The Core Worlds

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, SotC is getting another outing at my regular group. I’ve even managed to write up the story so far.

It has been a very long time since I’ve been able to run it (so long that one of my players has forgotten about the interesting dice in the game), and I’m really looking forward to getting my GMs hat on tonight.

I’ve been lifting large chunks from a prewritten adventure, but the third act never really sat well with me. So I decided to rewrite it, less than 24 hours before I ran it. Aren’t I clever? Still, I think my efforts last night were worth it, I got rid of annoying sequence of repeated “Look here, fooled you! Look here instead!” scenes, and added an Indy reference (along with a few things that I’d better not talk about before they come out in play).

I own a couple of games based on the FATE system (which is, in turn, based on the FUDGE system), and there are a couple of different approaches for rolling dice that appear in them.

The classic system is 4dF. A dF is a FUDGE die and has six faces representing the numbers -1, 0 and 1 twice over. It is a d3-2.

Starblazer Adventures uses a different approach and rolls d6-d6. This has the advantage that you don’t need to run out and buy dice that are so specialised that your friendly neighourhood gaming store doesn’t sell them.

This morning I decided to invest a few minutes into doing some analysis and comparison of the two systems (no doubt duplicating other people’s work, but entertaining myself in the process).

I generated all possible results that each of the two systems could provide, and converted them into percentages and then charted them.

There isn’t much to choose between the results, although the FUDGE dice give slightly less variance and are more likely to hit closer to zero.

Tomorrow night is the night my Tuesday group lets GMs propose games for the next six week block of games (with voting taking place a week later).

I have found my notes and all the character sheets from the last couple of times I have run the game — both one off sessions — and will be volunteering to run the game every Tuesday night for six weeks. Gulp.

I might even find time to write up the last session. I think I can remember most of what happened.

One day I might get around to running a Get Smart game using Spycraft 2.0. Crafty are even nice enough to define a base set of campaign qualities for Light Hearted so I don’t even need to dig through the list of options.

In the meantime, however, I present:

If two players get the same result — reroll.

List of named NPCs via Wikipedia.

I really like the Eberron setting, and the release of Fantasy Craft gave me all the excuse I needed to dust off my campaign books and start running a campaign.

Two sessions in (not counting The Day Of Character Generation, in which everyone fought over a single PDF and tried to build characters for a very different take of D20 fantasy) and everybody appears to be having a good time (myself included).

The system is a lot of fun to run, and the rules for standard characters (who get damage saves instead of wounds and vitality) and mooks (who just die when sneezed upon) make it a breeze to GM.

I have players who have written up nice, detailed backgrounds (which are already getting tied into the plot) and who can be bribed with in-game rewards to write up the adventure.

On that subject, I’m keeping the Campaign Log over at Obsidian Portal as an experiment. The site was pointed out after I made a previous blog post seeking information about online gaming.

It seems to be working well, and lets the players contribute content without me having to give them all access to this blog. It also structures the information in a format better suited to a campaign than I could achieve here.

On the subject of rewards, I’m offering bonus reputation. This is a part of Fantasy Craft that I like a lot, at least in theory, it is too early to see how it plays out in practice. Essentially, it is a representation of how much kudos you have earned and controls your Renown (how much sway you have with a given demographic, such as the military or the common people), Favours, Contacts, Base, Magical Shiny, and so on. There is something that just feels right about giving extra renown to players who shout about how great their characters are on the Internet!