Retro

[Evil Scientist]

I see a lot of retro games doing the whole old-school dungeon hack theme, of course, mostly deconstructing it, but still, going back to the "roots", the early stage of RPG history. What I'm waiting for is a late-80's-early-90's retro phase!! Where everything is over the top, , there are lengthy tables detailing all kinds of weapons and actions like "Short burst" and targeted shots, cyberware, leather jackets down to the ground, everybody is an antihero, and of course,


a disclaimer on every second page!


"The creators of this game don't condone violence and the rape of Sabine women";
"This is only a game";
"Magis is treated as real only for dramatic purposes";
"Do not try this at home";
"Manwhore Inc. does not encourage cult violence and drug abuse".

Call me when this happens.

[kylesgames]

Orchestra is sliding this way, slowly but surely. This is actually part of a consequence of building it as a tactical game, but also because I was raised on those 80's/90's games with that sort of stuff.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

I'm a fan of these types of games as well. However, its a bit of a pain to come up with a hundred different assault rifles, and still make their stats fairly different - when you're working alone. Furthermore, to pull it off, you need artwork. Most people simply don't know what a VP-70 or H&K G-11 look like, despite being revolutionary weapons. (Albeit ones that didn't quite catch on. The G-11 was going to enter full scale production in 1991, the need for a new German assault rifle rather disappeared in 1989... Also, the VP-70 has a cameo appearance in the film Aliens. Yes, I know way to much about guns.)

My very first RPG was going to have a fairly large amount of equipment, and I'd even come up with histories for some of the different types of ammunition. (Most common pistol ammunition being a 8mm cased round and a 10.7mm caseless type). Gangland has a sort of mix and match system, so you can create your own list of a few hundred easily. Dead and Back is fairly generic on firearms, though I've got details of some weapons written up for world flavor.

Lets see - I've got Cyperpunk-2020, Rifts, Twilight 200, and the Edge of the Sword Firearms compendium on my RPG bookcase. (Yes, I do have a RPG only bookcase.) Another bookcase has over a dozen coffee table books on military equipment. (Albeit rather out of date since I tend to get them from used book stores.)

So, if we wanted to work together to make this Retro 90s game, what would be our goals? Why would the game be gritty, and why would there be a need for so much military hardware? One option - you're a mercenary/warlord either in 1990s africa (second Congo war, Toyota War, Ethiopia-etrian conflict, Somalia, etc.) which would let us look at part of the world that is underrepresented in RPGS, and look at some real moral issues that were kind of ignored at the time. Alternately, some foreign colony world where the resupply fleet is late and people are getting really desperate.

[Evil Scientist]

I was always fascinated with Rifts, yet never had the chance to actually try it. By the way, you mentioning Rifts in another topic made me create this one, about the 90's retro...

I don't know much about guns, and if I were to make an over-the-top heavy-on-lists-and-tables RPG, all the entries would be fictional. Having real weaponry might lead to your product aging too fast. Of course, if you are depicting, e.g. the Gulf War, then it's no problem. A good example of a RPG's item list not aging well is KULT: it's packed with all kinds of equipment noone really cares about, plus the descriptions keep mentioning stuff like computers with a 486 processor being high tech.


Now, what you say brings us somehow back to a topic I started and kinda forgot : . I'm taking the liberty of answering there, as it fits more.

[maledictus]

Rifts have some interesting setting but I hate that game.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Think of a four course dinner of your favorite dished, then chop them into tiny bits and mix into one large container. In theory, nothing you don't like, but in practice it just doesn't work like that. Rifts is like that, but add in that some of the dishes are either over or under cooked as well. If you like a fixer-upper of a system or some inspiration its good, just not quite as a game itself. (Similar to how more people own GURPS sourcebooks than play GURPS)

Oh, and Rifts has KULT beat in poor aging - 1980s equipment and 640k computers 400+ years in the future. Of course with the show Robotech, an alien ship arrives in 1999, and the series proper starts in 2009...

Back to guns.

To some extent, it depends on which guns you choose to represent. There are more videogames featuring the "Pancor Jackhammer" automatic shotgun then there were prototypes built (about a dozen, with only 2 fully functional models). On the other hand, the Short Magazine Lee Enfield Rifle, Mauser 98, and Mosin-Nagant bolt action rifles remained in military service for 70+ years each (and the 7.62 ammo for the Mosin continues to serve in Russian machine guns and sniper rifles with no replacement likely for some time.) Kalashnikov pattern weapons are about 70, (from 1946) the first Armalites (AR-15/M-16) only about ten years younger. (AR-10, 1956)

Guns are built out of tough materials and to high tolerance to contain explosive force. Generally speaking, a maintained weapon will last just short of forever. Its the ammunition that is perishable - used up or the chemicals in the primer go bad. Effective arms control means limiting bullets, not guns.

On to the game itself. Equipment is a notable way to set up the concepts. The variety of cyberware in CP-2020 shows how cheap people are, and establishes the augmented vs baseline concept, and how corporations try to benefit from making people remove their limbs.

Its worth noting, in the 1980s, most US police forces still used .38 revolvers, its only the mid to late 90s that a need was seen to move to semi-automatic pistols. Simply the idea that the police in cp-2020 carry 45s or sub-machineguns was quite shocking when the game was originally published. The collection of guns and the idea that everyone has automatic weapons is kind of unsettling and says something about the state of collapse.

An unsettling take on all this would be to have no list of cell-phones and what not since we are quite used to these things.

We are living in a cyberpunk age. Compare the data, vehicle, and weapon access of a major city in the USA to somewhere in India. One of the oddities I saw in India was a set of slums built into a hill, not a kilometer from a four story pavilion mall selling Channel perfumes, Harley-Davidson Motorcycles, high-end electronics - every single shop in the mall had its own security guard to make sure nothing went missing, and this is after you went through a security cordon where they checked trunks, under cars, and had everyone go through a metal detector manned by a guard with a rifle. I had flown over seas in a jet powered craft watching newly released movies on the in-flight media system, and there were people sleeping in the streets outside the hotel I stayed in for the first few nights. I saw castles donated to the state because the owners couldn't afford up-keep, and the Ghandi Museum - one of the first places to use multi-media demonstrations.