Can Veeky Forums review this rpg?

Can Veeky Forums review this rpg?
Has anyone managed to successfully find a group and actually sit down and play VeloCITY?

Please review it for us, I might not ever find people willing to play with me, and I want to know if the hunt is worth it.

Other urls found in this thread:

1d4chan.org/wiki/VeloCITY
archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/36469386/#36636056
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Hi. I'm the lead (read: only) developer for VeloCITY. While I can't speak to any campaigns of my own (mostly because I haven't run any myself), I know of a few other people who have run their own campaigns, and they absolutely loved it. The game is played fast and loose, and the players get the opportunity to be properly radical.

If you do plan on looking for a group, make sure you have the latest version of the document from 1d4chan.org/wiki/VeloCITY

That said, I'm open to answer any questions you may have about the system to the best of my ability.

Are people racing in the game? Or trying to kill each other.

Yes.

Best case scenario: everyone is racing each other. Combat is possible, but you shouldn't have to resort to fisticuffs to win an argument or get a point across.

two gangs on a race to murder some guy
the gang that wins gets bonus street cred

Eh. It was okay. My friend made the pregens. And ran a game with them.

From memory (its been like a year since we played it).

Iirc: There were severe balance problems between the usefulness of the stats when we played it, despite them being priced the same.

He brought it up with the main designer along with several proposed foxes and tebalancing ideas to make them equally good, but the dev apparently didnt see that as a problemand had no interest in fixing it, and shortly thereafter then we all lost interest.

It made for a neat idea and a fun-ish no real consequences oneshot.

Ive played better games, but it was okay.

I don't recall the exact proposed changes, but I will say in my defense that I'm not going to make sweeping changes to the rules unless the proposed changes are thoroughly tested and vetted.

...

Eh. its your game, do what you want with it. I'm just stating my experiences playing that game.

As for what the proposed changes were, there were a few different ideas we came up with.

Repricing them based on their usefulness in the game, a different list of attributes that were more equally balanced, or extra stuff that the attributes could do, again, in an effort to even them out.

It wasnt a "these specific changes need to be made", it was a "this is a problem. Hopefully you can do something about it, here are some hypothetical approaches, we've done a bunch of math balancing, and they should all be more balanced than the current attributes".

I remember noting during play how useless some attributes are in comparison to others. The whole group was having the same issue.

When he said he was going to bring up our playtest results and wanted some ideas to give you for potential fixes, I helped him come up with them.

A while later he said you weren't interested and you liked things the way they were. Whether you used the potential fixes we came up with was unimportant, really. All it really comes down to is that some of your attributes are really crap in comparison to others (but they cost the same). Massive differences in how valuable they are.

We could have either played it with a bunch of houserules to fix it, or just played something else, and we ended up choosing the latter.

Tl:dr; In my experience VeloCity has some neat ideas and an interesting core mechanic, but the character options are poorly balanced and poorly thought out. If the game has changed significantly in the past year that may no longer be the case.

I mean you could look to see if it had,
if you actually care to
1d4chan.org/wiki/VeloCITY

>A while later he said you weren't interested and you liked things the way they were.
I don't recall saying that specifically.

waddefug

Okay. Well that's what he took away from your discussion, that you didn't care about the imbalanced character options.

Just looked. Stats and substats/skills don't seem to have changed, and thats what we found to be so poorly balanced.

If you give me those changes again, I'll take a look.

I no longer have them, but i can ask if he still does. I've moved twice, and my copy was rights of on a piece of paper, not digital.

He's going to take a look and get back to me.

If this thread is dead by the time i get a response I'll make a new one.

Apparently he only shared the one alternative we came up with, our better balanced looking list of attributes and skills.

The : "keep the same list but price each individually by its usefulness (gurps style) didn't get shared.

Found a thread where he started talking about it

archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/36469386/#36636056

This was largely the problem when we played it.

I could have sworn we also had updated skill lists we came up with, too.

Tying them to the attributes is certainly not the only approach that could work.

You could also separate out the movement skills and give players a separate pool of points that they can only spend on movement skills. That might work out well too.

But yeah. Most of the game is movement rolls, and the game doesn't work out so well /isn't much fun if there's a large disparity in the movement rolls between different pcs.

I remember one of the times we played i picked out an early draft pre gen that had a lower "best movement skill" than other PCs, and that session was fucking awful.

Also, tying each movement skill to a different attribute went a long ways toward making the attributes themselves worth taking.

But it did mean rewriting the skill list.

Hey ryx, you got that revised list of skills and attributes we came up with?

Okay Ray, from reading the thread you posted (looks like most of the discussion happens upthread, after I story-timed the playsession), and from going over what few notes I could find, it looks like we figured out the following...

Problem:
- The main issue is that Agility, Grit (in its role as the clinging skill? I don't remember.), Balance, and Strength were all rolled constantly throughout the session. 95%+ at a conservative estimate. Players who don't have skills in these things get left behind and don't have any fun. Players who over-invest in these skills succeed all the time.

Possible solution:
- Remove Agility, Grit, Balance and Strength from the skill list.

- Split Stamina into Stamina (cardio fitness) and Resiliance (ability to take a punch). Split Coordination into Coordination (dunking a basket) and Brawling (hitting a man with a pool cue). The four skills in Body are now Stamina, Coordination, Brawl, and Resiliance.

-Add Sneak and Larceny to the Speed skills. Sneaking is not handled by Velo very well currently and having a dedicated larceny skill makes sense in a game where you're basically street kids - even if you are the good guys. The four skills in Speed are now Aim, Reaction, Sneak, and Larceny.

(Looks like we left Mind and Soul alone, though there's a scribble here about maybe using Soul as a cap on style? So you don't dump a sessions worth all at once or something?)

>I'm not going to make sweeping changes to the rules unless the proposed changes are thoroughly tested and vetted.

Not to be contradictory, but you just said here that you never playtested it in the first place, meaning a guy with one campaign worth of experience has a leg up on you when it comes to how the game actually works in practice

Was more than one game. A couple games over a weekend, twice.

Likely more in the 3-6 games range. Let's call it 4.

Ryx is right though:
A couple of things make up 95+% of your rolls, and most of the skills used are under 'body', again and again.

If you take the right skills, you succeed all the time. If you don't realize how important they are you fail all the time.

Velocity has a lot of potential, but the fact that you can lose during chargen without realizing it is a big issue with the game.

The plan we'd come up with last year was this

- attach the movement sills to the attributes as follows: Strength attaches to Body, Agility attaches to Speed, Grit attaches to Soul, Balance attaches to Mind. Your movement skills are always equal to the stat they're attached to, but still function normally as skills besides that.This way you have even spread of the movement skills (because you have even point spread attribute-wise) while encouraging people to put up and use Soul and Mind, which are often neglected.

(In retrospect, it would probably just make more sense to declare Strength, Agility, Grit and Balance 'move stats' and say everyone has a set number of points to distribute between them, but I think doing that, you'll still get the game heavily skewing towards Speed and Body)

Looking back, I think I got frustrated, Bluesky, at how, rather than taking the things I had said into consideration, you just presented counter-arguments about how the system could be run in a way that these concerns were not a problem, despite it still very strongly being the case in all of the games of it I have run (which I suppose would be 6 at this point). I lost my enthusiasm for helping contribute to the system not long after and just kinda moved on to other things. This has been a real blast from the past though. I should see if I still have that session recording from the con last year, maybe upload it for the next thread.

There you go, user. Some review from people who have played it.

Was a fun game, but there are only a couple of skills /rolls that really come up.

Basically the gm needs to either change the stats as we proposed or add a bunch of restrictions on the minimums and maximums given to the "core rolls" so nobody accidentally ends up bumblefuck useless or unable to ever fail.

I don't know that I would ever run a long running campaign with it, but it does a pretty good 1shot.

Well, to be fair, that's just the experience of one group. The monthly threads are full of people who have really enjoyed it, even if I don't think a lot of them ever really stopped to get as critical about it as we did. Plus, our experience is a year out of date with the current ruleset.

Sure, it looks like the main issue we faced is still a problem, but the game is still fun if everyone is balanced and creative and really getting into it. Great for one-shots. If you're considering campaign play, start with a one-shot first, just to see how everyone does and to help get them into the system and mood and so you can really feel if its right for you. That's my advice, at least.

That would be nice, yes. I'll make sure to chew all this over, and I'll see if I can't incorporate the suggestions here somewhere. I sincerely apologize if anything I did disenfranchised anyone and made me look like a shitter.

I will say, Ryx, that your suggestion - now that I'm seriously looking it over - is sound and still encourages spreading points around the various core stats, especially since they are now directly tied to these crucial "movement stats." Since those four (Strength, Grit, Agility and Balance) are attached to their respective core stat, that leaves at least two empty skill slots each in Body and Speed, since you don't have to directly invest in Strength/Grit/Agility/Balance, so I'll have to jigger something together to replace them and maintain the "four substats per core stat" gimmick. Your suggestions (add a fight stat and toughness stat to Strength, and an infiltration stat or two to Speed) are also sound. I'll figure something out, but thank you.

>add a fight stat and toughness stat to Strength
To Body, I mean.