The Official Transformers Role Playing Game

[Rhinox]

Game Worlds - Transformers - Transformers Roleplaying Game - Page 1 - Renegade Game Studios

renegadegamestudios.com

So, am I the only one who had no idea this was a thing and coming?
It was pointed out to me by a friend on Facebook and, of course, I ordered a copy.

Came in today. Book looks nice, came with a free PDF of the book and character sheets. It'll probably be a bit until I get the chance to play a game, but it looks interesting.

Has anyone else seen this or picked it up?

 

[Dvandom]

I ordered it ages ago and it finally arrived in the mail this week.

It looks like they're taking most of the deep history from IDW's first continuity (but a tiny bit from the Ruckley version), trying to fold in most of the G1 cartoon, and bits and pieces from Prime/RiD and Cyberverse, so that "your Transformers" can fit in there somewhere. (Beast Wars will be getting an expansion, they offer a kludge to let you play a beast-like robot altmode.)

One thing I do like about the spliced continuities is that they ignored TF84 Secrets and Lies entirely and substituted a different "It's all my fault" incident that keeps Optimus from being so dirty while also giving Jetfire more of a core role in why they're on Earth.

Spoiler

Jetfire was an active Decepticon through the war, being an early member swept up by idealism and later kept in line by threats. Shockwave sent him to scout for planets where Energon could be harvested, and when he finally found one (Earth) he decided it was time to finally defect, landing in Iacon almost out of power and giving the information to Optimus. From there, the G1 cartoon events took place, with two half-starved faction feebly battling as they approached Earth before Optimus decided to force a crash landing.

Haven't gotten into the meat of the system yet, they decided to put that later in the book.

---Dave

 

[Dvandom]

Okay, the game definitely suffers from "You know the rules already, right?" syndrome. The actual mechanics are spread out and hard to find (and the index is utterly useless for the purpose), which usually happens when the writers have been using the system for a while.

"Essence 20" is basically modified D&D 5e with names changed (advantage and disadvantage become edge and snag, for instance, although snag is defined in chapter 6 and edge in chapter 9 and both are kinda buried in paragraphs without headers calling them out), with skills changed from straight bonuses to "roll a bunch of dice and take the best bonus to add to your d20 roll". They also replace random damage and high hit points with more of a wargaming "You start with 3 health and most attacks do 1 damage" approach. If I ever played this game (which seems unlikely) I'd probably just figure out straight bonuses equivalent to the "roll a d2, a d4, a d6, and a d8 all together" stuff that they have instead of "+4" (since four ranks of skill doesn't necessarily average out to getting +4).

---Dave

 

[Dvandom]

Here's the result of 200 rolls in a spreadsheet, because I could set that up in a couple minutes and I'd have to dig out my math books to figure out how to do it analytically (exact results should be 1.5 for one rank of skill and 2.625 for two ranks). So...kinda wonky and I'm not sure it's an improvement over just having straight bonuses.

---Dave

 

[Dvandom]

So, either buy 1 rank or 3 ranks of a skill at chargen, the second rank is the worst return on investment. (The fifth is the best, but you're unlikely to manage a skill at 5 during chargen.)

---Dave

 

[Dvandom]

Initiative is a trained-use skill under the Speed set. So, if you don't spend a Speed skill point on it, you roll 1d20 twice and take the worse result. If your Speed is only 1, you have to choose between moving and attacking. Only at Speed 3 or higher do you get to use "Free" actions in combat (Speed 2 can forgo their standard action to get two free actions, but Speed 1 apparently can't take free actions at all in combat).

It's not quite as bad as Agility in classic Villains and Vigilantes, but if you want to be even remotely combat effective, you need to invest in at least Speed 3. Mechanically, you start with 15 points spread over 4 stats, so it's not hard to have a Speed 3 (you could go 4 Strength, 4 Smarts, 4 Social, and 3 Speed and still be okay), but it does mean that any "strong but slow" concepts are not really feasible.

---Dave

 

[Dvandom]

The more I read this book, the more I'm sure it was never actually playtested properly. Oh, the system seems to work, if clunkily. But I don't think they had anyone try to learn the game from the rulebook. Or make up their own characters. I'd need to spend a significant amount of time making up player aids before I'd ask anyone to even consider making up a character, because you have to page through an entire chapter to get an idea of, for example, which class you want. Or influence (background), or origin (race). At least the character sheet puts all the skill names in one place, although there's no description of the skills.

---Dave

 

[Dvandom]

(I might put together such a guide, if only because it'll take me only a little more time to make up Channel in this system than if I tried making him without preparing the guide first.)

 

[Rhinox]

It feels like this is the first time this company has tried to make a rules system.
It'd do well to have a 'quick start' guide and it really does need some expansions. they call out combiners, minicons, beasts but they don't really give you anything for them other than name drops.

Overall it doesn't look bad, but it does feel half finished.

 

[Dvandom]

It's possible that one of their other licensed games is easier to learn from, like Power Rangers or GIJoe. Or they'll work harder to make the rules easy to learn for their MLP game using the same system.

Purely internal playtesting may work fine if all you need to do is refine mechanics, but you need outsiders to pick up things like, "Where is that rule?" (I ran into that once when helping playtest a White Wolf game...no one had noticed that they'd failed to include the rules on Aggravated Damage, but since I didn't really know the system myself, I spotted the lack.)

---Dave

 

[Dvandom]

Ugh, the equipment rules are totally Crunchy Soldier Game stuff. You need to requisition anything that isn't standard, and your role (class) determines what sort of things you can requisition. Signature weapons like Blaster's Electrodisruptor are impossible, because they have to be checked out for specific missions...and Blaster can't even check out an electric disruptor weapon, he's not trained on it.

The more I try to make sense of this game, the more holes I find, both of the "it can't make canonical Transformers" variety and of the "did no one proofread this?" variety.

---Dave

 

[Dvandom]

After sleeping on it, I've decided I'm done with this game. At best, you can play a generic background Autobot, and only in a formal "you are in an army and are issued equipment" version of things. The total lack of signature gear is where their attempt to shoehorn Transformers into their homebrew D&D kludge falls apart. It would work as a non-Transformers giant mecha game, it just isn't Transformers. On top of getting any outside playtesting done, they should have spent more time trying to actually create a system for the sorts of special powers that most Transformers have...they wanted a soldier game, but Transformers need a superhero game.

---Dave

 

[Zamuel]

From reading your posts, I wonder if they designed the system for GI Joe and didn't properly shift things for TF.

 

[Dvandom]

I think they put the system together before getting any licenses and then made it work for the licenses. As a giant robots in a secret war on Earth game, it has some problems resulting from insufficient editing and playtesting, but as specifically a Transformers game it does not work. It does feel more suited to GIJoe, specifically the more "realistic" takes on GIJoe, but even the grittier war-based Transformers stories didn't focus on requisitioning equipment and tracking loadouts and hardpoints.

I think if they tried actually demonstrating how to make Blaster (since several rules seem to exist purely so you can make Blaster), they might have run into the problems before going to print. The system can do some of the G1 Autobots fairly well if you ignore the equipment rules, but others not at all. They needed a "superpowers" section instead of equipment.

(I'd put a review on Amazon, but they've been getting reviewbombed by people angry about pronouns and have limited reviews to people who bought it through Amazon. I got it direct from Renegade.)

---Dave

 

[Dvandom]

Oh, if anyone wants the file I put together before giving up on the game, here it is.

---Dave

 

[Daith]

So for the most point, each of the Hasbro RPG's done by Renegade are practically identical in the majority of the rules outside the trappings of eache's special trappings like Morphing or Transforming. Zords= Joe Vehicles. etc. It's not good. I know they were trying to make a compatible system, but it needs to explore each franchises unique traits better.

 

[Dvandom]

Either their My Little Pony game will show more care in tailoring it to fit, or it'll be a glorious trainwreck of MLP40K.

---Dave

 

[Shadewing]

MLP40K.

---Dave

...IS it wrong I kinda want that now?

 

[Dvandom]

Let's just say, I'm not cancelling my preorder for Renegade MLP TTRPG. Transformers was a near miss, if a miss nonetheless. MLP could be so bad it hits an entirely different target for me....

---Dave

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

It makes one wonder how well the 3.5e-derived serial-numbers-filed-off "MechaMorphosis" game fared. Any reviews that can be dug up and reposted here?