Based on my experience. Of course, there’s plenty of rules mistakes and deck building mistakes, but I’m focusing on easy-to-fix problems. Also, even though I’m giving specific examples, I’m trying to fix larger problems.
I bought this game pretty much on impulse one Friday between the rounds at an FNM. Later on I found out that this game is popular among MtG players between rounds in large tournaments in the US. I can see why. Its fast, and it hones certain skills needed in high-level MtG.
Long ago, I got myself acquainted with Heavy Gear 2nd edition RPG. I liked the basis of the system, but the more I read it, the more I found some of the usual offenders of RPG systems of the time. Agility as a god-stat, Combat Sense skill 2 is mandatory unless you like to do nothing in many of the combat rounds, movement calculations need to be done beforehand by whipping out a calculator to do some fraction counting, and the overall fiddliness of the system made me dump it. But before I had the chance to do that, I fell in love with its seamless integration of the vehicle rules, and the damage system. SilCore as a whole stuck to my mind as a diamond in the rough; probably salvageable, but not without a heck of a lot of brainy type work.
I don’t really know why exactly I decided to give Silhouette Core another look after all these years, I guess I was bored or something, but I broke it into tiny pieces and put it back together. High attribute modifiers apparently are one of the things that have offended people playing it. I’d say the contrary: too much low attribute modifiers is the reason it doesn’t work well. Or rather, the radical contrast between them. This is a dice-system feature and nothing much can be done about it, if one wants to preserve the original game engine. The problems may be alleviated by handing out the essential bits free for everyone.
When I had put it back together, I reverse-engineered to see how it compares with the original, and I saw that the characters made through my method were somewhere between “cinematic PCs” and “cinematic major NPCs”. But that’s the way I like my games pretty much always. I do not want to sit moping in my chair due to an unfortunate Initiative roll, not even bothering to watch as other players get to do all kinds of cool shit.
So in my mind Combat Sense, along with Agility are the main offenders. Combat Sense and ranged defense had to be separated from the skills, so I made derived attributes out of those. In SilCore there are a whole lot of pretty much redundant attributes, so I decided to begin my work by cutting those. I ended up with four attributes, so that all of them would be used in determining Defense and Combat Sense. Alertness + Body for Defense and Intelligence + Spirit for Combat Sense.
I worked on simplifying skills, movement stuff, overall action economy, injuries, you name it. I even added some stuff that I felt was missing, like different close combat maneuvers, which are completely absent from SilCore. I ended up with a 23 page skeleton of a system that goes best for modern-equivalent settings or sci-fi when put some meat on its bones (I never thought that SilCore would be a good fit for fantasy or horror genre).
Anyways, here it is available (with permission from Dream Pod 9). I you have any suggestions, praises, comments, or you would just like to let me know how I have ruined the game, please leave a comment! ;)
Edit – Made a better character sheet.
Edit 2 – Made a change to the damage system.
Death and the act of killing a player character in roleplaying games is a controversial subject. The players are quite rightfully protective about their characters but even when not considering about their opinions about the death of a PC the hardest part of such an event is in the hands of the GM.
In my past I have shied away from killing the characters. As a teenager I tended to make all of my rolls in secrecy so I could always fudge the result to keep a character just barely alive. Later on I made the decision of making my rolls open so that the dice would decide wether the character survives or not. But lately (once again thanks to the AWengine) I have had to scrutinise my thinking. Continue reading
We had a Chrismas party a week ago. Instead of board games, I said I could run World of Dungeons. It’s an ultralight hack of Dungeon World which I hadn’t run it before, so we took it on a spin. Because nobody believed that we could play entirely sober, I decided on a full improv session. It degenerated slowly, but inevitably—and undeniably gloriously—into player vs. player mayhem, which surprised me very little. Despite my mistakes as a drunken GM, we had a whole lot of fun, and I learned a few important lessons. These are my notes from the GM’s standpoint. Continue reading
I know we’re a bit late on this, but it felt like a good idea, so here’s a short one anyway. Perhaps we’ll have one in good time next year. (No, we won’t.)
Note that we are not getting any money for any of the links. They might not be the best sources, but they were the ones I found first (well, in some cases they are the only sources). Anyhow, do your own research if you want the best deal.
Someone had found his or her way into this blog by using the words “wood sage mtg pauper commander”. That got me thinking. First thought was “is that really uncommon”? I would’ve thought such an old card would be rare with its awkward build-around abilities, but apparently it was reprinted in Conspiracy, so now it’s uncommon.
Second thought: It does really have potential, so why not?
After putting some money into The Dracula Dossier by Ken Hite (which you can – as of this writing – still back) Kickstarter informed me that this is in fact my tenth backed project. Seems like a nice round number to recount some of my experiences.
This is my view on John Harper and Paul Riddle’s The Regiment, run by Lauri. There’s nothing much I can add to Lauri’s description of the session, so I’ll talk a bit about my impressions of the system. Do keep in mind that even though the version number is 2.5, The Regiment is still a work in progress; beautiful and promising, but flawed. I hope these notes will a) help the designers hone the game, b) make you interested in testing in it, and c) give you a couple of hints while playing it. Continue reading