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Shadowrun

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[Digital Hellhound]

Maybe I'm too worried about the ecology and environment, but I was playing with the idea of a bounty hunter who's philosophy is that the environment is a much more dangerous opponent than any outlaw. Also, I imagine he looks like the old bounty hunter in Hateful 8.

Well, I mean, the hostility of the environment is a key part of the setting, so that’s perfect. On that note, any ideas how to make survival in the wilds and the environment more interesting? Right now I just have different levels of temperature requiring extra fuel and impairing characters on failed rolls, plus your usual blizzards and wind and other winter weather. Would be cool to give it another aspect than just inventory management and rolls.

The Hateful 8’s snowed-in winter storm aesthetic is pretty perfect for this game, yeah.

[Jimmy]

If you're building a game around survival aspects rather than monster-bashing, you could take a page from the majority of survival games and include a crafting mini-game to grant players boosts to their ability to survive. Whether it be crafting a shelter, fire, food, or clothing, you could get them to roll for gathering units of resources, then skill checks to create an item out of them.

Resources ideas:
Wood
Stone
Ore
Food (meat, fish, plants)
Pelts
Scrap (may count as one unit of any base resource, +2 DC to find)

DC 10 to gather one unit, add one additional unit of resource per +5 you exceed DC 10. Each check takes 8 hours of work (chopping wood, hunting game, etc.) and failing checks to survive in the outdoors imposes penalties on your check to gather resources as you slowly freeze. Crafting the gathered items into usable material requires additional crafting checks and additional time and can affect quality.

Of course, the entire thing only works for players who enjoy a game that is basically all dice rolls and inventory management. This definitely isn't for every group. Could be mixed into a game with combat too, if you wanted.

[Trekkin]

Just to play devil's advocate here: if we're going to so thoroughly mechanize survival as resource management, we could probably make a computer game out of it and save a lot of math.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea to make the players mechanically aware of how deadly the Rime is, but rather that the gathering of resources and so forth can be left in the background unless they happen to make good MacGuffins. There are certainly groups who would get excited they found three wood instead of two, rather than simply motivated to find wood because they haven't enough, but I would assume they're few and far between.

Now, having to negotiate with different groups who had those resources or access to them would be more resistant to being a computer game, but that might be at odds with the cowboy aesthetic.

[Interus]

I think something like that system could work.
Maybe 4 hours, and it's more that each 1 unit could be a day's worth. So if you roll well, you've got enough wood to keep warm for 3 nights.
I wouldn't include stone unless you're specifically trying to build something. What I'm thinking is that most of the players would be the kind of people who travel often, or don't do their own construction, so I wouldn't want these checks to take all day. I'd also make finding game more interesting though. A check to see if you find something, DM decides (maybe rolls on a chart, or 10 is small game, 15 and 20 are larger?) to see what you found, and you take the shot. Either you kill it, wound it and it attacks or runs away but is easy to follow, or miss it and it attacks or escapes. Then you get however much meat and a fur.
I suppose if you want to play a game where you just settle down and try to build a farm, that's fine. I know there's appeal to that, and for anybody interested, there's a game called UnReal World which is a survival game in Iron Age Finland which is basically all of that. Farming, hunting, fishing, gathering berries and mushrooms, building various shelters, and panicking while trying to build a fire because the ice cracked and you barely made it back to shore.

I think of the survival aspect as something you do while investigating what's been killing seacattle and leaving eviscerated corpses on the shore, or while tracking down Flintless Dave, who kills people after they've set up camp so that he gets their valuables and a warm place to sleep. That and specific situations like when you notice a blizzard is coming in and you've gotta either weather it outdoors, requiring turning your sled into a shelter and having enough food and wood, or remember that you know a farmer or rest stop nearby and impose upon them to let your group stay there. Maybe they've got enough food, and hopefully everybody can keep from killing each other before the storm passes.

[Persus13]

Wandering nomads on the edge of the ice sheet seems like a plausible way of life based on fishing off the edge and hunting creatures.

There could be a variety of amphibious monsters that need to come up for air or beach occasionally, and land based monsters that exist on the edge to hunt the sea based ones for the party to hunt. So like seals and polar bears in the Arctic, or it could be the opposite and be like seals and penguins in the Antarctic Sea.

[Trekkin]

Something like Torchbearer, then, where resources are a way to trade encumbrance for endurance (time away from camp, in this case)?

I could see that working very well, provided it were abstracted down to food and fuel. One unit of food feeds one person for one day; one unit of fuel staves off hypothermia for one person for one night. One unit of either takes up one slot of encumbrance and so forth. Then it's simply a matter of keeping the party away from the wagons and/or base camp too long.

[Mesa]

Well, my OL sci-fi West Marches game thread is finally up, for those who are/said they were interested.

[Rolan7]

The guy who did our Demons campaign is running again tomorrow.
Gods help us.  It's going to get weird again.

I would say more, having just had a semi-drunk character jam in the Mythos pile, but this isn't a secure channel.
We're just working for the EPA, in NWoD, that's all.  We're definitely not going to be vampire thralls.

And we definitely won't have weird tragic backstories.  “Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.” - Terry Pratchett

[Mephisto]

Speaking of things getting weird, I've started a local "weird RPGs" group. First session won't be for a few weeks.

For an intro to the weird, I was thinking Shard RPG. I've talked about it a few times around the forums.

Spoiler: What is Shard? (click to show/hide)

My favorite quote comes from someone's review on YouTube. "Birds... don't have... boobs."

Or maybe I should go with something more "traditionally" weird?

Barbarians Versus - play as barbarians. Reptile aliens abducted people and forced them to work in the mines. You've got to go kill them for honor and loot.
Exiled in Eris - schizotech sci-fi western Indiana-Jones sword-and-sorcery. How's that for word salad?

[IcyTea31]

It's one thing to have 5 pistols, but that sugar glider should figure out a way to wield them all at once, or else they just seem like dead weight to get in the way of gliding to me.

[Draignean]

Speaking of things getting weird, I've started a local "weird RPGs" group. First session won't be for a few weeks.

For an intro to the weird, I was thinking Shard RPG. I've talked about it a few times around the forums.

Spoiler: What is Shard? (click to show/hide)

My favorite quote comes from someone's review on YouTube. "Birds... don't have... boobs."

Those are the most magnificent breasts I've ever seen a frog endowed with.

[Mephisto]

It's one thing to have 5 pistols, but that sugar glider should figure out a way to wield them all at once, or else they just seem like dead weight to get in the way of gliding to me.

It's not particularly evident in the pictures I shared but Shard is very Asian-themed and it's set on a world where the base physics only superficially resemble reality. He'll be fine.

Those are the most magnificent breasts I've ever seen a frog endowed with.

And, dare I say it, several humans.

[IcyTea31]

It's not particularly evident in the pictures I shared but Shard is very Asian-themed and it's set on a world where the base physics only superficially resemble reality. He'll be fine.

Isn't that just a greater reason to learn to quintuple-wield?

[Kadzar]

Speaking of things getting weird, I've started a local "weird RPGs" group. First session won't be for a few weeks.

For an intro to the weird, I was thinking Shard RPG. I've talked about it a few times around the forums.

Spoiler: What is Shard? (click to show/hide)

My favorite quote comes from someone's review on YouTube. "Birds... don't have... boobs."

Or maybe I should go with something more "traditionally" weird?

Barbarians Versus - play as barbarians. Reptile aliens abducted people and forced them to work in the mines. You've got to go kill them for honor and loot.
Exiled in Eris - schizotech sci-fi western Indiana-Jones sword-and-sorcery. How's that for word salad?

If you're looking for weird RPGs, I can offer some suggestions:

Spoiler: All of these are free to download (click to show/hide)

• Alien Earth: Basically a post-apocalyptic setting where something (it's not really clear what) has happened to make Earth a strange, alien place.
• deadEarth: Also a post-apocalyptic setting, this one has a major focus on mutations, which can randomly kill you during character creation.
• Encounter Critical: A sci-fi game made to resemble very early, amateurish RPGs in rules as well as looks.
• Fleshscape: A game where everything is made of flesh, even the very ground you walk upon.
• Forgotten Futures: A game meant to resemble sci-fi of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It also has supplements, such as a complete space-based setting, Forgotten Futures XI: Planets of Peril; Forgotten Futures X: The Tooth And Claw Role Playing Game where humans and dragons coexist in a quasi-Victorian society; and The Original Flatland Role Playing Game (The Flattened Remix), a world that exists in only two dimensions.
• Ghost Lines: A game where you work aboard trains that travel through lands inhabited by ghosts.
• Mazes & Minotaurs: A game that imagines what it would be like if early D&D had been inspired by Greek myth rather than Eurocentric fantasy, and also had more coherent rules. Here is the DriveThruRPG page for it, since I believe some of the newer supplements may not be on the original site. Also, here's the page for the original "1972" rules.
• Searchers of the Unknown: A very bare-bones version of D&D, with several dozen variants, which are mostly different settings.
• Septimus: A game that takes place inside a Dyson sphere. There's nearly a hundred pages of setting before you get to the rules, which is why I personally never bothered with it.
• Songbirds: I'm not entirely sure what's going on in this game. I have read through it, but I'm still not quite sure what the player characters are meant to be. There are airplanes, but also the equipment lists swords and muskets, and everyone has a True Name. There isn't much explanation, and I think that might be intentional? Like, I think it's like some sort of rpg version of a poem, where you're meant to infer your own meaning. Or maybe it's Mad Libs. idk
• Talislanta: A weird fantasy rpg that includes no humans or any of the standard fantasy races. A while ago the original creator decided to give it away for free, and there are five different editions to choose from, along with a d20 version and 10th anniversary one.

[Dorsidwarf]

providing a link to deadEarth without any form of disclaimer is a low blow, kadzar.

"Danger: Game sucks, Beavis"