Alternate System (more narrative) for the Setting, Anyone think about this? Options

[JeffSz]

I've been looking at a lot of indie RPG's lately, such as Spirit of the Century and Houses of the Blooded, and I'm very impressed with the emphasis of narrative over crunch.

SR4 is an amazing setting, but I can't remember all the rules (or even where to find them in the books) and I end up fudging rules when I run it, and I find dice-pools do more than the players.

On top of that, I don't feel like buying another core rulebook to upgrade to the SR4A or trying to keep track of the errata.

Now, I could easily run a game of SR4 using Spirit of The Century or Houses of the Blooded, but I think that would dilute the setting a little bit -too- much. Six books of equipment and powers would be going to waste with no equivalents in those systems for possible conversion, and combat would lose a lot of it's lethality and depth.

So I'm trying to find a happy center - a system with much simpler rules, but something that keeps character stats and equipment relevant.

If anyone's interested in collaborating via email on a project like this, let me know.


Some of the things I want to include (stolen from Houses of the Blooded):

Privilege: when rolling to see if you can perform an action successfully, the outcome of the roll does NOT determine success. A successful roll means the player has narrative control, or "Privilege". If you have Privilege, you get to narrate whether your character succeeds or fails and how. If the roll is unsuccessful, the Narrator (GM) has Privilege, and decides whether (and how) you succeed or fail.

Yeah that's a mind-bender, isn't it? If you succeed on your roll, you can choose what the outcome is. If you fail, the narrator chooses. This means the dice aren't arbitrarily deciding what happens - they're arbitrarily deciding WHO DECIDES. Very beneficial to story. And yes, there are times when you want to fail. I'll get to that.

Wagers: when you're about to make a roll, you 'wager' some dice. That is, you set some of your dice aside, betting that you can make your roll without them. If you do succeed, you get to use those 'wagers' to add cool effects.

An Example of Wagers and Privilege:

...to be continued after work...