Quote:
Originally Posted by MrWilli
Hey, if you love SOTC, more power to you. I still think it only merits three stars for a system that cuts too many corners and a book tries to meld several genres into one without much success, but I'm only one guy.
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That's an interesting perspective, because SOTC is one of the
most thorough games that I've seen. There isn't a lot of fluff in the rulebook.
I'm guessing that the key difference is that SOTC does not predefine as many parameters for various abilities, creatures, and tools as a game like Savage Worlds does. Now, if the SOTC writers just gave you a brief overview of the Aspect/Stunt mechanics and left it at that, I'd see the "cuts corners" aspect.
But the rules give you a
ton of advice and examples of how players and GMs can customize and adjudicate those mechanics. To me, that's a lot of versatility and provides more variety than a game like Savage Worlds does, where a lot of the abilities seem very similar to one another, just adding bonuses to a different resolution roll. Both games seem to require you to provide the flavor to spice up the stats; SOTC's Stunts actually seem to provide more flavor to me than the Savage World traits.
The SOTC approach may be more work in some cases than having a rigidly defined trait, but I think the fact that this work is shared between the players and the GM (because both sides are encouraged to be creative) and the fact that you can come up with some of these things
in play (particularly Aspects associated with the environment or an enemy, which can often be done on the fly without having been statted up in advance) cuts down on any added work significantly from a GM standpoint.
Interestingly, Savage Worlds was developed out of the ruleset used for a miniatures war game. You're probably right in the target market for the game, so it's a compliment to the Savage Worlds guys that it works so well for you. And Savage Worlds has been out longer and has a lot of toolkits available to do much of the heavy lifting for prep work, so I imagine it's a faster game to get off the ground than SOTC, just from the time devoted to interactive character creation alone.
It seems to me like each development team created a system aimed (though not exclusive to) different play styles and did a good job of doing so.