Showing posts with label Generic System. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Generic System. Show all posts

Thursday, December 25, 2014

Playing in Tekumel, with Fate

I have been quite curious about Tekumel a while now. More and more Tekumel texts have assembled on my sagging shelves, and I have decided to take a dive into the deep end and run a game in the new year. Bethorm arrived and I blogged about my impressions. Having read a bit more in it I'm now pretty clear I wont run that game. It's a bit too fiddly for me. But, the game system I have been using lately, Fate, might do the trick.

Fate is a very different game. Different from almost all other traditional games I've been playing for all these years. Trying to adapt Fate for Tekumel I've found one of the reasons for that. If you were to become enamoured by Savage Worlds or GURPS and wanted to convert your old game to that new system, is would mainly be a question about how to map the different systems to each other. Magic works in one way in the original system, and then the question is how to make the target magic system to behave that way. Fate is different. I have found that when I started to do a "generic" conversion it felt a bit rough in places. It turns out that the game you want to play will strongly influence how you do it.

My first idea for a Tekumel game centred around a clan house. I figured it would be easiest to keep the game within one clan, within one location and centre is around interaction between clan siblings.

It turned out to be harder than I thought to model this by figuring out how to make the rules for the usual cabal of magic-user, cleric and fighters. I dived deep into the intricacies of Tekumel metaphysics and magic and suddenly I had a game where magic way more complicated than anything else in the game. But, magic was not intended as the big focus of the game! I found out it is very easy to use the so called "Fate fractal" to take that literally and recursively deep into a tailspin of complexity.

That was when I realized what I wrote above, the game you want to play will strongly influence how you do it. Fate is a game system that change depending on how you handle it. Once again I had been fooled. Once again the strangeness of it all had exposed how I had approached the game I was planning with an approach that the rules was something I brought to the game, not something that adapted to the game. I wonder if I will ever feel comfortable with that!

Now I have a set of Fate rule guidelines for a Tekumelian game, and once I have written it all down from my handwritten notes I will put them up for perusal.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

How many generic rules do you need? One?

Yesterday I was looking at the Open RPG forum over at rpg.net, and found poll about generic systems. The question of course was, which of the generic ones you use.

I found this interesting, since among the 60 or so rule systems that I own, I find a few of the ones mentioned in the poll. Here's the list of the systems in the poll.

  1. BRP*
  2. GURPS*
  3. HERO
  4. Savage Worlds*
  5. Unisystem
  6. FATE*
  7. HeroQuest
  8. PDQ
  9. d6 system*
  10. d20 system*

The systems I own is marked with a star.

Considering the fact that generic systems is supposed to be able to be used for any setting, why would you need more than one? Surely it would be cheapest to buy one and then use that for all your gaming needs, since it can be used for anything. Right?

Maybe I should ask myself why I own so many of these? I know I prefer some of them for different reasons, and to be frank I don't think I would enjoy using any one of all these systems for all my campaigns. I've heard of that kind of behaviour many times, but it don't seem to be my way. All those systems come with an agenda, and some kind of implied style of play. Since I don't own all of them I can't tell you what it is, but I'm certain it's true for all. Just compare GURPS and the D6 system vehicular combat rules. Two campaigns using these two will be very different, even if both are generic and universal.

So, why bother with generic systems if having style/setting/rules as a unit seem to make so much sense? I'm not sure, really. For me as an obsessive collector I don't need much to get a new system, but if forced to explain myself I'll be sheepishly out of words. I kind of hope I'm not alone at this...

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

How I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb, or at least D&D

One of my friends likes to tease me these days when I mention D&D. Back in the days when we spent hours and hours in our FLGS chatting about games and pontificating upon the merits or flaws of different games, I had some strong opinions about D&D. Some of these I now get to hear again, directed as questions and friendly sarcasms. I think I probably deserve it.

Even though I spent a lot of money on source books and adventures for AD&D, I never played the game, but I did have a grasp of the game mechanics. I had played the AD&D computer games from SSI, so I knew how things worked. Whatever you thought of D&D, it made sense to know a bit of it considering the amount of stuff you could then pick up and salvage for other games. The diversity of things like Al Qadim, Planescape and Birthright amazed me, and I bemoaned the fact it was written for this system which I despised. Back then I usually called AD&D a "bad combat system, masquerading as a roleplaying game". In a way I still see the flaws, but some developments made me change my general attitude toward D&D

A few years back someone at WotC wrote a very immodest piece on the history of the game. It all boiled down to the fact that D&D had tried to become a generic fantasy system and until 3rd ed came around it just made the game gain weight until it was too heavy to dance to all the different tunes played. Anyone who read Planescape probably remembers all the hairsplittingly complex changes to the magic system to account for the relations between caster and differently aligned planes. All the settings seemed to have similar changes and you could tell the game was a square peg being pushed into a round hole.

Now, when 3rd edition was published we had a very different beast. With a very expressive system of skills, feats and prestige classes you could tool the game to match your setting. It was designed to do it. Because of that I still think third edition is the "best" D&D published so far. It could do whatever you wanted it to. Needless to say the author of that history piece congratulated himself and WotC for their accomplishments, which felt a bit much.

Since WotC decided to publish their new edition very cheaply I picked it up, "for reference", and was charmed. Not too long after that I had started my first D&D campaign and my friends could quote my old digs to me and wonder why I was playing a "bad combat system, masquerading as a roleplaying game"? Maybe a valid question.

I don't think that the best edition for getting a classic "D&D experience" actually has to be the third edition. Having read a bit more about the history of the game, and understood how it once was a game of pulp adventure and sword and sorcery, I now have come around and prefer the so called B/X and BECMI editions of the game. This have been a journey I've been on a few years. Now I am in the midst of the Old School Renaissance, championing Tunnels & Trolls and happily buying games like Swords & Wizardry. One thing I understand now which I didn't when I was making fun of AD&D, is that the game I saw was trying to do something it was never originally intended to do. Not so surprising if it looked like a failure.

Then we have the next step in my evolution, when I learned to love the idea of dungeons. Maybe I'll post about that at a later date.

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