Strike! is better than Dungeon World

Strike! is better than Dungeon World.

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Oh good, the two most toxic kinds of shills on the board can fight each other.

Anyone have PDFs for Strike! or DW play books?

Dungeon World is better than Strike!.

I was wondering if anyone is going to reply to this thread at all.

Here's Strike!:
uploadmb.com/dw.php?id=1449846116

DW playbooks should be up for free somewhere IIRC.

They're very different games.

Are either of them OSR? No? Then they're both shite.

DW actually has OSR trappings/inspirations.

Strike! is merely extremely streamlined.

What is Strike!?

>every game that isn't OSR is shit
Come on, now. That's true for dungeon crawl games, but not very kind of RPG.

I actually agree. One can actually be called a game. I just don't like Strike's challenge system and the focus on tactical combat.

Well, you could check for yourself, the download link is just a few posts back.

Alternatively, read a review you can find after 5 minutes of google, like this:
fuckyeahdnd.tumblr.com/post/133344712112/strike-review

A bit too positive for my tastes, but it explains it okay.

>DW actually has OSR trappings/inspirations.
midkek

How is it not?

I mean, the only thing making it distinctly not OSR is actually having a unified mechanic.

But these are dungeon crawl games, and not OSR. Therefore, garbage.

>Implying OSR are objective best for dungeon crawl games
Oh I'm laffin over here with my OQ2.

Strike! is not a dungeoncrawl game.

Admittedly, it has a module for that, I think based on Darkest Dungeons.

I keep hearing people come in to random recommendation threads and be all like

>I recommend Strike!

Followed immediately by

>Stop shilling Strike!

I'd like to see some actual honest discussion of this game.

Strike! is a generic RPG like Savage Worlds, FATE and GURPS, but is leaning mostly towards the gamist side of things instead of simulation (it's still got a fair bit of narration).

It's got a very simple core mechanic, and a lot of optional systems. It is best fit for games where you play a group that gets into squad sized combat, and doesn't give much about realism (it uses some mechanics and was tested by running an XCOM game for example, but you could easily run D&D inspired or or shounen/mecha stuff as well), as that's the most well supported module.

I really should be sleeping soon but I like discussing the game; it hits most of the things I want out of my RPG, and strips away everything else (although maybe it strips away a bit too much at parts).

I disagree, and since makes a good point about honest discussion of the system, here's why.

Strike! has no reasonable way of representing basic character attributes. For example, let's say I want my character to be a strong, athletic type. In other games this could be represented by a high Strength and/or Constitution score (or equivalent stats). In Strike!, the only ways to portray this are through Advances and Skills, and they a piss-poor job. Skills only have one 'rank' by default and are incredibly specific; therefore my character would have to have a Skill for each specific aspect of his strength and athleticism (Jumping, Climbing, Swimming, Keeping my Balance, Holding my Ground, Gripping Things, etc). Advances work like non-combat classes, therefore if my character is a Brute (the Kit representing physical accomplishment) in addition to having to similarly take similarly narrow abilities enabling what aspects of strength my character has, I can only have ONE other Advance EVER that isn't related to being strong. So I could not, for example, ever get two Spy abilities such as being Fearless or having a License to Kill. There's no reasonable, functional way to say "My character's a big, strong guy" and represent that through the mechanics. That's a deal-breaker for me.

Strike! has an incredibly poor layout. Making a character requires that you read the entire book cover to cover and take notes. The 'Creating a Character' section on page 16 is poorly worded and only gives you the non-combat component of characters. The only alphabetized section in the ENTIRE book is the list of Roles, and I think that's a fluke rather than being intentional. Text is spaced and formatted inconsistently and the colours and design of powers and abilities are garish, bordering on atrocious. The artwork is generally sub-par. Overall this book looks awful its content is placed horrendously, and even I (somewhat of a veteran) was confused making a character.

>I can only have ONE other Advance EVER that isn't related to being strong.

That's actually false. You can have only one advance from another kit... without taking the base advance of that kit. You could take the Spy kit base advance and then take any number of spy abilities.

Also, because the skill list is variable, you could very well have a character who has a skill called "athletics", in that game probably the rest of the characters would have similarly wide application skills.

There's also a a multi-step mastery system so you have untrained-novice-trained-master levels, which could be used for the traditional 6 stats IIRC.

That said... yeah, the out of combat part is a bit too much of a departure from the classics and a worked out stat system would be nice.

Stop shilling Strike!

Why does Veeky Forums keep shilling Strike!?

They're both inferior to Barbarians of Lemuria Mythic.

>My character's a big, strong guy

By whose standards?

>Strike! credits

>Development
>Gabriel Butche, Yuri Kavalerchik, Jacob Saunders, Earth Seraph Edna
>These people checked my work for balance and clarity, contributed ideas, and gave advice when I needed it, which was often.

>Earth Seraph Edna

Jeez, that seraph really gets around, doesn't she?

>Strike! is better than Dungeon World.

X is better than Y

That's it? That's your selling point? Goddamn, Strike! must be absolute shit from cover to cover.

Why does he wear the mask?

[electric guitar intensifies]

I've heard of strike as a retroclone of 4e.
What differences does it make from 4e? What does it improve on and what does it do worse than 4e?

Specific skills trump variable skills so if you want to actually be GOOD at anything, you need the specific skill for it. Kinda like the difference between someone who does a mixture of jogging, weights, and cardio versus a trained marathon runner. There's no easy way to say, for example, "My character's got a Strength of 17, so I know how much stronger than an average person he is. That Orc has 17 Strength as well, that makes them about equal, and that Giant with 24 Strength is seriously strong." It creates baselines for comparison so that characters can evaluate themselves against the world.

A game where you can't do that is... shockingly bad in my opinion.

As above, compared to the baseline or average values of humans (or other races that don't have attribute adjustments from human baseline).

>DW playbooks should be up for free somewhere IIRC.
On a garbage bin, yeah.

...

>Kinda like the difference between someone who does a mixture of jogging, weights, and cardio versus a trained marathon runner.

That's kinda the point? If you are a generic strongman, someone who only focused his training on one strongman thing will be better at that thing. Like arm-wrestling champion guy being better at arm wrestling than strongman guy. How is that actually bad?

>A game where you can't do that is... shockingly bad in my opinion.

If you can't reduct all strength related things into a single stat a game is shockingly bad?

The point in Strike is that it's unimportant.
Being +2 faster or +3 smarter or whatever?
Irrelevant except for flavour. It adds colour to the scene and your roleplaying, and that's it.

If you are playing Strike, you are doing it because you want mechanically interesting team combat and conflict. The generic system bit isn't for all games - it's to hold the game together, until you get to more combat.

Just think of it like Power Rangers or whatever. The plot is there, but character individual skills almost never come up. The plot is there to give an excuse for fighting this week's monsters.

It's an IP scrubbed D&D 4e heartbreaker with storygame stuff lifted from PbtA games shoved in sideways.

That’s pretty much it: you get shill bait set because it's some dude's heartbreaker and isn't a major system, so obviously anyone talking about it is a shill.

Well I suppose it covers a niche (and it's not like they all have to be MY niche), but that sounds like it's missing critical parts of an RPG. I'll have fun setting up a combat scene, but I don't think I've ever run a game where I had specific combat scenes I wanted to use, then made up a story to get there. That sort of thinking just doesn't really make sense on a motivational level to me. I have a hard time imagining it would really draw out many people who actually want to run something in it

Which does sort of explain to me why suggestions of Strike! are usually met with "Stop shilling Strike!"

Tactical combat is fun, and roleplaying out a character is fun. That's really all there is to it.

Literally all there is that's 'required' in an RPG is "at some point, you are acting as a character". That's it. If you want, Snakes and Ladders can be an RPG. Chess can be an RPG. Battleship can be an RPG. Nobody's stopping you from roleplaying in any of those games.

For whatever it's worth, the author's own intent in making the game is basically the following:
1. They wanted to have lighthearted DnD-style adventures.
2. They wanted that combat to include meaningful, well-balanced combat in the vein of DnD4e.
3. They wanted prep to take as little time as possible. They wanted to be able to pull an encounter out of thing air - but ALSO have that encounter still be interesting.

So the goal isn't "think of two or three fights for a session, and build a story around it".
It's "have a fun story, and have interesting fights in it".
That's the game tagline, anyway. 'Tactical combat and heedless adventure'.

Now, I have read the game and not played it. While I think it LOOKS good, I can't offer any real opinion on how it works in practice

You don't have to set up a combat scene ahead of time and then have the players run into it tho.

Improvising a combat in Strike! is fast as fuck. I mean, if you want to make a "final boss" style encounter you probably should put in some time, but otherwise you can have the players go around and do whatever, and then break out the minis when the time comes. You could easily play it D&D sandbox style.

I already replied but basically, really, it and Dungeon World approach a similar style (improvisational light adventure) in different ways.

Dungeon World gives strong, strict procedures on 'general' play, but its support for combat is to treat it just like noncombat (I'm not saying this is a bad thing), and making it interesting is all in the GM's hands.

Strike is pretty loose outside of combat and almost entirely in the GM's hands, but gives plenty of support for making combat interesting when it does happen.

Which one is 'better' for fantasy adventure rests entirely on what the group likes.

Well, sorta. It's a lot less movement based than 4e as it did away with the traditional grid, which some 4e players don't like.

>Well, sorta. It's a lot less movement based than 4e as it did away with the traditional grid, which some 4e players don't like.

You are mixing it up with 13th Age, Strike! is heavily grid and movement based (or maybe that's the joke?).

I might be, yes. The two overlap more than a bit.

Eh, I wouldn't say so.

13th Age is really more of a modified 3.5e with some 4e-isms and narrativisms tacked on. Both 4e and Strike are both more balanced than 13th Age.

The combat mechanics and role/class system are pretty great, but the rest of the game is a clusterfuck that squanders everything it has going for it. The book didn't have an editor and it shows.

Hopefully there will be, at some point, a revised edition. I'll probably find that to be worth playing, but as of now it's not really worth the time to organize a game.

Eh, we have been playing for a while and the general consensus is "good enough" for out of combat stuff and pretty good in combat. It really, really needs an editor tho.

Bojack, you're only saying that because you're dead inside and believe that no one will ever love you.

>Why does Veeky Forums keep shilling Strike!?
I lurk every day and had never heard of until this thread.

I'm not sure why shilling is bad.
Like, indie game developers aren't paying anyone to go to fucking Veeky Forums and point people to their games.

People are just exciting about games they like and want to point other people to them in case it meets their needs. Is that so bad?

We should encourage as many different RPGs as possible.

Shilling is correctly used when there's a hidden agenda (i.e. "I'm getting paid for it") behind making a recommendation. keeps misusing for comedic (?) effect.

But literally nobody is getting paid for it except the one author?

I am listed in the development credits of Strike!, although I had the least input on it by far due to having contacted Mr. McGarva very late. I do not receive any percentage of the profits at all.

I think that Strike!'s combat is very well-refined and that the combat side of character creation is brilliant, but I wholly denounce all of the noncombat mechanics except for Team Conflict and chases.
The probabilities associated with "generic" unskilled and skill rolls are distressingly weighted towards harsh Twists as per the math in page 202.
The guidelines for valid skills are terribly vague and made even more confusing by the sample backgrounds which include broad skills like "Stealth" and "Bluffing" or "Stealth" and "Social Engineering."
Tricks and Fallbacks trivialize a shocking amount of noncombat challenges unless the GM demands skill rolls from the players on a very frequent basis. I have been a player in a Strike! game for thirteen sessions now, and the GM only calls for skill rolls only occasionally; a steady flow of Action Points plus Tricks and Fallbacks ensures that the party cannot truly fail most noncombat tasks unless they forget about such resources.
Asymmetrical skill acquisition between PCs essentially ensures that luckier characters will be gifted with much more skills than others. In the game above, where we make skill rolls only infrequently (and blaze through most with Tricks and Fallbacks), my character has learned four skills in total, while another player's character has acquired none at all.

I would rewrite the entirety of Strike!'s noncombat if I could.

Let's not forget roll20 got its start shilling here

>are distressingly weighted towards harsh Twists

Twists are only as harsh as the GM makes them tho.

Which of course has the problem that the "math" just doesn't work but it's still not as harsh.

It is either the "math" is not working as intended or the example Twists are too light. Either way, there is a disagreement within the writing, and something needs to be fixed.

Some more Strike! related: Does anyone know anything about the wilderness exploration splat or the new classes/roles in the work?

The mention of there being an extra role made me raise an eyebrow.

How do you feel about Skub?

I actually don't think that Strike is a bad idea at all. If someone wants a 4e clone beat em up then I am sure that it is a great option, especially with the dice system and fixed math from the start, along with the generic system.

On first glance, Strike! looks like BloodBowl mushed with 4e D&D.

I am in the development credits of Strike!, and yet I had never even heard of this supplement until you had brought it to my attention. I will be purchasing it and examining it.

That said, note that the vehicles supplement already had various remixed roles that could be taken upon player characters, so a new role is not particularly new.

A friend of a friend had some success by bolting on a different, more complete super-light RPG for noncombat stuff...but I totally forget which one. Maybe Risus?

It's not terribly important, anyways, just go with whichever you find most satisfying for noncombat and it should make things at least more cogent. Fate Accelerated would work a treat.

I have had a look at this supplement, and it is 22 pages of GM-only material with no new player material, let alone player material. That said, it is decent GM material for any setting, and there are even rules for founding and running a town here.

In the core rules, I cannot see why wilderness survival would be of any concern to most parties given the existence of Tricks and Fallbacks. Even a level 1 character has two tricks, and one of those can be the ranger background's "Always find a way back to civilization, creating a Success with a Bonus," which is far better than most parties would be able to manage by fumbling about with their own skill rolls. This supplement tries to rectify that by expanding upon team conflicts for wilderness survival and introducing new methods through which to resolve such challenges... which does not solve the underlying issues with Tricks and Fallbacks anyway, but it is a valiant effort nonetheless.

I'm going to assume here that when wilderness survival would be an important part of the game you would simply not allow tricks that bypass it to be taken at character creation.

Scaling the skills to the campaign is a good idea anyway.

Strike! 2e when?

Is there a bot for this?

archive.4plebs.org/tg/search/text/Stop shilling Strike Why does /tg/ keep shilling Strike/page/1/

No, it's a weak attempt at memery through continual repetition.

Do you really think someone would make a bot that can reliably get though Veeky Forums's captchas and then waste it responding to occasional posts about a heartbreaker system? Are you legitimately that retarded?

No it was joke at the expense of someone going to the effort of forcing the meme.

Lurk more then. Seriously this shit gets posted all the fucking time.

>That moment when a guy stops replying because he has no argument

o m8 am i laffin

>If you can't reduct all strength related things into a single stat a game is shockingly bad?
A game where you don't have baseline values for character attributes, or any way to evaluate effectiveness outside of a binary "Skilled/Unskilled" metric, is shockingly bad.

>Being +2 faster or +3 smarter or whatever? Irrelevant except for flavour.
If Grobnak the Barbarian and Elvindor the Wizard are attempting to solve a sudoku-style puzzle in a dungeon, and neither of them has a skill related to puzzle-solving, they're both equally capable of succeeding. This is despite Grobnak being dumber than a post and Elvindor having a genius-level intellect. I'm not obsessed with verisimilitude, far from it, but stripping characters down to 5 or 6 narrow distinctions robs them of so much that makes them fundamentally competent (or incompetent).

And to both of you, I know about the optional rules for additional levels to skills and they do not fix this fundamental problem.

I do not think "single-axis" skill systems are in any way egregious. It is perfectly feasible to have a game wherein all noncombat tasks fall under a set of "single-axis" skills which still manage to cover raw physique, athleticism, logical thinking, and so on and so forth. Fate Core, for all its problems, does exactly this with Physique (feats of raw strength and endurance) and Will (feats of mental resistance and pure logic and memory), for example.

I do disagree with the entirety of Strike!'s noncombat systems for other reasons though, such as the ones I list here .

To bad 13th age is so shit you would do better to mod 3.5 on your own then waste time on it.

I tried to read Strike, I really did. But the formatting and the art is so awful I just couldn't get through it.

>better to mod 3.5 on your own

This is never the answer.

>I do not think "single-axis" skill systems are in any way egregious. It is perfectly feasible to have a game wherein all noncombat tasks fall under a set of "single-axis" skills which still manage to cover raw physique, athleticism, logical thinking, and so on and so forth. Fate Core, for all its problems, does exactly this with Physique (feats of raw strength and endurance) and Will (feats of mental resistance and pure logic and memory), for example.

I completely disagree with you here Touhou (assuming that's you). Reducing characters to being Trained/Untrained at something and having no other methods of distinguishing their competency at task resolution is bullshit. Learning the skill 1 in 6 attempts is likewise completely ridiculous. If my barbarian is a might warrior who can 'Arm Wrestle', the noodle-armed Wizard in the party shouldn't become equally competent after competing against him once.

The Strike! skill system completely glosses over natural physical or mental ability, long-term training, innate talent, and cultural and social background. Anyone can get good at anything in two or three attempts, with no investiture of time or resources, no formal training, and despite marked physical or mental deficiencies in that area.

Not even kidding here, I'd rather use Lasers and Feelings for my non-combat rules than what Strike's offering. Effectively two Attributes, two merits from two different lists that grant a bonus to certain circumstances, and that's it. I can make an Engineer in Laser and Feelings and not have to take the Coding, Encryption and Security, Repairing Tech, Modifying Tech, Disabling Tech, History of Modern Technology, Operating Hardware, Hacking, Counter-Hacking, Alien Technology (one each for every different major alien species), and Delegating to Other Engineers skills.

Strike! might have functional (if garish) combat rules but the way characters are represented and built is utter nonsense.

Who and what now?

This is never what I was saying at all.

When I mean "single-axis skill systems," I mean skill systems that have no base attributes and only skills.

You can have a "single-axis skill system" with more granularity than "skilled and unskilled," and indeed, there are many single-axis systems that have traditional ratings for such skills.

I never said that the skill-learning subsystem was a good thing either. As I have said in , all it is done in the Strike! game I have been a player in is let my character learn four new skills over the course of the game, while another character has acquired precisely zero new skills.

Two systems that seems to trigger the autists, and serve as useful bait, packaged into one handy double bait thread.

When you say 'single-axis' it's unclear whether you're talking about breadth or depth. Since the comment I made was primarily complaining about a lack of metric for average/baseline character aptitude, I presumed that was what you were referencing as your axis.

Skill-only systems can work but aside from those like FATE, where Skills might as well be your Attributes since they cover all activities sand aspects of your character, I find they are lackluster and generally poor at making any kind of comparison between characters. Attribute-based systems can, through a few numbers, give you a very good idea of a character's all-around aptitude, and adding a handful of specific skills they're good in gives them depth while keeping that useful breadth. Attributes are also excellent at informing things such as physicality and mannerisms, or otherwise serve as an excellent jumping-off point. They're exceptionally useful for both GMs describing their world and players understanding and codifying the environment.

>This is despite Grobnak being dumber than a post and Elvindor having a genius-level intellect.

Then Elvindor probably should have skills, fallbacks or tricks that help with intelligence related challenges, while Grobnak should have a complication related to being dumb.

Using the term "single-axis" would not make sense if it was referring to "depth," because skill system A with two levels of proficiency and skill system B with ten levels of proficiency do not have any difference in the number of axes.

Strike! could use a single-axis skill system. Even three levels of proficiency would do, so long as they covered most possible tasks.

But user, I am running modded 3.5 in this community.

Deedlit is better than Pirotess.

Well, yeah. Deedlit isn't dead.

I thought single-axis systems meant realistic WW2 games, as opposed to those fucking fasces-fellating multi-axis systems.

Why is this thread still on? Everyone knows Dungeon World is shit both as a D&D clone and a PbtA stance, Strike is too much focused at what it wants to do and PbtA crowd is 100% fag tumblrqueer circlejerk.

Let this shit die.

I bought Dungeon World yesterday, because it was cheap and the shop had it.

I haven't really read about it yet. But what should I expect? I love the traditional dungeoneering world, with oozes and cloakers and whatnot.

Is it easy to DM?

>Is it easy to DM?
Say whatever you have in mind and let your players roll for any fuck they "trigger". Eventually they will kill themselves over a roll of 4 and everyone will quit this "game".

>OQ2
What the fuck is OQ?

Open Quest.

Thanks!

In that case...
>runequest knockoff
>better than OSR
Full pleb.

Is it really that bad? I am confused, I figured it was a decent roleplaying game, despite eschewing combat.

>eschewing combat
Good joke.

The reason DW is bad is because it tries to re-add tactical combat in a system that had simplified it out, among other D&Disms that don't fit.

Dang. So, what would be a good system for heavy roleplaying in a dungeoneering environment (underdark, bioluminescent mushrooms, cloakers, mimics, cults, treasure troves, dragons, etc.).

I've done 3.5, PF and 5E and am looking to try something new.

That's why Kardis gave us necromancy.

Don't listen to the memesters, Dungeon World is a good game.
Also, DW does not "add in tactical combat," it uses the Apocalypse Engine for dramatic, cinematic combat, which is a very different thing. And IMO, does a good job of it. The system's not without its flaws (the steading rules take a lot of work to deal with considering that they don't seem to do anything for me, for one thing) it's still miles better than the triggered bitches on Veeky Forums give it credit for.

Just the options I know of, other people can chime in.

Still using the *world system, there's Fellowship, but that's married to a concept that would take a bit of work to send underground.

There's Torchbearer, which uses the Burning Wheel system (which is good as long as you don't get too far into the subsystems)

Some of the OSR systems can be fairly light, as long as you're willing to handle the old-school element of it.

With some work, Reign could be used for it. The reason I say it might need work is because I'm not sure if there's a good "generic fantasy" splat to apply to it.

GURPSGURPSGURPSGURPSGURPSGURPSGURPS

>In my opinion is a good game, and that's what matters. And no, I have nothing else to add.

I'm an idiot when it comes to these. I've heard of Burning Wheel. I'll check out Torchbearer.

What is OSR? As for GURPS, I thought that was a super mechanically heavy system, focussed more on simulationism than narrativism.

I'm all for simulationism, but I figured I'd try something new given my difficulty DMing it without my players getting bored.

GURPS was the obligatory meme response.

OSR is Old School R(something), that emulates pre-3e D&D. Some of them are harder to get into than others, but the OSR thread here is a good place to ask for advice for which one you'd like.
Everything else should be in the PDF thread.

>Post con't didn't increase

OSR is the Old School Revival, a movement to bring back early (Pre WotC) D&D. It's big on tactical dungeon crawling and resource management/tracking stuff, with crazy high lethality. It suits some players and campaigns really well.