Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Mechamorphosis
On Sunday night, I'm supposed to run the second session of the Mechamorphosis campaign I started back in mid-March. I wish I could say I was looking forward to it, but I've really come to hate the system.
Character creation is time-consuming and not enjoyable, so making NPCs is a real bitch. The d20 ruleset in this incarnation is too gritty to properly pull off the feel of the old Transformers cartoon. My Mutants & Masterminds damage save modification didn't work at all. In fact, I think it made things even more lethal.
The oddities of scale really screw with my brain. Player characters currently range from the size of a big human to the size of a several-storey building, whereas the Autobots and Decepticons in the first season of the show really only came in three sizes -- normal-sized being the size of a house (Optimus Prime, Megatron, Starscream and most Tranformers), small being maybe twice the size of a human (Bumblebee), and tiny 'bots being about the size of a human (Rumble, Laserbeak, Ravage -- Soundwave's little guys). I have a hard time picturing a gigantic robot duking it out with a little pipsqueak robot and it being a fair fight. :-/
Basically, I'm just belly-aching about the game. I didn't enjoy it the last time out, and the only way I can see it being any fun for me is by scrapping the entire system, tossing the character builds out and porting everything to a system that is a lot lighter on rules and more heavy on the feel of after-school cartoons. If I could find a copy of Cartoon Action Hour, I'd probably look into porting it to that, as the game is designed to simulate after-school and Saturday morning cartoons. I haven't found a copy of it, and Amazon.ca seems to suggest it's out of print -- which I'm pretty sure is complete bullshit ... but whatever the case, Amazon doesn't have it.
Another potential idea would be Wushu, but it would probably need some modifications. At least character creation would be damn quick, though.
Character creation is time-consuming and not enjoyable, so making NPCs is a real bitch. The d20 ruleset in this incarnation is too gritty to properly pull off the feel of the old Transformers cartoon. My Mutants & Masterminds damage save modification didn't work at all. In fact, I think it made things even more lethal.
The oddities of scale really screw with my brain. Player characters currently range from the size of a big human to the size of a several-storey building, whereas the Autobots and Decepticons in the first season of the show really only came in three sizes -- normal-sized being the size of a house (Optimus Prime, Megatron, Starscream and most Tranformers), small being maybe twice the size of a human (Bumblebee), and tiny 'bots being about the size of a human (Rumble, Laserbeak, Ravage -- Soundwave's little guys). I have a hard time picturing a gigantic robot duking it out with a little pipsqueak robot and it being a fair fight. :-/
Basically, I'm just belly-aching about the game. I didn't enjoy it the last time out, and the only way I can see it being any fun for me is by scrapping the entire system, tossing the character builds out and porting everything to a system that is a lot lighter on rules and more heavy on the feel of after-school cartoons. If I could find a copy of Cartoon Action Hour, I'd probably look into porting it to that, as the game is designed to simulate after-school and Saturday morning cartoons. I haven't found a copy of it, and Amazon.ca seems to suggest it's out of print -- which I'm pretty sure is complete bullshit ... but whatever the case, Amazon doesn't have it.
Another potential idea would be Wushu, but it would probably need some modifications. At least character creation would be damn quick, though.
// posted by Chris @ 4:08 PM 
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