I actually used the Seventh sea Roll and Keep system for several other knock offs. Several things had to be done to make it viable for me.

No skill meant no exploders.

The need to restrict Attribute (the keep part) from being advanced while skills are ignored.

And using different attributes for the same skill, Ie using a stamina attribute with sprint skill for a marathon and a agility attribute with sprint for short runs. Minimizing the importance of any one stat.

In any case increasing attributes eventually breaks the game. I have reconciled myself to that but some of the other roll and keep systmes may work, so I am still looking at other solutions.

Quote from: Artifacts of Amber;637295I actually used the Seventh sea Roll and Keep system for several other knock offs. Several things had to be done to make it viable for me.

No skill meant no exploders.

I LOVE IT!

It fixes my 'swap Keep Attribute, Roll Attribute + Skill into Roll Attribute, Keep Skill' idea. Before I had no idea what to do about unskilled rolls, except keep 1/2 a die.

But with this idea I love it! Unskilled rolls Attribute but keeps only 1 die that does not explode. Buying up skill 1 rapidly accesses keeping one exploder. Buying up extra skills opens more keep die, and each one may be exploders.

So Air 3, Etiquette 0 v. Air 1, Eiquette 1 has a very fair chance to lose. Air3,Etq0 = 3k1 no explode, while Air1,Etq1 = 1k1 explodes allowed. Skillless high attribute has a chance to pick the best 1-10 out of 3 dice, but Skilled low attribute, while likely to lose with just one die, has a chance to explode and blow Skillless high attribute out of the water.

I have thought of making it roll attribute + Skill keep skill but that has a different set of problems. especially in non skilled use.

I have thought the solution is making attributes hard as hell to improve and let people know up front that is the way it is.

maybe making attributes a separate cost and pool of experience is worth the complication.

still most likely just go to another system and try that. Dice pools can be fun but advancement always seems to break them

Attributes were generally more costly to raise than Skills, IIRC.

That and all systems break in the face of ever-expanding infinity. To know that there's an upper playable limit does not worry me. To know the rate of progression too rapidly approaches and exceeds those limits does bother me.

Ergo, slowing progression down is a virtue of game design in my eyes!

Quote from: 1of3;629833One Roll Engine (ORE) is "roll and keep" if you take the words literally: You roll a number of dice, and keep some of them.

I like the idea behind ORE better than R&K because, while the hazzle you go through is similar, the method provides more information than a single number. The hazzle is even less, becuase calculation is not necessary.

I have my gripes with the ORE's other rules, though.

I am running a 7th Sea game and it has come to a point where all my players won't roll dice, using a dice roll app instead because the calculations have become so tedious.

A conversion to ORE could be very interesting, as ORE is a very fast system, and it is based on the same 1-5 attribute + 1-5 skill idea. Hummmm. I think it merits some aditional thought.

I'm not sure, if it does the flamboyant swashbuckling very well. Not sure, if 7th does, either, mind you.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;638323I do not mean to pry, but you don't by any chance happen to have six fingers on your right hand?

Nope, but I have a very cool beard

Quote from: 1of3;640269I'm not sure, if it does the flamboyant swashbuckling very well. Not sure, if 7th does, either, mind you.

Well, I guess it's more about tweaking the wounds system so Heroes don't fall easily, and importing things like Arcana, Backgrounds, and mook rules and the like.

I raised the question on RPG.net because I know there are both 7th Sea and ORE lovers over there, not so sure about this place.

Quote from: 1of3;640269Not sure, if 7th does, either, mind you.

It is quite bizarre actually: the last system i would pick for a swashbuckling game is one where you have to worry about buying different levels in 'Ambush', 'Conceal', 'Lurk', 'Shadow', 'Stealth' and 'Unobtrusive'.

Quote from: jadrax;640327It is quite bizarre actually: the last system i would pick for a swashbuckling game is one where you have to worry about buying different levels in 'Ambush', 'Conceal', 'Lurk', 'Shadow', 'Stealth' and 'Unobtrusive'.

Wacky. Is this one of those games where because of the way the core mechanic is set up raw stats checks are difficult to do or have an unfairly high/low success chance, so there needs to be a skill for everything?

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;640487Wacky. Is this one of those games where because of the way the core mechanic is set up raw stats checks are difficult to do or have an unfairly high/low success chance, so there needs to be a skill for everything?

Part of it was clearly from supplement bloat, a good half of the ones I listed were not in the base game. But part of it is that it was designed for some reason as a very fiddly system. Its this strange disconnect where it wants to be the kind of game that is swashbuckling and fast, but also wants to take account that firing a cannon on land is different to firing one at sea....

You basically get 'Skills' that contains 'knacks' and each knack has to be bought up separately. A lot of people seem to fix this by just having you buy on the skill level, which I think fixes some of the issues.

The other issue is that Raw Stat checks are actually almost as good as having a skill anyway, so the sensible thing to do is completely ignore skills and just buy your stats as high as possible.

ooo
OK thanks.

Quote from: jadrax;640524Part of it was clearly from supplement bloat, a good half of the ones I listed were not in the base game. But part of it is that it was designed for some reason as a very fiddly system. Its this strange disconnect where it wants to be the kind of game that is swashbuckling and fast, but also wants to take account that firing a cannon on land is different to firing one at sea....

You basically get 'Skills' that contains 'knacks' and each knack has to be bought up separately. A lot of people seem to fix this by just having you buy on the skill level, which I think fixes some of the issues.

The other issue is that Raw Stat checks are actually almost as good as having a skill anyway, so the sensible thing to do is completely ignore skills and just buy your stats as high as possible.

A minor nitpick.

If you have 0 in a Knack, then the target number goes up by 5 and your dice don't explode. But apart from that, yeah, high Stat beats high skill every time.

My players soon realized that, apart from sorcerers and swordsmen skills, you just needed to have 1 dot in as much knacks as possible, and boost your Stats as much as you could.

Also, your Drama Dice at the start of an adventure are equal to your lowest Stat, so raising all of them makes a lot of sense, which ends leading to all PCs being very similar (all Stats are useful in combat, and you do not want to stick to having only 2 Drama Dice for long).

Yeah, 7th Sea had its faults. That is why we houseruled a lot. For example we took the average (rounded down iirc) for nr. of Drama Dice and our GM had his eyes on our attributes (he flat out disallowed some of us to push our attributes further) etc. .

For me, i looove the R&K. Why? Because no other system felt that good in relation to character progress. Maybe it was only a feeling, because we never did an exact mathematical analysis, but at the beginning of your career as an adventurer there are certain things you almost never accomplish (this is how it should be, imo) and later on, when you have your first skills and attributes in the 4 or 5 range, there are things you're good at and therefore in tests that concern these things, there is almost nothing you can not accomplish (and again, that is how it should be, imo). It felt very natural/logical to me.
What i also really dig about 7th sea : the swordman schools. I loved the knacks and the special mastery levels. Sure, there were some balancing issues between schools, but again, nothing a group of adults can not handle.

The newest iteration of L4R (4th Ed.) has another incentive to push your skills (in contrast to the attributes) : you get boni if you reach certain skill levels (for example in combat at a certain skill level, your dice explode on a 9 and 10, not only 10 etc.). And you can put emphasis on skills which also give you boni. I think they handled that quite nice. Now it's not such a clear cut deal which you want to raise, attribute or skill.

There's also the Over the Edge system, which has a variation on roll and keep, where you roll and add a number of six siders, but you can have bonus or penalty dice in the roll that influence which dice you keep. So a 3 dice roll with a bonus die would be roll 4 and keep the best 3, while with a penalty die it would be roll 4 and keep the worst 3.

I suspect this is where the advantage die being played with in 5E comes from.

EABA uses a roll and keep method.