Hacker News Reader

Comment by neurobashing | Hacker News Reader

My annoyance with this is, you can pretty much run a "Blade Runner" TTRPG with any suitable system. You barely need to do any prep: we know there's guns, space ships, FTL, extremely good computers, etc. Thats like half the existing OOTB sci-fi settings. Pick one with the desired crunch and take a few minutes to skin it (no pun intended).

View on HN

The most stereotypical Hacker News comment has to be the "but you can already do this with existing tools" without recognizing how valuable it is (and transformative of the experience) when someone talented makes a tailor-made solution. :)

Honestly I mostly come here to laugh at everyone complaining at everyone and “constructively” shaming others for one thing or the other. This is a prickly lot to say it in the absolutely kindest way.

Of course. The value of this (as in any RPG set in a universe based on an existing property) is that the rule book and supplements will provide lots of additional background for the universe that wasn't already defined. I remember playing the West End Games Star Wars RPG in the 1990s before the prequels and I loved how the books expanded upon that universe beyond the original three movies.

Those actually created big parts of the SW EU! Stuff that was written for those games got authorized into canon. Star Wars also produced a ton of new material for its EU. It was a living universe, ripe for gaming.

Blade Runner is 2 movies. (Or 14 or something, if you count all the directors cuts)

> Blade Runner is 2 movies.

And a video game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_(1997_video_game)

Three movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soldier_(1998_American_film)

Ah, a true Connoisseur ... hat tip to you!

But do they actually consider the original novella, with Mercerism, the mood organ, artificial sheep, and the San Francisco setting?

I do not think so (but the Kickstarter has not started yet).

This logic follows for literally any setting for any genre, though.

Why even bother buying or downloading an existing system, for that matter, when you can just design one yourself?

Or... you could buy a premade game purpose-built for the very setting and type of story you want to experience, and avoid a lot of additional work.

Personally, I'm excited to check this out, and happy to see more cyberpunk systems being developed.

You can run any setting in any system you want or make up your own system but it's much easier if you're running off of something close and even better if it includes systems for what you want to do instead of having to make them up. There's a reason there's so many settings book for D&D, saves time having to invent an entire world so you can focus on other stuff.

That's surely true in a sense where the gameplay and narrative are disconnected. I think this is common in the practice of TTRPGs, but not necessary. Gameplay can reinforce or even _be_ the narrative and some games exemplify this (Primetime Adventures, Star Crossed, 10 Candles, The Clay that Woke, and Dialect all immediately come to mind).

I haven't read _this_ RPG to speak to it. But I can 100% imagine an excellent "Blade Runner" RPG which goes beyond just skinning a setting on to some ambient system and instead really explores gameplay that itself can tell a "Blade Runner story".

I'm kinda reminded of the Dropbox comment.

While I essentially agree, I don't think those conversions are trivial for anyone except an experienced GM, with an experienced group, who all consume the same sort of sci-fi media. "Extremely good computers", in isolation, isn't enough information to extrapolate a coherent setting. They're extremely good, fine, but are they, say, all airgapped from one another like in early Shadowrun? The consequences of this small decision affect everything from the players designing their hacker characters to the GM designing the layout of the corp they'll be hacking. Can you run a game without considering this at all? Probably -- just don't play hackers!! But the GM having the answers to questions like this, or better still, the players reading about what computers are like in a corebook before the first session of play, is ultimately easier for everyone and more immersive.

Further, a system used to play a game strongly affects the game's feel. Take the Star Trek license, there's been plenty of attempts[0]: FASA, LUG, even GURPS and d20 modern supplements. None really make for a playable game, because they're mere reskins of games fundamentally designed to tell different stories than those one usually thinks of when one hears "Star Trek" [1]. Those systems are more simulationist and gameist, particularly GURPS and d20, and express more DNA from RPGing's Great Ancestor of tactical wargaming than is appropriate for Star Trek. Star Trek needs a narrativist system.

The most recent attempt, Star Trek Adventures, has a ruleset that's a mere armature upon which narrative beats are hung. But what rules exist power a sort of bennie-economy [2] that allows the GM to menace the players with the mechanical equivalent of threatening musical stings, and allows the players to pull technobabble/white-knuckle-skill solutions from nowhere to defeat those otherwise-insurmountable GM-imposed obstacles.

It just feels more like Star Trek in ways that have nothing to do with the GM or the players individually. I'm not suggesting that this, uh, fairly aspirational [3] project is necessarily going to have that desirable trait, but rolling one's own system means there's at least a chance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_games#Role-p...

[1] Fine, "90s Star Trek"

[2] https://savageeberrontales.com/savage-worlds-and-bennies/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30956393

I don’t think blade runner has ftl actually

Roy specifically mentions witnessing attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, presumably that would be Bellatrix 244 light years from Earth. Given that Roy is approaching 4 years old I think one can assume FTL.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com