Review of 7th Sea

The 7th Sea RPG is hands-down my favorite RPG setting. An old friend (Hunter Gough) once said that 7th Sea "is set in the 100 year span between the fall of the Roman Empire and the birth of the Industrial Revolution." It's like all of European History were crammed into one moment, and then spiced up with some supernatural elements. Pirates feature heavily in the brand's marketing, but there's also Knights, Vikings, Courtiers, Musketeers, Revolutionaries, and Archaeologists. The major powers of Europe are reflected in the nations of 7th Sea: Avalon, Montaigne, Castille, Vestenmannavanjar (sp?), Vodacce and Ussura. Each nation has it's own swordsman's school, and it's own breed of magic. It's instantly familiar, yet full of promise and surprises. And sorcery is scary, creepy, awful business.

Man, I love that setting. Too bad the mechanics tork me off.

7th Sea uses a d10 die pool, with several innovative twists. There's a gambling element, where you can put "raises" on your difficulty to pull off extra effects. There's drama dice, which are an in-game reward to give your players when they do something cool. Arcana are basically a tarot card that grants a power triggered by your drama dice, each PC can have exactly one, chosen at creation. Swordsman's schools grant cool special manuevers and powers without the complexity of 3rd Ed's feats. On first read through, the mechanics sound beautiful and fun.

Truth is, the "Roll and Keep" system of 7th Sea is broken in many small ways that add up to incredible aggregate frustration. Character creation is filled with little twists that a veteran player can milk, but which will elude newbies. A starting character can have between one and five actions per round. Combat really drags when the other players act 4 or 5 times as often as you do. Raises sound awesome, but they often backfire and make you fail at a simple task. Combat involves too much die-rolling and math - there's basically two types of hit points, one of which is rerolled every time you're hit and resets whenever the second type gets damaged. The best tactic for your drama dice is to just sit on them and get the xp they grant if left unused at the end of the session - which sucks for the sorceries that are powered by Drama. The GM's book repeatedly says Arcana are terribly rare and NPCs shouldn't really have them, no matter how cool they are. The Vodacce sorcery does absolutely nothing at the starting level if your GM follows that tidbit of advice on Arcana.

I've never been so let-down by a rule system. I've never wanted a game to work more than I wish 7th Sea did. And despite all that, I love the setting enough to try running the game again sometime...

Perfect for Amber

The following Random Question showed up when editing my blogger profile, and I thought it'd go great on an Amber character quiz...

"For your birthday, your aunt gave you a maple syrup dispenser shaped like a rooster. Please write her a thank-you note:"

EDIT: What Silence posted a comment that is highly amusing. It's from the point of view of a character he played in a campaign I ran.

Barely Restrained Myself

There's this thread on the Scion Forums about what three-letter government agency (CIA, FBI, DEA, NSA, etc) the children of the Gods should go work for, and I have just barely managed to keep myself from posting this link there.

Blank White Cards on Flickr

Today I stumbled across this collection of images by What Silence. I'm posting it here because it includes several images of Blank White Cards, more than a few of which I had a hand in. (There are a few mistakes in his accreditations, as in two or three cases he mistook my wife's drawing and handwriting for mine.) Damn, I need to play BWC again, and soon. Hopefully he'll get around to making that Ruby version sometime. (Hint. Hint. Nudge. Nudge.)

Grin. I was there for many of those games, and looking back on this cracks me up. Thanks for putting those shots up, my friend. And thanks the smile on my face.

I may have to "appropriate" the cards named "New Plan! Let's kill Corwin AND Benedict!" and "Object Of Your Desire" for future Amber-related posts. Wonder if he'll notice...

Side-Effect of Continuum

While I generally love the Continuum RPG, and must acknowledge the impact it's had on my thinking and joke-cracking in my Yet, I have one caveat...

Beware the effect Continuum has on your ability to pace a game. You journal every moment and detail of a characters life in Continuum, so you can span back to moments you'd already experienced, or rather to avoid doing so. But that mode of thinking ruined my next campaign. I had actually temporarily lost the ability to think in the midst of a game "should I just jump ahead to the next important plot point now?"

Everyone loved my Continuum campaign. Everyone (myself included) hated the Amber campaign that followed it. I kept subconsciously trying to keep the players "level" in time, which meant that if one PC was off doing something interesting, everybody else had to live through the doldrums. Even when they were all together, I think I only said "a few days later" once. Instead I smashed the bloody pulps of a plot together into a single loaf and very rarely cut scenes off of it. Sorry about that, guys.

After GMing Continuum, start your next campaign "In Media Res" with the PCs already knowing each other and involved in something big. (I started Scion with a battle sequence.) Then jump ahead to a new scene. Only show the important parts. Don't sweat the details.

Playnomiblog Week 1 Summary

Votes have been tallied on week #1 over at my nomic game blog. Bill #9 has been unanimously ratified. Players may begin posting Lineages as well as Bills. Get your credentials ready! Who will be the first Baron or Baroness of Nomiblog?

There are currently four players, but you could sign up to be the 5th!

The scores / point totals are:
1 (r_b_bergstrom) to 0 (Kevin, Brother Andrei, and Ulaire Toldea)
Not that points do anything currently.

Four words in your Yet.

Frag (Noun): What you feel when the world you live in is no longer the world you remember. Left untreated it can lead to insanity, death and/or everyone else forgetting you ever existed.
Frag (Verb): To go back in time and change some aspect of a person's life so as to cause them Frag.
As in "So I hopped in my time machine, prevented their first date, and Fragged them both!"

Gemini (Noun): 1. In incident or event in which you meet your self. 2. Your junior or elder self.

Slipshank (Verb): 1. To declare that you will one day do something, and thereby cause it to have already happened. 2. To bring something from your own future into your own past by force of will. 3. To get yourself an item by means of Slipshank.
As in "I needed a gun, so I slipshanked one, duct-taped to the bottom of my chair"

Yet (Noun): 1. Your destiny. 2. Events you know happen(ed) to you sometime, but you haven't experienced them.
As in "I slipshanked myself that gun, so going back and taping it to the chair in the first place is in my Yet."

I (heart) recurring villains

My biggest complaint with Amber Diceless RPG is that recurring villains often die before they can recur.
While characters in the novels get exiled, locked in towers or dungeons, left amnesiac in some random corner of a random world, have their eyes burned out, etc, PCs always shoot to kill. It's very rare that a genuine PC vs PC rivalry doesn't end in a dead character in less than 5 sessions.

And a PC vs NPC rivalry always ends in one of three ways: 1) Dead NPC. 2) Dead NPC after the PC spent some time imprisoned. 3) Universe destroyed.

Oh well, at least that's one more option than these conflicts have in most other RPGs.

Review of Continuum RPG

Last year I ran a Continuum campaign, which I (and my players) enjoyed enough that it makes me feel this game deserves a little press.

Continuum, by Aetherco, is a time-travel RPG. Every PC has the ability to travel through time at will, and teleport in space. A starting character can only shift through a year of time in one jump, then they need to get a full night's rest. But that still means you can hop all over history if you really set your mind to it. And even within your one-year Span, there's a lot of crazy things you can do. All that nonsense from the last reels of the Bill & Ted films: talking to yourself, jumping away for a crash-course in guitar, retroactively hiding the keys inside the cage you were trapped in, skipping out to fake your own death, etc.

Keeping up with it all is a lot of work for the GM. I kept extensive notes on where and when everyone went so that I'd be prepared for the inevitable "Gemini Incidents" when someone met their younger self, and the "Fragging" situations where the past suddenly changed from what you had remembered. The game does a decent job of spreading that memory burden amongst the players, but the GM really needs to keep on top of the big picture. It's amazing how much trouble a PC can make for themselves given that kind of power. I probably could have cut my NPC cast in half and trimmed the plot back by 70%. The players would have still had fun bouncing around accidentally fragging each other.

The mechanics were the only shaky part of the game. If you have a favorite RPG that you run a lot, you may want to try importing that games combat system into Continuum. While the Continuum RPG had some wonderfully innovative features, most of the die rolls were less fluid than I'd have preferred, and I didn't care for the damage system.

Time-combat (the system for fragging and chasing foes through time) makes the mind reel, which is both a pro and a con, but absolutely necessary to the game. It really captured the feel of the craziness you could do with unlimited time-travel, but sometimes that was more than we linear-mortals could keep on top of. I ended up making a whole bunch of tools for keeping track of the campaign, and for summarizing time combat. I may post them here sometime.

As a GM, I really enjoyed skill-acquisition being just a function of time expenditure - if It was vital for a PC to have a particular skill, I could count on them hopping off for 6-month intensive course ASAP. Never a worry about play balance - just throw everything at the PCs and they'll level themselves up in the middle of the fight to deal with it.

Where the game really excelled was in theme and setting. Some serious thought went into designing Continuum. They have an extended timeline in the GM section that covers something like 18,000 years of history. Time travellers fall into two camps: The Continuum (a secret society which feels changing recorded history is harmful to the universe) and Narcissists (rogues who believe they can create their own reality by changing the past). There's also a third faction of sorts, Antedesertium, an enemy group that rules a section of prehistory and constantly fails to destroy the earth. Aliens, Atlantis, Neanderthals, Joan of Arc and the Comte de St.Germaine all make cameos. And the players get to be part of The Conspiracy.

Nothing's black and white. The Continuum are largely cast as the goodguys, because changing the past does indeed unravel reality (think of how Marty started to dissolve in Back To The Future). But the Continuum sometimes has to do very distasteful things (like save the life of Hitler whenever a Narcissist takes a shot at him) in order to preserve that past and prevent global fragmentation. The ancient kings of Antedesertium aren't human, but neither are the Inheritors whom the Continuum evolve into. If you enjoy moral ambiguity, shades of grey and shifting loyalties, this game's perfect for you.

I highly recommend Continuum. It can run the gamut from hard sci-fi with darkly oppressive conspiracies, to campy Dr.Who-inspired mystery and exploration, to wacky Bill & Ted slapstick. We hit all three in various phases of my campaign. It takes a bit of administrative work to keep it running smoothly, but the payoff is well worth the extra effort.

Pet Peeves regarding Attributes

One of the things that really bugs me about RPG systems is how much easier it is to play a character that's stronger (than you) then it is to play a character who's smarter (than you).

For example, let's say you need to get into a building:

If I'm playing a character with Human Maximum strength, I just tell the GM that I'm ripping the door off it's frame, and make a die roll.

If I'm playing Mr Dexterity, I just tell the GM that I pick the lock, and make a die roll.

But if I'm playing a mental or social-based character, depending on the game and the GM, I may be out of luck.

I could be playing the suavest most charismatic PC that ever walked the earth, but if the GM's hell-bent on making me role-play through the discussion with the guards out front, I'm probably not getting in. (See, while I, the player, do have Charisma, I'm about human minimum in Manipulation. People don't see me as an authority figure, and I'm no good at lying. I am fun to be around, but that's not so useful for getting past armed guards).
Chances are the GM makes me act through at least a bit of it. If he's a good GM, and I do a decent job of roleplaying, and remind him of the character's social skills, he'll eventually let me roll. But that still means my ultra-suave character is limited by my acting and social abilities.

Worse yet, let's say I'm playing a character whose physical and social skills are mediocre, but he's got the greatest analytical mind known to history. Can I get past those guards, through the window or over the wall with a single Intelligence roll? Probably not.
Even if the GM lets me make a roll, it's at best going to result in a few hints on how to get in. Definitely my ultra-clever character is limited by my own real-world cleverness. And if things don't go so hot, I may say or do something foolish that a spy/techie/wizard with years of training and experience would never do. That's usually when the GM pounces. I know I do it all the time - most recently just two nights ago.

All GMs let you roll dice instead of actually climbing a wall.
Some (but definitely NOT all) GMs will let you make a Charisma-check instead of having to talk your own way past the guards.
But few indeed are the GMs who will let you roll Intelligence for the character to come up with a plan that gets them inside, without the player having to figure out at least the basics of the plan themselves.

Don't get me wrong. The way things are makes perfect sense on many levels. The game is less fun (and greatly unbalanced) if any one attribute (in this case, intelligence) solves everything. And in a role-playing game, there's a natural desire to make the players role-play or act. But that immutable paradigm has pissed me off on more than one occasion, and is a contributing factor in why I GM more often than I play.

So I try to be a good GM. I let the players try things. When they make horrible tactical blunders I prompt them with "are you sure you want to do that?" If their character sheet reflects a quick thinker and/or super-intelligence, I try to give them a few more seconds to think about their action. I generally let people roll Charisma before I start emoting the NPCs reaction to the crazy thing they just said. And I only kill characters when the players have repeatedly ignored the warning signs I've given them.