Sep 24, 2015, 2:21 PM
Pirates and Swashbuckling
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So after having lurked on the site for a while I've seen a number of comments requesting a 7th Sea MUX/SH. I've always loved the setting but found the game itself to be...a bit wonky. I don't know. Maybe it's me but I've never been able to wrap my head around it. So if there were to be a piratey game could it be done another way? After looking through my RPG collection here were some thoughts...
Savage Worlds: The Pirates of the Spanish Main RPG was pretty good. I enjoyed it well enough. I think Savage Worlds could do everything 7th Sea could do. I'm not expert though.
GURPS: Crunchy as hell I guess but still one of my personal all time favorite RPGs.
7th Sea: We come back to this. I love the setting but, again, the mechanics leave me flat.
Game of Thrones RPG: I think Green Ronin games has put out a generic form of their Game of Thrones RPG, which I love. Might be more difficult to do some of the more supernatural type stuff but I think it'd handle most of the other stuff okay. Perhaps a bit more lethal than a swashbuckling game should be though.
Anyway, just wanted to start up a new thread instead of derailing an existing thread to discuss Pirate Game Goodness.
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7th Sea struck me as fairly balanced. It doesn't have a "dump stat" because the game designer things social stats that have no direct, m,eaningful mechanical impact on a consistent basis are dumb, which I don't agree with, but can accept as a premise.
It might heklp if you told us which parts of the system/mechanics fall flat to you.
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I've always found 7th Sea to be pretty elegant in play, although yeah, the mechanics don't read smoothly at all. But it has some of the best support for social combat of any system, even keeping the swashbucklely feel along with the court intrigue. Personally, I think GURPS would be a terrible idea for any sort of cinematic swashbuckling game - but I'm biased, as I loathe GURPS with the passion of a hundred, fiery suns.
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I've never had the opportunity to play 7th Sea might be a big issue. Maybe that's my issue. I'm also trying to think about it from a code point of view and trying to figure out how I'd code c-gen and it's not going well in my head.
I need to break back out my 7th Sea book and give it a look. Maybe do up a sample character and just try some of the mechanics out.
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@gwynn do you want the 7th seas books? I have them and offer them up to you. As to GURPS, GURPS is the RPG system made from a coder's wet dream. I like it, but i'm a coder.
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I really like the 7th Sea mechanics in theory but I have not played them so that might not be saying a whole lot.
As far as mechanics I am not picky, though I would vote against Savage Worlds as it is literally my least favorites system I have played. I have read worse but they were obviously bad so I never played them.
To me Savage worlds was not light enough to be a mechanically light narrative focus game and not robust enough to be fun to tinker with so just it the middle valley to be a a chore to deal with that slowed down the actual story.
I like GURPS and have played it a descent amount but I think it could be hell on a MUSH, kinda of like HERO system, fine for a table top when you are in the mood for a lot of crunch but on-line where most of the scenes have no or minimal rolling a lot of work for not much result. Also all the people that complain about WoD cgen being difficult would never make it through creating a GURPS character. -
I have em, thanks. The game caught my eye many years ago but my TT group never took to it so back on my shelf they went. I'll have to dig them out tonight and play around.
Another road block, from my POV, is the number of supplements the system has. Could a game be made just from the core book? Are there any "mandatory" supplements you'd have to include?
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@Gwynn said:
I have em, thanks. The game caught my eye many years ago but my TT group never took to it so back on my shelf they went. I'll have to dig them out tonight and play around.
Another road block, from my POV, is the number of supplements the system has. Could a game be made just from the core book? Are there any "mandatory" supplements you'd have to include?
This is THE @THENOMAIN PRINCIPLE, which states that "any game should be accessible via a single book and supplements shouldn't be mandatory to full enjoy it". I agree--as long as you don't introduce the supplements. Once you, do, tough shit!
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Savage Worlds strikes me as being too coarse-grained for a game that expects a large number of players. I played in a pirate-themed SW campaign that ran for about a year, and three of the four characters ended up looking an awful lot alike because there are a limited number of ways to be good at stabbing, and some of those ways are very obviously better than the others.
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THE @THENOMAIN PRINCIPLE goes on to say that it's fine to introduce supplements as long as the player with only the core book is not at a severe disadvantage without them. I don't exactly know what "disadvantage" means here, but it could mean being locked out of role-play opportunities because you don't know the setting or rules introduced whole-cloth later on, or it could mean missing out on character builds that make the core-book builds useless.
In the case of 7th Sea, e.g., this could mean don't assume everyone knows that the Queen of England has bone cancer and is going to die if that information was introduced in the England books.
If a player wants to build something from an expansion, tho, they need to read the effing book.
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I've kinda figured I'd make an FS3 Piratey game if I ever make another MU. But I am, among other things, lazy and a really shitty (at best) coder.
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I do kind of want to play on a 7th seas mush to be fair, but i've never actually wanted to code it.
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I would kill you all for a 7th Sea MU*. Well save for those running and coding it of course
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@Alzie said:
I do kind of want to play on a 7th seas mush to be fair, but i've never actually wanted to code it.
Pretty sure @Thenomain has a 7th Sea dice roller done. Or mostly done. I don't know if he ever made the sheet.
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I grabbed the book out of storage and set up a new tinymux db to play around with. We'll see how it goes.
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“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
7tth SEA! YEAH
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@Usekh said:
I would kill you all for a 7th Sea MU*. Well save for those running and coding it of course
If I could ever figure out how to make one work, I'd do it. Fuck world of darkness. Fuck Mage 2E. But I always circle back to: Isn't 7th Sea supposed to be about travel?
I mean. I suppose we could set it on some gigantic galleon thing ala star trek games being set on a ship-- but how would people be from different nations then? AUGH!!! pulls out her hair
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I know squat about 7th Sea, but I figured if I made a pirates game, it'd be 'set' on Tortuga, with ship-vehicles that you could sail about on a biggish (but far from vast) 'ocean' grid, with a few set points of interest and some non-fixed ones -- eg, your playgroup (ship) sails to a TP room and calls it Burma for a while.
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Would they get a shave there?