Unstated bits of TROS

[Spartan]

Somebody explain Insight, please. I would, but I'm trying to finish OBAM.

Jake

Otay.

Insight is like a downpayment on your next character.  It's also VERY cool.  How it works is like this:  For every SA point you SPEND (not merely use), you get a point of Insight.  When you generate your next character (evetually, the character will die or retire), the amount of Insight your previous character had gets bonus priorities (read: character points) with which to build your new character.  As long as you've spent even ONE SA point down, you get a bonus priority.  If you've gotten a very powerful character by building his up and spending lots of points, your next one will reflect this.  This is how you can end up generating characters who are (all at once) Landed Nobility, Gifted, and with 14 Proficiencies (normally impossible for starting characters).  Mind you, to get a character like that, you'll have retired a heck of a character to get it. :)  Even spending one point guarrantees a bonus E Priority, negating the crappy F Priority.  That's fairly significant.

All in all, the Insight system is one of my favourite parts of TROS.

-Mark

[Salamander]

If you've gotten a very powerful character by building his up and spending lots of points, your next one will reflect this.  This is how you can end up generating characters who are (all at once) Landed Nobility, Gifted, and with 14 Proficiencies (normally impossible for starting characters).  Mind you, to get a character like that, you'll have retired a heck of a character to get it. :)  Even spending one point guarrantees a bonus E Priority, negating the crappy F Priority.  That's fairly significant.

All in all, the Insight system is one of my favourite parts of TROS.

-Mark

It also does wonders for the Seneschal in determining just how powerful the new PC should be.

[LordIvan]

All in all, the Insight system is one of my favourite parts of TROS.

okay.
I must admit that this particular rule is not leaping out at me and saying 'hey, your character died, but it's ok' :)

I mean, it doesn't seem particularly different from the usual sort of house rule of 'create a new character a level below your old one', or 'create a character with the same XP as your old one, minus a few'.

There must be something more to it than this surely? Otherwise it's merely a formalisation of something most of us assume anyway. It also doesn't seem to serve to make the previous characters death any more dramatic or important or memorable. Just seems like 'cashing in'.

Still - as I've said before, you've managed to sway me with the idea of SA's - I _DO_ like the sound of those things. It's just that when it comes down it it, my play preference is to keep the same character through an entire campaign. Our whole group has gravitated towards that in the last couple of years - From high fatility, to no fatility. (Granted, in one of the more recent campaigns, we used D&D, and the longivity of the characters was sometimes assisted by 'raise dead', which DID cheapen the entire death thing significantly - But in another campaign, there was simply a 'no death rule' in place, and that worked really, really well.)

Well, I guess character death works for you lot, and if it does, great.
From the experience in our games, I find we can reach great depth of tension and dramatic power without it. (And believe me, there is something _very_ satisfying about finally reaching a story resolution after 40 or so sessions with the same character - having had this character for a year and a half or so. A long, long struggle :) )

Adieu.

[Ashren Va'Hale]

I haqve never had a character die, I do retire them though which is what makes insight worth while for me. Basically, I drop characters once they have fulfilled their driving purpose unless I can think of a good reason to keep him.
Insight allows me to then try a new complex idea and with TROS and Sa's there is an infinite number of possibilities.

[Brian Leybourne]

I guess it comes down to what a group wants from the game, right?

Some groups want gritty edge-of-your-seat with characters dying left, right and center. That doesn't really work for me anymore (after a certain Deadlands game that just got silly) but works great for some groups.

Some other groups like the "nobody dies unless they agree/want to" ideal. Contrary to popular belief this is very doable in TROS, it just requires some strategy on the part of the players and of course different interpretation on the part of the Seneschal (level 5 wounds incapacitate instead of killing, etc). 7th Sea paradigm basically. This works really well actually, and for some groups is also great.

Other groups like something in the middle. All of them can be played with TROS (IMO, anyway). It's even possible to still be very gritty without player deaths, although I would agree that for that the players need to think a little more, be more invested in their characters, and have a different mindset from games like D&D where there are hitpoints. It still works, though. I've seen it.

Versitility. Just another aspect I like about TROS. :-)

Brian.

[Kaare_Berg]

I'll put my two cents in here.

I am going to tell the story of a civil war. The first storyarc takes the characters into a struggle for control of one of the contenders to the throne. Some of them may die others may not, this does not really matter. When the arc is complete I plan to change over to other characters also involved in this war, but fighting on another front and maybe the other side.

Insight creates a continuity for the players, thus every time I start a new storyarc they are still in a sense of playing in the same campaign. To my players Insight makes this one campaign, not several different ones in the same setting. It also lets them take more and more significant parts in the war as their power grows.

Such is the power of Insight.