Of Roleplaying Games
Dec. 12th, 2016 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tcpipIt is true that I have several major interests in my life, external to hearth and mind. There is a professional dedication to provide researchers the skills to use free and open source computional tools. There is a political side dedicated to the practical implementation of personal liberty and social democracy, and the continuum that is between. There a long-standing interest in philosophy which, despite its innate propensity of some of its adherents to lead to unverifiable metaphysical presumptions and scholasticism, is at its heart the most important and most difficult field of inquiry. My other academic pursuits betray interests in organisational structure, strategy, and management, the effectis of normative systems on positive economics, and of course advanced adult and tertiary education. Aesthetically, I am known to have a some love of high art, yet also with deeply ingrained rocknerd sensibilities.
Then there's roleplaying games. My public vice whether it is from orcs, and hobbits, of faerie tales and dragons, or little green men from Mars, spaceships and wormholes, or even - to a lesser extent - superpowered individuals who wear their underwear on the outside. I know about 'Of Dice and Men', I have 'The Elfish Gene' (to use two pun-inspired books on the subject). But despite these popular culture affectations, where else do I find improvised theatre that places the characters in the heroic age of mythology, or the troubles of transhuman speculations. Where else do I find the exploration of models of reality with genre influences and debates? It is in roleplaying games, the undergound home theatre of the era, that is the only refuge for cerebral geekdom. After all there's not one, but two serious books entitled 'Philosophy and Dungeons & Dragons'. I feel it more important to do one on RuneQuest.
In any case this was a roleplaying weekend, starting no less with an interview with Dan Davenport from RPG.net on IRC over the upcoming Papers and Paychecks. Best line of endorsement that came from the interview: "I have to say, this game has some solid mechanics for a game based on a joke". After that I finished my interviews for the Alternity Player's Handbook and Gamemaster's Guide, and did a write-up of the last episode of our Eclipse Phase. The following day it was writing a review of the old TSR game Gangbusters (which took a lot less time), and putting it altogether to be released as RPG Review 32 which includes - no less - an interview with the author of BECMI D&D, Frank Mentzer. That afternoon was our session of Eclipe Phase using the new playtester rules which have some nice features (but that's all I can say at this stage, because I'm under a NDA). Of course, this wan't all I did over the weekend - but because things have been a bit RPG-heavy of late, I have felt the need to justify this idle pursuit within myslf.
Then there's roleplaying games. My public vice whether it is from orcs, and hobbits, of faerie tales and dragons, or little green men from Mars, spaceships and wormholes, or even - to a lesser extent - superpowered individuals who wear their underwear on the outside. I know about 'Of Dice and Men', I have 'The Elfish Gene' (to use two pun-inspired books on the subject). But despite these popular culture affectations, where else do I find improvised theatre that places the characters in the heroic age of mythology, or the troubles of transhuman speculations. Where else do I find the exploration of models of reality with genre influences and debates? It is in roleplaying games, the undergound home theatre of the era, that is the only refuge for cerebral geekdom. After all there's not one, but two serious books entitled 'Philosophy and Dungeons & Dragons'. I feel it more important to do one on RuneQuest.
In any case this was a roleplaying weekend, starting no less with an interview with Dan Davenport from RPG.net on IRC over the upcoming Papers and Paychecks. Best line of endorsement that came from the interview: "I have to say, this game has some solid mechanics for a game based on a joke". After that I finished my interviews for the Alternity Player's Handbook and Gamemaster's Guide, and did a write-up of the last episode of our Eclipse Phase. The following day it was writing a review of the old TSR game Gangbusters (which took a lot less time), and putting it altogether to be released as RPG Review 32 which includes - no less - an interview with the author of BECMI D&D, Frank Mentzer. That afternoon was our session of Eclipe Phase using the new playtester rules which have some nice features (but that's all I can say at this stage, because I'm under a NDA). Of course, this wan't all I did over the weekend - but because things have been a bit RPG-heavy of late, I have felt the need to justify this idle pursuit within myslf.
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Date: 2016-12-13 01:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-14 06:31 am (UTC)Drakar och Demoner! I have head so many good things about that game. If only my Swedish was (a lot) better.
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Date: 2017-01-04 09:15 am (UTC)The "base game" (as it were) isn't super-exciting, in this day and age. It's pretty much "Basic Role-Playing". The re-working into its 2nd (I think) version was a marked improvement and the expansions into "Expert" and "Gigant" ("EDD", and "GDD") were definite improvements.
It's arguable if some of the other Swedish games were or weren't related (Mutant certainly shared a lot of system similarities, in its first version). Apparently "Samuraj" was officially part of the product line, something that vaguely surprises me, although I would definitely say that there's common system heritage.
Mutant 2 has some similarities, but also has skill trees, which is definitely not in BRP heritage. I don't recall how they worked, but I think skills became more costly, as it were, the more general they were, and more specialised branches of a skill were basically bought as "next more general + increase". It's been 25+ years since I looked at the rules, so I am likely wrong.
I did end up getting a full set of the Mutant 2 rules "for free" (I had written a bunch of rules for either robot or cyborg characters for the first version, and the publisher wanted me to re-work that for the new rules, but as the game was still 2+ months from general availability, I started out with a print-out of the relevant rules and then got the full rules as a bennie; then ended up doing some of play-testing of modules).
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Date: 2017-01-05 04:17 am (UTC)That sounds like something I've played around with in the past.
There is a very rudimentary (two level plus specialisations) skill tree in Ringworld, a much overlooked game.
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Date: 2017-01-05 09:13 am (UTC)Specifically, each weapon has its own skill and many weapons fall in a category that has a "category skill" and the effective number to roll against (with a D%) is "specific + category". It also uses per-skill experience points, and you can trade (from memory) 3 specific EP for a category EP, but not trade the other way around.
One of the interesting choices made for EDD onwards was that skill rolls (and skill values) were dropped from D% to D20, but still keeping the "roll under or equal" mechanic, this makes stat-based rolls trivial (no multiplication), but makes skill advancement less granular. It also has interesting knock-on effects on critical successes and failures, where instead of having a specific target number, you roll again on 1 and 20 (on 1, a successful skill roll means critical success; on 20, a fail means a critical failure).