>You're a band of inter-dimensional badasses hopping between realities to prevent a team of supervillains from stealing the possibility of your home and becoming the overgod of the multiverse! >Wizard casting a spell in a no-magic reality? Cyborg running around in a low-tech reality? You better not fuck up your contradiction check or your magic is gone and your bionic rocket-leg turns into a wooden pegleg. Hope those weren't core aspects of your character you invested heavily into, or something.
I could forgive the 90s game design, I could forgive the metaplot and setting bloat, but I will never forgive TORG for having such a cool premise and setting and fucking it all up with the most retarded implementation possible.
That sounds absolutely infuriating OP. Was it actually that crippling? That sounds like it completely defeats the point of the multiverse premise.
Cameron Sullivan
It absolutely was. There are different types of contradictions and you usually fail only on a 1 or 1-4 (on TORG's retarded logarithmic-scale d20 rolls, but that's another matter entirely) but since you have to do it every single time you try to use one of your cool abilities that don't match the current reality's axioms it's only a matter of tiem before you fail. And then you have to make a reconnect check to try and regain the use of whatever you lost, but that only applies to abilities like magic, not to things like cybernetics. And if you're unlucky enough to have to make a check in the vicinity of a reality storm (a zone where two realities are clashing strongly, like say around a wizard trying to draw on mystical powers in a dimension where magic is unknown) you risk losing your powers forever.
Joseph Price
That sounds so abhorrently goddamn stupid
Connor Gonzalez
In fact IIRC one of the archetypes in the core rulebook is a naturalized lizardman from a low-tech dimension, he starts with a walkman and a Ninja Turtles t-shirt that by RAW would force him to make contradiction check constantly.
Nolan Hall
Well okay, but how would you do it otherwise? The whole point of each Axiom-world is that they're trying to enforce their reality on the other realities by eliminating those aspects of enemy axioms that contradict their own.
Otherwise, if everyone can use all their cool abilities just fine in every axiom, what's the point of having separated axioms at all? Just mash them all into one world...then your have RIFTS(tm)(c).
Christopher Green
Off the top of my head, you could have it reinterpret the power instead, keeping the same general manner of effect but changing the manner by which it works, potentially messing with the PC in interesting ways without completely crippling them.
Justin Davis
I dunno, maybe they could do what happens in a lot of dimension-hopping shenanigans stories and have the characters spontaneously adapt to the local laws, maintaining their special abilities as best as possible. You're Fantasyland? The cyborg becomes a warforged or a war golem. You're in Cyberpunkland? The wizard becomes a psychic. Pulpy silver age dimension? They become Metallo and Dr. Strange. Robot dimension? Everyone becomes robots.
You lose a lot of the interactions with clashing axioms but in my opinion the enforceing of rules as (meta)physics has always been one of the weakest points of TORG.
Julian Foster
GURPS has it's own inter dimensional police thing iirc
Alexander Hernandez
Could do that, but it'd be a lot of work for either the writers or the GM.
Cyberpapacy characters that go to the Living Land: >bionic rocket leg becomes wooden...stake-thrower? >rocket launcher becomes...greek fire? >cyber-brain becomes...uhhh
Axioms are supposed to be sliding scales too so that's even harder to adjudicate.
>You're Fantasyland? The cyborg becomes a warforged or a war golem. >You're in Cyberpunkland? The wizard becomes a psychic. >Pulpy silver age dimension? They become Metallo and Dr. Strange. >Robot dimension? Everyone becomes robots.
Sure, but that pretty much means the lower-tech cosms would be quickly stomped by the higher-tech ones, which the game explicitly states doesn't happen. After all, if a robot army travels into living land and nothing changes in their stats except their cosmetic appearance, then the lower tech cosms would be conquered easily. The central premise of the game, that these realities are evenly-matched, would collapse.
And if the stats *do* change then in consequence certain people will get nerfed if they go to certain worlds.
Think of it as a challenge.
David Parker
One way around this would be to make the PCs (and some antagonist NPCs) "special ones" that can avoid the axiomatic laws that apply to everyone else.
Oliver Thomas
In the rules PCs, main villains and some npcs do have a Reality skill that lets them slide and adapt, but all it does is let them roll their contradiction and transformation checks instead of auto-failing like most nameless jobbers.
Landon Williams
Make a disconnect just strip you of a possibility.
It's part of the reason why you're heroes, you've got the possibilities to be sacrificed when it comes time for contradiction.
You start casting magic in nippon tech and fail, you spend a possibility to negate it.
A cyborg in the living land could go survive by spending possibilities when they disconnect, and it's only when they've run out of possibilities, that what could be becomes what is, and they find the cold metal start to change into green verdant growth, as their cyberwear turns into a parasitic plant.
Lincoln Rivera
>Finally someone in the thread understands how the rules work
Ian Robinson
I think I'd rather play a game where a bunch of the multiverse's greatest heroes are scrambled across time and space, now stuck to that dimension's analogue form. Just imagine how much of a mindfuck it'd be if the first time your party's playing their team of Barbarians, Cyborgs, Wizards, and Samurais are all sent to the Cowboy dimension to stop Barron von Strucker from using his iron army from taking over the Wild West. Your powers still work the same basic way, except your Cyborg's plasma cannon is now a big clunky revolver and the wizard's spells is replaced with tribal indian magic. Everything still works the same, just in a thick coat of Cowboy paint. Like a Superhero Quantum Leap
Justin Ortiz
Didn't this get a new edition recently? I'm sure I saw a quickstart on drivethrurpg the other day.
Easton Sanders
Yeah, it had a kickstarter last year and the books have just arrived at the distribution centers. Backers should be getting their shit soon.
Nicholas Hernandez
Is it any good? The quickstart didn't seem anything special, but I think that was just because the story wasn't very interesting, it gave me the impression that the adventure ended before getting to the really good stuff.
Easton Barnes
My group enjoyed playing Torg back in the early 90's. We didn't have any trouble with the rules, they were serviceable, but not exemplary.
It was a huge amount of fun. My character was the only "Core Earth" storm knight, which made him the glue that kept the party together and focused trying to repel the other dimensions.
Lincoln Hughes
Yeah but then how would you deal with any non-magic or non-tech characters? Everyone's just going to end up as a wizard or cyborg since having magic or being a mechanized murder machine is way better than being a filthy pirate with gingavitus. Oh sure, you could play as a ninja and spend all your points into being one stealthy mother fucker, but why bother with any of that when your wizard teammate just casts a spell of invisibilty on everyone?
Jacob Hernandez
I honestly thought that TORG had some good ideas. The Madoka Magica fan splat is actually pretty good.
John Roberts
How many books were there for original TORG anyway? I remember dozens upon dozens. It was a very detailed setting.
Easton Carter
That sounds both really stupid, and easily fixable if you're running the setting in anything other than the 90's-design-OG-book.
TLDR: Keep the setting, throw out the bullshit.
Elijah Bennett
Including monsters, equipment and metaplot books, more than 40.
Jonathan Peterson
Because of possibilities.
Technology and magic aren't guaranteed to work. If you're in Orrorsh, and you try to use your magic as a wizard, or your antitank gun as a mechanized solider, you have to spend possibilities to do that. And every one you spend is one you don't have to deal with the big threat down the line, cards or no. If you spend all your possibilities, you become ordinary - or worse, vulnerable to the local reality. Your wizard can become a filthy peasant in a backwater swamp if he loses all his possibilities casting those spectacular fireballs and shit.
the reality you are in is inherently trying to convert you to its paradigm, and if you fuck up and try to be a hero without considering the consequences, you deserve the shit that happens to you.
Possibilities are the balancing factor in the game, as well as the weapon you win the game with.
