/rmg/ - Red Markets general

>>49062464
Looks interesting. Got a backer pdf to share?

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>>49062464
I'm going to be playing a career criminal con man who's barely surviving the Crash by calling in favors and pleading with debtors to keep his slippery ass uninfected. After all, no dead man can pay you back.
He's got an ex girlfriend, a son, and a current (sort of) boyfriend that he's tring to support by running over the fence into No Man's Land and doing dangerous jobs that pay.

>>49062464
Looks like yet another zombie game, but I'm open to being wrong if you've got a PDF to share.

>>49062464
I'm a backer, and I made some characters with my friends. Haven't gotten around to playing so far, but all signs point to it being in that sweet spot between crunch and narrative that works the best.

Also Caleb Stokes is just amazing, and everything he touches is gold. Perhaps I'm looking at it through rose colored glasses, but that's my two cents on the matter.

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>>49062704

Sure thing. Just remember to buy this when it comes out if you like it; this is one dude's passion project, not some big company like WotC.

>>49062851

The zombies are window dressing, an excuse to have a setting of intense disparity. The main focus is on the economic horror - do I risk my life in the hopes of getting out some day, or do I wallow in poverty forever - and the mechanics reflect that.

If it helps any, there aren't too many zombie settings where a decent chunk of the world survived intact, though as a stratified totalitarian dystopia.

>>49062909

What kinda character did you make? I'm >>49062464 and in a group with >>49062810, and we're trying to hash out where our Enclave should be in the Pacific Northwest.

>>49062464
Looks like S.T.A.L.K.E.R with (more) zombies.

At first, I thought it sounded cool, but the more I think about it and what their premise is, the less I like it. Your dudes will be loaded with gear that probably makes your average zombie not very scary other than the critical one-bite-is-all-it-takes, and if you are going to keep the tension up introducing mutant zombies then why not just dump the zombies altogether?

>>49063232

It's a game of scarcity, man. Character creation gives you enough Bounty to spend so that you'll have a decent weapon and a single piece of gear, or a shit weapon, a piece of gear, and armor. Any Bounty you earn has to go towards healing, helping your Dependants out, and putting those funds towards your retirement plan.

Plus there are fast zombies (Vectors) in addition to the slow zombies (Casualties), with those initially bit becoming Vectors and only slowing down into Casualties later on. So if your teammate gets bit and turns, he's gonna be sprinting fast and PCP-junkie strong.

>>49063232
The horror doesn't come from zombies, or even the Abberants. It comes from the fact that people are shitty, and you're running low on absolutely everything, and you have that struggle of deciding whether or not to feed your family, or get reloads for your gun.

So what are some interesting Enclave ideas?

I'm kind of curious about running a game set in Hawaii, as there's plentiful farmland but the geographic isolation would make any sort of machined goods stupidly hard to get after five years. Between the hordes of zombified tourists and Chinese refugees, you'd have a tense campaign of island-hopping scavenging to get by.

A state prison where a bunch of convicts and guards had easy access to heavy fortifications and riot gear. Criminals had a unique skillset that guards did not possess, as well as an adaptability and ingenuity that allowed them to improvise under pressure.
They make good Takers.

>>49063310
>supposedly
That's not scary. That's the ham-handed imaginings of a loser who doesn't even have dependents and whose experience with poverty was temporary and superficial at best.

>>49065802

I think it's a fine metaphor, and the actual play the creator has uploaded so far work pretty well.

Sorry you're so upset about it.

>>49065802
Coming from someone who's lived in actual, real poverty, for most of my childhood and some of my adult life, not knowing when your next meal is going to be, if you can even drink the water, or when the polizia are going to bust down your door any minute is fucking terrifying - way scarier than anything else. The metaphor for zombies being a symptom of capitalism and a government that's abandoned its people is a solid one.

>>49066628

The creator himself has grown up and lived in soul-crushing poverty himself, and this game is his own attempt to bring that horror into game form. What >>49065802 refers to as:
>the ham-handed imaginings of a loser who doesn't even have dependents and whose experience with poverty was temporary and superficial at best
Is kind of how actual poverty works.

>>49065802
This.

It's infuriating how many games now (Eclipse Phase, Shadowrun, World of Darkness) are obviously written by limousine liberals in their ivory tower safe spaces pretending to understand what it's like to be "disadvantaged".

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>>49068231

>Using "this" to jump on board with a post that was just revealed to be objectively wrong

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RPPR is shilling again. Hi Ross.

In all seriousness it seems like a work of passion with a lot of good ideas, but it has a lot of shelf space to compete against.

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>>49062464
Bumping because I want to hear more from people.

My GM is dead set on running this since he backed it, but frankly I'm not sure it really even sounds like fun.

The 'struggle' to the game is resource conservation
Zombies, as enemies, have no variety.

"Horror" as a genre here is near impossible to really pull off in TTRPGs, and the horror here is struggling to pay rent, etc.

Ehhh.... frankly I've never seen the zombie apocalypse setting as terrible good for a TTRPG, let alone "horror" based on IRL daily as mocked by
>>49065802

>>49068467
>revealed to be objectively wrong

How? People identifying with the devs based on their own personal experience is anecdotal evidence, which can't "objectively" prove anything.

>>49069432
The scenario could be interesting (obviously humans would be the unpredictable enemies).

But I think there's already a more interesting "economic horror game". It's called Traveller.

I guess no one is interested?

>>49069432
>Horror is near impossible to pull off
>the second longest running RPG is Call of Cthulhu

at least try with your bait, anon

>>49070735
Maybe if someone (a backer, maybe, but no devs or paid shills) had a summary of the game they played and how the mechanics made it both interesting and different from 'just another zombie game', which seems to be the most common criticism.

>>49070888

I'm a backer and will likely be playing later this week?

But if you want an example of play, there's several podcasts: Roleplaying Public Radio (who made this) did two campaigns, I think Technical Difficulties did another, and then One Shots did a one shot. In play, it kinda feels like a Shadowrun that makes more sense; find a job, haggle on the price and particulars, don't be able to afford the right gear, try not to die, get paid/get dead.

>>49063088
>"Casualties"
Why does everyone do this? "Infected", "Walkers", every zombie setting wants to come up with increasingly tortured vocabulary to describe what the audience is just going to call zombies.

>muh bitcoin
Because in the zombie apocalypse of course everyone will rush to use imaginary internet money

>>49071423

Maybe read the text?

>Early panic led to the suppression of the news outlets, outright censorship and government lies meant to “protect us” from ourselves. Thus came our ironic term for the
zombies: Casualties, the bloodless alternative to the word we were all thinking. “LA took Casualties” or “St. Louis lists Casualties” or your hometown “has Casualties to report.” And by report, they meant scream helplessly into a webcam as they were eaten alive. So now we had our name, because you couldn’t just call the fucking things zombies. The movies taught us that, too

>muh bitcoin

The currency of the Loss is Bounty, or the recovered legal identification of the dead. It's commonly exchanged for cryptocurrency when dealing with people far away (say, in the Recession) because you're likely doing business over totally-not-Skype and the dollar has died off due to the end of the world.

>>49071474
I don't care what clever excuses the book has. I wasn't asking for the in-setting justification, I was asking why the developers did it when it stopped being clever or interesting a long time ago.

>>49071529
>Why do people do this
>Get answers
>Reject answers and restate question

k

>>49071529

It says so right there; everyone does it in pop culture, so they did too. It's a nod to the zombie genre.

Lighten up, anon. That stick up your ass isn't doing you any favors.

>>49071574
>>49071619
Once again:

I'm not asking for the reason the characters in the world of Red Markets have for using the term, I'm asking for the reason the devs did it

>everyone does it in pop culture, so they did too. It's a nod to the zombie genre.

And if this is the reason, it's shit. The absolute last thing this game needs is more 'nods to the zombie genre', it's already overloaded on cliches as it is.

>>49071684
>gets two answers
>continues to be retarded

Are you the same kind of person that gets uppity when elves and dwarves are recognizable as elves and dwarves instead of being seventeen foot tall purple aliens? It's a genre convention. That's all it is. You're overthinking it and getting hung up on a single piece of terminology rather than examining any actual part of the game is moronic.

>>49069496
>How? People identifying with the devs based on their own personal experience is anecdotal evidence, which can't "objectively" prove anything.

What can be proved objectively wrong, however, is the claim that the creator is an "ivory tower liberal" who has a "superficial" experience with poverty. The game is based heavily on the dev's *entire childhood-long experience living in crippling poverty* and it's disingenuous to imply anything else.

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>>49063088
Posting my thoughts so far to keep the thread off page 10

>Ubik
Would have made more sense as the name of the anti-zombie drug, since that's a lot closer to the role of the substance in the original novel (drug/spray/liver and kidney balm which preserves your existence for a time).

>Dice system
Seems like the same thing could have been accomplished by just rolling a D10 vs a target number. The only reason to roll vs another D10, besides the thematic hook of 'profit vs loss' seems to be the critical system, which I dislike intensely. I think they should have listened to the playtesters on page 47 who said that their dice system made a +1 to a skill mechanically insignificant. Sure you can stack it with other bonuses but that doesn't change the fact.

>At base, there is already a 45% chance of any check succeeding, without the use of a skill or any charged equipment. That's awfully high for a horror game about costs and consequences.
I know this is part of a paragraph about an optional rule, but I think 'ineffectual characters=horror' is a diseased mentality to design a game around.

>Potentials
Having the core statistics be a maximum that you can raise skills to rather than a bonus that your skills build on top of is an interesting decision. It's nice that there are only 5 of them, and that they don't have separate stats for Strength and Constitution (since the first is inevitably a dump for non melee fighters). Having each point of Charisma generate a relationship is a nice touch that I assume is expanded on later in the book.

>Skills
Looks pretty good, aside from the aforementioned problem about +1 to a roll. There's a tiny bit of skill bloat, IE separating medicine into First Aid and Profession: Doctor, or the "Resistance" skill being used to hold doors shut, which seems like something a Strength roll would do just fine.