Post originally by Tim Gray at 2004-10-18 07:14:42
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Thanks for the review, Nathan. Glad you liked it.
(plug)Grey Realms is a slightly cynical and humorous twist on a "standard" fantasy setting. Beastwalkers came from musings on the World of Darkness lines. Both are 2-3 page starting points for games.(unplug)
Few points from your review:
* Dice succeed on 4, 5 or 6 (not 3, 4 or 6 - gremlin attack!).
* Resistance scores shouldn't really have +'s as those are the actual numbers of dice you'd roll.
* The website address is www.silverbranch.co.uk. Both currently go to the same place, but I'd rather this one were in circulation in case that ever changes.
My aim with Nugget was to get something suitable as a trainer game as well as a quick pick-up. So it has features which are very common in RPG's, like attributes, skills and initiative, rather than other forms of simplified mechanics. One of my thoughts was, "If my nieces ever ask me to run an RPG for them, what would I use?" I'm not sure it's a complete success - does one need a certain amount of RPG knowledge to be able to understand it? - but it has some utility and enables me to throw out interesting game/setting ideas that I can't be bothered to work up at length.
Post originally by Vin Diakuw at 2004-10-18 12:23:46
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Raise your hand if you wrote a game specifically for your niece or nephew... okay, you can't see it, but my hand is up. It's the Pirates of Dark Water RPG. http://www.members.shaw.ca/vdiakuw/DarkWaterRPG.htm
Post originally by Sergio Mascarenhas at 2004-10-18 19:47:09
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The system reminds me a lot of the Storytelling system used by Greg Stafford in Prince Valiant (your 50% chance of success in a d6 is equal to his coin-based randomiser and both are the equivalent of 1d2). Is there a connection or just serendipity?
Post originally by Tim Gray at 2004-10-19 00:19:56
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No connection. In fact, a friend gave me Prince Valiant recently and I still haven't got round to reading it (sorry IC!).
However, there was a connection to Gareth-Michael Skarka's 'Underworld', in the sense that it was one of the games fresh in my mind when I designed LODE for Legends Walk. 50/50 seemed like a simple and predictable thing to work with. The bonus of using d6 rather than coins, apart from not rolling off the table so much, is that you can do funky things with specific results, like exploding 6s which will appear in some incarnations of the system (notably Albion).
Post originally by Sergio Mascarenhas at 2004-10-19 09:37:11
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<< The bonus of using d6 rather than coins, apart from not rolling off the table so much, is that you can do funky things with specific results, like exploding 6s which will appear in some incarnations of the system (notably Albion). >>
Well, that's a way of looking at it, but there's another:
The bonus of using coins rather than d6, apart from a simpler and direct reading of the result (there are only two sides to a coin), is that you *cannot* do funky things, *specially* exploding dice...
I prefer really simple systems and to me those funky things only destroy the beauty of a simple system. But that's only me.
Post originally by Tim Gray at 2004-10-19 11:21:53
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My experience of Earthdawn and 7th Sea showed me that exploding dice affect the psychology of players, making things more exciting. So I added that to my design toolkit, to be used judiciously in the same way as every other tool.
I didn't use it in Legends Walk, for instance, because I wanted to minimise blurring between different ability levels - but it appears as a specific power, Wild Luck. In that version of the system (and the one in Nugget, I think), if all your dice come up 6 you get an extra success. If all dice come up 1 that's a fumble.
When we played Underworld there was a strong sense that people didn't like using coins, with the clattering and rolling (and probably lack of familiarity), and I took that on board. If there is an extra overhead in counting successes on d6 rather than counting heads on coins it's a very small one - it's a very similar task of pattern recognition.
Post originally by Sergio Mascarenhas at 2004-10-20 04:50:47
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<< people didn't like using coins, with the clattering and rolling (and probably lack of familiarity) >>
True. On the other hand, it can be played anywhere at any time without carrying dice around (not that this would be the normal situation for most players, of course).
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