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...

[pbangarth]

Both the concepts, Privilege and Wagers, look really cool. I am in no position to collaborate in developing a set of rules, but I am interested in hearing more about these concepts. Please tell more.

For example, how does the idea of Privilege fit Opposed Tests?

[Mr. Mage]

Those Priveleges and Wagers rules are pretty interesting...I might have to look at this game now (Houses of the Blooded, right?)

If you're looking for a specific system, I'd suggest Wordl of Darkness...it is very heavy on storytelling as opposed to dies rolls, unless you play it a certain way (I've always seen more roleplaying than roll playing)
The best way though is probably just to use some house rules or try different methods to encourage better storytelling....

Often times, it usually comes down to the players....
I GMed a D20 Apocalypse game recently and we had some stellar roleplayers in the game..and some not so stellar ones.
One player had a character who had an abysmal Dexterity score, and rather than let that take effect only in combat, he would roleplay that when his character got excited or anything, he would "fail his reflex save" and fall flat on his face...just to add to that particular character's story...He would be a great character with these Privelege and Wager rules....

Another player however, was just a cliche army gunner character. His response to almost everything was "let's kill it" and whenever we did some serious in town roleplaying, he would whine about the game being boring....not the best roleplayer, but he still enjoys it for the most part...so I guess that's all that counts....

[ludomastro]

I can't really contribute to the project at this time either as RL is looming large. Please keep us posted.

[Lok1 :)]

Check out THIS disccussion, http://tech.uk.msn.com/features/gallery.as...mp;imageindex=2
Only the last few posts realy pretain to what your talking about

[ZenDead]

I was thinking of doing something with Burning Wheel and SR just need to Gun fight mechanics to work better. Since that is it I have started to figure out how to do SR life paths for this once things are figured out I will be posting them.

[JeffSz]

Wow, I forgot I posted this - I didn't get back to the thread right away because I ended up not having internet for a month.

Anywho, I'm still interested in coming up with something to fill this need, but I think it's going to be a little bit different than my original plans.

Rather than try to come up with a mini-system, i'm going to simply write a module that can be distributed by PDF and added on to SR4 as-is, simply providing some tweaks here and there using ideas from Spirit of the Century and Houses of the Blooded, etc.

In order to make the game simpler, I'm going to have to come up with some kind of 'GMing shortcuts' booklet, or something.

[ShadowPavement]

I made up some one page rules for running SR with the free Risus system for a quick con or pick-up games. Maybe you can get some insperation from it.

The SR rules can be found here

And the Risus rules can be found here

[Hunter_Maddox]

This is similar to what I'm planning to do if I end up running SR but I'll be using Cyberspace (ICE) as well as elements of Spacemaster2 & Rolemaster2/C instead. Cyberspace covers most of the needed tech & rules elements while RM covers the races , creatures & magic (with tweaks). Spacemaster2 covers a few things like skills that Cyberspace doesn't. Over all it should be light on crunch but still allow enough customization. I don't own SR4a yet but I like some of the changes to the setting..not sure how I'd work technomancers though, but that can wait.