Of 7th Sea and Savage Worlds

I loved the 7th Sea RPG. I use past tense, because eventually Igrewfrustrated with it. I love the setting - present tense - it's sorichand flavorful. I hated, and hate, certain mechanics. Not all ofthem. Ilove the concept of drama dice. The hubris idea is alsoincredible. Butcertain other bits fall apart on playing.

The twobiggestproblems with 7th Sea's mechanics are # of actions per playerper turn,and the damage system. A starting group could easily have onecharacterwho acts once per turn, and another PC who acts 5 times perturn. Ifyour buddy is acting twice as often as you, you tend to getbored orenvious or both. If he's making 5 times as many attacks, itgets out ofhand damn quick. The damage system's problem was of one ofcomplexity.Everything else was one die roll, with anall-or-nothingwinner-takes-all motif that meant once you'd counted tothe difficultynumber, you could stop counting. Damage, however,required a variety ofmodifiers, then a roll, then the victim rolls, andyou either subtractand do math and record the math and maybe add thatmath to other math,or you erase what math you'd already done to recorda different type ofnumber. It was a sore thumb demanding attention. Combined, theseproblems magnified each other, as the character who acts5 times perturn might launch 5 attacks, get lucky, and need 5cumulative damageresults and the cascade of math that follows. Whenthat's all finallydone, the GM must wake up the other players. I'mserious. Gilbert fellasleep between combat rounds all the time thanksto my three morepoints of panache.

I've been playing a fairamount of SavageWorlds lately. It seems to be the most popular systemfor Emerald CityGame Feasting. I can't say that I like the SavageWorlds system,though. At first, I thought it was just my distaste ofd4s, especiallywhen they occur in mixed dice pools. Trying to put myfinger on it viaemail to a friend today, I realized what the problemreally was. SavageWorlds has 7th Seas problems.

It doesn't havethem to the sameextent. I'm pretty sure you can't get more than 2attacks per turn(maybe 3 if you're Two-Fisted and have First Strike,not sure if theystack), at least not easily. But, while most characterswill only haveone action per turn, some will get too. It's cheap enoughthat anystarting character can have it, but expensive enough mostwon't. If youtake the two-attack option, you're dedicating yourcharacter to combat.More importantly, it's enough of your resourcesthat the charactercan't really do anything but combat. Which meansyou're bored outsideof combat, so you provoke fights, at which pointthe other players getbored. With fights come damage rolls, which areclunky and burdenedwith more math than anything in the system. Mindyou, the extremesaren't as bad. 2 (maybe 3?) attacks instead of 5, andnot as muchdamage-related record keeping as 7th Sea.

But SavageWorlds islacking something else 7th Sea has: that beautiful, richenvironment.The generic nature of Savage Worlds is in some ways andadvantage, butit's also in some ways unfullfilling. I'm left with theanalysis that'sit's like 7th Sea, with minor improvements in the areasI disliked, butat the cost of completely missing the parts I love.


Update:Iacknowledge that a valid counter-argument could be raised as "butwithSavage Worlds you get to design your own flavorful setting" oreven"what the heck's stopping you from converting 7th Sea's awesomesettingto SW's somewhat less annoying mechanics."

Plasma Shields, Lasers and Pain Rays, Oh My!

Kevin clued me in to a Wired article with links to all sorts of real-world "sci-fi" weapons. Some of these are still in the theoretical stage, but a surprising number are in the testing / experimental stage, and a few are scheduled to be in service by late 2009 or 2010. Some are cool, others are damnably scary. As freaky as this stuff is, it's also really resonates with my geeky side.
Here's a few of my favorites:

• The Plasma Acoustic Shield System creates a bright wall of lights and shockwaves. Despite the name, it's not a forcefield yet. It intended use is kinda like a flash-bang grenade, but repeatable, at range (100m) and over a wide area. As a layman, I really can't tell whether or not this is actually a first-step towards forcefields.
• The Pulsed Impulsive Kill Laser is supposedly less deadly than the name implies. It is designed to take down UAVs. It's also designed to detonate reactive armors. Some tank armor is actually explosive plates that blast out against the incoming force of a projectile, and a laser system can detonate it from afar before a more conventional attack follows up.
• The army is paying $25,000,000 for 5 "Pain Ray Trucks" to be delivered in a little over a year. These are large trucks with a cargo-container on the bed. Inside the container is The Silent Guardian, a sweeping beam microwave transmitter (250m range) that causes intense burning sensations, but no physical wounds. The official story is that you use it to fire warning shots against unidentified vessels, but it strikes me that this system, or it's Active Denial System descendents, will one day be used domestically to break up riots and torture citizens. After all, it's silent, and doesn't leave a mark (provided you don't get hit twice within 15 seconds), so there's nothing disturbing to show on the news.
• Speaking of warning unidentified vessels, that's the claimed purpose of the Long Range Acoustic Device. It's basically a super-megaphone. At very long ranges, it's good for warning off approaching vessels, vehicles, or mobs. As the target gets closer to you (or vice versa), the decibel level is high enough to cause ear damage and (this part freaks me out) loss of vision. Far from hypothetical, the NYPD actually has a few hummers with LRADs mounted on top, which they used against protesters at the 2004 RNC.
• There's a number of other proposed Active Denial Systems (aka microwave weapons) currently under development, everything from pain-causing burglar alarms, prisonwide riot suppression systems, and even rifles. Microwave weapons can shoot through windows without breaking them, and the pain effect can pass through cracks in cement walls to affect targets on the other side. Again, the torture potential is pretty scary, especially for anything man-portable, since it causes excrutiating pain, but no lingering physical symptoms.
• And then, of course, there's Lasers. I knew there was a reason for E997.0. Military lasers are quite versatile because they can deliver non-lethal/lethal/anti-tank (at 100 kilowatts) levels of damage depending on how long an exposure you apply to the target. They have effective ranges of over a mile, and are extremely accurate. And of course, with that kind of range on a silent weapon, you have a recipe for plausable deniability. The Lawrence Livermore labs is currently working on a Laser "Gatling Gun", with multiple garnets for focusing the light beams. I'm sure it will look wicked, and hopefully end up in some kickass movies.

In the interest of full disclosure (and, more importantly, bragging-by-association), my wife did work at LANL imploding metal cylinders via lasers, and I used to judge Magic tournaments with a Air Force Colonel who worked on a battlefield laser project. Not that that means I have any insiders perspective on any of the above, since my wife's work was on a micro-scale in a lab environment, and I didn't want to make John Shannon uncomfortable with unending questions about his line of work.

Munchkin Slutty

From the Scion forums, advice for a new GM...

Grumpert wrote:

My only other advice is this system is not munchkin proof. It's not even muchnkin [sic] resistant. It's more munchkin slutty. Now if you have good players, this is a non issue. They will make who they want to make and play accordingly. If you have bad players, kill them, then run it.

That should be emblazoned on the cover of the first book. I may lay-out a little warning label to that effect, and print it out on a sticker sheet for my copy of Scion: Hero.

Making a game of it

Hopefully, all my "doom and gloom" predictions from yesterday turn out to be completely blown out of proportion. Hopefully, the new President* is elected by the people, with a minimum of hanky-panky and no voter fraud. With any luck, their new administration* will dismantle the fascist machinery erected by the previous one.

That way, I'll be able to write a nice Alternative History game, an RPG about a parallel world where everything went from worse to apocalyptic. As I learned via my Scion campaign, that sort of stuff isn't actually fun to game in if you honestly believe it's currently going on, or even just has a good chance to happen. The lead up to the characters in our Scion campaign dueling Dick Cheney (corrupted Scion of Posiedon who'd struck a bargain with Prometheus) was really uncomfortable on a lot of levels.

*: I hope that new President isn't McCain, and even more I hope the new VP isn't the religious extremist named Palin, but more important is that whoever the majority of Americans actually vote for ends up in office.

The Coup occurred on October 1st, 2008

The groundwork for it had been laid years before, ratcheted up incrementally, depriving us of our freedoms, our liberties, and our peace of mind. October 1st was the day that the "President's personal army" set foot upon American Soil. The 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry is an urban-warfare combat unit on active deployment within the US to "protect" us from civil disrest.

Haidtian Alignment System

It seems to me that this Jonathan Haidt speech at TED could result in an interesting RPG alignment system.




Rough draft / concept:
We use Haidt's 5 Foundations of Morality, and the extra category of "Openness to Experience" as something akin to the Virtues of Scion (and Exalted). In short, they are infrequently used to make tests to resist certain types of action, and more frequently used to boost rolls and empower characters to succeed at tasks for which they have some degree of moral inspiration.

So, perhaps we start off by giving each character 1 dot each in Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity, and 1 additional dot to add to either of those two.
Then, you choose whether the character is Liberal or Conservative.
If Liberal, you get 5 more dots to split between Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, and Openness To Experience.
If Conservative, you get 5 dots to split between Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity.
(I'd love to include Moderates, but am having trouble thinking up a way to do so that doesn't make it mechanically superior or inferior to being liberal or conservative.)
At this point, I'm assuming any given trait can be rated from 0-5 (which is how it works in Scion) because it gives nice simple numbers, small enough to add to dice or use as a dice pool. A different way of handling it might be to do a percentage-based or 1-20 scale, but then you obviously need far more points. I'd have more thoughts on this, no doubt, once I know what style of RPG I'd be using this system in.

In a slightly more complicated version, we would then choose whether the character in question is a Hero or Villain. We'd feature additional traits such as "Self Interest" (and possibly "Sadism", "Greed" or "Appetite") and modify the point allocation to incorporate that, so that characters (of either Political spin) could take dots in these darker "Virtues" instead.

That would, however, start getting more like Scion's system, and I don't want to just rip them off too badly. Honestly, I've found some aspects of Scion's Virtues (and certain Virtues in particular) downright unplayable, so emulation isn't ideal. But I do love the concept of an Alignment system that actually boosts your chances of success when striving for your ideals.

From The Land Of Sky-Blue Waters

Last night at the Wayward, we played in Laura's Toon City Vice game. The group was far smaller than normal (and foot traffic at the Cafe was really low) no doubt thanks to the VP debate (which I kinda wanted to watch, but I'm not sure it's healthy for me to be so invested in politics - I really don't need an ulcer).

Anyhow, about Toon City Vice. The setting was derived from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but it was several decades later. The system was Savage Worlds. There were just 3 PCs. Sarah was playing Casper the Friendly Ghost, John was playing Wile E Coyote, and I played my beloved Hamm's Bear. Here's a few clips for those unfamiliar with the Joe Camel of watered-down beer.



I made him a burned-out has-been, no longer beloved by children and instead just hitting the bottom of the barrel (and keg or can), as he rightly should be. To properly represent his decline, I gave him the hindrances of Major Habit (Hamm's Beer), Obese, and Outsider. We were each allowed one "Toon Edge" a special power that was based on our character's cartoon powers, and a "Toon Hindrance" aka a special weakness. Since he has no powers in the cartoons, I had to stretch a bit. I decided his special power was the ability to find a beer anywhere, and his weakness was his drunken swagger and the trail of empty beer cans that could be used to track him.

Then I bought fairly crappy skills to match the commercials. Boating, knowledge: injuns, things that weren't likely to come up much in Toon City. In any other game, this character would be unplayable. But in the cartoon genre, being effective is far less important than being funny, and that he was.

Reprising self-imagined greatness

Last thursday, I played Hollows & Hobgoblins at the Emerald City Gamefeast. H&H is a Wushu-derivative. I'd played it before for Manu's first playtest. I got to reprise my character from that Gellur, the overly flamboyant warrior/metalmage, who liked to remind people that he was a hero. It's the most annoyingly pompous I've ever played, and remember - I've GM'd Amber.

The character's a bit like Zap Branigan, except with some magical talents so he's not completely useless. I'd share more, but one of my cats just decided he and his claws need my attention. The game was fun. Manu improved greatly on the first session, which itself was a very enjoyable game to begin with.

The Zap Branigan comparison isn't entirely accurate. Gellur was/is more flamboyant, and less lecherous. He's also a lot more heroic. I spent much of the session assuring the other PCs that I'd protect them (not that they wanted protection, or my assurances thereof, but I didn't let a little thing like that stop my character's ego), especially the "little ones" (half the party was hobbits). As a result, I took a lot of damage (but surprisingly little of it was inflicted by the rest of the party).

I named Gellur after the famous spoon-bender / charlatan. Hollows & Hobgoblins has a cheaply available magic, much of it with an elemental theme. So, I made him a Metal Mage. His Signature Move is making inanimate objects that people are holding grow mouths and bite them.

My wife starts teleworking in half an hour, and needs the computer, so she's clawing and biting me just like the cat was. Gotta go again.

de Blob

I'm really digging this odd Wii game we rented. It's called de Blob.

In the game, you're battling against a Fascist government that has illegally seized power. So, it fits my politics.

I was nearly an hour into the game before the first fight scene happened, and it lasted maybe 2 seconds and three swings of the wiimote. You see, it's not yet another first person shooter. Instead, in this game you're playing a blob of paint, and the enemy includes inkwells and little robots that suck pigment out of people. The Fascists have stolen all the color from the world, and your job is to paint the buildings. Doing so will liberate the people, and return funk music to the land. When you paint a block, the inhabitants come outside, and celebrate. Then you paint them, and they celebrate more. You bounce around trying to find more surfaces to paint, mixing colors as you go, and spreading joyful populist graffiti to the masses.

It's pretty kooky.

I wish they'd done a little more with the controls, though. I think the challenges could be harder, and the controls more responsive. Seems like the same swinging motion does just about everything, and that's my only complaint with the game. Despite it, I'm finding the game ravenously addictive.

Ultimate Mass

I was about to provide someone on the forum with a link to James McMurray's big ol' Scion mass chart, when I realized it had an error.

Epic Strength 1 gives +500 lbs lifting capacity. The 2nd and 3rd dots double that. The 4th to 7th dots Quintuple the bonus at each level. The 8th to 10th dots multiply the total of the previous dot by 10.

It would appear the chart at James's site (which I and formorach69 helped create) didn't take that last transition into account. The chart was made before any of us were playing God-level PCs, and may have been made before the God book was published (I don't remember). Whatever the timing, the chart seems to progress levels 8 through 10 at the same x5 multiplier of levels 4 to 7. As a result, it lists the Empire State Building as Mass 11, when it's actually Mass 10. Military Tugboats should be adjusted to Mass 8. The entries for Loaded Freighter, Cruiser, and Large Bridge should all be downgraded to Mass 9.

I'm gonna try to contact James McMurray and get it fixed. He's not currently active on the Scion forum, so I might not be able to get it changed. Update: I got in touch with him, and he updated/fixed the page linked above.