Quote from: Shipyard Locked;905930Picture this: As the GM you have prepped to make your 'jolly time in the salons of not-France trying to corner the master thief' campaign as richly detailed as possible. You have put time and effort into getting key locations, scenes and NPCs right. Then the players turn up with the following 'stories' (more or less)…

The key to this is not to let your players come up with these stories in a vacuum.  You sit them all down in a room together and have a Writers' Room style round table.  You (the GM) lays out some parameters (We will be starting in the Montaigne city of Paix, where a notorious master thief everyone once thought dead has returned) and then lead the players through the process of creating their first story.  This way, no one comes to the table with, "how nice of you to make this adventure for us, but my Hero is desperate to get back to Ussura and will stop at nothing to get there).  Encourage players to come up with intertwined stories and stories that related to your GM's story (since the game already rewards that with potentially faster advancement).  Take a page from TV series and repeat this every 10 game sessions or so to keep everyone on the same page.

I love the IDEA of the story step mechanic.  (Hell, I really want to rip it out and put it in my Witch Hunter game yesterday!)  You may be right that it turns into a nightmare for a GM.  If I ran 7th Sea for my library game group, all 12 players, yeah I would probably ditch most of it as unworkable.  But for 5-7 adults who are on the same page in terms of the game, I love that it could work.

QuoteNow you could argue the GM has a duty to restrict the XP 'stories' to what will fit his campaign, but then aren't you defeating some of the purpose of this 'brilliant' mechanic? Then you're just narrowing them down to a limited range of "Plots I was probably going to do as GM anyway". What's the point then?

Which is exactly what I do and nope, I don't feel that way at all.  The GM is running the game and has a story to tell too.  Just because you get a character story doesn't mean you get to be a special snowflake.  And, no.  If someone comes up with a cool idea that everyone likes, you can always suggest that get tabled until the players finish the current storyline (and collect their reward!) before going in a different direction.

Essentially, Stories are what Backgrounds were in 1st edition.  They telegraph to the GM exactly what the players would like to do and give him extra grist to add to the campaign.  The player comes up with his own plot hook.  You don't have to bait him.  But the player has no idea what lies in store between Step 1 and the Ending, which is all very vague when you boil it down.

QuoteThe trouble is unless you are spending sessions actively seeking out zombies and ghosts to react to with these powers, they are dead (heh!) options. You will soon wish you had picked something else whenever the campaign centers around, oh I don't know, masked balls, carriage chases, duels on rooftops, seduction scenes, ship-to-ship combat, intrigue against cardinals... Again, why is there a "battle zombie hordes on a frequent basis" character type in the middle of the swashbuckling Europe game? John Wick apparently removed most of the magic plate armor of Dracheneisen from not-Germany because it was a pandering out-of-genre imposition on his vision of the setting in 1st ed... then replaced it with this!?

Dracheneisen hasn't been removed.  It's now the prevue of the Die Kriezritter.

And I don't disagree with you.  I think Hexenwerk is a lame replacement.  A couple of folks have taken up the task of trying to reinsert it, basically taking 1st ed Eisen and dropping it in 2nd ed.  I'll post some links if you'd like.  I'm very tempted to go that route.  If I was starting a game tomorrow, I probably would.  I would also be the first to tell my players, "I don't imagine us killing zombie hordes in Eisen any time soon, so Hexenwerk may not be a good place to focus your character."  I've done that before with certain orders in my WH game.

And as I mentioned, there has been plenty of talk about houseruling Hexenwerk to affect monsters in general, not just undead, which gives it MUCH more utility.

QuoteSo what if there's a small chance of turning into a villain NPC, thereby throwing yet another huge wrench into any attempt to maintain some semblance of a coherent campaign? Lots of players live for that kind of brush with raw power, that kind of risk, that kind of attention. It's an "everyone look at me!" button. What a great gaming story that will make later, forgetting how the campaign fell apart shortly afterward due to GM burn-out.

Ah, so now the complaint about the Commonwealth being a Mary Sue/Special Snowflake makes a bit more sense.  I mean I really can't tell you that you're wrong about this.  The player could unleash the fire gorilla as a major favor, burn a hole in the capital city and call it a day.  I suspect that isn't going to happen in a lot of games, mainly due to pressure by the other "heroes" ("There has to be another way!"  "Don't go into the light, Carole Ann!") and by the magnitude of the consequences of the act.  But sure, it could happen.  And it can shake things up a bit.  

QuoteBy the way, I've seen you writing about this game in more than one venue, and you're often one of its first defenders despite your own skepticism. As you've said, it's "outside of your comfort zone". Do you worry that perhaps you are a bit emotionally invested in this 2nd edition working and that's affecting how you perceive it?

Hey now, I did preface all of this by saying I LOVE 1st edition 7th Sea, warts and all.  I love the setting.  The rules hit my sweet spot.  The second edition setting is…mostly the same.  The rules are just very different.   I was very skeptical at first, but a lot of the tools in 2nd edition make sense.  I'm not running a long-term game any time soon, but I do want to play.  I also want to see someone cook up a really good 7th Sea 1.5, because that would solve 90% of my issues with this edition.  I love that people are retro-fitting dracheneisen back into the game as Eisen's national sorcery, and tweaking Die Krieuzritter so they don't lack in return.  Am I a bit emotionally invested?  You bet your sweet ass I am.  I won't deny that one bit.  Is it affecting how I perceive it?  Possibly.  But I do try to keep an open mind about it in terms of other people.

Shipyard, you aren't wrong if you don't like it.  If everything about the system, the sorceries, the setting scream, "kill it with fire!" I'm not going to tell you how you are a terrible person.  I'll give you my perception of things where I think we are opposed, but that's it.  If it doesn't click, it doesn't.  And that's all there is to it.

Tom

Quote from: Blusponge;905946And I don't disagree with you.  I think Hexenwerk is a lame replacement.  A couple of folks have taken up the task of trying to reinsert it, basically taking 1st ed Eisen and dropping it in 2nd ed.  I'll post some links if you'd like.  I'm very tempted to go that route.  If I was starting a game tomorrow, I probably would.  I would also be the first to tell my players, "I don't imagine us killing zombie hordes in Eisen any time soon, so Hexenwerk may not be a good place to focus your character."  I've done that before with certain orders in my WH game.

And as I mentioned, there has been plenty of talk about houseruling Hexenwerk to affect monsters in general, not just undead, which gives it MUCH more utility.

I don't think Hexenwork is unsalvageable. The abilities that let you talk to corpses, poison someone into a zombie slave, project yourself as a ghost or gain monstrous characteristics are solid. "Death" and "creepy cooking" are themes with lots of potential for powers, so it wouldn't be hard to steal some ideas from other games and put them into Hexenwerk. I'm just baffled that Wick fucked this up.

Quote from: Blusponge;905946Ah, so now the complaint about the Commonwealth being a Mary Sue/Special Snowflake makes a bit more sense.

Well it's more than that. Honestly Wick clearly had a hard-on for the place during the writing process, and I find the write-up (which I know actually have before my eyes) unrealistic. Well, ok, I'm not familiar enough with Polish history to judge I guess, but their government sounds impossible at first blush. Entire villages abandoning their work to trek to some distant parliament and vote their whims? Maybe you understand this history better than I do. I could use some insight.

Quote from: Blusponge;905946I suspect that isn't going to happen in a lot of games, mainly due to pressure by the other "heroes" ("There has to be another way!"  "Don't go into the light, Carole Ann!") and by the magnitude of the consequences of the act.

Speaking of which, what has stopped not-Polish sorcerer dictators from using Sanderis to take over the world? Nothing in the rules or flavor text holds Sanderis villains back.

my blog post on keeping heroes' stories and GM's stories from stumbling over and contradicting each other is now live. I don't promise it will turn anyone into a believer, but it should help address the issue.

https://braceofpistols.wordpress.com/2016/07/07/the-writers-room-7th-sea/

Looks like you are not the only one with a play report. Sign of the Frothing Mug posted one yesterday.

Thanks for the additional data guys.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;905999Speaking of which, what has stopped not-Polish sorcerer dictators from using Sanderis to take over the world? Nothing in the rules or flavor text holds Sanderis villains back.

The only thing that I've come across, in my hasty read through, is that once you seal the seventh bargain you might not be "you" anymore. The ultimate power is that the deva (?) takes you over, and that's a "secret" of the power.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;905999Well it's more than that. Honestly Wick clearly had a hard-on for the place during the writing process, and I find the write-up (which I know actually have before my eyes) unrealistic. Well, ok, I'm not familiar enough with Polish history to judge I guess, but their government sounds impossible at first blush. Entire villages abandoning their work to trek to some distant parliament and vote their whims? Maybe you understand this history better than I do. I could use some insight.

I'll clarify that I haven't actually read anything about the new 7th Sea, and barely remember the old one.

As far as the historical Polish Commonwealth, it had a situation where all the Szlachta, the Polish nobility, had a number of special powers, including voting for the new king, and participating in the governing process through sejmiks and sejms.

The Sejmik was a regional parliament, where in theory any member of the Szlachta from that region could attend. In practice, most sejmiks only drew around 5% of all the local nobility.  The Sejmik would make regional laws and would select representatives to go to the Sejm, the Commonwealth Parliament.

Nobles in the Commonwealth were all equal, in theory at least.  The saying goes that the poorest farmer-noble was exactly alike to the most powerful commander of the armies. There wasn't the standard mixture of baron/earl/duke/etc in the Commonwealth; all Szlachta officially had the same title: Hrabia ("Count").  Even so, very wealthy and powerful nobles would be referred to as 'magnates' and in practice of course had more influence. But every Noble, even the poorest or humblest, had the same special legal privileges. This eventually extended to the 'liberum veto', the right to veto any vote taken in a sejmik or Sejm to which they had a right to attend (this later development is one of the big factors that crippled Poland as a nation and led to its eventual partition).

The Commonwealth was curious in that it had a far larger percentage of nobles than most other European nations, about 10% of the population were Szlachta, compared to 1-3% in most other European countries. But as you can see, this definitely did NOT mean 'entire villages trekking to distant parliaments to vote their whims'. 90% of the population didn't have a right to vote anything, and of the remainder 95% didn't even bother trekking to their local parliament two fields over.

Thanks for the history lesson, Pundit. ::files that away::

The trekking from small villages comes from the Sarmatian Commonwealth background in 7th Sea. Essentially, the dying King is looking for a way to blunt the power of the nobility, so he uses the only power he has that the nobles can't veto: he makes every citizen a noble. This makes the Commonwealth the first democracy in modern Theah. It also really pisses off the old establishment.

Obviously, as with many other places, the history of Theah and Earth diverge quite considerably.

I'm sure that is some form of virtue signalling, coupled with the all too common historical illiteracy all too common of their ilk....  

Quote from: Spike;908544I'm sure that is some form of virtue signalling, coupled with the all too common historical illiteracy all too common of their ilk....  

It's also a bit more feasible than the actual Commonwealth, at least if it does NOT include the liberum veto.  I haven't read enough of my copy to know if it addresses that.

JG

I'm more sniffing at the historical illiteracy of declaring the firstest evah direct democracy in a renissance... resitance... fuckit, 3 musketeer era, poland, rather than some three fucking thousand years earlier.  Or for that matter, making it in a faux switzerland, some four centuries earlier.  Or....

For that matter: why no Theah Swiss? Seriously: Have you seen how those guys dress?  You gotta have balls of selenium core carbon fiber wrapped tungsten steel to dress like that, and they use motherfuckin HALBERDS. Today. Like, seriously: You mess with those swiss mercs in italy in Current Year and you'll get a halberd to the face from a dude dressed like Bozo the Clown's worst nightmare!

Tell me that ain't Swash and Buckle!

Fegh. Poland. Whatevah.

Quote from: Blusponge;908463Thanks for the history lesson, Pundit. ::files that away::

The trekking from small villages comes from the Sarmatian Commonwealth background in 7th Sea. Essentially, the dying King is looking for a way to blunt the power of the nobility, so he uses the only power he has that the nobles can't veto: he makes every citizen a noble. This makes the Commonwealth the first democracy in modern Theah. It also really pisses off the old establishment.

Well, there's no way that would have happened.

Quote from: Spike;908727I'm more sniffing at the historical illiteracy of declaring the firstest evah direct democracy in a renissance... resitance... fuckit, 3 musketeer era, poland, rather than some three fucking thousand years earlier.  Or for that matter, making it in a faux switzerland, some four centuries earlier.  Or....

For that matter: why no Theah Swiss? Seriously: Have you seen how those guys dress?  You gotta have balls of selenium core carbon fiber wrapped tungsten steel to dress like that, and they use motherfuckin HALBERDS. Today. Like, seriously: You mess with those swiss mercs in italy in Current Year and you'll get a halberd to the face from a dude dressed like Bozo the Clown's worst nightmare!

Tell me that ain't Swash and Buckle!

Fegh. Poland. Whatevah.

Well, the Polish Constitution of 1791 was a hugely progressive Constitution by the standards of the time in a European monarchy.  It was pretty much a last-gasp attempt at reform, but came too little, too late to stop Poland's collapse.

Quote from: RPGPundit;909412Well, there's no way that would have happened.

Nope.  But the fey aren't going to show up and give the queen of England a magical chalice, either.  So I won't count it as a mark against the setting.

Quote from: RPGPundit;909413Well, the Polish Constitution of 1791 was a hugely progressive Constitution by the standards of the time in a European monarchy.  It was pretty much a last-gasp attempt at reform, but came too little, too late to stop Poland's collapse.

No doubt. Of course the real problem is that, at least in first edition, Theah has a massively truncated history, basically ignoring anything before Rome... except for Aliens/Gods/Whatever.

Its fucking lazy as shit, and it leads to patently absurd declarations like Not-Poland having the first true democracy in the world.  Sure: Because your world managed to reach the age of sail while only having a single millennia of history en toto, and only counting one continent...