, but prove to be annoying when done in an interactive medium - the example given in the book is about developing enemy NPCs, and how they can't afford to have entire scenes about themselves simply because that is time in which the PCs are stacking up towers of dice and playing with their phones, because they are not actually playing the game.
We can take one thing from episodic fiction though: Episodes of GGG are meant to give the PCs a chance to roleplay their Themes either during an Intermission or during an Operation - sometimes both. Any excuse to gather the group together will do (such as those from the d100 Table in the GM's Section) and from there, the GM is to provide content uniquely suited to the PCs, preferably involving multiple characters each time.
Then come the battles. You know, the ones with the robots? Before this game started to be about all that pretentious stuff regarding storytelling and characterization? Yeah, those. The easiest of battles should be the Operations during the early Episodes, requiring no more than one or at most two Genre per PC to pull a victory and increasing in difficulty gradually until the end of the Episode Arc, which should leave them empty of points or close to it. Repeat every Arc until the world has been saved or your equivalent ending has been achieved.
This is what it boils down to in theory. Again, shaking things up is recommended, not just to keep things exciting but also to make them suit the individual group's own style best. Variety is the spice of life and all that.
December 26, 2011
It Begins
I figure that, for my first blog entry, I should post the thing that got me to open up a blog on the first place. So here it is, Giant Guardian Generation, a cheesy Mecha game that is not remotely related in any way whatsoever to Super Robot Wars.
Like, for serious!
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=BKKV0RD7
or
http://www.mediafire.com/?gamkbb9oycsk6q3
The .rar contains the manual, a quick rules reference separate pdf, and the necessary character sheets.
or
http://www.mediafire.com/?gamkbb9oycsk6q3
The .rar contains the manual, a quick rules reference separate pdf, and the necessary character sheets.
What you will find in GGG:
-A streamlined Mecha system that is easily adapted to any kind of game.
-Mechanics that emphasize the narrative and incentivize both good sportsmanship and character immersion.
-Balanced Gameplay that can be as simple or as complex as the group wants it to be.
-Rules that allow any kind of PC to be just as good a pilot as everyone else, no matter how feeble or wimpy.
-A setting with three possible game modes, evocative of classic and modern Mecha with their own distinctive style.
What you will NOT find in GGG:
-Mecha customization extensive on the numbers akin to an engineering simulator.
-Gameplay that prioritizes narrative control over all other mechanics.
-Necessary referencing of tables and charts during gameplay.
-A system for standalone one-shot action adventures.
-A miniatures-based combat system.
I firmly believe more RPGs should be honest enough to tell you that you might not like them from the get go.
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