I picked this game system up on a whim, having read Greg Stolze's writing before in the City of Lies for L5R. I just love the way Greg writes.
Anyway, I'm trying to prepare my first series using the REIGN game. I pre-ordered/supported Reign: Enchiridion but might not be able to hold out for that release.
I'm not overly fond of the game's setting, even though it has some really cool bits and pieces. I guess the freakish geography sends my head for a loop.
I know what I want this game to be about. The players are going to be brothers, sisters, or cousins in a powerful noble family. They will be caught up in the intrigue of court politics and be occupied by duty and obligations.
The setting will be psuedo-Roman with a bent on historical fiction, rather than historical accuracy. I'm trying to decide if there will be magic or not. I'm thinking I might borrow from the Reign setting here. Magic is a neat element in the Reign setting, particularly the detection of and the time that it takes to cast major mojo.
I'm mostly in the brainstorming stages. I'm also reading the rules and trying to grasp the mechanics as I go through the book. I will likely keep it simple, perhaps adding more advanced combat options later on if I feel they are needed.
If you have any experiences with Reign or other ORE systems that you would like to share, please do. Pointers regarding the mechanics... things to watch out for... things to do, things to avoid... that sort of thing... would be appreciated. And if you have any ideas for a psuedo-Roman setting other than Hinterwelt's fine Roma Imperious, please feel free to share those as well.
Thanks.
One big difference between your "Roman" empire and other nations is laws - Rome was an empire of laws, compared to most. Not always nice or good laws, but they were (AFAIK) much more organized.
That should be part of their life and culture.
Granted, I'm far from an expert and will probably be corrected shortly.
With my limited knowledge of ORE games, settings are obviously big differentiators and not just because of martial specializations or magic powers but also the influence on the list of traits and skills that will be present on the character sheet.
Monsters and Other Childish Things was a big eye opener for me. With its few organic traits (face, guts, hands, feet, brain) and very short list of skills (2 for each traits) it makes for a very lean use of ORE and I love the contrast with super crunchy Reign. I love Reign too, that's not the question, but it's got something like ten skills that relate more or less to social tasks, and that's a clear statement about the game. But I know if I was to run a Reign campaign I would slim it down a bit. I wonder what Enchiridion will say about traits and skill lists.
Also player can focus on skills and ignore traits in Reign whereas M&OTC is more "traditional" because traits are used to represent endurance to damage as well.
There's an assumption in these 2 ORE games: a skill is associated with one trait. It's not written in stone that a skill should always be rolled with its associated trait but it's strongly implied. WoD games have a more flexible approach to this: a social skill more or less implies to be rolled with a social trait (say manipulation + subterfuge) but there's always a possibility for a deviant call (say wits + empathy or whatever). I think it would be interesting to use ORE in the same flexible way but it means you would have to keep the size of the trait and skill lists under critical mass or players would feel lost about how to make efficient PCs.
One shouldn't neglect the importance of One Roll Generators. It's quite a lot of work to tweak them but I assume they can enhance a game dramatically.
I'm very interested in A Dirty World also because of intriguing mechanics I read about. Like pairing traits together and putting a cap on the sum of the two. I'm curious about those pairs and their implications on the gameplay. If anyone has experience with this I'd love to read about it (I'm not big on Noir genre that's my problem with Dirty World)
My pointer from two games of Godlike:
In the two games I ran we discovered that the game plays more keystone cops than "gritty" (Gritty is moody settings, mechanics that make things dangerous, but doesn't make you fail so often--ORE? Lots of failures.) Unless the PC's have wiggle/hard/expert dice (or whatever Reign calls them.)
Now they may have fixed Reign, but I doubt it. The measure between keystone cops and super competent is a very very small margin. I wish I could show you William Stoddard's (GURP's Fantasy writer iirc) comments on the system, but I'm pretty sure they were all on the old Pyramid forums.
In general their response to such issues (the creators*) has been "Do not apply the dice system unless its a really stressful moment!" which to me reads as "don't use the system."
For the record, others seem to like the failure rate.
I once went and tested 1000+ rolls because of their arguments that it will balance out and the math was sound. In that I was getting that the alleged "50/50" rate in my 1000 looked more like 69 failure vs 31 success. (Or something similar, its been a few years.)
Maybe eventually in 10000 rolls it will even out to 50/50, but frankly I hope my players don't ever make 10000 rolls of the dice in a campaign unless it goes for decades.
Problem with letting pure math decide your game rules, rather than actual playtesting.
My players at the time refused to ever consider trying an ORE powered game. I really wanted Wild Talents to work, it had been something I'd been waiting for when Godlike came out and I decided despite the WW2 setting to pick it up.
Of course your mileage may vary, and it may work for you.
*Creators who seem to think I'm just a "hater" rather than someone who tried their games and really would like them if they didn't play so mechanically rough.
A REIGN-specific suggestions: scale the Company rules to suit the sort of campaign you're running, and adapt the Company actions to match. If your players' Company is a nation, then use the Company rules to cover mighty empires at one end and tiny statelets at the other end. Depending on the setting, perhaps some other groups will be powerful enough to cause concern on a national scale - major guilds, organised crime syndicates, international drugs cartels, global conspiracies, that sort of thing - so those are worth statting up as Companies too. But a small gang of petty thieves working out of the slums of the nation's capital? Not worth representing mechanically as a Company - they might be able to cause trouble for the PCs as individuals (a knife in the ribs is a knife in the ribs, whoever's holding the handle), but their organisation simply isn't on a scale that's going to disrupt/help affairs of state.
On the other hand, if your players' Company *is* that gang of petty thieves, then again, scale the Company rules accordingly. Use them to model Companies which a) would have an impact on the PCs' world, and b) are of a scale where the PCs can impact them - so for the gang of thieves you'd want the company rules to cover major gangs, the city watch, and so on at the high end of the scale and small businesses and small groups at the lower end of the scale. When the PCs are comparatively small fry it's not worth statting "the nation" as a Company because the PCs' Company doesn't have the resources to really have much of an impact on the nation as a whole (though that might change if they get more powerful), although individual arms of the state, like army divisions and bureaucratic departments, might be modelled as powerful Companies.
In short, the descriptions of what scores from 1 to 5 mean in the various Company stats should only be taken as guidelines - rewrite them for the campaign you're running. (And, likewise, consider rewriting or adding to the list of Company actions to suit the scale.) In the book, they're biased towards modelling nations, and are scaled to suit, but once you realise that you and your group can rewrite the scale to suit your game you're gold.
Also, although I prefer to improv most of the time when GMing, I did find it useful to stat out the more important NPC groups in the setting (both in terms of IC importance - the big movers and shakers in the setting - and OOC importance - the groups which the PCs are going to be interacting with the most). And when it was time for the players to decide on Company actions, I'd go into the next room or something and decide what the NPC Companies are going to do whilst the players were deliberating. I found that this was a great way to come up with natural-seeming IC events, with the interplay of different factions resulting in situations I wouldn't have thought up on my own, but it also a) let me be confident I was coming up with these plans for the NPCs without taking my OOC knowledge of the PCs' plans into account, and b) threw up the occasional surprise. For example, supposing the PCs decide unexpectedly to attack an NPC Company - whether that NPC Company's hunkered down to a defensive position, or embroiled in a fight on two other fronts is going to have a big impact.
@Silverlion: out of curiosity when you say you tried 1000+ roll I wonder what tool you used and what number of dice were rolled.
Quote from: Silverlion;364286In general their response to such issues (the creators*) has been "Do not apply the dice system unless its a really stressful moment!" which to me reads as "don't use the system."
Which strikes me as a really strange reading of the game, since that's how all RPGs play, but you're clearly invested in this mis-reading.
Regarding pseudo-Roman patrician families, I presume that you'll be using the Company rules. Have a look at Paul Elliott's
Warlords of Alexander (http://www.balbinus.com/Warlords.pdf), for a similar treatment of Greek family Houses. The concepts are close enough to both patrician families and the Company rules to port over almost as-is. I think you'll find some very good inspiration here.
!i!
Quote from: Ian Absentia;364306Which strikes me as a really strange reading of the game, since that's how all RPGs play, but you're clearly invested in this mis-reading.
Regarding pseudo-Roman patrician families, I presume that you'll be using the Company rules. Have a look at Paul Elliott's Warlords of Alexander (http://www.balbinus.com/Warlords.pdf), for a similar treatment of Greek family Houses. The concepts are close enough to both patrician families and the Company rules to port over almost as-is. I think you'll find some very good inspiration here.
!i!
Awesome. Thanks for the link.
In reading the rules, I am a little concerned about probabilities for success. But I'm sure that I will need to see how it actually plays out before I can make a firm judgement on that.
Quote from: boulet;364302@Silverlion: out of curiosity when you say you tried 1000+ roll I wonder what tool you used and what number of dice were rolled.
I used 1000 actual rolls of 4 dice and 6 dice. I kept record of the matches and non-matches of the rolls in a spread sheet (Open Office) then used a calculator to get my percentages.
I've used a dice rolling program as well to do more rolls of other dice numbers. But seeds are not truly random, so really mapping to complete randomness is always off by a bit.
Ian: No, I've gone through numerous threads hoping for a fix to ORE that worked, and all I've seen are excuses and hand-waving. Its one thing to make rolls "important" it's another to encourage people not to use the system and apply it erratically to smooth results. The latter is more the gist of how its presented (on Rpg.net and elsewhere.)
We've discussed this before--you like the game, that's cool. Go have fun. I wanted to like the game and found it failed the criteria that is most important to me. "Will my group be willing to play this..." which is an absolute no for two different groups. (A third group I've not tried it on--but I've since gotten rid of my ORE books in trades for other games.)
@Silverlion: I think I get what you're saying. The main problem would be if a character tries to be a jack of all trade and ends up with an average of 4 dice for most of his rolls then the whiff factor will be quite high.
In conflict resolution, the exciting type of tactics like multiple actions would require PCs that are even more competent because it's tough to get 2 sets on a dice pool of size N-1. Using the troll probability calculator (http://topps.diku.dk/torbenm/troll.msp) for instance, the chance of two sets are slim (28%) with 6 dice. This means starting with a 7 dice pool which was the lowest of the pair of trait+skill involved... Note how impressive the PC would have to be to get 28% of success at doing two things at a time!
The multiple actions resolution is quite surely impractical unless one plays uberPCs.
PS: for the curious I used this formula for 6 dice
c := 6 d10; count(2 <= (foreach x in 1..10 do count(x=c)))
Quote from: Silverlion;364316We've discussed this before--you like the game, that's cool. Go have fun. I wanted to like the game and found it failed the criteria that is most important to me.
My rebuke came away harsher than I'd intended. I understand your complaint of the game's mechanics, but your objection hasn't proven a problem for me in actual practice. In particular, your objection to Cardinal Rule #1 ("Roll Only When a Task is Difficult or the Outcome is Significant.") strikes me as particularly odd, since this is virtually a truism that I've applied to every game I'm played since I discovered the problem with unintentionally frivolous rolls while running
Traveller and
Call of Cthulhu.
I will throw down with boulet, though, and admit that the multiple actions rules are prohibitively difficult without the benefit of special dice to buy off the situational penalties. On the up-side, though, the cost of having special dice in
Reign has been flattened, making them much more affordable than in earlier iterations of ORE.
!i!
Quote from: Ian Absentia;364342My rebuke came away harsher than I'd intended. I understand your complaint of the game's mechanics, but your objection hasn't proven a problem for me in actual practice. In particular, your objection to Cardinal Rule #1 ("Roll Only When a Task is Difficult or the Outcome is Significant.") strikes me as particularly odd, since this is virtually a truism that I've applied to every game I'm played since I discovered the problem with unintentionally frivolous rolls while running Traveller and Call of Cthulhu.
Me too for the most part it just seems they "really really mean don't roll most of the time.." the way I've seen it noted in the past. I am fine with rolling only when its significant/important. Pretty much what I do in most games. Yet it seems to me to be held at a more extreme view of such a concept than even I use.
QuoteOn the up-side, though, the cost of having special dice in Reign has been flattened, making them much more affordable than in earlier iterations of ORE.
!i!
That is a good fix. Perhaps the multiple action issue is how long their "time scale" is? I can't recall do they have short exchanges/rounds?
Quote from: Silverlion;364345That is a good fix. Perhaps the multiple action issue is how long their "time scale" is? I can't recall do they have short exchanges/rounds?
If I recall correctly, each exchange or round is approximately 5-6 seconds of actual time. Seeing that most multiple actions would be in the form of an attack/defend type, this doesn't seem to present an issue. Of course there is still the matter of coming up with more than one set of matches to pull that off.
Reign has expert dice and master dice. These seem like they will help with multiple actions once a character has sufficient abilities.
Quote from: PaladinCA;364404Reign has expert dice and master dice. These seem like they will help with multiple actions once a character has sufficient abilities.
Yes, and they are both less game-upsetting than some of the wilder special dice of earlier iterations of ORE (e.g. Wiggle/Trump Dice in particular) and they are had more cheaply. So the upshot is that more characters will have more access to reasonably superlative skill sets, which will in turn make dynamic stunts like called shots and multiple actions more achievable.
With regard to multiple actions, I've always thought of them as nearly simultaneous actions, which ought to be difficult.
!i!
Quote from: Ian Absentia;364437Yes, and they are both less game-upsetting than some of the wilder special dice of earlier iterations of ORE (e.g. Wiggle/Trump Dice in particular) and they are had more cheaply. So the upshot is that more characters will have more access to reasonably superlative skill sets, which will in turn make dynamic stunts like called shots and multiple actions more achievable.
This is my experience. When I ran a REIGN campaign, the players made sure to get special dice in those skills they wanted their characters to excel at. It made multiple actions
much more viable.
I maybe I have to refresh on the multiple action rules but if I remember well the procedure was sth like this:
- pick the smallest dice pool among the two attempted actions
- remove one dice from this pool by extra action (unless a martial path-feat-thingy applies)
- obtain one set for each action
The master/expert dice would disappear at step 2 if I remember correctly.
Quote from: boulet;364498The master/expert dice would disappear at step 2 if I remember correctly.
Not exactly. Special dice should be considered, effectively, two dice -- one die is the regular roll, the other die is the special ability. For difficult actions like called shots and multiple actions, the special die first loses the special ability, but it can still be rolled as a normal die thereafter. All penalties are drawn off the special die abilities before they remove any normal dice.
!i!