The Shadow of Yesterday

[Matt Wilson]

Never mind that my character spent a good half hour of the game wearing only a shirt. And never mind that during that time he was bitten in the nether regions by a large mastiff.

The Shadow of Yesterday is cool even without that.

Since I was a little spacey during the feedback portion of the game, I thought I'd post a whole, uh, post about it. It's a bit brain-dumpy, so bear with me.

My overall impression is that the system does its job without bringing a lot of attention to itself. Its key points of "system color," if that's what I should call it, are the Secrets first and foremost, and the attribute "pools" coming in a distant second. The rest, I thought, was quiet but far from understated. I think that's a good place to be for this kind of game.

The system is quick and easy. We learned just about all there is to know in three minutes. For A, you do this. For B, well, you do pretty much the same thing as for A. And so on.

The Secrets are great "rulebreakers" and were fun. Not having looked at the rules before play, I only saw the 4-5 on my record sheet, and those alone produced a healthy "ooh" from me. In a con environment, I think the mid-level characters would do a good shilling job.

The skills were at the level of detail that I would probably have gone for. I've been feeling pretty minimalist about traits in general, but these made sense and didn't overwhelm me.

I'm not sure that there's a fix for it, but I was bummed at situations where I spent a point from an attribute to improve a roll, and it didn't help at all. I would have liked to be able to apply more karma to that kind of situation, but I think that's more of a game style preference, and may not fit with Clinton's "vision."

However, the risk in this game isn't so immediate that a clumsy roll won't spell instant doom. Fighting was like in 7th Sea, or even D&D, where foes are sort of worn down. There is no one hit/one kill possibility, which defines some of the game's style. It gives fights an interesting pace. You have a turn or two to get your act together.

I was a little worried about the use of a chart but the one in this game is pretty darn easy. It reminded me a bit of the one from Fading Suns, with fewer bits on it and less to do afterward.

I was often compelled to pursue XP based on my character's Secrets, which made for some interesting situations. It left me curious about what will happen with certain groups. Will the gamist look for the best combo to get maximum xp and leave the other players behind? Balance doesn't seem as much of an issue, so it may not matter.

End brain dump. Ran out of thoughts.

-Matt

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Matt,

Thanks for posting this. I had a great time last night, too, and thought your character's foibles were hilarious.

As for the combat system, foes are kind of "worn down." Still, we actually had one situation in which an NPC was hit and went directly down. I've thought about turning up the game's lethality, but like how things went so far. Part of the reason I went with a system in which one hit won't take down most people (and a reason I think many game systems do this) is that it gives everyone a chance to shine. To overpower the average enemy, the whole party has to work together, which seems to keep everyone happy.

Re: Secrets and Gamism. I'm totally caught. The Key Secrets (the experience motors) are designed in such a way that a Gamist player might load up on them to advance faster, but then finds that he has to introduce a metric buttload of story each session for his character, or he's just stuck with a lot of his so-far experience spent on things that don't help him. It's basically meant to use instances of Gamism and convert them into Narrativism, like some sort of RPG alchemy.

In order to alleviate some of the letdown behind getting a bonus die and it not helping, I might change the rules to allow any number of attribute points to be spent for bonus dice in a situation.

[rafial]

I also had a blast playing TSOY, especially the character of Oliphant.  I think your take on goblins is especially cool.  The game definately had that "old skool" 1970s feel that can be a blast to reexperience sometimes here in these heady days of jaded Narrativism :)

It gave me flashbacks to Traveller (2d6 basic roll & skill focus) and T&T (2d6 basic roll & presence of typical "antagonist" races as PCs).

My favorite feature was the use of attributes as resource pools to feed skill use.  The secrets were also cool, in a D&D "smell my feats" sort of way.  The magic system is also very cool, and I'm busily pondering ways to break it (for research purposes only of course).

I also think your cultural write ups, such as they are so far, are quite cool. Cuisine is definately an underexplored area of role playing, and I'd like to see more of it!

[rafial]

I'd just like to add after some more pondering that I think that while the dice mechanic, attribute pools and secrets are the up front "cool" factor of TSOY, I think that the key idea is the idea of, well, Key Secrets.

The basic notion is that you get to choose what sort of activities give your character XP, and during the game you can buy off some of those, and select others.  Really powerful idea I think, because it lets players choose what it means for their particular character to "get ahead," and it provides lots of motivation to "trick" point moochers into creating story.  For example, my little goblin had the Secret of Unrequited Love for another PC.  This motivated me into role playing various embarrasing acts to attempt to impress her, including singing a hideous little song at dinner.  And I got XPs for it!