Lead Adventure Forum
Miniatures Adventure => Pulp => Topic started by: redstarnyc on August 21, 2020, 12:50:12 AM
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Does anyone have any experience with this one? I'd be really interested to read what people think.
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I don't like the mechanics of the game (let's say "the engine"), but the points of interest (with events within) is f*****g treasure....
I apply that system to my games, setting points of interest that have to be checked and may include events, clues, enemies....
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We downloaded .45 and gave it a go years ago. I thought it had some interesting ideas but it did not fit our style of play and some of the players didn't like it at all. Our go-to rules for skirmish level gaming is Pulp Alley.
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It was one of the seminal pulp 'table-top RPG lite' pulp skirmish games; and spawned sci-fi, swashbuckling and Sword & Sorcery spin offs. At the time it was very popular, but it's definitely 'crunchy' with lots of detail, skills with special rules and even location based hits effecting stats. Forces are 1-5 characters a side, occasionally up to 10 for a very rare Villain with minions type scenario. Characters are divided into 'grades' 3 - hero, 2- side kick, 1 - bit part, 1/2 - faceless red-shirt extra; all figures of a certain grade are notionally comparable, but a grade 3 may not be worth 3x grade 1's. The rules have a wide variety of archetypes, which can be further customised using a set number of points to buy skills, stat increases and weapons/modifiers.
I keep peering at various titles in the series, reading the rules, and then picking a different system to actually play with... Whilst I like the general concept the implementation is too rules dense/figure limited for my style of play
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Exactly, Xander. Take a look at Pulp Alley, much cleaner and streamlined....
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I don't like the mechanics of the game (let's say "the engine"), but the points of interest (with events within) is f*****g treasure....
I apply that system to my games, setting points of interest that have to be checked and may include events, clues, enemies....
I would like to know more about that mechanic. Could it be spliced into Pulp Alley? I do like PA, but the one weakness I find occasionally is that it can gravitate to “grab the closest plot point and fight for the last one” and turning into a bit of a dicing slugfest. The best games I have played in saw only the odd plot point on the table, or none, with the PP’s being revealed as the scenario progressed. I am not knocking PA. I have probably played more of it than any other game of late, but if there is a weakness, for me that is it. I am interested in mechanics that might mitigate this, although the best is probably clever scenario design.
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Played it some much preferred "Astounding Tales" by Howard “Masked Avenger” Whitehouse . Both are more involved then the current rule set I tend to use (Pulp Alley). However... Astounding tales is a great resource for pulp info. Still like them enough that I would use them again
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I would like to know more about that mechanic. Could it be spliced into Pulp Alley? I do like PA, but the one weakness I find occasionally is that it can gravitate to “grab the closest plot point and fight for the last one” and turning into a bit of a dicing slugfest. The best games I have played in saw only the odd plot point on the table, or none, with the PP’s being revealed as the scenario progressed. I am not knocking PA. I have probably played more of it than any other game of late, but if there is a weakness, for me that is it. I am interested in mechanics that might mitigate this, although the best is probably clever scenario design.
For me Pulp Alley is one of the best games I've seen...
The setting is so thematic, the character/band creation is top, the dice mechanics are really good....
But...
The card system, from my point of view, is quite abstract...
So, what I have done is play Pulp Alley but changing the plot points and perilous areas and placing several point of interest tokens (like a plot point)
When checking those points of interest, you roll on a chart where the result can be a clue of the case, a peril, more enemies, allies... Or even nothing...
But every scenario has its own chart, so nothing is abstract...
Bear in mind that this is MY opinion!!!
(and also bear in mind that for me pulp alley is one of the best games I ve seen... In fact now I am playing a pulp alley campaign!!)
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I played ´45 a few years ago and agree with some of the other writers: it is a kind of lite-RPG and a little too rule-heavy in some areas. It works best with 1-3 miniatures, with more the games tend to be too long for my current preferred style of play. As for many, I find pulp Alley the best skirmish system currently available for my style.
I agree with commander roy: The best is clever scenario design, and that is where PA really shines in my opinion. There are so many different scenarios for PA out there, and it is amazing how easily you can make your own ideas work with the game engine.
@tereydavi: I think I understand what you mean with finding the card system of PA abstract. Being an experienced roleplaying GM and tabletopper, I have created dozens of scenarios for my group. I like the idea of "points of interest" which have an effect on the current game instead of mere plot points very much. But I found that real life does not leave me time enough to create a list of events for every scenario i would like to play.
Maybe it is more important for you because you are a solo player. Solo play can be a kind of boring without a scenario and game engine which keeps things interested, because the interation with other players ( for me the main reason to play in the first place) is missing.
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We used to play .45A for several years before Pulp Alley came out. I honestly can't remember much of the rules, but when we switched over to Pulp Alley it was a good thing
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For me Pulp Alley is one of the best games I've seen...
The setting is so thematic, the character/band creation is top, the dice mechanics are really good....
But...
The card system, from my point of view, is quite abstract...
So, what I have done is play Pulp Alley but changing the plot points and perilous areas and placing several point of interest tokens (like a plot point)
When checking those points of interest, you roll on a chart where the result can be a clue of the case, a peril, more enemies, allies... Or even nothing...
But every scenario has its own chart, so nothing is abstract...
Bear in mind that this is MY opinion!!!
(and also bear in mind that for me pulp alley is one of the best games I ve seen... In fact now I am playing a pulp alley campaign!!)
I agree with this re: the card mechanic in PA. For me it is too "mechanical" and not narrative enough. Takes me and other players out of the immersion. I prefer to instead use predetermined perils and plot points that fit the narrative like a role- playing scenario, perhaps with some themed random result built in.
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For me, the cards are only abstract if you have players who are not into what they are doing. For example, when I am running a convention game, the first thing I do is start describing what the peril is based on what it calls for for rolls, and once players pick up on describing what the card will do, it becomes less of a card, and more of an event.
.45 Adventures was too dense and model specific for my tastes - I went from that to Rugged Adventures, and then to Pulp Alley. I've never looked back.
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I am not sure if they are still available but we used to post a lot of games on here years ago including the famous or infamous Zeppelin game good fun set of rules
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For me Pulp Alley is one of the best games I've seen...
The setting is so thematic, the character/band creation is top, the dice mechanics are really good....
But...
The card system, from my point of view, is quite abstract...
So, what I have done is play Pulp Alley but changing the plot points and perilous areas and placing several point of interest tokens (like a plot point)
When checking those points of interest, you roll on a chart where the result can be a clue of the case, a peril, more enemies, allies... Or even nothing...
But every scenario has its own chart, so nothing is abstract...
Bear in mind that this is MY opinion!!!
(and also bear in mind that for me pulp alley is one of the best games I ve seen... In fact now I am playing a pulp alley campaign!!)
Totally agree with you on all points and I like that idea. Deals with the “we all know where the plot points are” grab and smash and introduces a gives more thematic focus. Good idea. Having said that when I have played we tend to run our own narrative of events, which can be hilarious fun. What I miss is, say I have a game involving fauna, knowing a particular character is under threat from x creature, and putting that on the table. You can narrate that, but it loses the specific nature of the threat, if you see what I mean...
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I like pulp alley for its structured system even though at times it makes it feel a bit like a board game. You can play a game in a short period of time and the cards give it a good deal of pulp flavor.
I liked astounding adventures because it was more like an RPG and had deep Pulp roots ie it had stats for almost every major pulp character found in the pulps. Pulp alley does not do that in fact someone attempted to get Pulp Alley considered for a pulp award at a Pulp convention in Pennsylvania and they said it did not do enough to highlight the Pulp Genre. Pulp Alley is a great pulp game and it would be even better if they would put out the stats for actual pulp characters like Doc Savage. ;) ;) What do you say Dave?
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I think Dave is working currently on a PA character book, read it in another thread. Seems like you get your stats soon...😀.
What I miss is, say I have a game involving fauna, knowing a particular character is under threat from x creature, and putting that on the table. You can narrate that, but it loses the specific nature of the threat, if you see what I mean...
No, I admit i don' t see it. When a peril, say from a perilous area, represents a creature, you can either put the appropriate miniature on the table or simply narrate the encounter. What has this to do with the cards? Another thing is, after revealing the peril the "marker" comes alive and will change into a creature on the table which has to be fought or avoided. With PA you can do all those things without breaking the system. I never had any difficulties making up a story from what the cards provide as possible solutions, in fact narrating the story together with all players involved is the most fun part of a game for me.
All players know where the plot points are from the start? What about there is only one point per player at the beginning, and the next one will be placed only after solving the first? What about wandering plot points? What about "red herrings" (fake plot points)? PA has been evolved in the last years and the "smash & grab" thing has long gone in my experience, these are only the introductory scenarios in the rulebook.
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I like how Pulp Alley encourages story telling. I am not taking anything away from the idea of making up a chart of pre-planned perils ahead of time. If that works for you then more power to you. But I feel like part of the fun for us is making up the perils on the fly. It feels spontaneous and more of a surprise that way. Jay was doing a plot point last night in our Lemuria campaign and he decided the plot point was a native woman so we decided the peril was her angry mother. We had a good laugh when Jay blew the peril and was hurt by angry momma swinging a stick. lol I wonder if we have hijacked this thread? Oh well it is a good conversation.
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I was wondering if it was hijacked too. Apologies! Let me say again that I am not knocking PA. Not by any means. I acknowledge that what was a good game already has evolved into a better game, and developments in scenarios have been a factor in this. I do like the idea of using the points and rolling on a theme table for some games. If I have an aquatic game, and I have various shark models, octopus, squid etc, I want them to appear knowing what they are and with the bite (excuse the pun) to match. I could say, “two with finesse, failed with only one, he pulls out a reload for his spear gun but fumbles it...” but was it really a shark or a Moray Eel? Does the shark stick around and deter others? You can narrate the results, but you can’t necessarily conform the results to your narrative. I think that is what I am driving at. Pulp Alley though is a great game. It probably vies with Red Alert (PSC Games) as my favourite playing experience at the moment.
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Does anyone have any experience with this one? I'd be really interested to read what people think.
I once went back and read all the posts in this Pulp forum going back to the very beginning. I also bought Gloire and Under the Black Flag from Rattrap Productions, along with downloading the Fantastic Worlds supplement. These rules are essentially based on the .45 Adventure Pulp rules. That was one of the sets of rules that helped to make the Pulp Genre popular between about 2000 and 2010. There was also Rugged Adventures and some others. But there were a lot of posts here during that decade that referenced .45 Adventures. Support by the writer seemed to drop off this last decade, and .45 Adventure never caught fire enough to dominate the Pulp miniatures genre.
Mechanically, what is different is that .45 Adventure used a more traditional miniatures wargaming convention of using a d10 with lots of modifiers added or subtracted from the die roll. It was also more gritty and viseral in that weapons made a difference and hits had locations and produced specific injury effects. This seemed to come from the mind of a wargamer. It was more graphically bloody in that sense. But I didn't actually play it, so I can't say if that was fast or slow in practice. It did have different levels of characters, along with a variety of abilities. I'm sure that's somewhat common in this genre. And perils were supposed to be related to whatever the physical situation on the board suggested. So the ability used to accomplish something was not a random challenge as in the currently more popular Pulp Alley rules.
One other thing that was a feature of .45 Adventure was that it produced books about different genres of Pulp. There was a book on swashbuckling (Gloire) with a pirate supplement (Under the Black Flag). There was a book called Amazing War Stories for the soldier pulp genre. There was sci-fi book called Fantastic Worlds. I think 7TV is going in that direction, with various rules for the sub-genres of Pulp. I think that's a good idea in terms of producing more flavor for each sub-genre.
I think one of the reasons why Pulp Alley took over as the leading Pulp miniatures rules in this last decade is because it didn't come from a wargaming tradition. It was developed playing it with kids, including females, especially the author's daughter Mila. So the graphic bloody detail on wounds and weapon types weren't part of it. And Pulp Alley started out simply asking the question of who is the hero, who is the sidekick, and who are the red shirts? And so the focus was on the impact of their interactions on the story rather than the bloody details of weapons and wounds. Using both die size and numbers of dice as variables made a more satisfying way to resolve interactions than the old traditional method of adding and subtracting numbers on the die roll.
I was just having the same conversation about lack of flavor in the random card generated challenges in Pulp Alley with one of the guys who plays in my games. He would also like more detail about weapons, since he is a more traditional wargamer. He might actually like some the features of .45 Adventure more. However, I'm now very committed to Pulp Alley, and I'm just going to have to figure out how to give the different genres and weapons and perils more flavor in my scenario designs. It's such a solid system that it's kind of hard to break it. Pulp Alley does handle quite a bit of modification while still functioning well.
Having said that, I will say that good ideas can be derived from other systems such as .45 Adventure. The character levels and abilities are similar. I also have some Pulp genre booklets from Savage Worlds, another light RPG system. I especially like the hindrances that give characters some disability and personality. I also have a GURPS book that has other good ideas. I think this is a good genre of miniatures for collecting books from different systems to mine them for ideas.
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I'm now very committed to Pulp Alley, and I'm just going to have to figure out how to give the different genres and weapons and perils more flavor in my scenario designs. It's such a solid system that it's kind of hard to break it. Pulp Alley does handle quite a bit of modification while still functioning well.
I have been a fan of Pulp Alley for awhile and I've seen it improve and get better and better through the years. In the 2E rules book page 102 through 105 there are a bunch of optional rules for fine tuning your game for a specific genre, setting, or flavor. Also do not miss the cool weapons tables on page 115 and 116.
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Your analysis warrenpeace seems spot on to me. PA is a great game and will suit some people exactly as written. It is less crunchy and I don’t think that is a bad thing at all. Fiddling with rules is quite a wargamers thing to do, not because rules are bad but because we want to bend things to our own perceptions and needs.
I would like genre books/ materials too. The rules included are good, but slight. I would like a Pulp space campaign too. It was suggested by Dave that Lemuria could easily be adapted to this, but it would be nice to have something specific (and I believe I have played some Lemuria scenarios).
I am not too worried about weapons, which just goes to show that we all focus on different things.
It is fortunate that PA can stand up to a bit of tinkering. I have 7TV, but it just didn’t feel right for my tastes.
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When Broadsword Adventures and Fantasy Worlds were first published, Richard ran a few online scenarios and I was lucky enough to take part in one of them. It was really great fun. Richard did a great job of GMing the game but it did feel very much like a light RPG, rather than a skirmish wargame (or "Narrative Adventure" as Richard called BA). I liked the flexibility of the character creation system and with a GM, I think it worked very well. However, as I do mostly solo gaming, I couldn't see it working with the amount of time I had available.
I have tried PA but, as I think I have mentioned elsewhere, I don't like the use of cards (with the exception Sellswords and Spellslingers). As Warlord Frod says, I feel that they make it feel like a boardgame and even more so when playing it solo where the three figures first activated each turn have to draw a card, no matter what they're doing in the scenario, while the others don't.
Perhaps once retirement has beckoned I might revisit .45.
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I’m a big fan of PA and use it more than any other set for skirmish. However the claim that it has hardly any modifiers (or is "less crunchy") that slow the game down is somewhat disingenuous. In fact, it has masses of them – they’re just hidden in the Abilities, League Perks and all the "bolt-on extras" and these can frequently make a game situation slow and complicated.
Here’s a not untypical confrontation I had whilst playing a solo Western game using PA:
Big Jim is easy. He has 3D10 Brawl. This is reduced to 2D10 because he has already fought earlier (shooting back at Luke). He uses his Flying Tackle skill to reduce Luke’s dice by 1. The cost of this to Jim is that he shifts his dice to D8 from D10. Still with me? So Jim will roll 2D8.
Luke decides to use Defensive Fire rather than Brawl. His Shoot skill is down to D6 because his Health is now D6. However, he has Dashing which brings him back to D8. He is reduced to 2 dice because he shot earlier. He employs his Quick Shot ability to bring him to 4 dice but this also means he goes from D8 to D6. Then he is reduced to 3 dice because Jim is using Flying Tackle. Finally, as he is using Defensive Fire, he gets an extra dice so ending up with 4D6. Simple.
So the roll will be 2D8 for Jim vs 4 D6 for Luke. However, I got lost somewhere while working all this out and only gave Jim D6. I didn’t realise the mistake until I came to write everything up. Sorry, Jim; fortunes of war again.
I think that’s quite crunchy......!
Doug
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THANKS so much for all the encouraging comments and suggestions. I feel like we've improved Pulp Alley over the years, and mostly that is due to the feedback and suggestions from our players.
One thing we had always planned to make was "Peril Decks" for specific settings (city, desert, and so on), so that the perils were more defined. In general, most players said that making up their own perils was part of the fun. But I think there's definitely room for both ideas in Pulp Alley, so I'll dig up those old files and see what we can do.
I'd love to expand the books/settings/genres for Pulp Alley as well. And this has also been on our to-do list since the beginning. Unfortunately, I write rather slowly so if anyone wants to help out a write something for Pulp Alley, I'd definitely discuss it and appreciate the help.
A couple specific replies to ---
.... Pulp Alley is a great pulp game and it would be even better if they would put out the stats for actual pulp characters like Doc Savage. ;) ;) What do you say Dave?
I always feel a little uncomfortable when I see people profiteering off someone else's characters, so I try to avoid publishing stats for the classic pulp character in our books. However, I do have stats for a bunch of characters that I can share freely with you.
.... I especially like the hindrances that give characters some disability and personality....
There's a bunch of these in the Pulp Alley Second Edition rulebook. They were added based on suggestions from players. There is no "Bad Stuff" page though, so they are just scattered through the abilities. Take a look at Dithering, Impetuous, Unlucky, Hindrance, and so on. ;)
Also, as someone already mentioned. Please be sure to check out the pages for Pulp Genres and the Weapons towards the back of the book.
It is fortunate that PA can stand up to a bit of tinkering. I have 7TV, but it just didn’t feel right for my tastes.
Yes, I can't think of too many games that I owned/played that I hadn't thought, "Man, I wish they had done that different!" lol
When Mila and I started working on Pulp Alley, we simply wanted a game that helped us tell the stories. In many ways Pulp Alley was designed as a framework so that the game provides the rules - and the players provide the story. As we have progressed, we have got more into the storytelling as well in our campaign books and Scenarios of the Month series.
I learned a long time ago that not everyone is going to like a game. Have fun with whatever you play! :D
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I am not sure if they are still available but we used to post a lot of games on here years ago including the famous or infamous Zeppelin game good fun set of rules
Saw the pictures years before I meet you personal. It was a highlight for me. We played the rules with Grimm years ago, it is a RPG with miniatures for me. So, with a RPG-Background we were huge fans. But the support ended from one to another day.
Pulp Alley is not the same in my eyes. A good game, but another direction and background. Had a bunch of great games at the BLAM with Pulp Alley. Remember the Dad's Army game made by Eric The Shed.