Mass Effect RP

Because anyone who wants to RP in the mass effect universe wants to ERP in the mass effect universe, and dice just get in the way.

There is D6, D20, Dawn of Shadows and Spectres, Mass: the Effecting (for WoD), Fate Effect, and a couple RP forums.
And I'm probably forgetting some.

>too much HFY
then base it on ME1.

HFY?

Because ME's fanbase is composed of horrible people.

>Humanity Fuck Yeah.
Definitions varies, but nowadays it's usually sci-fi wankery by bad writefags about a cultural element that they consider important.

They are some excellent stories in that genre, but it's Poe's Law at its finest.
Still not a reason to trash everything with that etiquette.

1d4chan.org/wiki/Humanity_Fuck_Yeah

Interesting read. I like it mentioning pursuit predation.

I'm not really into vidya, but what is the appeal of this setting? It always seemed pretty boring.

What does Mass Effect's setting have going for it that would make it fun for a multiplayer RPG?

vidya
>new rpg after a long time without a decent one
>sci-fi, to boot.

tabletop
>non-humanocentric setting, based on exploration and discovery

Take a look at a couple entries here, it should be enought to give you a broad idea of the setting (and the differences between ME1 and ME3)
shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792

I think the main appeal the setting has is it's a high tech space opera that isn't Star Wars or Star Trek. It's also refreshingly unique in a lot of aspects, and its aesthetic has a very recognizable identity.

The ships look cool, the armor looks cool, the weapons look cool, the aliens look cool. It still has the typical Galaxy of Hats approach to its alien races but it's a little more understated and individual alien still have pretty distinct personalities.

Basically, it's a quality RPG setting which has most of what you'd want in a sci fi game already in it. It's a viable "third option" if you want a space opera game which doesn't have Jedi or the USS Enterprise in it and you don't feel like going through all the trouble of homebrewing a whole new setting.

It also has a sizable following, because the vidya were pretty fun. A quality science fiction experience featuring a colorful cast of interesting characters and a story which was fairly compelling until it shat the bed near the end.

>until it shat the bed near the end

What was wrong with ME3 ending lore-wise?

I can see why Joker wants to tap that
/r/ing pic of EDI's cameltoe

pursuit hunting is actually badass. as a hunter i have to say it's not really possible or convenient nowadays but knowing that it's a strength of our species is pretty damn cool

I'm not as familiar with the huge amounts of backlore for the game as other people here, so I can't tell you much. My main beef was it came out of absolutely fucking nowhere and the "destroy the universe in three different flavors" style ending was pretty darn unsatisfying.

Forgive me for linking this, but here is a novel length rant that explores just about every reason people dislike the third and second games. In short, suspicions that Bioware changed writers for someone who wanted to tell a completely different story. And who presumably though Kai Leng was a good idea.

In fact, here is a picture just so you have something to direct your hate towards.

Derp, forgot to actually link:

shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27792

Literally everything.

The basis of ME3, both in lore and mechanics, is using all the knowledge, alliances and sacrifices made along all the games into a final battle against the legions of space-tech Cthulhus. You lose a huge battle, and every day you are there sucking the dick of a random aliens and doing the chores to get them to help you build the biggest army in the galaxy, and every person you saved and helped from all the games comes to your aid, while Earth's population shrinks by the day. You solve all sorts of centuries-old fuckups, even if they might cause huge wars afterwards, because everyone understands how much the evil tech gods will fuck the galaxy.

What happens when you reach the machine that most of Earth died to build and most of the galaxy sacrificed to aid it's construction? The most literal Deus ex Machina (As in, a ghost-god-machine-kid) telling you that you are a fucking retard, and that you can choose which color the ending is.

All three endings have all kinds of holocaust-level implications. The Red one? You blew up synthetic life, which is one of the most ambiguous thing since you spend a large portion of the game defining what is really life with some shades of transhumanism/transalienism. The Blue one kills you (all of them do) but you now control all the Cthulhus. Even if you are a murdering psychopath that sacrifices everything for the sake of what you want. The Green one? You fuck up dna so hard that the entire life in all of the galaxy is now a synthetic and biological hybrid. Your clue as much as everyone on how hard that fucks up life.

Also, you have an aditional chance of wiping all life on Earth, most of the life on all Galaxies and destroying most advanced tech if you don't get enough arbitrary points. The two ways to get arbitrary points are sucking as much dick as humanly possible, and by playing multiplayer.

To this day I still don't understand people who hate on Mass Effect 2.

It's by far my favorite game in the series and honestly I'd put it on my list of all time favorite games.

Question, what precisely did you like about it? The main storyline, the setting or the character side missions?

>Lacklustre sequels

ME2 was one of the greatest sequels ever you dumb cunt

Weren't you able to refuse using the Crucible?

All three, really.

>The ships look cool, the armor looks cool, the weapons look cool, the aliens look cool.
That doesn't really matter for an RPG, though.

As for the rest of what you said, why would ME need its own system, rather than just refluffing a generic space opera system like Traveller?

Not originally, that is DLC.

And if you do, the entire game goes "Shepard fucked up, and we hope when the next time comes to try save the galaxy they don't fuck up." and everyone dies.

It feels more like a fuck you for complaining than an option.

There's a pretty decent d20 homebrew out there, too

>d20?! REEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Yeah, yeah. Nobody cares.

You'd be surprised how much people take aesthetic into account for their RPGs. I certainly was.

I also never said ME needs its own system. Just explaining why other people feel it does. If I were to run an ME game I'd just use Savage Worlds since it's my pet generic system.

Not him, but the atmosphere is different enough to feel fresh but doesn't feel like a different setting (Omega in particular was great), the new squadmates were all great (save Jacob), I liked the main 'heist' plot of the story and how it felt tighter than the original and the missions on Horizon, Collector Ship, Reaper IFF and Collector Base were excellent. Gameplay wise it was much better too. Combat was improved more in Mass Effect 3 but it was heaps better in Mass Effect 2 compared to the original.

There's always that autistic as fuck website.

If I was going to run Mass Effect I'd likely use Fate, or use it as an excuse to try Savage Worlds or Tristat dX or Traveller.

Use Fate if you want to emulate ME's deep focus on personal narratives and characterization.

Use SW if you want to play around with aliens and the tech. The sci fi supplement basically has everything you need for statting out both.

It was a excellent game by itself.
Gameplay in particular, was miles above ME1 (Christ, the loot system...).
However, it didn't advance the plot of the series one single bit, and paved the way for a lot of the issues that made ME3 despicable.

Hivemind at work

>However, it didn't advance the plot of the series one single bit

It did advance the plot, just not in the ways the new writing team they got for ME3 wanted. I'm thoroughly convinced they only hired people who put "I hate ME2. PS: Thane is a fag" on their resume to write that game.

>It did advance the plot
How?
Shepard doesn't progress compared to ME1, since the Collectors didn't exist in the first game, and are killed at the end. He did nothing to stop or study the Reapers in that game.
You could reskin ME3 and ignore the events of ME2 with minimal efforts.
The only element that furthers the plot is Haestrom's sun getting messed by Dark Energy, but it's both tiny and never brought up again.

There's Arrival, but it's a DLC.

Dungeon: The Dragoning 7th edition came out while ago.

>ctrl-f "GURPS"
>0 found
What the fucking fuck

ME2 wasn't a sequel.
It was an introduction of the "new" head writer's characters, into a universe he didn't care enough to build upon. I mean fuck, they even admitted to FORGETTING what the Protheans looked like (squid people in ME1) so Mac the Hack could introduce a race of Not!Geth (Collectors).

ME2 is a glimpse of what Mac wanted out of the first game. So much so that the thin plot of the sequel is almost a blow by blow of the first, just with more stereotypes...err I mean characters.

Lurk more faggot.

Can asari cross breed with varren? If i ever played an ME RPG, i'd play aggressive half varren asari, or at least everyone keeps implying or teller her she is to piss her off. Either that, a krogan or a vorcha. Hel, make her salty about not being let into the bloodpack.

Asari don't technically "crossbreed" with anyone at all, and when you get down to it their method of reproduction doesn't even require sex to happen, just skin-to-skin physical contact to help randomize her own DNA.
An Asari who wanted to get pregnant literally just could touch someone's nose with the tip of her pointer finger and then wham, she's knocked up.

That's why they treat sex so casually in their culture; it really has literally no inherent meaning at all to them so it's something they do for entertainment purposes.

I could put my dick in Tali

Yeah this is completely wrong my man

Please give me examples about how ME2 is a 'blow by blow' of the first. Aside from the 'run around trying to find out what the villain is doing ' but that applies to so many films and video games

Same but my Shepard's vagina and garrus' bird dick

You mean the metal bird dick

Do not ingest

We made a really fast homebrew hack of FFGs Star Wars system and it works really well.
Basically you erase some Force powers and rename others so that they can be biotics and rename some species. Twi'leks are Asari, Trandoshans are Krogans, etc.
It worked surprisingly well for a hack that was made in 1 minute

Ran a game based on the D20 rules. Had fun.

>Dog fucker
>Wanting to play a ME rpg

I'm not surprised in the least.

GURPS is a terrible choice for damn near everything. It might surprise you, but most people don't like spreadsheets.

GURPS is excellent for modern stuff, and pretty good for patchwork settings.

I wouldn't recommend it for a space opera like Mass Effect, though.

>but most people don't like spreadsheets

Oh gee wiz, guess who didn't try GURPS.

ME2 was a series of recruitment missions punctuated by three story missions, and chest high cover wall shootmans with hilariously barebones sorry excuses for RPG mechanics and progression.

I've never understood why people love it so much. There's really not much there.

The character writing and world building was good, user. Seeing the darker side of the bright, happy world from the first game was pretty awesome.

That and the RPG mechanics and progression weren't that good in the first place, so it wasn't a big loss when they played around with it.

I agree. The gameplay, the story and the world seemed terribly bland for me and I couldn't spend more than 2 hours on it.

I'm with . How exactly?

ME2s plot consists of these beats:

- We know the Reapers are out there, but the Council is doing nothing about it (which is unforgivable no matter what choice you made at the end of ME1. Saving the Council should make them give you the benefit of the doubt and start planning for the possibility Shepard is right - and sacrificing the Council and getting a pro-human council should logically mean they'll want to politically back Shepard).

- Shepard dies at the hands of the collectors.

- Cerberus (a terrorist/rogue organization who is directly responsible for one of the possible Shepard backstories, Akuze) "resurrects" Shepard because the Illusive Man has more money than teeth.

- Cerberus sends Shepard 2.0 to fight the Collectors (no chance of refusal) and discover why they're taking human colonists. Shepard 2.0 assembles a team of specialists for this mission.

- It is discovered that the Collectors are degenerated Prothean slaves of the Reapers, and that at least one of them (Harbinger) is prowling the galaxy. They're taking human colonists to build a Human Reaper (which looks like a skeletal Sentinel from X-Men). Apparently the process to create Reapers involves rendering organics into a grey paste or something.

- Collectors are defeated, baby Reaper is destroyed, and that's it.

The only real news is that not all the Geth supported the Reapers in ME1. By the end, we know that the Reapers are out there. They're coming. And no one is listening to Shepard for no particularly good reason so Shepard gets to be right and say "I told you so" in ME3.

So, we're basically where we started at the end of ME1, with a side story that only serves to highlight how poorly thought out the series was.

Despite this, ME2 is my favorite.

They love it because it's better than the first in every way minus maybe the massive scale. Conversations flow better and have less exposition (fuck talking to Tali in the first one), and say what you will about cover shooting it's miles better than the janky shit of the original.

Like I said before, I've always seen Mass Effect 2 as a heist plot rather than anything else so the recruitment never bothered me.

Yeah, my least favourite part of Mass Effect is the main plot.

>Apparently the process to create Reapers involves rendering organics into a grey paste or something.

I seem to recall that one of the original ideas was that the human Reaper was bank of genetic material because "muh diversity" which was constantly brought up in ME2 and this was supposed to result in some kind of benefit. This plot point was then changed into something else in ME3.

The problem with ME 2 and 3 was the lack of immunity.

I miss taking rockets to the face with impunity on inasnity.

Tali is the best side character. Ending should have been Shepard and Tali building their own home on Rannoch, pioneer style

No matter what, the dialogue about the reaper juice as "the ESSENCE of humanity" at the end of ME2 is so deeply stupid it makes me want to jump off a cliff into a shallow vat of liquid nitrogen.

There are so many good sci fi settings that settling for Mass Effect isn't necessary.

Most of the main plot in Mass Effects makes me wish I was doing sidequests and exploration instead. Which is also why I like ME2 the best.

To me there was a very stark difference between ME1 and ME2 & 3 for that. I mildly enjoyed the main plot in ME1, and i despised it in the other two games.

Tali sucked and I got her killed deliberately

That's because you're a soulless monster who is incapable of empathy and love.

I liked the idea of the ME2 story being about investigating strange slavers in a rogue system. Most of it ended up just being about picking up fun characters, but whenever the plot wanted to remind me it existed, I always found it intrusive.

to be fair, we did see collectors in the prothean vision, and that would have been fine had they not introduced what the protheans looked like in 3. that under the reaper enslavement and being turned into horrors and foot troops made them so fundamentally different from what they actually looked like.

if they wanted to showcase the protheans, they could have done what they did for the ME3 multiplayer and have a single collector break away under thanks to the intervention of a Leviathan orb. that would have been.acceptable

I have the Mass Effect d20 system and it's objectively bad just by looking at it. The formatting alone causes me to weep blood. Pic related is a common example of what you're getting.
>White text on a blue background
>Two columns that are trapezoids, not rectangles, slanted diagonally from the upper left to lower right
>Tables are black text on alternating light blue and white background with a bright red border
>Horrible negative space everywhere, especially above or below tables

When pictures of characters are presented, they're in the middle of the page and the text wraps around them. The edge of the column becomes an IRREGULAR CURVE that adjusts so there's negative space between the text and the image.

I honestly don't know if this game is good or not because I can't stand to read it. The occasional glimpses and skimming I've done tell me that it's based on D&D 3.5 only with classes that draw their powers from a common pool of Combat, Tech, and Biotic abilities, with one or two unique abilities per class.

Huh, you'd think there would be GURPS Effect. On the Bioware dev blogs they flat out said that they used GURPS for in-house RP and initial worldbuilding

I completely agree. I felt the same way.
I did enjoy the way the final mission was implemented, but the main plot stuff had terrible writing and was either uninteresting or stupid compared to the companion-related missions, so it always felt like it was beside the point.

Well, I also cared even less about the plot because ME2 was the first game I played in the series.

Ahh a fellow man of class and taste.

Well, covers most of it, but from a Doylist story perspective rather than an in-game lore Watsonian one - The Catalyst is not foreshadowed at all. The goofy little AI fuck just shows up at the end of the game, with a 'fuck you very much.' All those 'dream forest' nightmares are so much wasted time in game that could have been better spent giving the Catalyst some foreshadowing and actual character.

Narratively the three endings (all four, with the extended cut) shit all over the primary theme of the ME universe, which is choice. Your choices matter. Every time you make a choice in ME1 or 2, it echoes into 3, and choices made in earlier games impact what options you can take against the Reapers and what options are closed to you. But you get to the endings, and none of the previous choices matter. Now it's a choice between red, blue, and green. The initial endings completely ignore the serious and possibly horrific consequences of compromises and back deals you make to try and gather up the forces to form your giant armada. The extended endings are better, but only give your previous decisions a nod or two.

Trying to wrap up the whole of the ME trilogy with a single, easily contained ending was a mistake, and what it really needed was an extended epilogue chapter that let you play as a new recruit fresh to the Normandy, showing how things had changed in the year(s) after the Catalyst fired.

Storywise, 3 is all over the place as well - Some arcs are fucking astounding, like the whole thing with Mordin Solus. Other parts are total shit, like anything involving Kai Leng.

I can understand the hate ME2 gets even if I don't share it. It's a perfectly fine for most Shepards - except Sole Survivors. They want to punch Miranda's head off of her cat-suited body and tell TIM to go stick his head in a space oven. Instead you are pretty much forced to go along with the same guys who murdered your buddies.

You got any porn ya wanna share?

At least the Yellow ending isn't so bad. Every sapient creature in the galaxy dies, but the next cycle defeats the Reapers using all the information gained from Liara's beacons. It's also implied that they solved the whole 'synthetics and organics will inevitably murder each other' problem, making the insane troll logic of the Reapers just that clearly idiotic.

The Indoctrination Theory is still the best ending, and the fact that Bioware didn't incorporate it into their DLC is a crying shame. It would have been a really cool way to correct their horrible writing mistakes while honouring the fans.

Someone did an Alternity conversion for the series back in the day. It was looking fairly decent but I dunno if they finished it.

Didn't take much looking, but it looks like he only got partway through the project before abandoning it. I'd still say this is probably best to run Mass Effect under, since Alternity is straight up designed for Space Opera.

And I forget to copy the link like a moron.

Mass Effect Alternity:
thefairlyunkempt.blogspot.com/search/label/mass effect

I can see that. Normandy sr-1 is small and fighters have variable mass torpedoes that can in lore rip apart an asari dreadnought with the right placement and 3-5 shots. Thats why fights fight fighters in fighter fighters cause if even one gets through they just poke holes in everything.

>Thats why fights fight fighters in fighter fighters cause if even one gets through they just poke holes in everything.
user did you have a stroke

Nope. Its legit ME fighter tactics. Fighters fight fighters in fighter fights FIRST. Survivors fight everything else second. The reason is if you ignore even one than thats a fighter that will be swiss cheesing your shit while you deal with other fighters. So fighters must fighter fighters first in fighter fights.

It ignores everything you did and basically tells you that your goal the entire time "Unite the galaxy-- Defeat the Reapers!" wasn't even the real goal, and is instead some bullshit about how organic and synthetic life cannot co-exist unless you merge the two.

Even if you managed to get the Geth and Quarians to make peace and co-inhabit their homeworld because Legion, the best goddamn companion in the series, died for their sins.

Also, it was incredibly ham-handed as fuck, and revolved around literally the worst aspect of the game, some kid that was literally impossible for Shepard to save, but for some fucking reason we need to deal with PTSD nightmares about the kid, only to have the kid condescend to you in the form of an AI with a plan to keep peace that makes no fucking sense and just makes the Reapers, previously creepy and alien, into utter fuckwits.

The mechanics were so much better, but the story wasn't quite as good as ME1's. I blame Harbinger.

So fighters must first fight fighter fighters in fighter fights.*
Phones autocorrect was sure this was entire sentence was off. weird.

I felt that too. Like, I got to that point the first time I was playing, and shot the hologram in frustration (I bought it after the DLC came out) and then I felt like the game just got super bitchy with me. It was almost as if it was saying "Fine, don't like these choices? FUCK YOU, YOU LOSE!"

If it makes you feel any better Andromeda throws all that shit out the window by leaving it open ended as you leave earth for an entirely different galaxy before the reapers touch down.

Not really. I'm done giving BioWare and EA money though, so it really doesn't matter how I feel about it.

It's pretty clear the Reapers were a metaphor for "The Patriarchy," and the solutions are the super-extreme political solutions usually straw-manned in politics. If they'd fucking bothered to properly foreshadow the ending situation it could had been palatable, even with the superficial ham-fisted "choice that isn't really a choice" bullshit. It could have been GREAT if they just laid off the fucking politics and proselytizing a tiny goddamn bit.

>Leviathans notice organics creating synthetics inevitably causes synthetics to murder own creators.
>Leviathans create an AI to solve this problem. It creates the Reapers and attempts to annihilate its own creators.
>Reapers cull the galaxy of organics in 50,000 year cycles (the calculated time at which organics will begin creating synthetics).
>Somehow this is supposed to prevent war between synthetics and organics, and somehow preserve organics by imprinting their DNA/"essence" into new Reapers.

The solution is to build a giant space penis, dock with the space vagina and:

>Use Space Magic to kill all synthetics.
>Use Space Magic to become Space God.
>Use Space Magic to make all synthetics partially organic, and all organics partially synthetic. Somehow this will make them brothers and sisters in eternal peace.

So, mind explaining how you arrived at the Reapers being "The Patriarchy"? I'm not really seeing it. Genuinely curious.

>So, mind explaining how you arrived at the Reapers being "The Patriarchy"? I'm not really seeing it. Genuinely curious.

>Reapers use "Indoctrination." They all are defined with hyper-male voices. The solution is clearly multiculturalism.
Not to mention the """writer's""" own politics definitely permeated the story, not to mention the business.

I kind of see where you're going with this, but machines manipulating people's minds or brainwashing them is not unknown in SF (the Berserkers, for example, upon which the Reapers were based - at least in ME1 anyway).

The hyper-masculine voices... I dunno. Seems a bit of a stretch. I just figured they made them sound that way to be intimidating/scary.

However, the writer and company politics I can see. That goddamn Green ending was definite some hugbox space magic BS.

*definitely, rather

Also, I want to point out that the Green ending is AS BAD as the mindwipe option on the Geth from the previous game.