|
Impermanent posted:REIGN has a brilliant streamlined system for making tactical and social prowess of characters matter and be reflected in combat. Write something quick up about it? It's been a year or two since I've read through it, but I don't remember anything special about the social skills from it except the usual mechanics of gobble dice breaking sets, with optional yelling at the start of combat to scare away grunts. I did think that the company system was the great, though, and really is flexible enough that you apply it in almost any game system. I still want to try it out in a really prolonged campaign at some point.
|
#
¿
May 26, 2010 03:52
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 18, 2024 00:31 |
|
|
Evil Mastermind posted:One of the things I love about Reign is that it can handle a group starting as just a bunch of people with a common goal, and slowly build them up into an actual force to be reckoned with. The company rules are awesome, and you can even use them behind-the-scenes in a completely different gaming system as a semi-abstract way to figure out what sort of impact your players have on politics on a local, regional, or even global level. I used it in a GURPS game a while ago, basically running the different gangs, guilds, and factions of a city at a high level using the REIGN company rules, and applying modifiers to the rolls based on what the players did. It worked great. We had the players split up a guild into warring factions, have their own puppet guild absorb one of those factions, suffer through lean times after an underling looted their treasury, quash an internal rebellion, forcibly eject several gangs from their territory, and finally see everything they'd gained slowly get ground away over a period of months by the corrosive social influence of a cult. All of which easy to figure out in the REIGN company system. If you want to throw some sort of political metagame into your setting, it really is pretty drat solid.
|
|
#
¿
May 30, 2010 20:04
|
|
|
FrozenGoldfishGod posted:Thoughts about the viability of this idea are appreciated, as would be any suggestions on how many points to give the players for their company's Qualities (I'm leaning towards 7, with a ban on starting with any Quality above 4.) We tried something along these lines (no characters, though); the big issue is that it begins feeling very much like a board game without a lot of narrative flow. With the way the rolls resolve in a single shot, it was hard to have it not turn into "OK, new month, what does your company do now? OK, you burned down his grain warehouse and reduced his territory by 1, anything else?" It was fun, but more board-game fun than RPG-fun.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2010 20:17
|
|
|
goatface posted:I'm just concerned that starting characters won't be enough for them each to work in most situations. I think the big takeaway that we had from our brief dalliance with REIGN is that you really don't need as big a dice pool as you might think. Four dice is enough to have a reasonable chance of a width 2 set, and five dice seemed to be the sweet spot before diminishing returns began to really kick in. Even with a basic 85 point buy, you can get total pools up to 4-5 dice in several skills pretty cheaply, and still have enough to get ED/MD in one or two 'spotlight' skills. An ED is only 2 points, so they should definitely have at least an ED in one or two skills linked to their highest stat. For what it's worth, we never found a way to work with magic that satisfied us, and didn't use much in the way of martial paths/esoteric disciplines; we ended doing a low-fantasy style of game and thought it worked pretty well. As noted before, though, combat is really drat lethal, so make sure everyone's wearing a helmet and/or understands that they really do want to buy at least a little parry/dodge, even if they're planning a less combat-oriented character. The other important thing I figured out was that giving them a Company is a great way to let them focus on gameplay elements that interested them. My group was more combat-focused, so anytime there was some sort of major social challenge for them, they'd always "send [the] company diplomat to deal with it", and we just handled it as a company Influence roll. On the other hand, we almost never rolled company Might actions, because the PCs were happy to game that out in detail.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 10, 2011 23:56
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Who do I have to bribe to get them to run this game? I'd totally run a PbP of it if (although probably not in the 'default' REIGN setting, which I have an intense and unreasonable dislike for) I could figure out a good way to handle the ED and MD without bogging everything down.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2011 20:20
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:...you can play UA and have the characters be normal people? UA works great as a horror game where you've got the PCs as completely normal people whose lives get completely and utterly hosed by the magical world.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2011 22:43
|
|
|
Offense is usually your best defense, anyway. To defend you have to match both height and width, while if you attack then winning on width is enough to let you go first and knock down the guy's set by one die, which is enough to wreck the set most of the time. If you did sort of automatic multi-action parry/defense for everyone, then you need to specify what you're rolling; if people just roll body+fight (or coord+weapon) and can make gobble dice from that with no penalty, then it pretty much removes the use of the parry/dodge skill. Maybe put it into a martial path. It'd probably make a decent 3-point ability, something like: "When fighting with [insert preferred weapon here], you may use coord+weapon in place of body+parry whenever you attempt to both parry and attack in a single round; both the parry and attack must be directed at the same person. If you roll only a single set you must use it as an attack." Or if you wanted to skip the -1d penalty as well, make it a 4-point ability. That'd keep the parry skill useful (since you might want to go completely defensive, or parry from a different target than you're attacking) but still let you combine attack and defense.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 14, 2011 22:00
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 18, 2024 00:31 |
|
|
Sionak posted:Where most RPG books assume a lot of familiarity with the source books, A Hunger Like Fire works pretty well as a novel in its own right, and I think it's the better of the two. Yeah, I played Vampire exactly once in like 1996, and have read absolutely none of the other books in the series, but A Hunger Like Fire gave me no trouble at all, and was a pretty entertaining read.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 10, 2011 17:05
|
|