Everway & The Pool

[Michael James Bogue]

Hi everybody!
I'm a long time lurker, first time poster.
First off lemme say I read "The Questing Beast" and the Pool and loved it. A great idea for a game. I think it could be the next big little thing!

I used to play a bit of Everway "back in the day" and think that this system would be a great way too run it. I found Everway too hard and too free form for me to run, but I think that the Pool would be perfect.

I'm thinking of using the Vision cards in the Spherewalker decks (as soon as I replace mine - alas they got lost somewhere in one of my moves) and the players have to use those as the Motifs.

I'm curious to know what you folks think about that, and anyother ideas or advice you might have adapting the Pool to Everway.

thanx!

[James V. West]

Hello Michael! Welcome to The Forge.

I bought Everway this summer but haven't yet played it (so many games, so little time, so damn few people around here to play them with!). I can see what you mean by the system being too loose, or too free-form.

The vision cards are beautiful and full of red hot potential for role-playing. Mixing the two games would be something I'd love to hear about. Unfortunately I can't give you any specific advice on how to do it since I've never played Everway. It seems to me that Everway's character creation system is already right in-lin with The Pool. Just pick a cool card and write 50 words about it, pick some Traits, spend some dice, and go.

I say give it a whirl and let us know how it went.

[Michael James Bogue]

Alas my Everway has gone missing :-( but i plan to pick it up again - esp. with the new cards.

My thought was basically the same - use the cards to determine the character, with each card having to have at least one die put into it - though I may scrap that.

I will probably be busy the next couple of months - but I will let you know how it goes.

Hello Michael! Welcome to The Forge.

I bought Everway this summer but haven't yet played it (so many games, so little time, so damn few people around here to play them with!). I can see what you mean by the system being too loose, or too free-form.

The vision cards are beautiful and full of red hot potential for role-playing. Mixing the two games would be something I'd love to hear about. Unfortunately I can't give you any specific advice on how to do it since I've never played Everway. It seems to me that Everway's character creation system is already right in-lin with The Pool. Just pick a cool card and write 50 words about it, pick some Traits, spend some dice, and go.

I say give it a whirl and let us know how it went.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Michael,

My thought was basically the same - use the cards to determine the character, with each card having to have at least one die put into it - though I may scrap that.

As luck would have it, last year I ran both The Pool and Everway. And I think this is an utterly fantastic idea for how to combine the two. Pick four to six Vision cards, treat them as traits, and attach dice to them. Flesh out the character by writing the brief character description last, rather than first. In a conflict situation, the player displays one of his cards and explains why it's relevant: "Having grown up in the streets of Cafor, I'm familiar with the way someone can get a good deal in these kinds of barter transactions."

Heck...the sphere-spanning nature of the Everway setting makes it damn near seamless for your group use almost any CCG or comic/art cards for the game that they may already own. Character development would be handled simply by adding cards to the character. Sounds like it would be a blast, and would provoke a lot of creative investment from the players. For instance, I want an Eternal Warrior bodyguard as a 3 dice Trait pretty bad right now.

Paul

[James V. West]

Hey Paul

I love the idea of using The Pool with art cards of any type.

In fact, as I was telling Moose a few months back (a year??), I was working on a game called Vizion which was almost exaclty that.

I used to run shotgun games a lot (that's hic for "run this game RIGHT NOW or I'll blow your head off, sonny--in other words little or no planning). I'd sift through a bunch of art cards a few minutes before play and pick out a handful that I was in the mood to deal with. I'd hand the stack to the players and tell them to pick a card and write up a character based on it.

My rules were simple: you get 10 points. Write down Traits and assign pluses to them amounting to 10 points altogether. I'd assign on-the-spot target numbers during play. They'd roll d20 and add any of the Traits that seemed to fit. That was the entire rulebook. This was years before The Pool.

What worked best about it was the immediate visual associations that occured. People automatically knew who their characters were and they had a tangible grasp on what the setting looked like since I based the entire scenario off of the cards they chose.

Anyway, tangent alert.