The gang got together to make characters for the new Mage campaign starting up. We've not played yet, but we've got our group together. There was a lot of confusion and vagarity in discussing magick, which is to be expected when you've got a bunch of folks who have never played the game before. It's not mechanically difficult, but the broad philosophy of designing your own paradigm of reality is something of a mind bender when you try it the first time.
Sans actual play though, I'm not going to discuss any of that. Instead, I'm going to focus on the one thing that everyone seemed to agree on, even if they didn't use my exact words: first level sucks.
Showing posts with label Game Findings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Game Findings. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Game Findings: Extreme Vengeance
Anyone who plays my games for any length of time comes to know that I'm a fan of pathos in my fiction. I love to heap pain on my characters and force them into agonizing situations with an eye toward seeing how they grow to overcome their adversity.
The answer, by the way, is to become cold and murderous. No, I'm only kidding. Well, I'm painting with an overly broad brush anyway. I mean, there were only a few executions and torture sessions and...
Ahem.
Fully realizing that I was doing the same thing over and over and might not only be stuck in a dramatic rut, but also frustrating the hell out of my players in doing so, I decided to try something wholly different in not only mechanics, but tone too. So I got my mits on a game I'd only heard about in passing: Extreme Vengeace, a game of action movie mayhem.
This is the game to play if you're looking to reproduce the stories and style of anything you've seen on the big screen starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stalone, Jean Cleade van Damme, Dolf Lundgren, etc. Light on the story, lighter still on the logic, and big on the explosions and ass kicking. It's a game where you take it easy on the players and let them badass their way around the set for a while before pulling out the stops with the final heavy, who everyone knows is going to get his ass beat something fierce. It's the exact opposite of how my games typically go, so I figured it would be a good stretch for me and a fun change of pace for them.
Now, while you play a character in the world of an action movie, like Jack Slater in Last Action Hero, I decided to change it up just a little bit and put the focus on the cinematics of the game. So instead, I had the players play actors who were playing parts in an action movie. This way, when they invoked their powers, I had an easier time asking them to narrate flashback sequences and camera angles.
How'd it play?
Conceptually, the game is great. And while it wasn't intentional, the way character creation is done makes the transition from character to actor a snap. See, characters consist of two aspects: your description and your type. Descriptions are things like athletic (Jackie Chan) or pumped up (Schwarzenegger), while types are things like soldier, fighter, and agent. In a standard game, you pick one of each, add together the stats and powers, and BAM! Your character is done.
All I did was make the description into something called typecast and applied it to the actor. That was the base character. Thus, every role that actor Glitterpony Sweetcream (yes, an actual character from my game) ever played would be played smooth. Smooth was his typecast, but his role might change from film to film. One film he might be playing a smooth cop (though knowing Glitterpony, he'd refuse that role), in another he'd be playing a smooth soldier (though again, not really his thing). If he plays a hitman, he'd be a smooth killer. Same with a ganger. I've belabored this example enough.
Mechanics were pretty simple: you've got two stats. When you want to take an action, you say what you want to do and allocate dice to it. Roll those dice and look to beat a target number or the opposed roll. One neat thing about this is that your description can modify your pool.
Oh yeah. This was my favorite part of the game. See, the GM plays the audience watching the film, and audience reaction to what's going on affects the die pool. "I shoot the helicopter," gets snores from the audience and thus takes a penalty. "I race my motorcycle up the stairwell, blow open the door to the roof and jump the bike off the edge, crashing it into the cockpit while emptying my gun into the gastank so it explodes while I fall into the harbor," on the other hand would get a rousing round of whoops and hollars, maybe even get people doing the wave (anyone remember that? Anyone?). Of course, it also comes with a hefty die bonus.
I'll admit though, my joy in playing the audience didn't come from encouraging more narrative input from the players. It should have been that, and it has been something I wanted more of in the past, but this time it was something far simpler.
I got to heckle the actors, and it was part of the game, so it was 100% okay.
Oh, the joy. Maybe some of that player character sadism has worn off on me, but I did so very much love dropping my head on the table and snoring, or outright booing when someone wanted to search bodies for spare cash. And yes, I even got to yell "you suck!" at Glitterpony once when he played it like a girly man. It was far more fun than it was supposed to be, I'm sure.
As for observations that might be useful to you, faithful reader, well, here's what I observed:
The answer, by the way, is to become cold and murderous. No, I'm only kidding. Well, I'm painting with an overly broad brush anyway. I mean, there were only a few executions and torture sessions and...
Ahem.
Fully realizing that I was doing the same thing over and over and might not only be stuck in a dramatic rut, but also frustrating the hell out of my players in doing so, I decided to try something wholly different in not only mechanics, but tone too. So I got my mits on a game I'd only heard about in passing: Extreme Vengeace, a game of action movie mayhem.
This is the game to play if you're looking to reproduce the stories and style of anything you've seen on the big screen starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stalone, Jean Cleade van Damme, Dolf Lundgren, etc. Light on the story, lighter still on the logic, and big on the explosions and ass kicking. It's a game where you take it easy on the players and let them badass their way around the set for a while before pulling out the stops with the final heavy, who everyone knows is going to get his ass beat something fierce. It's the exact opposite of how my games typically go, so I figured it would be a good stretch for me and a fun change of pace for them.
Now, while you play a character in the world of an action movie, like Jack Slater in Last Action Hero, I decided to change it up just a little bit and put the focus on the cinematics of the game. So instead, I had the players play actors who were playing parts in an action movie. This way, when they invoked their powers, I had an easier time asking them to narrate flashback sequences and camera angles.
How'd it play?
Conceptually, the game is great. And while it wasn't intentional, the way character creation is done makes the transition from character to actor a snap. See, characters consist of two aspects: your description and your type. Descriptions are things like athletic (Jackie Chan) or pumped up (Schwarzenegger), while types are things like soldier, fighter, and agent. In a standard game, you pick one of each, add together the stats and powers, and BAM! Your character is done.
All I did was make the description into something called typecast and applied it to the actor. That was the base character. Thus, every role that actor Glitterpony Sweetcream (yes, an actual character from my game) ever played would be played smooth. Smooth was his typecast, but his role might change from film to film. One film he might be playing a smooth cop (though knowing Glitterpony, he'd refuse that role), in another he'd be playing a smooth soldier (though again, not really his thing). If he plays a hitman, he'd be a smooth killer. Same with a ganger. I've belabored this example enough.
Mechanics were pretty simple: you've got two stats. When you want to take an action, you say what you want to do and allocate dice to it. Roll those dice and look to beat a target number or the opposed roll. One neat thing about this is that your description can modify your pool.
Oh yeah. This was my favorite part of the game. See, the GM plays the audience watching the film, and audience reaction to what's going on affects the die pool. "I shoot the helicopter," gets snores from the audience and thus takes a penalty. "I race my motorcycle up the stairwell, blow open the door to the roof and jump the bike off the edge, crashing it into the cockpit while emptying my gun into the gastank so it explodes while I fall into the harbor," on the other hand would get a rousing round of whoops and hollars, maybe even get people doing the wave (anyone remember that? Anyone?). Of course, it also comes with a hefty die bonus.
I'll admit though, my joy in playing the audience didn't come from encouraging more narrative input from the players. It should have been that, and it has been something I wanted more of in the past, but this time it was something far simpler.
I got to heckle the actors, and it was part of the game, so it was 100% okay.
Oh, the joy. Maybe some of that player character sadism has worn off on me, but I did so very much love dropping my head on the table and snoring, or outright booing when someone wanted to search bodies for spare cash. And yes, I even got to yell "you suck!" at Glitterpony once when he played it like a girly man. It was far more fun than it was supposed to be, I'm sure.
As for observations that might be useful to you, faithful reader, well, here's what I observed:
- Simple, but out of the box: The combat system is pretty cool. As I said above, you want to do something, you give the action dice. Combat in Extreme Vengeance is loosely organized chaos. There's no codified initiative. Instead, everyone shouts out what they want to do when they want to do it, and whoever puts more dice into the action gets to go first. If you want to go before someone else, up your bid. He can up his as well until someone comes out on top. There aren't any rounds either. You stay in the current exchange until everyone's out of dice. Then all pools refresh and you go at it again. Thus you can be truly awesome at one action, or try to split your pool among multiple actions. Remember though, narration can increase your die pools, so even though driving and shooting might require you to allocate dice to two actions, while keeping some in reserve for defence, saying you're yanking your hot rod underneath the trailer of an 18 wheeler to come up on the passenger side and emptying your uzi at the gunman hanging out the window as you sideswipe another car is probably going to get you plenty of bonus dice. The game encourages you to think big.
This is all handled with die pools, which are a tried and true method of game mechanic design. This chaotic element, while something I found cool though, was something that some of my players found frustrating. There was a lot of confusion in the beginning. One player wanted to shoot three guys. He thought he was putting three dice into the effort, but in order to shoot three people, he was really putting one die into three different shots, which meant he was routinely interrupted (he was shooting extras though, so one die was all he needed).
I like out of the box thinking in RPG design. I've already got many many many shelves filled with similar, now stock, mechanics. So this sort of thing was refreshing for me. It might push some out of their comfort zone though, and not everyone likes that. - Action movie effects: While you only have 2 stats, your character gets loaded up with a series of powers call his repitior. This is a series of camera tricks, special props, and special acting abilities that allow him to manipulate the movie. Examples include catchprases, soundtracks, zooming camera, and the famous single hit shown in quick cut multi-angle replay. They're awesome, and upon reading any of them you immediately know what they look like and how they can be used. I loved them.
So did my players. Too much. This game laid bare a simple truth: give a player something to play with on his character sheet and he's going to use it. All of it. All of the time.
Characters start with too many repitiors in this game. The session we played consisted of a single scene: the characters converge at a run down project building where a gang has taken over and the leader, whom the characters all have a grudge against, is issuing demands. After a quick fight with some extras, the group blasted onto the roof.
At this point we're about15 minutes into the movie. It's an in media res sort of beginning, with minimal character development so far, and we're about to kick off the first big fight that spells the end of the beginning action sequence. After this, we'll probably throttle it back, show the characters relaxing a little bit, establish them more as people, and then ramp things up again. You've all seen films like this. But remember, right now the credits are in recent memory and we've just begun the movie.
So the characters bust down the door to the roof and converge on the gang leader.
Suddenly one of the players invokes a flashback to show the gang leader killed his brother and then flashes back to the present all angry and crying tears of vengeance with screams of "Luigi!" (he was playing Mario, a plumber).
As Mario throws a wrench at the ganger, Glitterpony draws his piece and fires, the camera riding the bullet to impact.
Now we cut to one of the other characters and the film speeds up as he fires off a burst with incredible speed.
The ganger manages to get his hands on one of the characters and proceeds to grab his throat and punch him in the face over and over, pausing after each one in true JCVD fashion.
Glitterpony doesn't like that, and as the camera turns back to him, his soundtrack begins to play, and he cuts to a flashback of the ganger grabbing his friend by the throat and punching him in the face (I outlawed that use).
In short, the party tried to blow through every last use of repitior they had in that first fight. Only one of them thought to try a stunt action without resorting to a repitior (and it was prety cool, running at the ganger, dropping to his knees and sliding through the guy's legs while driving the butt of his guns into the ganger's knees; I gave him big cheers, and big bonus dice for that). Repitior are cool, but they're too available in the beginning. I think the game should start you off with less and ease you up as you progress. This forces you to come up with more stunts of your own and get more comfortable milking the crowd for cheers, which is where the real meat of the game is, I think.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Game Findings: 7th Sea
This post might seem a little unusual. After all, 7th Sea is hardly some small indie game that no one's heard of, and it's been around long enough to generate tons of reviews. I'm willing to bet that any gamer who is both old and ecclectic enough has at least given this a short go.
So why the hell am I talking about it here? Because in the course of finishing up my campaign I encountered a few things that I'd not read about, nor ever experienced in all the 7th Sea games we'd played previously, and those things caught all of us by surprise. That sounded worth talking about here.
In a nutshell, high-level 7th Sea is a very different game from low-level 7th Sea (if you'll forgive the rough nomenclature). Now sure, there's an excellent argument to be made that if the game doesn't change at all as your chracter advances, then there's no point in advancing at all. If you're prepared to say that, I'm prepared to agree with you. Statistical analysis of the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons showed that the average hit percentage stayed the same and even dipped a little bit as you progessed from level 1 to level 30. You opposition ramped up in pace with you, meaning that while you were doing math with larger numbers, your actual performance wasn't changing much at all. What's the point then?
Well, in D&D, you get access to more and better powers. These things open up avenues of action that you didn't have previously, making you a little broader in addition to numerically taller. But we're not talking about D&D, we're talking about 7th Sea. The thing is, 7th Sea does that exact thing as well, assuming you're either a swordsman or a sorcerer. In all the time I've played and run this game, eery character has always been one or the other (usually a swordsman), so that shouldn't be much of an issue. But you can in fact make a character who is neither, which happened this last campaign.
I'm rambling, so let's break this down a bit, and start with the basics. The roll and keep system is a good one. No, it's a great one. It's simple, it's flexible, and raising is still the single most awesome game mechanic that I've encountered in a decade. 7th Sea takes roll and keep and makes heavy use of it to great effect. However, at the end of a long campaign where most people are rolling pools approaching 10k5 or more, things begin to slow down. With rasing and well placed bonuses, those pools can shoot close to the 10k10 range, especially when dealing damage. Add in exploding dice, and suddenly you're dealing with a whole lot more math than you were at the beginning of the campaign where people were tossing 6k3. Actions began to slow down, and while the size of the pools finally convinced most people to throw everything away once they reached their target number, anytime we had opposed rolls there was no choice but to add everything up. This would have been muchworse had we done raising by the book, which drove target numbers ever higher instead of reducing the pool size. We could still move the game along, but there was a noticeable lag. In short, the roll and keep system didn't scale well to the high end of the game. It worked, but it didn't work as well as it once did.
High scores impacted combat in another way: panache. For those few out there unfamiliar with the system, combat has 10 phases, and you get one action per point in your panache score. Roll those dice, and each one tells you which phase you get an action on. If you've got a panache of 3, you're going to have 3 actions, the phase of each determined by the results of the dice. It's a cool system and one I found got things moving quickly and cleanly. There's an easy sub-system for dealing with ties, and certain options to let you act out of phase. It's good, and well designed.
When most the combattants have 3+ actions though, the nature of combat changes. Obviously, there's going to be more ties that need to be resolved, but more than that there are a lot of abilities in the game that build up over rounds or require rounds to recharge. Swordsman schools are big on this, and they're what I was getting at when drawing a comparison to D&D, but I'll deal with them more specifically in a moment. For now, suffice to say that when you've got an ability that takes a few rounds of combat to really develop power, there's a big diference in its effectiveness if your opponent is going twice this round or if he's going five times. And Theus help you if you're ganged up on by two panache 5 opponents. You've got no chance.
Therein lays the big scaling problem with this game. The way your character grows mechanically in ways more intesting than larger numbers is his accrual of special abilities, granted by either his school or sorcerous heritage. However, when you factor in the average die pool size getting chucked around by the time you can lay hands on many of these abilities, they lose a lot of luster. The best example of this is an ability one of my players wanted from the very first session of play. It was the ability to begin administering last rights to your opponent in the middle of a fight, and the process was so unnerving that it gave you a mounting fear factor in the combat. In terms of imagery, it's phenominal, and I wanted to see it in play as badly as he wanted to use it.
As the game grew to a close, he amassed enough experience to earn that power. Each round he was in a fight, his fear rating would increase by 1. Unfortunately, by the time he got it, each round was so chocked full of actions that the fights would be over in a single pass, or two in extreme cases. Everyone was doing so much that the party could lay waste to the opposition, who also had a ton of actions, before his fear factorcould grow to anything meaningful. He hung his head after several fights like this and proclaimed he'd dedicated his character to gaining a useess ability.
Normally I don't pan things so quickly, but he really did seem to be right in this case. His ability still looked phenominal on paper, but because to much action could be packed into each round now, it was useless, especially since fear is a resisted thing in thi game, and high level opponents had appropriately high scores, which meant you'd need a high fear rating to shake them. This proved true of many swordsman abilities (though certainly not all of them). The bredth promised in that style of advancement wasn't keeping pace with the power level of the game, which drove several people to begin concentrating strictly on numbers, and within that stats. The power of stats over skills is a widely known quirk of the system, but that stats outshine everything else, including schools and sorcery, was something none of us were ready for.
In short, 7th Sea remains a fantastic game with a rich world anda great system filled with simple innovative rules, but the game tops out long before anyone maxes out their scores. Just because the character sheet goes to 11 (or, really, 5) doesn't mean you can play that same game all the way through.
So why the hell am I talking about it here? Because in the course of finishing up my campaign I encountered a few things that I'd not read about, nor ever experienced in all the 7th Sea games we'd played previously, and those things caught all of us by surprise. That sounded worth talking about here.
In a nutshell, high-level 7th Sea is a very different game from low-level 7th Sea (if you'll forgive the rough nomenclature). Now sure, there's an excellent argument to be made that if the game doesn't change at all as your chracter advances, then there's no point in advancing at all. If you're prepared to say that, I'm prepared to agree with you. Statistical analysis of the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons showed that the average hit percentage stayed the same and even dipped a little bit as you progessed from level 1 to level 30. You opposition ramped up in pace with you, meaning that while you were doing math with larger numbers, your actual performance wasn't changing much at all. What's the point then?
Well, in D&D, you get access to more and better powers. These things open up avenues of action that you didn't have previously, making you a little broader in addition to numerically taller. But we're not talking about D&D, we're talking about 7th Sea. The thing is, 7th Sea does that exact thing as well, assuming you're either a swordsman or a sorcerer. In all the time I've played and run this game, eery character has always been one or the other (usually a swordsman), so that shouldn't be much of an issue. But you can in fact make a character who is neither, which happened this last campaign.
I'm rambling, so let's break this down a bit, and start with the basics. The roll and keep system is a good one. No, it's a great one. It's simple, it's flexible, and raising is still the single most awesome game mechanic that I've encountered in a decade. 7th Sea takes roll and keep and makes heavy use of it to great effect. However, at the end of a long campaign where most people are rolling pools approaching 10k5 or more, things begin to slow down. With rasing and well placed bonuses, those pools can shoot close to the 10k10 range, especially when dealing damage. Add in exploding dice, and suddenly you're dealing with a whole lot more math than you were at the beginning of the campaign where people were tossing 6k3. Actions began to slow down, and while the size of the pools finally convinced most people to throw everything away once they reached their target number, anytime we had opposed rolls there was no choice but to add everything up. This would have been muchworse had we done raising by the book, which drove target numbers ever higher instead of reducing the pool size. We could still move the game along, but there was a noticeable lag. In short, the roll and keep system didn't scale well to the high end of the game. It worked, but it didn't work as well as it once did.
High scores impacted combat in another way: panache. For those few out there unfamiliar with the system, combat has 10 phases, and you get one action per point in your panache score. Roll those dice, and each one tells you which phase you get an action on. If you've got a panache of 3, you're going to have 3 actions, the phase of each determined by the results of the dice. It's a cool system and one I found got things moving quickly and cleanly. There's an easy sub-system for dealing with ties, and certain options to let you act out of phase. It's good, and well designed.
When most the combattants have 3+ actions though, the nature of combat changes. Obviously, there's going to be more ties that need to be resolved, but more than that there are a lot of abilities in the game that build up over rounds or require rounds to recharge. Swordsman schools are big on this, and they're what I was getting at when drawing a comparison to D&D, but I'll deal with them more specifically in a moment. For now, suffice to say that when you've got an ability that takes a few rounds of combat to really develop power, there's a big diference in its effectiveness if your opponent is going twice this round or if he's going five times. And Theus help you if you're ganged up on by two panache 5 opponents. You've got no chance.
Therein lays the big scaling problem with this game. The way your character grows mechanically in ways more intesting than larger numbers is his accrual of special abilities, granted by either his school or sorcerous heritage. However, when you factor in the average die pool size getting chucked around by the time you can lay hands on many of these abilities, they lose a lot of luster. The best example of this is an ability one of my players wanted from the very first session of play. It was the ability to begin administering last rights to your opponent in the middle of a fight, and the process was so unnerving that it gave you a mounting fear factor in the combat. In terms of imagery, it's phenominal, and I wanted to see it in play as badly as he wanted to use it.
As the game grew to a close, he amassed enough experience to earn that power. Each round he was in a fight, his fear rating would increase by 1. Unfortunately, by the time he got it, each round was so chocked full of actions that the fights would be over in a single pass, or two in extreme cases. Everyone was doing so much that the party could lay waste to the opposition, who also had a ton of actions, before his fear factorcould grow to anything meaningful. He hung his head after several fights like this and proclaimed he'd dedicated his character to gaining a useess ability.
Normally I don't pan things so quickly, but he really did seem to be right in this case. His ability still looked phenominal on paper, but because to much action could be packed into each round now, it was useless, especially since fear is a resisted thing in thi game, and high level opponents had appropriately high scores, which meant you'd need a high fear rating to shake them. This proved true of many swordsman abilities (though certainly not all of them). The bredth promised in that style of advancement wasn't keeping pace with the power level of the game, which drove several people to begin concentrating strictly on numbers, and within that stats. The power of stats over skills is a widely known quirk of the system, but that stats outshine everything else, including schools and sorcery, was something none of us were ready for.
In short, 7th Sea remains a fantastic game with a rich world anda great system filled with simple innovative rules, but the game tops out long before anyone maxes out their scores. Just because the character sheet goes to 11 (or, really, 5) doesn't mean you can play that same game all the way through.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Game Findings: Swashbuckler
With most of my recent gaming caught up in playing other people's work and playtesting ground to wish dust, I'm left with precious little design work to write about. But that doesn't mean I haven't been learning this whole time. So, for a little bit, I'll be musing about the things I've learned by playing some other titles.
First up, Swashbuckler, by Jolly Roger Games. This was something I really wanted to try as soon as I read about it. The setting is more or less real world Europe, and the core system is pretty spare. Roll some dice, add them up, look for a target number, and you succeed if your total exceeds the difficulty. One thing about this I thought was pretty clever is that attributes are measured with different sized dice, ranging from d6 to d20, while skills are pools of d6s. Since rolling a 1 on your attribute die constitutes a funble, this strikes me as a clever way of differentiating talent and training and making them distinct and equally important.
Since this was a game played with FLux rules, I made the characters, and I made them with experience already spent. I think I spent experience in a way not intended by the game though, since the players all had skills so advanced that they regularly blasted past most target numbers with ease. This had them wanting to raise. Alas, there is no raise mechanic, and I didn't cobble one together for them.
So if you don't spend xp on skills, what do you spend them on? Fighting tecniques. See, combat in Swashbuckler has nothing to do with your stats or skills. Combat is its own independent system. You have a number of techniques available to you, and at the start of combat you select which one you're using. You compare your chosen maneuver against the one your opponent is using, which gives you a modifier. You then apply this modifier to a straight d20 roll, and the higher roll wins. The next exchange, however, you can only use certain techniques, ones the last technique allows. For example, after you lunge, you might only be able to perform a hasty parry, even though you know the maneuvers "shoulder ram" and "hack" as well. Thus your techniques form a web, with some leading to others.
It's neat in concept, and it's pretty cool in application too. I found that what happened was that players first jumped to what they thought was the best technique, but after a few fights they began watching the opponent to determine what kind of style he used, and tried to pick their way through their own fight webs to choose techniques that would give them the best advantage. I'm sure that's exactly what the game intended, and my players had a lot of fun with it.
Combat's very fast, with damage being the margin of victory over your opponent, and wound checks working as a simplified version of 7th Sea's own mechanic (as soon as you fail a wound check, you're down). This makes for fragile characters, but I think it works with the combat system, which is geared more toward not getting hit with the right use of techniques than it is about weathering repeated blows. That strikes me as true to the genre as well. You don't see many swashbuckling films where a fencer powers through receiving thrust after slash after lunge. It's more about desperate, last minute parries, so my hat's off to Jolly Roger Games for getting the genre down in mechanics.
Any hitches? Well, a few.
The combat system is AWESOME when it's one-on-one. One of my players got into a duel with an arrogant musketeer and we went back and forth through multile exchanges that were exciting and beautifully choreographed for us by the rules. It turned tense as they both struck home several times and were woozy and exhausted, either one about to drop when the next blade cut flesh. Everyone agreed it was a fantastic way to run a fight.
This back and forth falls apart very quickly when you're trying to run multiple combattants at once however. It was true both when you have a single opponent fighting multiple foes and when you have multiple one-on-one fights going on. In both cases the fact you need to shift focus from one pair to another means that natural rhythm that develops in one-on-one fighting is lost, and the whole thing becomes just another combat. I'd almost suggest that this become a separate duelling mechanic used to handle duels of honor and use a more abstracted ruleset similar to attribute and skill use for broader combats, since it's a real pitty how much magic the combat system loses when you can't focus in on two fighters exclusively.
The other complaint, though I suspect this will be a common one in many games, is that there's no raise mechanic. Ever since being introduced to raising, my players have become hardcore addicts of the rule, in whatever incarnation it may take. They crave the ability to set their own stakes and reach for the stars in ways that aren't exclusively the call of a high die roll. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with too many games that provide this. Hell, a lot of my own games don't even do this, and I love the concept as much as they do. I don't count that as any failing of the game though; it's a taste thing only.
All in all, Swashbuckler proved to be a fantastic sidebar in our campaign, and I think everyone enjoyed it. That said, given how the combat system really seems to need to be constrained to two individuals to shine, I thnk playing this as an extended one shot worked best for us. I'd want to flesh this out and create a combat system that better handled larger fights (perhaps something like 7th Sea's system, where your techniques aren't tied to a web and can be used in place of basic attacks). It's a fun game though, and not pricey either. Recommended.
First up, Swashbuckler, by Jolly Roger Games. This was something I really wanted to try as soon as I read about it. The setting is more or less real world Europe, and the core system is pretty spare. Roll some dice, add them up, look for a target number, and you succeed if your total exceeds the difficulty. One thing about this I thought was pretty clever is that attributes are measured with different sized dice, ranging from d6 to d20, while skills are pools of d6s. Since rolling a 1 on your attribute die constitutes a funble, this strikes me as a clever way of differentiating talent and training and making them distinct and equally important.
Since this was a game played with FLux rules, I made the characters, and I made them with experience already spent. I think I spent experience in a way not intended by the game though, since the players all had skills so advanced that they regularly blasted past most target numbers with ease. This had them wanting to raise. Alas, there is no raise mechanic, and I didn't cobble one together for them.
So if you don't spend xp on skills, what do you spend them on? Fighting tecniques. See, combat in Swashbuckler has nothing to do with your stats or skills. Combat is its own independent system. You have a number of techniques available to you, and at the start of combat you select which one you're using. You compare your chosen maneuver against the one your opponent is using, which gives you a modifier. You then apply this modifier to a straight d20 roll, and the higher roll wins. The next exchange, however, you can only use certain techniques, ones the last technique allows. For example, after you lunge, you might only be able to perform a hasty parry, even though you know the maneuvers "shoulder ram" and "hack" as well. Thus your techniques form a web, with some leading to others.
It's neat in concept, and it's pretty cool in application too. I found that what happened was that players first jumped to what they thought was the best technique, but after a few fights they began watching the opponent to determine what kind of style he used, and tried to pick their way through their own fight webs to choose techniques that would give them the best advantage. I'm sure that's exactly what the game intended, and my players had a lot of fun with it.
Combat's very fast, with damage being the margin of victory over your opponent, and wound checks working as a simplified version of 7th Sea's own mechanic (as soon as you fail a wound check, you're down). This makes for fragile characters, but I think it works with the combat system, which is geared more toward not getting hit with the right use of techniques than it is about weathering repeated blows. That strikes me as true to the genre as well. You don't see many swashbuckling films where a fencer powers through receiving thrust after slash after lunge. It's more about desperate, last minute parries, so my hat's off to Jolly Roger Games for getting the genre down in mechanics.
Any hitches? Well, a few.
The combat system is AWESOME when it's one-on-one. One of my players got into a duel with an arrogant musketeer and we went back and forth through multile exchanges that were exciting and beautifully choreographed for us by the rules. It turned tense as they both struck home several times and were woozy and exhausted, either one about to drop when the next blade cut flesh. Everyone agreed it was a fantastic way to run a fight.
This back and forth falls apart very quickly when you're trying to run multiple combattants at once however. It was true both when you have a single opponent fighting multiple foes and when you have multiple one-on-one fights going on. In both cases the fact you need to shift focus from one pair to another means that natural rhythm that develops in one-on-one fighting is lost, and the whole thing becomes just another combat. I'd almost suggest that this become a separate duelling mechanic used to handle duels of honor and use a more abstracted ruleset similar to attribute and skill use for broader combats, since it's a real pitty how much magic the combat system loses when you can't focus in on two fighters exclusively.
The other complaint, though I suspect this will be a common one in many games, is that there's no raise mechanic. Ever since being introduced to raising, my players have become hardcore addicts of the rule, in whatever incarnation it may take. They crave the ability to set their own stakes and reach for the stars in ways that aren't exclusively the call of a high die roll. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with too many games that provide this. Hell, a lot of my own games don't even do this, and I love the concept as much as they do. I don't count that as any failing of the game though; it's a taste thing only.
All in all, Swashbuckler proved to be a fantastic sidebar in our campaign, and I think everyone enjoyed it. That said, given how the combat system really seems to need to be constrained to two individuals to shine, I thnk playing this as an extended one shot worked best for us. I'd want to flesh this out and create a combat system that better handled larger fights (perhaps something like 7th Sea's system, where your techniques aren't tied to a web and can be used in place of basic attacks). It's a fun game though, and not pricey either. Recommended.
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