Micalan
New Member
Pen-Wielder
Posts: 5
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Post by Micalan on Sept 4, 2008 4:41:07 GMT
As invalidgriffin said, a Storyteller system would be much better for this (in my opinion), as it is much more flexible and less combat-oriented, so its rules are better for social situations and "combat" rather than bashing-people-with-pointy-things combat, which I can't see playing any large role in any Gunnerkrigg Court game.
I also really like this idea in general and was thinking of making such a system myself if my gaming group loves the comic as much as I do once I introduce it to them. Mostly a matter of making a few new merits and either a new supernatural merit or two or adapting the psychic and medium rules from Second Sight to fit the setting. The character sheet is what I expect to be the hardest part. For a d20 system it would be a matter of new classes, spells, abilities, skills, and probably more, and in the end I don't think it would even fit.
Also, an alignment system - while just plain crappy in any situation - seems to me to be completely inapplicable to Gunnerkrigg Court. Which is much of the reason why I love it and am bothering to read through this forum and post. Jones said that both sides are equally wrong and that pretty much sums up realistic conflicts. And makes the abilities that make alignment have mechanical benefits rather useless, as there really is no clear-cut evil.
On the off-topic topic, Coyote does not seem evil at all to me, even ignoring my disbelief in evil at all and just using the D&D 3.5 definition. I have not seen him do anything malicious at all.
Another argument for a Storyteller system is that, though a chaotic character can be honorable in D&D, that would be in spite of their alignment rather than inherent to it, while in White Wolf, faeries (undoubtedly chaotic creatures) adhere to the word to such a point it becomes magic, and make contracts with the land.
Which leads me to another point - the Storyteller system uses real world mythology quite faithfully (if with its own flavor added in), much like Gunnerkrigg Court does, whereas D&D uses its own mythology with only a slight basis in real world myth and far more in Tolkien (whose world also had only a slight basis in real world myth).
Anyway... pie.
P.S. How did you like my conclusion? I thought it was brilliant. Pie is good.
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Post by AluK on Sept 4, 2008 17:19:29 GMT
Heh, once I get home I'll make the char sheets for Annie, Kat, Reynardine and Mort, using nWoD templates. I'm thinking about mixing Innocents and Second Sight. Wish I had my Hunter books already, heard that they've got templates for low-level mages and stuff.
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Post by AluK on Sept 9, 2008 15:57:57 GMT
Antimony “Annie” Carver
Virtue: Charity Vice: Pride
Attributes: Physical: Strength: 1 | Dexterity: 3 | Stamina: 2
Mental: Intelligence: 3 | Wits: 3 | Resolve: 3
Social: Presence: 2 | Manipulation: 2 | Composure: 4
Skills: Physical: Larceny: 2 (Specialty: Lockpicking) | Stealth: 1 | Brawl: 1
Mental: Investigation: 2 | Medicine: 1 | Occult: 4 (Specialty: Psychopomps) | Study: 3
Social: Empathy: 3 (Specialty: Supernatural Beings) | Persuasion: 2 | Subterfuge: 1
Merits: Multilingual: 4 | Unseen Sense: 2 | Permanent Death Sight: 4 | Contacts: 1 (Psychopomps) | Mentor: 4
Advantages: Defense: 3 | Health: 6 | Initiative: 7 | Morality: 7 Size: 4 | Speed: 8 | Willpower: 7
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Post by amtgardjean on Sept 10, 2008 3:47:23 GMT
Seriously BESM would be the perfect non-combat system for it. Any and I mean any ability can be done by the D6 BESM book.
Also if you want to do GC monsters that is really easy. One word Zimmy! Zimmy gets seperated from Gamma and then poof big bad ugly monsters. There is also classes that suit most of the GC crew.
Annie: OK maybe a stretch but Beguiler. Kat: Scientist... but you gotta find it on the net. YOu could find all the classes out there you want. THiese classes are of course D&D
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Post by todd on Feb 7, 2009 2:07:09 GMT
It recently occurred to me that Antimony would be an excellent way of countering the myth that the Charisma stat in D&D refers to physical beauty. Annie's pretty, but she's also reserved and withdrawn; she prefers to keep to herself, and has only made one close human friend at the Court so far. If she was translated into D&D terms, I'd say "high average" Charisma, at best (and that's with her looks countering her unsocial tendencies).
Kat, on the other hand, in light of her outgoing nature, would certainly have a much higher Charisma score than Annie, if translated into D&D terms. (Her only problem with making friends at school came from the other kids having a prejudice against anyone who had teachers for parents.)
As for which character in "Gunnerkrigg Court" would have the lowest Charisma score if translated into D&D - no, that one's way too obvious....
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Post by Babble-jargon Bill on Feb 7, 2009 4:04:31 GMT
I only ever played Dungeons and Dragons for a while at camp with my cousin, so I don't really have any sort of knowledge or experience about the rules or the system that could be used to make a Gunnerkrigg Court themed table-top game. I do have one request though. If anyone ever gets around to making a GC game, include Gelatinous Cubes. Hands down the best mythical creature ever created.
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Post by Mezzaphor on Feb 7, 2009 6:48:27 GMT
It recently occurred to me that Antimony would be an excellent way of countering the myth that the Charisma stat in D&D refers to physical beauty. Annie's pretty, but she's also reserved and withdrawn; she prefers to keep to herself, and has only made one close human friend at the Court so far. If she was translated into D&D terms, I'd say "high average" Charisma, at best (and that's with her looks countering her unsocial tendencies). Apparently the Gunnerverse follows a slightly different rule set (maybe it's a homebrew system?) with two different Charisma scores. Annie's taken the unorthodox strategy of maxing out her Charetheric, while using Char mundane as her dump stat.
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Post by warrl on Feb 7, 2009 10:44:27 GMT
Apparently the Gunnerverse follows a slightly different rule set (maybe it's a homebrew system?) with two different Charisma scores. Annie's taken the unorthodox strategy of maxing out her Charetheric, while using Char mundane as her dump stat. Antimony clearly does not have an exceptionally *low* Char mundane, it's at least in ordinary range. I propose that it's actually fairly high, probably around 13-15 on 3D6. That's enough to get her noticed and make a few people jealous, but not high enough to have people falling on the floor for the privilege of having her step on them. Everyone DOES notice her when they first encounter her, and most in a neutral-to-positive way. You may observe that at the beginning of chapter 2, William Winsbury is aware that she spends lots of time in study hall - in spite of a clear implication from Mrs. Donlan that he doesn't spend enough time there himself. People who interact with her, if they are not *trying* to give or take offense (and sometimes even if they are, e.g. Zimmy), find her pleasant, inoffensive, often helpful. Also intelligent and insightful about people/entities. So why doesn't she have more close friends? Really, there's a very simple reason for that: She's an introvert. One or two friends as close as Kat, and a few people to plan special occasions with, is plenty. Any more would be more effort than it's worth. (A side effect of being an introvert is that Winsbury's attempts to aggravate her tend to roll off like water off a stone golem's back. She really doesn't care what he thinks or says, and may not understand what he's trying to do - let alone why. On the other hand, the effects of such attempts on her friends/chosen associates, Kat and Reynardine, *does* matter to her.)
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Post by todd on Feb 7, 2009 11:47:22 GMT
Yes, Annie's Charisma score would have a bonus for dealing with etheric beings. (Indeed, the only male characters who seem attracted to her - Mort and maybe Reynardine - are both etheric.)
And I agree about Annie being an introvert.
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Post by warrl on Feb 8, 2009 5:58:19 GMT
Another side effect of Annie being an introvert is that Tom will rarely have to draw crowd scenes around her. ;D
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Post by todd on Feb 8, 2009 13:27:08 GMT
And (sorry for moving this away from the original topic) despite what Kat's done for Annie, she still seems a loner. In Chapter Nineteen, she didn't speak to the other children (except when she had to explain to them about who Zimmy and Gamma were), and Tom mentioned in a footnote that she hadn't even been invited; only Kat was, and she brought Annie along with her. (The Dr. Disaster chapter *does* have Annie getting cheered by the other kids near the end, but that one always had something of an Elseworlds quality to it.)
I don't think we're likely to see Annie move away from her old tone that much, in any case; her being an unsocial girl more at home with the etheric than with humans is crucial to the story. Curing her of it would be like curing Don Quixote of his delusion that he was a knight-errant. (Well, that did happen, but only at the very end of the book.)
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Post by Babble-jargon Bill on Feb 8, 2009 21:44:35 GMT
I wouldn't exactly call Annie a loner, since many people see that as a negative term. I agree that introvert is the best thing to call her.
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Post by todd on Feb 8, 2009 23:27:10 GMT
Yes, introvert's better.
Jack may eventually team up with her and Kat (unless Tom's nervous about having a trio of kids, two one gender - one of them the protagonist - and the other the opposite, after the earlier comments about a certain bespectacled boy wizard....).
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Post by Babble-jargon Bill on Feb 9, 2009 3:18:29 GMT
I thought that Tom's comment about how he read the Harry Potter series because people said that his comic was similar to it was pretty funny. I think that GC and Harry Potter are pretty different aside from the fact that both revolve around kids that go to a boarding school in England with weird goings-on surrounding them. Then again I wouldn't know much about HP, I am only one of two people I know on earth who have not read the series, and even then the other individual tends not remember anything that happened more than a few days ago...anyway this is getting really off topic.
Gelatinous Cubes!
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Post by Rasselas on Feb 11, 2009 0:51:21 GMT
For tabletop, especially d'n'd or any kind of hack and slash, a variation on the episode with the Enigmarons would be in order. The Court obviously has the technology to make it happen, so make your own adventure and dive in. It's basically like the holodeck in Star Trek, and you could play out all kinds of things there. Or something like the episode with Basil. That's what I can see happening, exploration of the court/wood and stuff. And yeah, Tom very much nixed online roleplay, as far as I can recall. Wisely done, too. I've seen so many of these devolve into really bad fanfiction material, or even worse, a veritable vortex of online drama. WHO GETS TO PLAY ANNIE AND DOES KAT GET HER ANTIGRAV SHIP. I think that kind of thing is a nightmare for authors. "You made my characters do WHAT?"
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Post by Count Casimir on Feb 11, 2009 8:47:59 GMT
I recall back the last time we talked about an online replay, we decided (before the Nixing) that we would've created characters unrelated to the main story, and probably unrelated to the main timeline, for exactly that reason.
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Post by sebastian on Feb 11, 2009 14:11:24 GMT
Speaking in D&D terms I think Mediums should always have at least a part of their alignemt neutral, IMHO Antimony would be neutral good, Smith lawful neutral and Parsley Chaotic Neutral.
That said I think using D&D to play a GC campaign would not be impossible but certainly very inefficient, there are much better games to do it, expecially if less focused on combat, some good examples could be Gurps, the summentioned BESM (I don't know WOD, beside I'm no fan of dice pools) or even better FATE/Spirit of the century(http://www.faterpg.com FREE!!!!), its Aspect based mechanics could works very well to recreate the GC setting, just to name two.
Also while the system could be too mechanical heavy to use for GC I think would be worth checking out the Wonderland supplement for JAGS (http://www.jagsrpg.org Also FREE!!!!) there some things in the flavour it that strongly remind me of the GC cosmology, to the point that I thought Tom was inspired by it.
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Post by Inugami on Feb 11, 2009 19:12:44 GMT
I boggled at the idea of playing Gunnerverse with DnD. WoD just makes so much more sense.
But as this trades out the alignment system for the Morality system, one needs to think about that.
Do the etheric beings operate on the human Morality, or something... inhuman?
In my opinion: Morality, each and every one of them.
Gunnerkrieg Court doesn't seem to ascribe to an animistic kind of supernaturality, so it's etheric beings are different in essential origin from the spirits of nWoD's Werewolf game. Unlike the inhuman spirits of the nWoD, the etheric beings of Gunnerkrieg Court appear to be pretty much "human" in their natures.
Which, of course, includes being selfish or downright mean jerks. That is, as a matter of choice, rather than their true nature -- even their own kind are put off when one of them lies, cheats, steals or murders.
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Post by Jonny Rocks Hard on Feb 11, 2009 19:39:29 GMT
On a non GC related note...
How about just plain 'ol Roleplaying here? Doesn't have to be GC at all even.
I'm down for D&D (3.5 and 4, though I prefer 4th edition) If you can get me the rules for other systems, I would consider those. I also have a system I homebrewed myself (based off of d20 4th Edition; the system that D&D 4e uses) in the Dragonball universe. The rulebook's not quite done and I have a few more holes to fill, but it's close enough to being done.
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