I would suggest that maybe we go look at the sales numbers for the War For/Fall of Cybertron games (and/or TF Devastation) and see how well they did relative to their budgets.

Meanwhile, the freemium ones like Earth Wars and Angry Birds are still trucking along out there, and we've never gotten a serious tabletop game based on the license before, so this is pretty fucking cool if that's your thing.

 

Why do they think NOT being able to play as Optimus Prime is a selling point...?

 

Because if one player is Optimus Prime, who wants to be Bumblebee?

Letting players make their own characters who exist in that world rather than playing as the famous guys is pretty much how games of this nature work. You don't play Luke and Han in a Star Wars RPG game, you play Tryst Valentine and you have adventures in the same world as Luke and Han.

 

Combiners plz

 

Look, I'm sure if you wanna munchkin up some rules for a main character you'll be able to. That's the beauty of a Tabletop RPG.

Oh man, that would be amazing to role play in a group. A true gestalt controlled by a group of players, absolute mayhem for a DM!  

 

Kids on Bikes, which is from the same studio, has rules for running an ET or Eleven or similar character who is more powerful than the main players - everybody shares control and you hand it off to the player who has a certain “aspect” that is most relevant to the situation.

So for Computron, one player might be “calculator brain” and one might be “protect the weak” and one might be “optimal strategist” and depending on what you need Computron to do, the different players would “manage” him for that action.

 

Getting some real "QWOP" game vibes from that, lol.

 

Not really into the RPG games.

I'll probably get them cause Transformers and they might be good supplements?

However I'm more excited for their actual board games. Hoping for some goodun's there. I think they mentioned a deckbuilder when they announced the license? If it has coop that would be divine.

 

Liking just for mentioning Tryst.

-ZacWilliam, on topic I want to buy these RPGs and Board Games sooo Bad like right now. Hurry up!

 

But why not make a game in which you can do both? And in answer to your question - if the mission involves any sneaking around or contact with humans, Bumblebee is going to be the preferred option. It all depends on the adventure context, presumably not every game is a pitched battle!

I disliked the way she seemed to think not playing as a favourite character is a selling point - maybe for RPG purists but certainly not for someone like me who may have decided to dip a toe in the RPG waters.

 

I mean, thats kinda always the thing with Tabletop RPGs of pre-established franchises. You've got both people who want to make their own characters, and people who want to play as already existing characters.

 

I would be shocked beyond shocked if it didn't include stat blocks for Optimus, Megatron, and other notables, at some point. The Star Wars games from Fantasy Flight came out in 2013 and didn't drop stat blocks for Darth Vader until a year or two later and stats for Boba Fett, Han Solo, or Luke Skywalker until 2019.

But the point of those games was that you were a smuggler on the fringe or a Rebel pilot on the front lines, far away from such notables.

Depending on what kind of a "Transformers story" this game is trying to tell, you might be in an IDW-style "infiltration" unit and the closest you get to Optimus or Megatron is when Prowl sends you a message every so often with updated mission data... or you might be doing G1 cartoon silliness, or Bay-era small unit combat, or who knows until the actual book comes out.

Based on a very quick skim of the Altered Carbon rules, I think it's safe to say that they'll do their best to make it "feel right" and if you want to play as Optimus or Bumblebee or whoever, someone will very gladly stat those characters up for your use if they aren't in the back of the core rules. With the aforementioned Fantasy Flight Star Wars system, people were doing homebrew stats for Fett etc. almost as soon as the beta test materials dropped.

 

After briefly looking up what Mekton is, it would seem to me that the main reason Hasbro doesn't go with it is that they don't own it. The two latest releases in the timeline on wikipedia being "twenty years ago in Japan with USA TBA" and "been delayed for five years in a row" respectively probably did not help matters much.


I hope this game is good, and that it eventually includes pretenders and actionmasters.

Additionally, "inventing new transformers" is one of the few easily doable creative things for TF fans to do in a hobby that is otherwise consumption-based or dependent on some heavier modelling skills and tools. Skipping out on rules for making your own dudes would be a bad move. It'd be like Marvel making an RPG but you can't invent your own superhero, only play as the Avengers.

 

Oh man, here I was hoping the author was chosen because of his merits. I’m bummed out.

 

I’m sure the four people that buy this will be very happy.

 

The RPG market has seen a massive resurgence, so the audience is not a small one. The number of TF fans in the role playing world was shocking to me, so again, even if a subset of gamers and a subset of TF people (with an overlapping group) buy the game, it would be no small print run.

 

and anyway, a good and interesting RPG will pick up non-TF fans who'll want to play something new

 

lov too show up in threads and shit on things i don't care about

i'm cool

 

At least initially, that’s how the OG Marvel Superheroes RPG (with the Universal Results Table and the FASERIP stat blocks, one of my favorite systems of all time) handled it. There were character creation rules, but all the modules and pre-Gen content assumed you’d want to be “real” characters and were written and designed accordingly (and also, sneakily, were the only place to get official stats for some characters - you want to know how Alpha Flight stacks up, better buy the adventure featuring them!)