Fantasy Flight Games gets Star Wars games licence

[Stark]

Absolutely. This is why I showed how poorly Age of Conan rates and sold. Face it, it is Risk: Conan.

I'm not sure how many times I can highlight that nobody says AoC is a great game. Maybe you're really longsighted and can't read. PS? The only use of the word 'great' in this thread is you, right here.

Not an excuse. Age of Conan was supposed to get an expansion too. It was cancelled because of poor sales of the original.

And... so?

Again, you can pretend Age of Conan is a good game, but the overwhelming market reaction is simple: Age of Conan sucks. Chaos in the Old World rocks.

Actually not even the BGG reviews say it sucks, and other review sites say it's fine to excellent. Sadly, this is totally irrelevant to the point you're intent on blithely ignoring. I guess you're just really pissed Chaos in the Old World got a bad review.

You're the one engaging in "I like it so you're wrong" stupidity when I've shown several actual measures of market reaction to the game.

Market measures = measures of quality?

Are you some kind of idiot?

PROTIP: I don't even own AoC. I've never played it. I have absolutely no investment in it whatsoever. It's just a neat game with interesting ideas based on a dogshit awful licence, used to highlight how FFG work well with even bad licences.

Oh, and Chaos in the Old World is awful, horrible dogshit.

Not really, I've had it played by people who know nothing of Warhammer lore. The fact that you have four different factions makes it a much superior game to the snooze fest that is Age of Conan which has four barely different factions.

Factional diversity is the root of quality? You heard it here first, folk.

Oh I see. You make stupid claims that CiToW is horseshit... despite it being in the top 50 of a site that is dominated by Euro players (i.e. NOT miniatures Warhammer Fantasy gamers).

Yes, Chaos in the Old World is horrible, awful ass. That is like, three steps removed from the point, but I"m happy to keep repeating it because it drives you crazy.

You're the one who is trying to justify that Age of Conan is a good game despite being ranked below the top 500 of the web's top boardgaming site.

I'm really not.

You're a lying shit. I show you actual data on sales and popularity, and you go WAAAAH! Zine insecure. Fucking grow up.

Wait, so not only are sales the indication of quality, but BGG is the indicator of popularity? This just gets better and better.

PS, Chaos in the Old World is dead boring.

The truth of Age of Conan is really simple. It was designed by the guys who made War of the Ring, and wanted to make a four-player version of it. Rather than make up their own fluff for it though, they got lazy and tacked the Conan license on top of it. That's why nobody likes Age of Conan except you. It was lazy design.

I thought they hated it because the factions were all the same? Can you put me in touch with the 'everyone', since I've already read the BGG reviews and they really don't agree with you.

No you fucking moron. If you actually knew the game's actual development history, you got it all backwards. They mechanics were designed first. They then tacked the them on top of it. It's not taking a shitty license and making it golden. It's taking a pre-existing game (War of the Ring, but four players) and putting Conan on top of it to sell.

Actually, some BGG reviews specifcally refute a comparison of play to WotR as 'superficial'.

Moreover, if you'd actually known anything about the damn game, you'd realize Age of Conan isn't actually an FFG game. They publish it, but the design is by some Euro guys who did War of the Ring (and that company recently went bankrupt, albeit they seem to be restarting).

Which I guess is why you're so ANNNNNNNNNGRY anyone dared say anything not entirely negative about it.

Oh wow. You say AoC is great and you've never actually fucking played it and just read the rules?

Again, you make sweeping pronouncements about the quality of a game you've never played?

I don't want to scare you and stuff right... but... uh...

B they DID make a solid game out of goddamn Age of Conan, so maybe.

You lose, fatty.

Forty cards rather than one dice increases components count fortyfold. That's 4000%. In practice, it's usually a 55 or 110 cards so it increases component count by 5500% to 11000%

Unlike you, who only reads about the rules and thinks they're awesome without actually playing the fucking game, I'm not "someone who posts in BGG". I'm someone who's actually played over 70 of the top 100 BGG games, so I know the pitfalls of a lot of games.

FFG can hugely reduce their component count by stopping this trend of replacing dice with combat card resolution.

Yeah, that totally refutes the suggestion that using location decks instead of software and piles of tokens instead of sliders or tracks would reduce component load!

By contrast, the tokens you keep wailing about will only decrease component count by around tenfold. You can, for instance, replace Five health markers in Arkham with one health "counter" and a numerical health track. But that's seriously just a fivefold decrease in component count, as opposed to the hundredfold created by dice.

Are you saying you think raw dice results can replace card-based combat with special rules etc? Serious question for our elite board game master.

Have you heard? Chaos in the Old World is fucking horrid.

tl;dr: Stark is talking out of his ass. He hasn't even actually fucking played Age of Conan, while I've not only played it; I've played over 70 of the top 100 games on BGG and know the pitfalls of FFG better than he ever hopes to do.

The joke is actually that I can quote myself describing AoC as 'solid', and thus totally undercut all of your hysterical knee-jerk tryhardism.

Now, because I hate you, I'm going to quote some stuff from BGG - bear in mind, BGG is the metric of popularity.

Some have compared it to War of the Ring; are they really so similar? ... Maybe Conan could be described as a multiplayer version of WotR but I don't think that this comparison is so hugely helpful

The world is very loyal to the Conan mythology. The four powers are well made and play surprisingly differently.

First, I had to notice that the "hottest" review is still largely based on a pre-release version

Straight for the source of truth; game not really like WotR, factions not the same, impressions based on pre-release version.

Its kind of funny how easy it is to beat you at your own game, when you're having so much trouble even keeping track of what I'm saying. To make it easy for you, I'll repeat myself again; FFG have a history of making solid games out of crap licences, so a better licence should give them no problems.

Please continue to reply with 100000 quote boxes!

[Zinegata]

Damn, I saw the title and hoped that FFG was getting the Star Wars Pen and Paper RPG license.

It's my understanding that FFG has the Star Wars pen and paper rpg license, but haven't specifically announced their Star Wars RPG yet.

Yep. FFG indeed has the license.

I suspect the big reason why they're starting with the X-wing game and the co-op LCG is because they have existing rules for it. They'll probably just adopt their rules from a WW1 Fighter game they used to publish, and for the co-op LCG they just recently published the LoTR LCG.

For the Pen & Paper RPG however, I suspect they'll have to break entirely new ground and thus require a longer development cycle. Their RPG line is currently split between the 40K and Fantasy one... and they're very different.

The 40K RPG is basically the old Warhammer RPG IN SPACE which relies on rolling two D10s for resolution.

The Warhammer Fantasy 3rd edition is... a hybrid. It has an RPG book, but it also has a huge number of counters and custom dice for resolution. You don't roll a typical D20 or D10 in the new Warhammer RPG. You roll a special custom dice which has a number of "Success" faces, much like its Doom / Descent series of games.

The latter though has been plagued by issues (it's been taking them a while to release the expansions), especially compared to the 40K line.

I'm hoping that their SW RPG will take a more "traditional" route ala the 40K version... but it's also possible they could be trying to rework the Warhammer Fantasy special dice + counters model.

[Zinegata]

Stark->

Oh, I see. Your definition of a "solid" game about Conan... is to get a totally different game (Risk, War of the Ring) that relies on completely ignoring what Conan is about.

Well then, don't complain if FFG ends up making a game that says "Jedi Lightsabre Duels" on the title when it's actually a set-collection game more along the lines of Alhambra (the game revolves around collecting sets of similar-colored cards). Hey, it's Alhambra, it's still a "solid" game!

(A game that tacks on a theme so loosely isn't solid. It's lazy design. You become sensitive to these things when you actually play games instead of wasting time on the Internet talking out of your ass.)

I ignore your further feeble juvenile trolling because you can't accept the fact that while you may dislike CiToW, it's simply the better game by pretty much every measure.

There is no need to argue with a someone who admits dissing or praising games he doesn't even actually play; that time is better spent playing actual games.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Speaking of rogue squadron, why has it been so long since Lucasarts licenced a combat simulator for home console?

Star Wars Galaxies Jump to Lightspeed. It added space combat to the game in the form of an updated version of the X-Wing/TIE engine. They had that as a gameplay feature and any new X-Wing vs TIE Fighter game would cut into their lackof sales.

[Gunhead]

If FFG was to publish a new SW RPG, they need to stay the fuck away from the 40K rpg as humanly possible. There's no sense in making another bad RPG system based on a retread 80's RPG that was bad when it first came out. The only thing I liked about the Dark Heresy was the background and how they neatly avoided a lot of pitfalls by setting it into their own little world.

-Gunhead

[Zinegata]

If FFG was to publish a new SW RPG, they need to stay the fuck away from the 40K rpg as humanly possible. There's no sense in making another bad RPG system based on a retread 80's RPG that was bad when it first came out. The only thing I liked about the Dark Heresy was the background and how they neatly avoided a lot of pitfalls by setting it into their own little world.

-Gunhead

Given that the 40K system tends to kill characters like flies until the later expansions, they probably will adopt a less brutal system than the twin D10s.

[Gunhead]

Given that the 40K system tends to kill characters like flies until the later expansions, they probably will adopt a less brutal system than the twin D10s.

By less brutal you mean less asstastically sucky I suppose? I don't really have that much faith in FFG's RPG making pecks system wise, they might be able to write a new angle to the otherwise trodden SW path. What kinda worries me is that out of their current line of RPGs, the closest to SW is the 40K line the others being some sort of fantasy RPGs, might even be good fantasy RPGs. I don't know, never played them. I do know RPGs geared towards fantasy do not usually translate well into settings with pewpew guns and spaceships.

-Gunhead

[Zinegata]

Given that the 40K system tends to kill characters like flies until the later expansions, they probably will adopt a less brutal system than the twin D10s.

By less brutal you mean less asstastically sucky I suppose? I don't really have that much faith in FFG's RPG making pecks system wise, they might be able to write a new angle to the otherwise trodden SW path. What kinda worries me is that out of their current line of RPGs, the closest to SW is the 40K line the others being some sort of fantasy RPGs, might even be good fantasy RPGs. I don't know, never played them. I do know RPGs geared towards fantasy do not usually translate well into settings with pewpew guns and spaceships.

-Gunhead

Pretty much. The problem with 40K isn't just that it's based off WHFRP. It's that the twin D10s will cause a lot more failures than successes, so that your characters will generally fail at everything in life until they reach epic levels. It's not exactly fun to have something like a 1/3 chance of hitting something whenever you shoot - you want to be a hero shooting at enemies who came from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy, not be an alumni of the said Academy :p.

To its credit, the new Warhammer Fantasy with the special dice seems to be less inclined towards this "You must fail constantly" paradigm, but it also breaks a huge number of sacred cows that turns off a lot of RPG players.

[Broken]

While I would love a good, solid Star Wars RPG mechanically, I don't worry too much about it. I don't remember the last time I played a PNP RPG without house-ruling the shit out of it. Oh wait, I remember, it was 4th edition D&D where I read through the rules once, looked at my gaming group, and said "I'm never touching this shit again and we're sure as hell never playing it". Oh course, we were long-standing players of the Forgotten Realms since 2nd edition and the grey box; we didn't like our setting getting officially nuked for "awesome". We liked having tons of gods and goddesses with their own niches and cultural touches, we liked having so many high-end plots and gambits running that they occasionally run over each other without warning, and we liked being more then poke em with the sharp-end adventurers.

Anyway, I would prefer a mechanically cool and interesting RPG for the Star Wars license, I can alter whatever rules we do end up with into what I would like without too much trouble if it comes to that. How lethal you want the game, power-levels, and especially ranged combat are all things that are hard to get right and those would be the first thing I would look at to determine how mechanically able the new system is. That will also depend on whether you are running a movie-style space opera with all the epic escapes and action that entitles or a more gritty and "realistic" campaign. I've run both with different Star Wars campaigns and mixed them as well. It was fun, but you have to know your group well before starting either path. But an interesting setting, details, plot hooks, characters, and general background; that takes some time and effort I don't always have anymore, so extra help there is always welcome. That is what I would most like out of a Star Wars RPG; reasonable mechanics, plot hooks, setting, and interesting lore/background as a jumping off point.

[Broken]

Edit: quick reply double post.

[Lord Relvenous]

It's always confused me when people complain about the difficulty of Dark Heresy. The GM has complete control of what bonuses he assigns for tasks. When you stop assigning every single action a Challenging difficulty, your party can actually be good at things. Start making things that these characters would have done thousands of times an Easy or Routine test. It's amazing at where that can take you. Challenging or worse tests are left for plot effecting actions or tense sections.

If you mean in combat: 1) it's incredibly easy for relatively competent players to get tons of bonuses and 2) not having Inquisitorial acolytes just walk over things at low level is incredibly thematic for the setting.

[Gunhead]

It's always confused me when people complain about the difficulty of Dark Heresy. The GM has complete control of what bonuses he assigns for tasks. When you stop assigning every single action a Challenging difficulty, your party can actually be good at things. Start making things that these characters would have done thousands of times an Easy or Routine test. It's amazing at where that can take you. Challenging or worse tests are left for plot effecting actions or tense sections.

If you mean in combat: 1) it's incredibly easy for relatively competent players to get tons of bonuses and 2) not having Inquisitorial acolytes just walk over things at low level is incredibly thematic for the setting.

The "difficulty" comes from the skill vs. raw talent system being completely borked as written. Sure, a competent GM can adjust difficulties anyway he likes but that just basically means he is needs to drag the characters up from sucking at everything to a level where they have a chance of making shit happen. The skill tree system is just utter shit.
The combat is just so laughably badly done it's not even funny. The whole system of situation bonuses for single, semi or autofire is utterly retarded, cover is made useless by certain talents and their armor vs. magic pecks of steel system is shit too.

-Gunhead

[AMT]

Meh. Call me if they get the RPG lic.