I own and have run They Came From Beyond the Grave. I love the Hammer Horror genre, and the conceit that you are both the characters in a movie and also stereotypical 60s-70s actors at the same time.
It went well, I kind of enjoyed the system at first principles. I have no useful WOD/COD/Storytelling hinterland, having had young kids when it was all rage.
So… there seems to be a whole “Path” thing in later chapters. I don’t think I really understand it, if I need it, or can ignore it.
Plus, is the surplus extra success economy ok? I can never get these meta economies faster than my players!
Finally, I do love the concept of these “They Came From…” games, I am just trying to resist using Fate Accelerated or Savage Worlds with the Cinematic and Quip cards.
Well, Whartson Hall has just finished an adventure in They Came From Beneath the Sea. We’re planning to have a fuller discussion of both system and setting at some point, but we did find the system something of a barrier: My own thoughts:
Dice pool makes it harder to work out probabilities. As a GM, how hard should you make a task so that the PCs have a reasonable chance of doing it? As a player, how much of your limited resources to make things better should you commit before the roll? Here’s a chart I drew up. probs.pdf (7.4 KB)
A setting like this wants you to be doing wild and wacky stuff. But in the quest to find distinctive mechanical rewards for playing in genre, there’s the thing that gives you more dice, there’s the thing that gives you more successes if you get one on your own, there’s the thing that removes penalty levels but doesn’t give you a bonus if you get the penalty down to zero… look, tell me this is a setting in which I should be quipping, I’ll quip. I don’t need a special reward that’s only for quips to encourage me to do it, and too many of these things came down to “find the item on the great long list that’s more or less a fit to what you want to do”, which kills the pace.
I have a suspicion this is just too much system for what is needed. They are doing a lighter version now, and maybe I will read it, but I have a suspicion I might be better just saying “let’s focus on the front end of the rules”
Absolutely, but to me there are two separate things here.
“You get a reward for doing something in-genre”: OK, arguable, but I see this as a gentle incentive, a way of hinting to players who maybe aren’t as familiar with the inspiration as the enthusiast who bought the game in the first place that these are the things you should be doing in this sort of world.
“Each class of in-genre thing you do works in a different way and gets you a different sort of bonus, and you may have to look up a list of things of each class”: yeah, that’s too much complexity for something that’s meant to move fast.
I think the quips work as cards or printed on the character sheets, they are easy and help the (majority?) of folks who don’t easily quip like a 60s louche movie star.