Slashdot Mirror

A very little research gives us details on the Directors of Hasbro.

http://markets.ft.com/tearsheets/businessProfile.asp?s=us%3AHAS

The mean ages, which missing out one of them, Bennett Schneir, is 53 years old.

So yeah, perhaps they just would have never considered it.

But just to make another point, consoles and PC games are a different beast than board\card games. It's quite possible to enjoy both.

For your interest here are a few of my current favourites, Zombie Flux, Cthulhu 500, Bang! and Give me the Brain. Check them out, you might enjoy them :-)

Have you looked at the Hero System? It is basically what you want. The main rule book contains a list of abilities and their associated costs. From these ingredients you create your own recipes whose costs you can calculate to keep things balanced. The genre books then offer a series of templates.

While there are some things about the system that bother me, and which I prefer in the d20 system, its a really interesting system none-the-less. In fact, it is probably the best system that no one has played a game in, which is a shame

We've just started using Ars Magica 5th Ed. It's really great and I recommend the core book to everyone no matter what system they currently use.

http://www.atlas-games.com/arm5/index.php

Humm. Having played Ars Magica more than a few times (my favorite game too), I would say it is biased towards a historically accurate setting (with the twist that magic was real and not just superstition). With even the title being "The Art of Magic", saying it is slightly biased towards mages is like saying Linux community is slightly biased towards open source. Well, you do have all the other character types as well, but the bulk of the available source material is related to magus characters.

IMHO though, that is the strength of Ars Magica. Is has the best magic system bar none, and the setting has real depth because you can use any history book about medieval Europe for reference (and many do - there are quite a few historians among the players). Low-magic or high-magic is up to you - it depends on how common or scarce magical resources are. In our games, magical resources were more common and some of the mages became pretty powerful - and a powerful Ars Magica magus is a damn scary thing...

Oh, and if you feel curious - the previous (fourth) edition of the rulebook is available for free as a PDF, have a look at http://www.atlas-games.com/arsmagica/.

• Ars Magica 5th ed. winner of the Best Role-Playing Game for 2004 Origins award.
  
• Vampire, Mage another White Wolf "World of Darkness" games.
  
• GURPS, the generic role playing system, now in its 4th editon.
  
• Hero System, originally designed for superhero-oriented gaming, it is now a generic system with special focus on supers, fantasy, SF and martial arts.
  

not kicking Mortimer Snerd's butt and taking his lunch money

Well... have you ever played Lunch Money?

It's a card game, a-la Magic: The Gathering (which means it's quite old now), where the object is to do exactly that. You beat up the other kids on the playground and steal their lunch money. Don't seem to recall a big whoop-de-doo when that one came out... 'course, it wasn't a video game, and it wasn't Rockstar...

This isn't a new concept, though... I remember playing the card game Lunch Money back in high school, which is the same kind of thing...

The premise is that you are a bunch of catholic school girls trying to beat each other up for your lunch money on the playground. Cards include attacks, weapons, etc.

Fun game, regardless of your feelings on bullying.

Another big hit was Four Player Chess, formerly purchaseable at 4playerchess.com but is now managed by a domain-name squatter. :/ Anyway, mine has always been a big hit amongst the Coffee Shop Crowd. it's not too hard one of your own. Take a normal chess board then add three rows to each side (making the board look like a big Plus sign). Add two sets of Chess pieces (preferably all distinct) and you're off!

Steve Jackson Games' Knightmare Chess. It's a card game played while playing chess. Play a card, move a piece. The cards change the rules as you go (e.g. "All Pawns attack forward and move diagnal until this card is banished"). This game in conjunction with Four Player Chess is hours of insane fun. A quick search revealed one for sale elsewhere.

Lunch Money is a sick and masterfully done game of kill-thy-neighbor. Always a big hit amongst those with a ken of violence.

Hot Death UNO. My personal-favorite diversion, an extension of Crazy Eights (UNO), this card game add almost 30 new cards to the game of UNO. For example: Mutual Assured Destruction, Fuck You!, Harvester of Sorrows, The Shitter, Glasnost.... This game is not for the meek and merciful. There's also a PC version here and a Sourceforge project desperately in need of a programmer with mad (motivational) skillz.

I recently forked over $75 for a set of the original first edition Paranoia because our local gaming group was getting way too obsessed with their stats and game mechanics. The ensuing pandemonium and infighting didn't solve the problem, but at least it entertains the game master, which is the point of it all, right?

I'm especially happy to hear that the new edition won't be using d20. I've been using Active Exploits, a free, diceless game system, and it has worked very well for keeping the game fast and simple -- an essential for Paranoia.

There are also some excellent resources for individuals who want to play Paranoia online; Paranoia-RPG is probably the best place to start.

And, finally, if Paranoia tickles your fancy and you want to try a different comic genre, check out Atlas Games' Over the Edge, a lightweight conspiracy game that makes Fox Mulders' wildest guesses seem tame.

"Balanced characters" is a convention, not an unbreakable natural law. In paper roleplaying games some very well regarded RPGs, such as Ars Magica, consciously abandon the principle that all character classes should be equivalent in power. (In ArM, for instance, mages totally rule, and everyone else is basically support.)

And you know what? Players still have fun. Players still play the "inferior" character types. Because in these games it's not about maximum firepower, it's about roleplaying. You can have fine roleplaying experiences in these classes that you can't have as a top gun. So, lo and behold, these games survive.

I could easily imagine a similar ethos prevailing in SWG.

Forgot to mention in my other post that Human Head Studios has already demonstrated its affection for paper-game roleplaying, via the well regarded publisher Atlas Games. The Rune RPG, based on Human Head's computer game, was designed by versatile designer Robin D. Laws, whose other credits include the RPGs Feng Shui, Glorantha: The Hero Wars, and The Dying Earth. (Than which a stronger contrast to Rune would be hard to imagine.)

Forgot to mention in my other post that Human Head Studios has already demonstrated its affection for paper-game roleplaying, via the well regarded publisher Atlas Games. The Rune RPG, based on Human Head's computer game, was designed by versatile designer Robin D. Laws, whose other credits include the RPGs Feng Shui, Glorantha: The Hero Wars, and The Dying Earth. (Than which a stronger contrast to Rune would be hard to imagine.)

A lot of RPGs nowadays have free versions of the rules.

If anyone is interested in GURPS, you can check out GURPS Lite, a simple subset of the GURPS rules. Some people prefer it to the full GURPS rules.

Microtactix gives away Simply Roleplaying!, and they also make cool printable cardstock stuff.

Guardians of Order will be releasing their Tri-Stat dX system for free tomorrow.

Atlas Games has released Ars Magica for free.

Grey Ghost Press gives away Fudge.

It's a good time to be a gamer.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is still the bar none best rpg out there fatntasy at least

Have a look at ArsMagica. I am most familliar with version 3 published by White Wolf. Once you get past (or discard) the idea of the 'troupe' and tone down the mages a bit you will find that it has some really nice game mechanics. For a little while my group used ArsMagica mechanics, in the lands of Greyhawk and ForgettenRealms. Ars Magica version 4 is now published by Atlas games.

I do agree that Warhammer FRP is one of the best. The mechanics were flexible and had a nice sense of realism without being overdone. I always found the career system a little odd, but loved its flexibility. Warhammer FRP is now published by Hogshead.

I could have spared myself the research headache, and gone straight to the source for an answer.

I guess I deserve a (-1, Clueless) mod for that.

Yes: they've released a joint announcement that the official role-playing game of both organizaitons will be Ars Magica.

(In other words, no.)

Atlas Games : A small games company which has the distinction of being the fourth organization to own the Ars Magica property (following WotC, which followed White Wolf, which followed Lion Rampant). For my money, Ars Magica is the best roleplaying game ever written: it has the best background for any game I've ever seen, and the guts to say "screw game balance, we're making the mages kick ass."

Atlas Games : A small games company which has the distinction of being the fourth organization to own the Ars Magica property (following WotC, which followed White Wolf, which followed Lion Rampant). For my money, Ars Magica is the best roleplaying game ever written: it has the best background for any game I've ever seen, and the guts to say "screw game balance, we're making the mages kick ass."

You know, I'm not usually a Katz-basher myself, but, please!

Methinks somebody's been paying attention to White Wolf's own hype. After all, everybody knows Vampire is about the struggle with darkness within (which is naturally why so many people play it as superheroes with fangs). And Changeling is about the sorrow of our lost childhood. And Werewolf is about the sad demise of our environment. Just because they take themselves that seriously doesn't make them deep.

It's a game. It's a game that's been out for years! This sort of article reminds me of the magazines in the early nineties touting their "new" discovery - the internet, as if it had only just begun to exist because they noticed it.

For the sake of honesty, I must confess that I'm part of a small gaming company, so I take these things kind of personal. But Jeez! This years Con was HALF the size of the 98' con. The Wizards Castle was HUGE! You know why? To cover up the fact that there were *very* few small companies there. Those who came rocked, natch, but still. Part of that might have had something to do with the now outrageous prices charged by Andon Unlimited (Guess who owns them?), the company that organizes Gen Con and Origins. Atlas Games and Steve Jackson Games now share a booth because of the outrageous prices. These companies are middle sized fish in this particular pond! If they have to share a booth, what are small businesses supposed to do? So yeah, that's my opinion.