The Forge Archives

Hello everybody!

I’m playing a German RPG named Degenesis. You can download it here for free. The artwork is terrific and absolutely worth a look. It’s a post-apocalyptic setting in Europe and Africa. The basic mechanism is to throw 2D10. The results are added and compared with your attribute + skill. Whereas attribute + skill is the upper barrier and the difficulty is the lower. So you have to hit right in the middle. In theory this sounds quite fair (at least for me), but in reality chances to succeed are minimal. Advice from the game-designers is to apply dice rolling only in stressful situations. In my experience this leads to Min/Max characters (social situations are role-played, fights need to be rolled out). Last year I presented FATE to my group. Unfortunately they loathe Fudge-dices and describing skills and I wasn’t able to explain the advantages and differences of aspects, extras and skills. So you can’t imagine my joy when I stumbled over TSoY v1 and my shock when I realized the changes in v2.

Character creation in Degenesis is quite similar to TSoY. Characters are defined by Culture, Concept and Cult. Each of these C’s has it’s own skill-list. So I have in mind to define inner and Cult-attributes as A-attributes, Culture- and Concept-attributes as B and all the rest as C.

The inner attributes I have in mind are:
Hardness (Vigor)
Initiative (Reaction)
Faith / Self-control (Reason)
Endurance

I changed a little bit the damage system. If a character in BDTP is broken he has to pay a dice from the corresponding pool and has to succeed in Hardness/Initiative/Faith/Self-control. What I like about v2 is the fact that broken isn't reduced to bruised after BDTP is over.
I want to use Endurance for the regeneration of Pool-dices. After a night of drinking and whoring you get at least one dice in the corresponding pool plus the sl of an Endurance-check. I’m wondering if I want to allow the use of Endurance together with Hardness/Initiative/Faith/Self-control. Maybe a Secret (e.g. the Secret of Synergy) is required.

In Degenesis you chose a principle for every C (e.g. Cult: Scavenger --> Principle: Greed). Alas they have no function besides giving your character a direction. TSoY gives the opportunity to bring these principles to live by evolving them to a key or a secret.

At present I’m discussing these changes in my German forum. The two main points are the the transfer of weapon damage and differentiation of A, B and C attributes. What I like about the old system is the linearity of character advancement. You are not forced to choose the “expensive” progressions in the beginning but are invited to create a “round” character. In Degenesis jack of all trades are a waste of points because in character generation points are distributed 1:1, whereas later bringing up a skill from 2 to 3 is cheaper than the step from 4 to 5. This means I’m quite pleased with the old system. Nevertheless the differences between A and C is quite significant and I would be pleased to find a solution.
Be it some sort of ladder:
4 pts. A (used), 5 pts. B, 6 pts. C, 7 pts. key/secret/pool, 8 pts. A (unused), 9 pts. B (unused), 10 pts. C (unused).
Or something numerology (the 4 plays a important role in the meta-plot) with progressive costs:
1-3 competent 4 XP; 4-6 adept 8 XP; 7-9 master 12 XP; 10 grand master 16 XP

Concerning weapon damage I think I’ll use as rule of thump that guns give 2 - 3 sl bonus; knives, swords 1 - 2 sl, but melee weapons may be used together with a strength-ability check. Just wondering if I allow a secret that gives extra-sl…

Okay, that’s for the moment. Thanks, Clinton, for this game. I hope I can infect my fellow players with this set of rules, too.

Erik