What's a good game system for running a Worm style game?
I was thinking GURPS, due to the ease of which you can design unique, quirky and effective powers that take up most of a characters effectiveness, as many Worm characters have.
It also has the whole "heroic realism" thing going on, which is good for a superhero setting where a man with a gun can be a huge threat.
However, combat can be a bit clunky for people unfamiliar with the system.
Any other ideas?
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Have you thought about trying FATE?
I've never looked into fate. What's good about it?
I wholeheartedly suggest FATAL. As the most accurate, well-researched, best playtested, and best-working roleplaying game ever, it's clearly perfect for your needs.
Why must you shitpost so?
Why not use Weaver Dice?
I'll confess that I didn't read much into it after a bad first impression. I really disliked the weird character creation rules, and it turned me off from the system.
Paranoia’s way of handling mutant abilities fits worm powers perfectly. Just because you can shoot acid from you mouth (or in the case of propper worm-like powers “Open two portals in front and behind you that only organic or inorganic matter can enter or exit at your choosing.) doesn’t mean you are immune to getting shot. The system starts to break down once you start including brute powers because paranoia’s rules depend heavily on people being easily killed.
Because it’s a horrible mess once you get past it’s brillient system for determining a character’s starting powers.
Godlike / Wild Talents. ORE Game, fairly simple but the power system has depth and lets you make either standard superpowers or the most JoJo tier batshit insane powers. Characters without powers to compensate are squishy and can easily die from normal weapons.
I shitpost, therefore I am. I am, therefore I shitpost.
Weaver Dice sucks. I wouldn't let anyone but me decide what my powers would be. Worm makes a big deal out of powers being thematically appropriate to the character, and I don't trust randomization or a bunch of goofballs just spitting out ideas to do that for me, either resulting in a big mess or a character I don't want to play.
>What's a good game system for running a Worm style game?
A noose
FATAL-posting is a core pillar of Veeky Forums's board culture.
Why do people dislike Worm? It has a good setting, and the only complaints I've heard about the writing are the time skip, deciding the fate of characters through dice, and the overuse of the term "headspace".
No simulationist rpg can really capture the flavor of Worm, IMO. You need something more narrative and a group of people willing to roleplay rather than relying on the mechanics to dictate things. Fate, like suggested, might be good although I don't care for the system myself. Microlite Storyteller where you have superpowers instead of bloodlines or whatever could do it well, too, I think.
The writing is pretty bad. I love the setting but I find reading the actual story to be grating.
And "copacetic" never encountered the word before in my life, and it was EVERYWHERE.
It's a generic universal RPG that sort the anti-GURPS in it's approach. Design for casual to simply to "play" character concept rather than worry about the nuts and bolts of it.
The fat character trait in GURPS would come with a lot detailed rules about what areas it game if effects and what penalties and bonuses it has according your body size and muscle to weight ratio.
FATE just gives you a few story points, and tells you to come up with a way being Fat could help you in a situation if you want to spend them to get a bonus. The GM on the other hand supposed to give you story points back when the character trait is gonna hinder you in someway.
It has its fans but most of Veeky Forums isn't one of them.
It's great at incentivising roleplay and you can make any character with little to no effort.
That's a personal thing, user. I've heard "copacetic" plenty of times from different people. It isn't a common word, but I wouldn't think strangely of someone saying it
I remember googling it after running into about 25 times.
I don't know why not, it's a perfectly cromulent word.
I found it perfectly felicitous
>I was thinking GURPS, due to the ease of which
Damn it, made me laugh.
Someone has obviously never played GURPS
yes. OP.
Designing powers in GURPS is pretty easy once you've done it once or twice. It also has a lot of mechanical granularity, which means you can have two different powers use the same advantage but function very differently.
I can't think of a single Worm character that can't be modelled by GURPS
Sleeper
I'm not the best at GURPS, but how would you model Lung's ability to get stronger the longer he fights?
How would you do Coil?
Energy Reserve with Special Recharge from powers p 119, have it add points to Enhanced ST, various innate attacks, and DR. Have a limitation going on where SM increases as reserves increase or something along those lines.
Very tough due to basically being a plot device totally unsuitable for anything but an NPC or a 1 on 1 game. There's no point statting his power because it will never really be noticeable as a power to others. However, to model its effects in the game, you can probably through in a bunch of "luck" powers to represent how this is the universe he succeeded in, as well as intuition for information gathered in other universes.
What does Sleeper even do?
Bad setting, bad characters, bad writing, bad everything.
It's objectively terrible.
Welp, no arguing with this. It's objective.
Fucked up describing Lung, but basically all the Advantage levels are bought ahead of time then given a costs FP modifier, a -10% can only use energy reserves modifiers, and then just have higher levels of certain advantages cost boatloads of points so that lung can go full kaiju mode without it costing a ton.
I also derped out and forgot you can just include growth as one of the powers.
What's wrong with the setting?
It's bad.
"OBJECTIVELY"
I swear it's like you don't want to understand.
What makes it "objectively" bad?
Objectivity, of course.
Seriously, are you even trying?
>Oh damn, I thought I could make a post to argue with him but turns out it’s actually objectively terrible so now I have to live with the fact that it’s actually bad.
I like Worm's emphasis on... I'm not sure how to put it. Logistics? Mechanics? Realism? Worm is the reality ensues of capeshit. A lot of thought goes into equipment, power limits, power function, etc. It's not a how-to book, but it's way closer to a how-to book than anything else about people with powers out there and I can appreciate it for that.
A truly blind first read of Worm is presumably a priceless thing, the [Redacted]s existence reveal and final battle between [Redacted] and [Redacted] are both mindscrews that are unlike anything else in fiction just for the imagery they convey.
Also...
>Best origin for people getting superpowers ever.
Old school FASERIP Marvel my dude.
The best supers system of all time, ever.
>I don't like thing so it's objectively bad
It's impossible for a creative work to be objectively bad, because there is no imperical, objective measure for artistic quality.
>What does Sleeper even do?
No one fucking knows - the whole point of his existence in story (if memory serves me correctly), is to be a mystery; someone said to Wildbow that there should be some parts of the plot/world that go unexplained, and he made Sleeper as a result.
He has made mention of what his power is in the vaguest of terms, though - there was a thread on reddit (I know, I know, just go with it) a while back, on who out of a hypothetical team of parahumans would survive going near sleeper - or something like that - and Wildbow chimed in to say that near everyone in the group would fucking eat it in a heartbeat if they tried.
It was said at one point that he "subsumed" an entire universe, i.e. took it within himself. That's the kind of power levels we're talking about here.
Another character that is hard to model is going to be scion
>mindscrews that are unlike anything else in fiction
This is why people don't take Wormfags seriously.
>I like Worm's emphasis on...
Pseudo-realism.
But that's exactly how becoming a parahuman works: These are your powers, yes they suck, get creative and apply them somehow.
You think people like Scapegoat asked for their particular powers?
Yep. WB didnt want to take superpowers and extrapolate a realistic world that would come about from them, as some claim. Instead, he took the basic capeshit scenario of heroes vs villains, and justified it thoroughly.
People sometimes come in with the wrong expectations and are disappointed.
It has its faults, but I loved it.
This.
I think I'm more than capable of creating a Worm appropriate power on my own and that getting stuck with an insanely gimped healing ability when it's not even close to something I would be interested in would kill the game for me.
I'd go with drivethrurpg.com
It's technically made for an entire different YA superhero setting, but it's thematically close enough to Worm for it to be refluffed.
There are no healing abilities. The whole point is that you don't get to choose your powers, but the way you apply them largely defines your role. A character isn't solely defined by his superpowers.
Scapegoat chooses to heal people by layering versions from parallel universes over them. This could be similarily used as a weapon. The strongest, most effective capes don't necessarily have the best powers, they just get the most creative with them (Taylor, Jack, Accord, Number Man), demigods like eidolon, glaistig uaine and contessa who shouldn't be pcs anyway aside.
Actually, in the case of Worm's writing, it is objectively bad. It's extremely amateur, and performs a myriad of basic mistakes that are universally recognized and will ultimately be edited out in its final form. Even the author recognizes that the writing is bad. Since it's not deliberately attempting to be bad, such as in the case of Push, it's really only fair to call it objectively, heavily flawed.
Things like grammar, tone, pacing, vocabulary, all of these can be quantified and examined, and are regularly done when critiquing writing for publication. It's what editors do, or rather what editors would prefer the writers do themselves before submitting a work, just as a first step before tackling more subjective questions and considerations, like characters and setting.
Sounds like a novel idea but ultimately it's one of the reasons why Weaver Dice is trash. Even more important than capturing the lack of agency is the player's own enjoyment and making a character that is thematically cohesive, with a power and downsides not only appropriate to the trigger and the circumstances but also who the character IS, and what kind of personal story the player is looking for from there, and what HE wants to play. It's not about getting a great power, it's about getting a good, fitting character that would be fun for you, and having a bunch of people all on different pages building you a character from patchwork while the rules literally say you should be silent is not fun, and not just because the chances are slim that you won't end up with a retarded power that has no depth or creativity to it at all.
Also, your examples of the most effective capes not having the best powers are stupid, because they all have some of the best powers on the surface. Taylor literally kills Alexandria just by getting mad and shoving copious amounts of bugs down her throat, and even Miss Militia says that Taylor's power isn't one of the ones that are deceptively strong or apparently not all that useful in application.
UMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM MUSIC THEORY IS A THING
I don't think Wildbow is ever going to fix his pacing, unfortunately.
It's a poorly-written story filled to the brim with incredibly unlikeable characters. I don't mean unlikeable people. The people in a story can be unlikeable while keeping them likeable as characters. Almost every single character in Worm is unlikeable, especially the protagonist.
There's lots of likeable characters
Grue, Kaiser, Hookwolf, Lung, Shadow Stalker, Glory Girl to name a few I personally like
I agree. The system's pretty dogshit.
Wild Talents is pretty good, I think, but FATE is even better.
This.
So is Film theory, and all the principles of photography etc.
It doesn't really incentivise roleplay because you end up being more like a director dictating the lives of your character than you are putting yourself in the shoes of your character. Fate will have you wanting bad things to happen to your character intentionally because it gives you metacurrency, and having more metacurrency will ultimately win you whatever you want.
Worm is about planning and doing well with whatever hand your dealt. Some characters actually are stronger than others. I don't think that FATE accurately simulates this.
The pacing is terrible but I don't think that the prose itself is any worse than your average YA crap. It's really no worse than Harry Potter or GoT. If yo are looking for some high quality Veeky Forums then capeshit is not for you in the first place.
>It's really no worse than Harry Potter or GoT.
That's a bad joke. The prose in Worm is more on the tier of Twilight than HP or GoT. It's on the bottom level of YA crap, and you're trying to compare it to some of the top.
The story gets pretty poor, and the Undersiders are probably the worst characters in the setting, but it has some good characters. The Wards, Dragon, Glory Girl, Faultline's crew, etc.
Twilight is actually fairly well-written. It's the movies that are lifeless piles of shit.
>theory
>empirical form of measurement
Even still, you can't measure the objective quality of something with music theory, that's not at all what music theory is for.
Something being flawed does not really equate to something being objectively "bad." You can quantify flaws, but the only metric for what makes something good or bad is whether or not you enjoy it. Since people enjoy media in different ways, there can't really be an objective right and wrong in terms of something being bad.
Worm is absolutely flawed, but I still enjoyed it. To me, it is good.
>Twilight is actually fairly well-written.
No it's not. I've read it, you can't pull that bullshit bluff on me.
I think I now understand why you think Worm isn't that bad.
I think I remembered it being used in Splinter Cell. The first one. The director guy used it in the context of making someone/some organization more "copacetic" to something.
Never actually figured out what it means though. I assumed it meant something along the lines of agreeable.
...
Never read Worm, but for the longest time Space Battles was filled with threads a threads of Worm based stories so I kind of disliked it on the principle that I wasn't interested in any of the threads about it and it was crowding out the things I was interested in.
What can't be solved with Bugs?
Wrong guy, I actually think Worm is pretty bad, storywise.
Yeah, the fanbase gets pretty rabid. It's mediocre, overall, but if Wildbow was actually getting it published and had editors to curb his shit it would probably be a lot better, or at least not as bad.
There is precedent for making it a bannable offense to promote FATAL.
How would I stat up Hookwolf's power in GURPS?
>Not simply running the Draft style character creator that is mentioned in the character creation doc
That one specifically is mentioned to allow everyone to contribute to making up characters and they bet for the pool, and includes the balance mechanism of creating double the players count of capes, with the DM picking however many of the leftovers to act as antagonists, either before of after the voting stage.
Regardless, you can always just fucking, I don't know, ignore that rule and just make a character you like and settle it with your friends? ignore the rules you don't particularly enjoy and accept the ones you like.
>I was thinking GURPS
Consider MAID instead.
Why?
What makes MAID a good system for Worm?
Haven't read Worm, but MAID is usually better than GURPS at _________.
What's his power?
The only way I could ever get my friends to try Weaver Dice is if I run it, and they aren't interested in superheroes anyway so even then I would have to practically beg them. Realistically the only way I could ever play in Worm's setting is to join a Weaver Dice game online, and since 99% of the people playing it online are Worm fanboys and 99% of Worm fanboys treat Wildbow like a writing messiah and would never go against his way of capturing the themes of Worm, it would almost certainly not be fun.
He can turn into a giant fishhook from hell. Basically, he just becomes metal, hooks, edges, twisting rending metal, etc. And also he likes to shape his 'hookform' into a wolf.
AKA he's both bait AND an edgelord AND a furry.
And /pol/, since he's a neonazi.
To expound on that, while transformed he has a small metal 'core' that is the only weak-point of the twisting, rending metal. His hook-form has been torn in half and blown to crap, but so long as the core is fine he can utilize his power after a few weeks break.
He shapeshifts into whirling bits of metal, and he can do it selectively. So like he can be metal under his skin, he can change his arm and nothing else, etc, and he typically makes his metal form into a wolf.
Shapeshifting with a large point budget that's aspected to metal morphing only. Can give himself DR to represent being metal, a Cutting Innate Attack or five for melee/injuring everyone that touches him, etc.; Pretty basic stuff. Neonazi would be Intolerance (Everyone unlike me) [-10] or something like that if he's hardcore about it.
>if he's hardcore about it.
He's not. He's with the Nazi gang because they let him be violent.
Sounds like a personal problem to me buddy, my friends are hella chill and even let me design the powers for them because they never read the story like I did.
And even I as someone who liked Worm am skipping a bunch of rules because fuck it, the power corebooks aren't even done yet and Wildbow himself has even said to go with whatever feels comfortable in terms of rules in general, he only made it accurate to the setting, which it really is, you dont get a choice in powers and you get disadvantages as almost a matter of course and shit is bleak as fucking possible. But I ignore the rules when it would make the game more enjoyable for me and my friends.
Sucks to have friends who wont humor a campaign you would willingly make for them.
I don't really see your point. I'm not allowed to have criticisms because I can just ignore the rules if I ran the game myself?
Simple. He's got a transformation power that grants extra wound boxes on every hit location, and moves his 'core' to his torso. Then he's got HyperBody and Hyperbrawl, and a killing damage extra with the brawl. Maybe a 1-point extra that means he can activate his ability only on certain limbs, granting only the hyperbrawl and the extra wound boxes to that limb. And finally, a 1-point flaw that any wounds he takes while in hook form, he has to heal up before he can take that form again.
Boom. That's how you do it.
That's the same RPG argument fallacy called 'Homebrew Fixes it'. If the ruleset is flawed, the ruleset is flawed. Just because you as a GM can fix it, doesn't mean the ruleset isn't flawed.
For example, FATAL can be 'fixed' that. Just scrap all of the rules entirely and make your own goddamn rules from the ground up. Boom, 'fixed'... .except you're not playing FATAL at all.
>wound boxes
>HyberBody
>Hyberbrawl
>killing damage
>extra
>flaw
What? Is this for some other system?
It's for Wild Talents.
I did it for FUN.
>Wild Talents
Only system I'd try to run anything close to Worm in.
Fuck yeah. Wild Talents is awesome. I had a ton of fun just statting up characters and powers.
I've also got Clockstopper statted up. It's an Interference with Duration, but the Interference has 8+powerwidth, meaning that people tagged have basically no sets unless they have more than 10 width somehow.
It's super expensive, though, since you have to pay for the interference for both attacks and usefuls.
Clockblocker, I mean. I'm an idiot.
It's okay for Worm, but it's a setting that is *verging* on not being able to be managed in an effects based system. You know, like how statting a Jojo stand in GURPS would would really just not result in the same dynamic to fights that was in the series.
I'm really keen for 'consequence based' powers, I've been meaning to make an adaptation of this JJBA module I made towards Worm.
It also answers a few of the problems that , , , raise, in that each player has primary agency over their own power, but has to cede *something* *somewhere* to others, who are usually modifying the power *without even knowing what it is*, giving you powers which are potentially extremely good but in a way that isn't necessarily cohesive enough to make efficient use of its qualities.
For instance, the last game I was in, we had a dude who could transfer liquids between vessels, including people's bloodstreams, which is a great power and in theory can instantly disable most people when used intelligently, except in this case it was *too powerful to be used effectively*, since it effected everything in a 45 degree cone in an uncontrolled fashion over a planetary distance. Meanwhile, another chappo had a dog that caused you to gradually substitute every object in your field of vision, and eventually your other senses, with more dogs, but only if you could see it, which tended to be a lot more tactically useful due to its limitations.
I barely understood the point of your original post.I'm saying that it seems your problems stem from your friends that don't want to humour your setting and your own biases against the online community of weaverdice. Thats a fault on you not the game itself, you have friends you have to "beg" to play weaverdice. You can have your criticisms but nothing in what you said seemed to reflect something poor in the system.
Its literally impossible to use the rules in weaverdice as they are right now, the ruleset is flawed, like most systems can be. Weaverdice however is not finished yet, the only powers with a finished doc are Tinker and Blaster, Brute is mostly done I think but other than that the other 9 classifications are nowhere near finished. You can't run a Weaverdice game right now without a little homebrew in it.
And so far I haven't seen people mention "flaws" in the ruleset other than the character creation not letting you make your characters, and I've already said it lists a way to have you make your own.