[Throne Of The Spider God] Pulp S&S

[charles]

Hey all

"Throne Of The Spider God is a game of bloody combat and daring exploits, perilous magic and the wrath of gods. It takes you to exotic worlds where you play a hero who is what others can never be, who does what others would never dare.
Its goal: the shared creation of heroic characters and settings through fast, exciting gameplay."

Features:
* the rules are designed to capture a classic pulp Sword & Sorcery feel
* play is about creating Setting. Every player (GM/non-GM) is responsible for that creation.
* every time you roll the dice, you risk hurt to your character. Every time.
* the only way to gain experience is by getting hurt
* characters have a single 'attribute', called a True Name. It's created by the player, subject to no-one's approval but their own
* the meat-and-potatoes of the character sheet are Heroic Deeds (what the character's done) and Fated Deeds (what they need to do to advance).
* Deeds are created solely by the player.
* the setting is created from the character's actions: the only 'facts' about the gameworld are characters' Heroic Deeds
* actions: the 1st question is always 'How much will it cost my character to succeed?', never 'How hard is it for my character to succeed?'
* magic is: personal, violent, unnatural, cursed. But it's powerful.
* mechanically, magic has only two purposes: to allow players to create cool effects, and to complicate their characters' lives

Note: this hasn't been playtested at all, so the above is how I hope its going to work...

The first draft's at www.ivoryroad.com

Oh, and it's long (28K words). Check "Your Feedback" on the site if you'd like a pdf (email only for now, I'm afraid).

cheers, charles

[Eric J-D]

Hi Charles,

From your description this game sounds very appealing and something I'd be interested in reading more about, but when I go to the link the text is a mess (there are all sorts of weird codes/commands everywhere).

Is this just my computer or do you get this as well? 

Anyway, I thought I'd give you the heads-up.  If you can fix it easily, I will definitely have a look and post some thoughts since I love pulpy S&S goodness.

Cheers,

Eric

[Ron Edwards]

Charles, it's you! By Crom's bronzed balls!

I shall peruse & comment.

Best, Ron

[Eric J. Boyd]

This sounds awesome, but I'm getting the weird text with commands and codes, too.

The Heroic Deeds and Fated Deeds sound like they'll drive play very well. What size groups do you have in mind for the game? I've only got a couple players, but I'd be eager to playtest a game like this.

Cheers,

Eric

[Larry L.]

I'm seeing no such weird text. If y'all expect him to troubleshoot the problem, you might want to provide him with more specific info, like your browser version and OS version.

(Admittedly, MS Word is not the best tool for web authoring.)

[Eric J-D]

Thanks for the tip Larry. 

I'm using Internet Explorer 6.0 and when I go to the site it looks like this:



<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]-->
"We shall go to Rome together and have bloody adventures."
- Proximo, Gladiator
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]-->
Throne Of The Spider God is a game of bloody combat and daring exploits, perilous magic and the wrath of gods. It takes you to exotic worlds where you play a hero who is what others can never be, who does what others would never dare.
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]-->
Its goal: the shared creation of heroic characters and settings through fast, exciting gameplay.
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]-->
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]-->
The Principles Of The Game
<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]-->




I could certainly struggle through it, but I worry about missing crucial stuff due to the weird code/commands that appear everywhere.

Since I have no computer-fu to speak of at all, I have no idea why the text on the website appears this way.  Any thoughts?

Eric

[Larry L.]

Hmm. I tried it in Internet Explorer 6 and I see the same problem. Those are comments, they are not supposed to render. Works correctly in Firefox. Basically, your browser sucks. (I kid!)

[charles ferguson]

Hey all,
Thanks mucho for comments! Ron, long time no talk :)

I just checked the site in IE, & it sucks in all the ways you said. Firefox & Opera bring it up fine, but it seems to be cut short. Worked last night when I posted it... but having said that, I've seriously bastardized the free webpage the site offers to get it up at all. I'm working to remedy that asap.

In the meantime, I've taken out the ruleset itself and put up the email address for the pdf.

Eric JB, I have no idea how many players it "needs"--its never been playtested (I'm also working on). I'd love it to work with GM + 1 or 2: some of my best gaming was done with groups this size. I really don't know the minimum players needed to give it critical creative mass at this stage. LIkewise, how it'll work with larger groups.

But your offer of playtesting is gratefully acknowledged and logged!

cheers, charles

[Larry L.]

Charles,

From the updated teaser text, this sounds like good stuff.

Not to tell you what to do or anything, but is there a reason you don't just post the PDF version on your site? (To keep tabs on interest, to limit circulation, technical limitations, to stop it falling into the wrong hands, whatever.)

[charles ferguson]

Hey Larry,

>but is there a reason you don't just post the PDF version on your site?

um, yep: I don't currently have a site. TOTSG is long overdue (3 kids under 3 about sums it up) and it was, OK that's it, nothing's ready but publish or be dammed. I was like, fuck it, got a free page last night, signed up, found they didn't offer anywhere for me to put my pdf file, just a homepage. So I cut & pasted it all 28 000 words of it (times a gazillion because its word to html)directly onto the page. After some torturous reposting it actually worked last night when viewed with Firefox, but was mangled horribly when I saw it this morning in IE. Also, it truncated the original document severely.

So next step is to CutePDF (sorry, no bells & whistles) it when I get home tonight and start mailing it. A website with the PDF is in the works.

THis all TOTALLY reverses my usual design paradigm of immaculate production values that see me spend 2 years working on the initial marketing strategy & another 5 years agonising over the finer details of potential artists & a mind-blowing layout, but somehow never ever finding myself with an even halfway-finished game to actually market. (As in, "Wha...? Product? I need a product?")

So it's rough & raw, I'm afraid. You'll see it's lacking a bibiography,a playlog/play samples, and the character sheet, which are all high on the agenda. I'm not sure how much sense it'll make without those, but hell, I figure if anyone can piece anything together out of what's there, it's the Forgies :)

cheers, charles

[charles]

The pdf is now available from download, thanks to Guy and his timely suggestion about pbwiki ;)

The url is unchanged: ivoryroad.com

[Eric J-D]

Wow.  That was fast!

I'll definitely be giving this one a close look.

Thanks for making it available so quickly.

Cheers,

Eric

[John Harper]

I just read the PDF.

First reaction: Wow. This looks very cool to me. I definitely will be playtesting it at some point soon.

I probably won't have any real meaty comments until after I play it, but here are a few gut-reactions:

- I'd like to see a more robust system for creating adversaries. Maybe something like NPC creation in DitV. Even a simple benchmark guide to Strength levels would help a lot when determining how tough an adversary should be.

- Related to the above: How do you determine the Strength of a starting Minion?

- Weapon strength and damage: There's definitely a sweet spot, statisically, for weapon strength (realtive to your hero's skill). If it's too low, you will hit more, but not do enough damage in the long run. Too high, and you won't hit often enough to make the higher damage worthwhile over time. Is this intentional? If so, a few words about this sweet spot number and how it affects combat would be good.

- When your hero dies and a new one is created, do you always start with a Strength 3 True Name, or does experience "carry over" to the new hero somehow?

That's all for now. I'm psyched to give this one a try.

[charles ferguson]

Hey John

- When your hero dies and a new one is created, do you always start with a Strength 3 True Name, or does experience "carry over" to the new hero somehow?

Starting strength is actually completely arbitrary. There's no reason mechanically not to start with Str 1, or 10 (frex). The reason I arrived at 3 is this:
I want the game to be something that someone who's never roleplayed before (wheter 10 yrs old or 40) can pick up & run with, & it just kind of works. I thought that 3 gives reasonable odds of achieving stuff, once you throw in Passion (at +5 this bumps Str to 8). At Str 3, there's a minor difference between Intrinsic (full Str) actions & Known (1/2 Str) actions, so hopefully players won't get caught up agonising over "Is this action Known or Intrinsic?"--they'll get used to making a call and just going with it, because "right" or "wrong" (in terms of maxing effectiveness or doing "what's allowed") doesn't actually make any sense in TOTSG, and makes no appreciable difference mechanically. At the same time, Str level 3 should allow them to advance pretty quickly, so there's a quick payoff for buying into the reward mechanism: XP for getting wounded is probably gonig to be counter-intuitive for many experenced roleplayers (although I think it might make perfect sense to to a lot of newbies).

So the reason for the starting Str of 3 is to simplify intitial character creation, and to let people learn the mechanics as they play. If new players focus on their hero's Str as what's important, they're going to miss out. It's about how they use it & most importantly, how they describe what they do. One way to hopefully slash any mini-maxing stat-juggling is to have everyone start with exactly the same scores: players have to differentiate their heroes some other way.

Once you've already played one hero,  then to start a new hero you pick whatever Str you want, possibly limited to a range decided by the group during The Startup.

The effect of Strength in the game is always relative: what's important isn't how much it is, but how much bigger or smaller it is than those around you
So the ramifications to your hero's starting Str is mainly about how much bigger or smaller it is than the rest of your group, if you're all going to be facing the same adversaries. If it's too much bigger, either you'll get no experience (because you'll cakewalk everything & never get Hurt) or the other players will constantly get creamed, or else either you or them will sit everything out. Dunno how it all pan out in playtesting yet. Actually, it might not be such an issue, because even a Strength of 10 is reduced to 0 in a battle where you have abosultely no expertise. We'll see.

I'd like to see a more robust system for creating adversaries.

Noted. I'm mulling that one over.

How do you determine the Strength of a starting Minion?

Minions use exactly the same Str track as heroes. In fact, Minions are really heroes who just havn't converted their Outstanding Traits into Deeds. They're meant to be 'shorthand heroes', sacrificing detail for speed of creation. The idea is you can convert a minion to a hero & play them in the blink of an eye: just do the trait conversion as you did when you created your hero. I had the idea for 'heroic minions': minions who do have Deeds instead of traits (D&D-speak "NPCs"). In this draft I left them out, pending playtesting.

My current idea for hero/minion Str:

3 = normal: effective in a few limited areas
5 = tough
10 = a real bad-ass
20: the stuff of legends.

The idea is that over 10, Str only advances on a roll of 20. So few reach this level. But advancement is almost impossible to predict without lots of testing, so this is still very much in the air.

Weapon strength and damage: There's definitely a sweet spot, statisically, for weapon strength (realtive to your hero's skill). If it's too low, you will hit more, but not do enough damage in the long run. Too high, and you won't hit often enough to make the higher damage worthwhile over time. Is this intentional?

My intentions were these:
It matters what weapons you use--but not in terms of direct lethality, in terms of what your hero does with that weapon. A dagger can kill as quickly as a TH Sword, but not if you use it the same way that you would a TH sword. Big weapons are mostly more effective against heavy armor. Most important to how much Hurt you deliver is the number of dice you choose to throw, and your foe's Str relative to your own: if your Str is 2 higher than your foe's, you add 2 to ANY Hurt you do them. That's big.

Remember, you can throw up to 5 dice for any attack. Unless you're Wounded, your chances of hitting with most weapons using 5 dice are extremely high. You can also use an Impromptu attack to use half weapon Str. This increase your attack options dramatically. Combat's mostly about the options you choose relative to the situation you're in.

John, thanks for the questions (& enthusiasm :), hope this was a help.

[John Harper]

Thanks for the response, Charles. I actually already understood the rationale behind the starting Strength and how relative Strengths work. That stuff is all pretty basic.

Since the game seems concerned with character "advancement" however, I think it's important to address what happens when a hero dies and a new one is made. Something to think about for the next draft.

Your benchmark chart for Minion strength levels should go in the book. Since setting the (relative) Strength level of a Minion has A LOT to do with whether the Heroes succeed or fail, it's important to create good tools for GMs to get that right.

I understand that combat options and how many dice you choose to roll have a big impact on how the combat goes (I think -- only playtesting will tell). But weapon str. relative to hero str. is still a really important consideration. It might be good to be fairly explicit about the ramifications for taking a weapon equal to, higher than, and lower than your hero's strength.