High Fantasy System

[Ian Freeman]

Hey everybody, long time no see.

I've just slammed out a rather interesting little high fantasy system that is designed specifically to feel like high fantasy. The whole system is worked out, but I have only recently punched out the chargen guidelines and I'm looking for brutally viscious comments and (hehe) suggestions for a name because "High Fantasy" is pretty awful.

The whole shebang is located at http://vv.carleton.ca/~ifreeman">my site

[ This Message was edited by: Ian Freeman on 2002-01-02 17:22 ]

[Skippy]

Without the rest of the system to review, bear in mind that these comments may have already been dealt with.

1) Talent/Experience vs. Youth/Age.  Your sample character seems to be high Talent (10/5), but old (3/12).  (So he is talented, lacking in experience, and a geezer.  What, did he just wake up one day with the Power?)  What is the offset for these?  Is there, in fact, a way to cheat the "disadvantage" of lack of experience with increased Age?  This area seems a little fuzzy to me, and perhaps redundant.  Most high fantasy geezers are a foil to the youthful talented hero, showing just how wicked pisser the whipper-snapper is.

2) Mechanics.  Without a frame of reference, it is hard to judge the difference between a 2 rating, and a 4 rating in a trait.  However, looking at your character, that is a lot of traits for a fairly simple game.  Do you intend to encourage that level of detail in the system, with long lists of skills?  Not a criticism, just curious.

3) Again, mechanics.  What is the function of the Youth/Age, etc. stats?  How do they add to the sense of character, or improve the game?  Unclear from the text.

4) What's the game hook?  What am I going to get from HF that I can't get from another generic homebrew game system?

Peace,

Skippy

[Garbanzo]

Ian-

Brilliant.


I love that players define the potency of their abilities.  (For those who haven't clicked over, essentially the player decides whether "dowsing" is a 5pt advantage or as a 40pt advantage for their character.  Except through an elegant point system that integrates character creation with task resolution).


The system as a whole echoes a conversation I had a few days ago.  After taking the skeptical girlfriend to see LotR, she said she felt it was fascinating, but overlong and boring.  (Boring?  Wha??)

I was saying that the great thing about the books is that the peaks (the flash exiting parts) are just punctuation, instantiations of these huge sweeping troughs of culture - geneology, history, language, poetry.  And that the film essentially culled all the peaks, strung them together and called it a day.  100% mandatory to make a box office film, but the rich backdrop is what gives power and resonance to the exciting bits.

Rich setting and societies give weight to characters.  This depth is the core of what seperates High Fantasy from Fantasy Pabulum.  For me, I know the backstory, she didn't.  And that fact colored utterly the way we saw the movie.  


Back to the point.  High Fantasy the RPG - sorry, no better titles spring to mind - works this by having (player defined) traits first described by how well they accord with the larger culture the character springs from.  

But rather than first clunk out a culture before a character can be devised, the player defines the culture *by inference* as a byproduct of creating a character.
Genius, I say, genius.

8.7 from the East German judge.

-Matt

[Thededine]

Looks very nice and clean.  I only have three questions and comments:

a) how do these traits and numbers and whatnot -work-?  Character Generation is all well and good, but until the character's traits can be expressed in actual in-game action, they are little more than words.

b) the section where you describe how to spend points is very confusing.  It needs to be rewritten and expanded, but I would also consider placing it higher up in the character generation section -- or at the very least tell the reader that his traits will be rated numerically, as it came as something of a surprise to me.

c) lastly, I'd rework your point of decreasing returns to work smoother.  Points -2 through 3 being one point and -then- things getting expensive is slightly cludgy.  Can you rework it so that all the points follow a consistent progression? (first point is .5, second is 1, third is 2, etc -- or first point is 1, second is 2, third is 3, etc)?  I think that would smooth things out considerably.

[Ian Freeman]

All right! Updates have been made.

I have included the basic resolution system. What's missing? The coming rules for all those "funky" traits like the dynamics, magic, and traits that augment other traits.

To reply to requests: Peter can have those wonky dynamics because of what they represent. The fact that he has high talent and lot experience does not mean that he is inexperienced, but rather that he relies on his talent more than his experience. Again, his aged is increased beyond what it might typically have been because of how well traveled he is and how much he knows (part of what age does)

As for the hook, a part from just playing a system which (to me) feels a lot more like an HF story than most the big hook (which has yet to rear it's ugly head because it is tied a lot to the setting) is cultural conflict. Basically, in the setting lot's of disparate cultures are suddently connected to each other by portal type dealies and are forced to deal with their interactions (henace the importance of culture traits)

As for detail, I like it. But some don't. If you prefer less detail there is a pretty elegant solution. Allow for much broader (over the edge style) traits, and then give less points.

Why have these dynamics? To me... they have always felt like extremely important elements of HF and I have never seen them directly dealt with in an RPG. By giving these stats different rules I am trying to more firmly cement the players in the heightened reality of HF and let them play HF chacters. BEcause in HF young people DO resist magic better, they DO live longer and die heroically. The Innocent DO get believed, etc... and instead of just letting people take traits like "get believed" and "not die" I like these dynamics because they give a much better feel of the genre. I guess I really do need to publish the rules for these things, eh?

I've put the point spending and explanation at the top, reads better now. Also, I took out the stat cost scaling because i think i prefer 1 to 1 ratios anyways.

Oh, I've also added advancement rules. I like 'em, but I need comments.

Just to repeat the address for these rules: http://vv.carleton.ca/~ifreeman">go here

[ This Message was edited by: Ian Freeman on 2002-01-02 23:40 ]

[ This Message was edited by: Ian Freeman on 2002-01-02 23:42 ]