Altered Carbon RPG

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TristramEvans

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Saw the first season of the TV series, and liked it a lot. Heard the books were good. But not familiar with the company that adapted this rpg (Hunters Entertainment).

Anyone pick this up? Any thoughts?
 

Saw the first season of the TV series, and liked it a lot. Heard the books were good. But not familiar with the company that adapted this rpg (Hunters Entertainment).

Anyone pick this up? Any thoughts?
The company is now connected to Renegade Studios. They previously made Kids on Bikes. Renegade have the license to do Altered Carbon, but they will be publishing games for Hasbro (Transformers, G.I. Joe, etc) and also Paradox (World of Darkness games; Werewolf: The Apocalypse in 2021).

As to the game itself, only the PDF is currently out, so dunno.

Video here though:
 
Wow, instantly hate the corporate spokesperson.


But interesting that it's based on The Window's dice system I guess
 
The company is now connected to Renegade Studios. They previously made Kids on Bikes. Renegade have the license to do Altered Carbon, but they will be publishing games for Hasbro (Transformers, G.I. Joe, etc) and also Paradox (World of Darkness games; Werewolf: The Apocalypse in 2021).

As to the game itself, only the PDF is currently out, so dunno.

Video here though:

"Uses both mental AND physical attributes."


I need more coffee.
 
Is it just me, or does the sci-fi genre attract more movie/tv licenses than any other genre of RPG?

We have Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Alien, Dune, Firefly, Stargate, The Expanse, Altered Carbon....

The supers genre can barely hold Marvel or DC for a year or two. Game of Thrones barely registered interest in the fantasy genres, really. Horror RPGS used to have Buffy for a while.
 
Is it just me, or does the sci-fi genre attract more movie/tv licenses than any other genre of RPG?

We have Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Alien, Dune, Firefly, Stargate, The Expanse, Altered Carbon....

The supers genre can barely hold Marvel or DC for a year or two. Game of Thrones barely registered interest in the fantasy genres, really. Horror RPGS used to have Buffy for a while.
Good point, T Trippy I would add John Carter, Tales From the Loop, Battlestar Galactica, and Fallout to your list. And for fantasy I'd add Conan.
 
Marvel's license imposed on Marvel Heroic was ridiculous along with the insistence on no character creation rules (Marvel tried that with TSR too, but Grubb and Winters fought hard against that to get chargen rules in the basic set, and by the time they did the Advanced set, their one major note from Marvel after fan feedback was "make sure it has character creation rules"). I think they impose unsustainable licensing fees for a niche hobby.
 
Marvel's license imposed on Marvel Heroic was ridiculous along with the insistence on no character creation rules (Marvel tried that with TSR too, but Grubb and Winters fought hard against that to get chargen rules in the basic set, and by the time they did the Advanced set, their one major note from Marvel after fan feedback was "make sure it has character creation rules"). I think they impose unsustainable licensing fees for a niche hobby.
So their hopes was that people only used Marvel characters? No new villains either?
 
Marvel's license imposed on Marvel Heroic was ridiculous along with the insistence on no character creation rules (Marvel tried that with TSR too, but Grubb and Winters fought hard against that to get chargen rules in the basic set, and by the time they did the Advanced set, their one major note from Marvel after fan feedback was "make sure it has character creation rules"). I think they impose unsustainable licensing fees for a niche hobby.
You could get a random generator from a supporting PDF.
 
This isn't really true. Marvel Heroic RPG had 2 of the 3 types of characters as in the original Marvel Super Heroes game from TSR:
- Use an existing Marvel hero
- Create your own original hero (by choosing ratings, powers, etc.)

The only part it left out was the random tables so you could use dice to roll up your own hero with no decision-making by the player. I know a lot of people claimed that to be "no character creation" but I've personally never met anyone in real life who used the tables in MSH and found the completely random characters generated by it remotely fun and/or interesting to play. I have seen people online say that they liked the random heroes, but I've never personally seen it with my own eyes in a real game.

And MWP did then release a free set of random tables once the fans complained. So I'm not sure I believe the claims that Marvel demanded no hero creation unless it comes from someone who was part of MWP at the time.
 
The problem is that a lot of people for various reasons don't consider open-ended modelling a character creation method, since at that point you can argue that exists in every game ever (and for people who have issues with it, have the same problems in all of those, too, which is why the only place you see that claimed as a character creation method is superhero games who otherwise don't have one).
 
The problem is that a lot of people for various reasons don't consider open-ended modelling a character creation method, since at that point you can argue that exists in every game ever (and for people who have issues with it, have the same problems in all of those, too, which is why the only place you see that claimed as a character creation method is superhero games who otherwise don't have one).
There is little difference between MHR character creation and that in, say, Fate Core (pick 5 aspects vs. pick 3 distinctions, etc.).

The main difference is that Fate gives you a set of starting values to assign to your skills, which is done solely to balance starting characters against one another, a step that is utterly unnecessary in MHR due the balance being elsewhere in how the system works.

When a system doesn’t require a particular step in character creation, it’s silly for people to claim it’s “missing” when they don’t find it.

But on topic, how about that Altered Carbon game, eh? I’d like to check it out more but I’ve read a couple of people say the system isn’t great. Anyone here have any direct experience yet?
 
Marvel's license imposed on Marvel Heroic was ridiculous along with the insistence on no character creation rules (Marvel tried that with TSR too, but Grubb and Winters fought hard against that to get chargen rules in the basic set, and by the time they did the Advanced set, their one major note from Marvel after fan feedback was "make sure it has character creation rules"). I think they impose unsustainable licensing fees for a niche hobby.

IIRC Simon Burley ran up against something similar when Games Workshop was angling for the Marvel license with the game that would become Golden Heroes. I can't recall the specifics.
 
This isn't really true. Marvel Heroic RPG had 2 of the 3 types of characters as in the original Marvel Super Heroes game from TSR:
- Use an existing Marvel hero
- Create your own original hero (by choosing ratings, powers, etc.)

The only part it left out was the random tables so you could use dice to roll up your own hero with no decision-making by the player.

lol, no

I've personally never met anyone in real life who used the tables in MSH and found the completely random characters generated by it remotely fun and/or interesting to play. I have seen people online say that they liked the random heroes, but I've never personally seen it with my own eyes in a real game.

lol
 
The problem with character generation in the MHR system is that characters are not balanced at all in terms of traits - so there is no sort of points based process or any other deliberate process to make new characters. The balancing mechanism of the game comes in the way in which dice are rolled (all at once, with the total and effect chosen from the dice rolled). That is, a low powered character can still operate on equitable terms with a much more powerful character depending on how they roll and play their dice. Random generation can work in such a system - but points buy is pretty redundant as the mechanics mean that you don’t necessarily 'get what you pay for' in Champions terms.

Beyond that, I think the marketeers surmised that their market were Marvel fans by choice, and as such probably craved more for stats and encyclopedic details of their favourite characters from the comics and movies, than they did for creating new characters. While some fans complained about it, and it may be controversial to say, but they were probably right in marketing terms.
 
And, back on topic, regarding Altered Carbon....on balance.......I really couldn’t give a sclerotic dick about it either.

Not that I have it to give away. :thumbsup:
 
I've personally never met anyone in real life who used the tables in MSH and found the completely random characters generated by it remotely fun and/or interesting to play. I have seen people online say that they liked the random heroes, but I've never personally seen it with my own eyes in a real game.

I enjoy random chargen in supers. Probably because my favorite supers game is Golden Heroes, which employs a (mostly) random power generation. We played a game of it on this very forum not too long ago.
 
Considering that I opened the PDF of the MHR basic rules and the PDF of the MSH basic rules on my computer before typing up my response, just to make sure I wasn't missing something, your response comes across as just a refusal to accept what's right there in the book.

Though, to be honest, I don't have an issue if you've got an actual point to refute what I said. I genuinely don't have a problem being proven wrong, but "lol, no" isn't a refutation of anything.

The funny thing about it is, I don't actually like MHR all that much. I've run it a bunch of times hoping it would get better and it just wasn't that fun and the system was way too swingy for my tastes. But I keep seeing that "there was no character creation" nonsense crop up and I have to wonder if I bought some kind of super-exclusive version of the game, as my copy certainly has one, and every one of my players easily created a hero using the rules present in that PDF.

I enjoy random chargen in supers. Probably because my favorite supers game is Golden Heroes, which employs a (mostly) random power generation. We played a game of it on this very forum not too long ago.
I don't doubt that you enjoy it. And I'm definitely not saying no one enjoyed it. I've just never seen it in real life. What has always happened in our games is that people have rolled randomly, gotten a bunch of ridiculous results, and then changed them into some kind of thematic, playable superhero that would actually be found in mainstream comics. So they maybe kept a single one of the random rolls to give them a starting point, and then changed everything else.

But I've also seen someone roll up a character with something like flight, water breathing, and whatever power it is that lets a person understand and speak all languages. I'm sure someone on these boards could come up with a cool idea for playing such a character (I know there's a thread on here somewhere where people were already doing something like that), but even if they could, it's not exactly a combination that most people would want to play without changing a thing or two, which means you're really just picking from a list anyway using one or two random rolls as a starting point.

(As an aside, when we started using the Ultimate Powers book, it seems like at least 80% of all heroes that any of my players rolled up started with Water Breathing as a power. There's only a 1.12% chance of getting that power on any given power selection roll, but it seemed to come up on our rolls all the damn time :irritated:. None of us ever had an interest in an underwater campaign, so all those rolls were pointless to us. Which is why we just used the book as a big of list of things to pick from, rather than rolling and hoping to get something useful.)
 
Hell, I don't know if we've used anything but random character generation in any of our superhero games aside from Savage Worlds. My favorite character generation system, period, is Icons and their random character creation.
 
Hell, I don't know if we've used anything but random character generation in any of our superhero games aside from Savage Worlds. My favorite character generation system, period, is Icons and their random character creation.
Out of curiosity, do you tend to do thematic campaigns or just go with whatever people rolled? For example, I've run campaigns that were specifically "you are all mutants at Professor X's school" or "you are all Asgardians" or that kind of thing. So random results don't tend to work for us, as the resulting characters tend to not fit into the campaign very well without the necessary tweaking that makes power selection a better option.
 
Out of curiosity, do you tend to do thematic campaigns or just go with whatever people rolled? For example, I've run campaigns that were specifically "you are all mutants at Professor X's school" or "you are all Asgardians" or that kind of thing. So random results don't tend to work for us, as the resulting characters tend to not fit into the campaign very well without the necessary tweaking that makes power selection a better option.

I tend to go with what people come up with. But we did do a young mutants game once in Marvel FASERIP that started with the agreement that everyone was a mutant - so skipping the Origin roll - and then randomly rolling the rest.

I will say I hated the Ultimate Powers book. Icons has a much better weighted set of tables (especially in Great Power, their version of the Ultimate Powers book), and does allow for, say, swapping out a rolled slot for a related power, which does cut down on the randomness if you choose to use it.

I hate point buy in most games, though, and supers more than anything. We've never bothered with modeling, unless I was building specific NPCs.
 
Considering that I opened the PDF of the MHR basic rules and the PDF of the MSH basic rules on my computer before typing up my response, just to make sure I wasn't missing something, your response comes across as just a refusal to accept what's right there in the book.

Though, to be honest, I don't have an issue if you've got an actual point to refute what I said. I genuinely don't have a problem being proven wrong, but "lol, no" isn't a refutation of anything.

The funny thing about it is, I don't actually like MHR all that much. I've run it a bunch of times hoping it would get better and it just wasn't that fun and the system was way too swingy for my tastes. But I keep seeing that "there was no character creation" nonsense crop up and I have to wonder if I bought some kind of super-exclusive version of the game, as my copy certainly has one, and every one of my players easily created a hero using the rules present in that PDF.


I don't doubt that you enjoy it. And I'm definitely not saying no one enjoyed it. I've just never seen it in real life. What has always happened in our games is that people have rolled randomly, gotten a bunch of ridiculous results, and then changed them into some kind of thematic, playable superhero that would actually be found in mainstream comics. So they maybe kept a single one of the random rolls to give them a starting point, and then changed everything else.

But I've also seen someone roll up a character with something like flight, water breathing, and whatever power it is that lets a person understand and speak all languages. I'm sure someone on these boards could come up with a cool idea for playing such a character (I know there's a thread on here somewhere where people were already doing something like that), but even if they could, it's not exactly a combination that most people would want to play without changing a thing or two, which means you're really just picking from a list anyway using one or two random rolls as a starting point.

(As an aside, when we started using the Ultimate Powers book, it seems like at least 80% of all heroes that any of my players rolled up started with Water Breathing as a power. There's only a 1.12% chance of getting that power on any given power selection roll, but it seemed to come up on our rolls all the damn time :irritated:. None of us ever had an interest in an underwater campaign, so all those rolls were pointless to us. Which is why we just used the book as a big of list of things to pick from, rather than rolling and hoping to get something useful.)


Funny you should mention it, my most recent MSH character got Swimming, Water Breathing, and a flame attack. I called him Fireshark, but he's pretty useless.
 
I tend to go with what people come up with. But we did do a young mutants game once in Marvel FASERIP that started with the agreement that everyone was a mutant - so skipping the Origin roll - and then randomly rolling the rest.

I will say I hated the Ultimate Powers book. Icons has a much better weighted set of tables (especially in Great Power, their version of the Ultimate Powers book), and does allow for, say, swapping out a rolled slot for a related power, which does cut down on the randomness if you choose to use it.

I hate point buy in most games, though, and supers more than anything. We've never bothered with modeling, unless I was building specific NPCs.
I get it.

I don't like point-buy when it's necessary to master it to create a viable character. We moved to Mutants & Masterminds 2E and stayed there. But I hate it when players need to optimize everything to squeeze out every last point, so I tend to pick a Power Level and then give them unlimited points to create an appropriate character. I've never had to veto a character, as I don't play with people who will make a godlike character or take everything they can - they will come up with a character concept and build to that, but the unlimited points means that they don't have to be masters at the point-buy system. They can just take a few powers and skills at the appropriate levels that fit their concept and if the point cost is "inefficient" it doesn't matter to the game.

So, really, we just ignore the points mostly, build to Power Level, and take what's appropriate. Not much different than we did when we tried to play MHR, except there wasn't a Power Level necessary to balance starting characters.
 
M&M is a great game but I never liked its advancement system much. They should have created a system similar to MSH or DCH where players had to choose to bank power points to increase abilities or use them to re-roll dice, do stunts, etc. I just don’t believe supers by the book should always be improving.
 
M&M is a great game but I never liked its advancement system much. They should have created a system similar to MSH or DCH where players had to choose to bank power points to increase abilities or use them to re-roll dice, do stunts, etc. I just don’t believe supers by the book should always be improving.
I agree. Other than skills improving a bit and the purchase of the occasional new feat, we did very little advancement in our campaigns.
 
M&M is a great game but I never liked its advancement system much. They should have created a system similar to MSH or DCH where players had to choose to bank power points to increase abilities or use them to re-roll dice, do stunts, etc. I just don’t believe supers by the book should always be improving.

Out of half a dozen attempts over three editions, I've never finished character creation in M&M. Love the writing in the sourcebooks...just always get bored with the bean counting.

But I agree...the "zero to hero" advancement (or "hero to whatever" if you start stronger) doesn't make sense for most supers arcs, IMO.
 
Maybe for a discovering your powers kind of mutant supes game? That's the only arc like that that holds any appeal. Mostly, if I'm going to play a supers game I want to play Spiderman goddamn it, without farting around as Peter Parker to start.
 
If I were crafting a supers game, I’d have any kind of power advancement or learning tied into what’s happening in the game as opposed to just handing out XP like candy after sessions. Maybe have certain triggers in game. But there has to be triggers to lose the power upgrades too.
 
There is little difference between MHR character creation and that in, say, Fate Core (pick 5 aspects vs. pick 3 distinctions, etc.).

The main difference is that Fate gives you a set of starting values to assign to your skills, which is done solely to balance starting characters against one another, a step that is utterly unnecessary in MHR due the balance being elsewhere in how the system works.

When a system doesn’t require a particular step in character creation, it’s silly for people to claim it’s “missing” when they don’t find it.

This is based on a premise many of them don't accept, so they don't accept the conclusion.
 
Considering that I opened the PDF of the MHR basic rules and the PDF of the MSH basic rules on my computer before typing up my response, just to make sure I wasn't missing something, your response comes across as just a refusal to accept what's right there in the book.

Though, to be honest, I don't have an issue if you've got an actual point to refute what I said. I genuinely don't have a problem being proven wrong, but "lol, no" isn't a refutation of anything.

I don't think I needed to refute anything. Your response to the statement that the rulebook doesn't have a chargen system was to point out that "the only thing they left out" was a system.

Hence...lol.

As to your belief or lack thereof of the licensing restrictions, I dont know. This was what was stated online, and I saw no reason to doubt it but I don't know the specifics of Weis's actual contract with Marvel. However, I do know, from direct first-hand source, that was the case with the TSR Marvel Superheroes RPG contract, both the initial (proven without a doubt false) conviction of Marvel that players would only want to play established Marvel characters, and Marvel's total 360 turnaround on that asinine assumption when the advanced set was being written.
 
On a related note, you know what the HUGE difference was between the DC MMO and the Marvel MMO (when they were both around, Marvel's is inactive now): In DC's, you made your own character. In Marvel's, you were only able to play existing Marvel characters.
 
M&M is a great game but I never liked its advancement system much. They should have created a system similar to MSH or DCH where players had to choose to bank power points to increase abilities or use them to re-roll dice, do stunts, etc. I just don’t believe supers by the book should always be improving.
Thing I don’t like about the M&M system - aside from all the technical listings of powers which do not create a tidy profile - is that you roll a saving throw against damage.

This, of course, was a feature of the game when it came out, as it broke with the D20 traditional HP, and meant that polyhedral dice weren’t used at all in the game (only D20s). However, at the game table, it is a bit frustrating for players that they don’t get to roll damage when they hit and inconvenient for the GM who has to roll a saving throw for the NPCs.
 
I don't think I needed to refute anything. Your response to the statement that the rulebook doesn't have a chargen system was to point out that "the only thing they left out" was a system.

Hence...lol.
Now I think I see where you’re coming from.

From what I can tell, you don’t think picking things from a list and assigning ratings is a system. (Not trying trying be snarky, just genuinely curious and I wrote this three times trying to find a better way to phrase it.)

See, I don’t see much difference between that and Fate Core. The only real difference to me is that Fate gives you a set of ratings (+4, +3, +3, +2, +2, +2, +1, +1, +1, +1), purely for balance between starting characters, which isn’t necessary in MHR.

So, would you say that Fate also doesn’t have a system? Or would MHR have a system if it gave you a specific set of dice to allocate, or is there something else that needs to be there for you to consider it a system?

Obviously, we agree that a set of random tables is a system. I just consider it a really shitty system for supers.
 
Its funny, because I agree with both sides of this; I think random generation is a really crappy way to generate supers (barring some careful constraints on it, and even then I think its suboptimal), but I also think calling "These are powers, pick and assign ratings to suit yourself" is really stretching the term "system" out of shape.
 
Its funny, because I agree with both sides of this; I think random generation is a really crappy way to generate supers (barring some careful constraints on it, and even then I think its suboptimal), but I also think calling "These are powers, pick and assign ratings to suit yourself" is really stretching the term "system" out of shape.

And I would rather do either one of those than sit and count beans to make sure I've put 250 points (or whatever) into a character. Bores me to tears.

Luckily, there's an option out there to satisfy most people, regardless of preference.
 
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