Post originally by Mike Czaplinski at 2003-07-03 07:19:32
Converted from Phorums BB System

Michael wrote:
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[snip]

But nobody has ever really nailed it. Don't know why. For my group, the Nile setting for Torg came closest, and I believe that Justice Inc. was pretty popular in its day.

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I think that JUSTICE INC is still the best of the general pulp games. Given that it used
the Hero system, the character stats were fairly complete, and thanks to the (relatively)
lower power level compaired to Champions, you didn't have to toss buckets of dice
every time your character threw a punch, and the system certainly helped to maintain
the heroic feel.

My only real quibble with it is that the gadget and unique power rules were basically
"Go out and buy CHAMPIONS". I don't put this up to malice or a desire for maximized
profits by Hero Games, since I'm sure that they figured that a lot of the same people
who would buy JI would also own CHAMPIONS (since the game systems were largely
identicle) or be willing to buy it, but it still would have been nice to have some sort of cut
down rules for those who didn't want to mix metaphors.

Of course, if you didn't like the Hero system, that would limit the appeal of the game,
but the written supplements managed to capture the feel of the period excellently
(thanks to Aaron Allston's love of the genre).

An under-rated game for a pulp feel is CALL OF CTHULHU. Even though it was overtly
a 'horror' RPG, the subgenre that inspired it was not mutually exclusive to pulp-style
adventures. Some of the most effective period Cthulhu Mythos stories were written by
Robert E. Howard after all, and some of them include a number of 'pulpy' elements
(two fisted adventurers in jungles, etc). I also like the extensibility of the Chaosium
system: As much as I admire the completeness of Hero, the percentile-based
Chaosium system was always much more intuitive for me and most of the players I
worked with, and could balance gritty seeming-realism (especially if you adopted some
of the optional combat rules) with over-the-top action without any violation of the basic
math of the system.

MikeC