Universalis, D20 and The Wheel of Time

[Matt Gwinn]

For the last month or so my Friday gaming group has been playing The Wheel of Time.  Things where not very exciting and we didn't accomplish very much in the line of character or story development.  We talked nearly every week about how d20 wasn't the right system for The Wheel of Time, but we continued to play.

Last night our game master came over and informed the group that we were switching game systems (for at least one night) to Universalis.  

We skipped world creation and simply used our existing characters and setting.  Everything that has come up in play over the last month was considered to be fact.  Character costs were equal to their level.  Example: a 5th level armsman would cost 6 coins and would have 6 ranks in each of the armsman class skills.  Crossclass skills cost an additional coin per rank.  We didn't bother with Feats or attributes, but we determined later that the cost would be 1 Feat=1 coin and high attributes would simply translate to a description thus an exceptional attribute would cost 1 or 2 coins.

We were each given 30 coins to start.  Having skipped world creation this gave us PLENTY of coins for the whole session.  I'm not sure whether or not that changhed the dynamic of the game, but it was nice to always have coins to spend.

This was our first time using Universalis, but at least half of us were familiar with the rules.  Our first conflict ended up being a huge debackle.  A couple assasins were sneaking around outside the palace and were discovered and chased off by the guards.  Eric interupted and narrated that the guards chased after the assasins and were ambushed.  Charles challenged that because he didn't think the guards would leave their post and thought there should be no ambush.  THat's when hell broke loose.  Everyone started adding to the scene and taking a side, argueing ensued about what did and did not contribute to whether the ambush would occur or not.  For the most part it was Eric being intent on getting his way, but I suppose I facilitated that somewhat by disagreeing with him.  IN the end (about an hour later) we ended up rolling about 50 dice between the fice players and the Ambush never happened.

After that things went a lot smoother.  The plot was thickened and we got more accomplished in the next 3 hours than we had in the last 3 sessions combined.  IN the 4 or 5 scenes (and about a dozen mini scenes) we introduced 19 new characters, at least 6 new groups, a palace worth about 30 coins and a ton of interesting plot twists.

What We Discovered
------------------------

1)  We hardly roleplayed.  It was all storytelling, which was something we were kind of disapointed about.

2)  We came to the conclusion that it would cost nearly the same amount to create the entire Kryptonian Race as it would to create Superman.  In more than one instance we would spend coins to increase an entire group's skills instead of increasing the skills of the single member of that group which we were focusing on at the time.  Were we doing this wrong?  If not, we determined that it's a glaring flaw in the system.

3)  We will switch back to D20 next week.

4)  Every long running campaign (using any system) that starts to slow down in the creativity department, should switch to Universalis for at least a single session.  We generated enough ideas in last night's session to drive the game for at least 8 more sessions.

Overall, we really enjoyed the evening's play.

,Matt

[Valamir]

Hey, glad to hear you played and had a good time!

Its a little hard for me to judge what was going on in your session from what you wrote, but I'll give it a shot.

Your solution for how to convert the characters seems the easiest, but I can't quite tell how you did it.  Did you give each armsman character a number of Traits equal to the full slate of class skills all at x6 (their character level).  If so this would normally cost FAR more than 6 Coins.  Each level of each Trait would cost 1 Coin.  While this isn't that important during a setting conversion process and can easily be ruled with a Rules Gimmick, it would explain how your Complication got so big.  That's a lot more dice than I've ever seen.

For simplicity what I would have done is make Armsman a Role so that Armsman x6 would, in fact, cost 6 Coins.  I would then have used the Class Skills as a guide for the types of things the Armsman Role could be applied to but likely wouldn't have treated them as seperate Traits (except for ones the character was especially noted for which I would have bought seperately).  This would limit the number of dice that would go into a Complication since "Armsman" could only be drawn on once, not once per skill.

This was our first time using Universalis, but at least half of us were familiar with the rules.  Our first conflict ended up being a huge debackle.  A couple assasins were sneaking around outside the palace and were discovered and chased off by the guards.  Eric interupted and narrated that the guards chased after the assasins and were ambushed.  Charles challenged that because he didn't think the guards would leave their post and thought there should be no ambush.  THat's when hell broke loose.  Everyone started adding to the scene and taking a side, argueing ensued about what did and did not contribute to whether the ambush would occur or not.  For the most part it was Eric being intent on getting his way, but I suppose I facilitated that somewhat by disagreeing with him.  IN the end (about an hour later) we ended up rolling about 50 dice between the fice players and the Ambush never happened.

I followed this right up to the point where you were rolling dice.  What point was the complication entered into?

Eric narrated that the guards chased after the assassins and were ambushed.  If Eric were not in Control of the assassins a Complication would start here between the guards and the killers.

Charles came up with an excellent use for the Challenge mechanic.  I'm assuming that Eric didn't buy his arguement that the guards wouldn't leave their posts and insisted on taking it to bidding.  I'd further assume that the rest of the players were fairly split about whether it was or wasn't a good idea?  Usually if there is just one person trying to force something different they back down before going to bidding because trying to win would be prohibitively expensive.

I get a little hazy with the "all hell broke loose" part.  The Challenge mechanic is intended to be very orderly if the situation comes to bidding.  At this point the ONLY thing that should have been going on is:

1) Establishing Eric's version of events (the guards chasing the assasins) as the event being Challenged.

2) Establishing Charles's version of events (the guards wouldn't leave their posts) as the Challenger.

3) Determining if there are any pertinent Facts already established that would support one or the other of these ("The guards have orders to pursue all tresspassers", "The guards are known for never abandoning their posts", etc).  If so the side the Fact supported would get its Coins doubled during the Challenge.

4) Each player in turn around the table (with the Challengee going last) would add (if desired) 1 or more Coins to whichever side they preferred be the one that occurs.

5) If desired one of these other players could propose a third alternative version that could be voted on.

6) The side with the most Coins in support wins.  If that had been Charles the guards remain at their posts, Eric gets to recover any Coins he spent setting up the pursuit and ambush.  If that had been Eric the guards pursue as he suggested and the Complication (if such is warranted) can continue.  All bid Coins go to the bank.

This is really the only thing that should be going on until the Challenge is resolved.  I can't tell from what you wrote if you did it this way or not.

I have to say I've never seen a 50 die Complication before.  What sort of Traits were drawn on to provide that many dice.  Were most of them purchased directly?  If so what were the justifications?

Question:  Did you use the Coins that were being bid as part of the Challenge as a Dice Pool?  I can't tell if that's what you did, but if it was, it would be incorrect [insert caveat here about anything being correct with the appropriate Rules Gimmick in place].  Challenges and Complications are seperate subsystems not designed to be combined.

After that things went a lot smoother.  The plot was thickened and we got more accomplished in the next 3 hours than we had in the last 3 sessions combined.  IN the 4 or 5 scenes (and about a dozen mini scenes) we introduced 19 new characters, at least 6 new groups, a palace worth about 30 coins and a ton of interesting plot twists.

Thats one of the game's strongest features.  What I expect will happen is that your players will find those characters and plot twists more compelling because they had a hand in creating them.  The same sort of committment that comes from a well designed kicker.

What We Discovered
------------------------

1)  We hardly roleplayed.  It was all storytelling, which was something we were kind of disapointed about.

This came up in the discussion related to Laels RPGnet review too.  The game does not support very immersive play (at least not for very long) because all players are expected to be GM's as well.  That's pretty much a design feature of the game.

We've found that there is ample opportunity for roleplaying (especially using the dialog mechanic, and how one spends Coins won in Complications), as long as your definition of roleplaying doesn't require deep immersion.  But that opportunity often goes untapped, especially by first time players.  I suspect if you were to play again, alot of the experimentation with the rules and plot twists would become second nature enough that you'd notice such opportunities more often.

2)  We came to the conclusion that it would cost nearly the same amount to create the entire Kryptonian Race as it would to create Superman.  In more than one instance we would spend coins to increase an entire group's skills instead of increasing the skills of the single member of that group which we were focusing on at the time.  Were we doing this wrong?  If not, we determined that it's a glaring flaw in the system.

I'm not sure what part of the rules you're referring to with your question.

If you mean the Master / Sub Component rules...yes.  Defining all of Superman's Traits as being part of the "Kryptonian Race" as a Master Component would cost about as much as defining the Traits just for Superman.  You could then buy a horde of Sub Component racial members linked to that Master Component.  The key difference is one of Importance.

If you gave Superman 20 Traits he would have an Importance of 20 and require 20 Coins to write out of the story (e.g. kill or defeat).  If you gave a Master Component of "Kryptonian" 20 Traits and then bought Superman as "A Kryptonian" than Superman WOULD have access to all 20 Traits of his race, but would only have an Importance of 1.  Meaning Superman could be killed off with a single Coin.  Of course you could then add 20 additional non racial Traits to Superman (like his relationship to Lois and Jimmy) which would give him his own Importance...but it would never be as high as if all of the Traits had been purchased for him directly.

That is absolutely an intentional design feature.  Its most often used for generating alot of Mooks (like super stealth killer ninjas) who are capable but go down easy.  However, there are alot of advanced uses for it as well.  

For instance you could have created the Armsman Class as a Master Component (maybe you did) and assign all of the Class Skills as Traits for the Class.  Then you could have made each character "An Armsman" Subcomponent.  Thereby getting access to all class skills cheaply.  Similiarly d20 style "races" (like D&D Elvish vision and affinity for bows) can be created as Master Components.  Religions and their associated believes, Social Classes and their associated perks, Professional abilities, Organization memberships, etc...can all be created as Master Components allwoing individual characters access to these traits in a cost effective manner.

In fact, I have visions of Universalis "Genre Books" (some fans have already expressed an interest in doing them) which would in great part be a compilation of such "standard" Master Components.  A Western Setting might have Master Components for "Gunfighter" "Cavalry Soldier" "Indian Scout" "Cowboy" "Saloon Gal" "Gambler" etc.

3)  We will switch back to D20 next week.

Hopefully that's because your foray into Universalis gave you enough good stuff to work with that you can get you d20 game moving somewhere and not because you don't want to play it anymore...

4)  Every long running campaign (using any system) that starts to slow down in the creativity department, should switch to Universalis for at least a single session.  We generated enough ideas in last night's session to drive the game for at least 8 more sessions.

I don't know if your GM (who was it BTW) got the idea off of our site or came up with it himself, but using Universalis to jump start other games is one of the ways I encourage it being played.

What I've suggested to people is to use Universalis to map out all of the behind the scenes stuff.  What are the princes, and villains, and power brokers in your game up to...in order to get a backdrop for your PCs to get involved with.  Sort of an interactive Relationship Map designing thing.

I don't know of anyone else whose actually ported their actual PCs back and forth between games.  Thats a first (that I know of) and a pretty cool idea.  

Did you make the PCs community property as is Universalis standard or did you maintain specific player ownership of them?

[Matt Gwinn]

Ok, I guess I'll take this one step at a time.

Converting from d20
For existing characters and NPCs we considered every level to cost one coin.  Characters are considered to have all class skills equal to their level and every cross class skill costs one coin per rank.  This made existing characters very expensive, but it wastn't a problem when we introduced new characters.  This didn't cause any problems during play.

The Incident
I don't fully remember the full conflict that caused the ruckus, but I'll go over it.

Charles framed the scene.  The Components that came into play at this point were: The Palace wall, the guards who were brave and valient (a total of 3 coins), 2 Silver dagger assasins (they were created the week before so I don't know their actuall cost, but Charles paid one to add them to the scene).  The scene progressed as I mentioned earlier...Eric pays a coin to take control of the scene and introduced the Cunning Silver Dagger Leader (3 coins) who arranges the ambush, he also added dark and shadowy to the wall (2 coins).  It was actually Charles that called for a conflict which could be where the confusion came about.

After the conflict was called for we tried to determine what aspects of the scene came into play.  Eric insisted that the Guards being brave and valient would make them chase the Silver Dagger (thus allowing them to be ambushed) the rest of us were pretty sure that the fact that they were palace guards would make them not leave their post.  NOw that I think about it, the Brave and Valient (2 coins) should have counted for Eric while the guards (1 coin) should have counted for Charles.  We ended up giveing all 3 coins to eric.  Eric also got dark and shadowy (2 coins) for him.  This took a little while to sort out.

Next, we went around the room and everyone got an opportunity to add to the conflict, which I';m not sure we were supposed to do.  Jason introduced a guard tower with keen eyed 3rd lvl archers (6 coins for charles), I introduced the evil, corrupt, power hungry, captain of the guard, 5th level armsman, with 4 levels of diplomacy that was in league with the silver daggers (16 coins) who call calls back the guards so the Silver Daggers can get away.  I originally wanted the captain to count towards preventing the ambush, but by the time I was done spending coins I wasn't sure what would be better so we determined that he was his own entity thus 16 coins for me.

Eric then introduced a secret escape route that would allowed the Silver daggers to sneak up behind the guards (2 coins for eric) and sleeping gas boobie traps to keep the guards from running away (1 coin for eric).

Charles then introduced perfectly placed lighting along the wall (2 coins for charles).

Then we rolled
Eric = 8d10
Charles = 8d10
Me = 16d10

So it wasn't quite 50 dice, but 32 is still a lot and we likely did it all wrong.  I ended up winning the die roll and narrated that the ambush didn't happen.  We all ended up getting quite a few coins back.

We didn't bid on anything in this incident which may be what we were supposed to do all along.

Challenges and Complications are seperate subsystems not designed to be combined.

I think this may be where the problem occured.  I don't think we were supposed to roll.  It's unlikely that we would have invested so much if we knew we couldn't get our coins back.

I'm not sure what part of the rules you're referring to with your question.

If you mean the Master / Sub Component rules...yes. Defining all of Superman's Traits as being part of the "Kryptonian Race" as a Master Component would cost about as much as defining the Traits just for Superman. You could then buy a horde of Sub Component racial members linked to that Master Component. The key difference is one of Importance.

I see what you're saying here and I guess we weren't looking at it from an importance factor as much as power factor vs cost.  For example.  Janet introduced the group of "sailors" (1 coin).  Later on she desided to name six of them and have another character hire them.  She also wanted those six to be tougher and gave them all an additional 2 levels (18 coins: 1 to name each and 1 per level each)  that got us talking about whether she should have paid 2 coins to make ALL the sailors 3rd level and then spend 6 coins to name six of them.  This would result in a shipyard full of the toughest sailors ever to exist, but would save Janet 10 coins.

THis leads me to another question.  Lets say she did it that was and saves the coins, but then someone spends 3 coins to have a tidal wave kill all sailors.  What happens to the six sailors?  Do they still exist as characters with 4 importance (1 per level + 1 for being named)? or do they get dropped to 1 because the group "sailors" no longer exists?  or do they die with the rest of the sailors?

Well, I guess that's enough for now.
By the way, Charles was our GM and he was at GENCON with us.  He didn't work the booth but he stopped by a lot.  I'm pretty sure he played a few demos.

,Matt G.

[Valamir]

The Incident

<snip>

Ok.  It sounds like you did it perfectly right.  Charles Framed the scene and initially had Control of the Guards and Assassins both and so was free to narrate whatever he wanted.  Eric Interrupted, and (presumeably) took Control of the Assassins.  Now that the Assassins and Guards were controled by different players, a Complication arose.

You went around the table adding lots of stuff which built to a pretty big Complication.  Any time an existing Trait is drawn on, its use has to be justified.  Eric tried to draw on the guards "Brave and Valiant" Trait to help the Assassins, essentially using the guards own Trait against them.  To justify this, his arguement was basically that the guards were so brave as to be reckless and get themselves into an ambush.  Charles then Challenged the Eric's use of the Trait that way (an excellent use of the Challenge mechanic).

This is the issue that then should have been resolved as I outlined above.  If Charles and Eric couldn't come to terms with how that "Brave and Valiant" Trait should be used (either for the guards or against them) then bidding would have ensued to determine whose version wins.  Subsequently the Complication would continue.

Then we rolled
Eric = 8d10
Charles = 8d10
Me = 16d10

Having 3 dice pools is absolutely acceptable.  Its not explicitly stated in the core rules because we decided to make that an advanced technique that we'll shortly be putting up on our site as an Add-on (as soon as I find the time to write it up) but lots of variants like this are possible by using Rules Gimmicks.  In the game I ran at DemonCon I did this exact same thing with a character who I hadn't decided which side of the battle he was going to help.

One thing I'd mention that I noticed from the way you described the Captain adding 16 Coins to your pool.  You add 1 die to a pool for each level of each Trait a character has that applies to the current situation that you can justify, not 1 die per total Coin value of the character.  It wasn't clear to me from how you wrote it if you did that.  You probably did it right, but I thought I'd mention it just in case that wasn't clear.

So it wasn't quite 50 dice, but 32 is still a lot and we likely did it all wrong.  I ended up winning the die roll and narrated that the ambush didn't happen.  We all ended up getting quite a few coins back.

I have seen a few Complications with dice in the 30s.  Not very many though, thats still a pretty big Complication, and from the sounds of it it deserved to be.  By getting Coins back, do you mean that after determining how many bonus Coins you got from the roll, most of you decided to keep most of those bonus Coins rather than spending them?  That's perfectly legitimate, but a bit anti-climatic sounding.  Was there a real dramatic moment when this big looming conflict that could have gotten nasty faded away with a sigh of relief...or did you find the outcome disatisfying for its lack of resolution?

We didn't bid on anything in this incident which may be what we were supposed to do all along.

The only thing I noticed that should/could have been bid on was how the "Brave and Valiant" Trait finally get spent.  It sounds like Eric got to keep the "Brave and Valiant" dice AND the "Guard Dice" for the benefit of the Assassins (using the Guards Traits against them).  Since you say you didn't bid for this, what must have happened is the rest of you decided to give in and let Eric do it his way (Charles dropped his Challenge) which is a perfectly good (and usually preferable) way to resolve Challenges that don't require bidding.  If, as you say, most of you were opposed to Eric's use of the Trait in this way, than it sounds like you let him get away with something because you probably had enough support to overturn if you'd taken the Challenge to bidding.

Challenges and Complications are seperate subsystems not designed to be combined.

I think this may be where the problem occured.  I don't think we were supposed to roll.  It's unlikely that we would have invested so much if we knew we couldn't get our coins back.

No, now that you explained it further, I think you probably did it right.  I had initially thought that you had started with a Challenge and then wound up using Complication mechanics to resolve the Challenge, which would have been a mistake.  But from the sound of your description you did it exactly right near as I can tell.  It was a Complication, and you can keep the Coins you win in a Complication.  Note, that technically this isn't getting your Coins back...actually those Coins are spent and in the bank and the Coins you get to keep are the Coins that you won based on the die roll (sum of successes for the winner, 1 per die rolled for losers).

I see what you're saying here and I guess we weren't looking at it from an importance factor as much as power factor vs cost.  For example.  Janet introduced the group of "sailors" (1 coin).  Later on she desided to name six of them and have another character hire them.  She also wanted those six to be tougher and gave them all an additional 2 levels (18 coins: 1 to name each and 1 per level each)  that got us talking about whether she should have paid 2 coins to make ALL the sailors 3rd level and then spend 6 coins to name six of them.  This would result in a shipyard full of the toughest sailors ever to exist, but would save Janet 10 coins.

That's an interesting situation.  I've only ever seen someone actually name individual characters of a group Component once.  That was for a single Component representing 2 inseperable comrades.  IIRC we did it the same way you did.  The only thing I might have suggested as a player in your game is for Janet to spend a Coin for a Rules Gimmick to allow that, since it isn't explicitly permitted in the rules.  Of course, it isn't explicitly forbidden either, but it would feel a little off to me for it to be considered standard.

THis leads me to another question.  Lets say she did it that was and saves the coins, but then someone spends 3 coins to have a tidal wave kill all sailors.  What happens to the six sailors?  Do they still exist as characters with 4 importance (1 per level + 1 for being named)? or do they get dropped to 1 because the group "sailors" no longer exists?  or do they die with the rest of the sailors?

Well, backing up a bit, there are really 5 different ways to build the Sailors.

1) Each sailor is an individual:  This would cost 6 Coins to Create 6 seperate characters with the Role of "Sailor".  Then 12 Coins (2 each) to make each "Sailor x3".  Then 6 Coins (1 each) to give each a proper name.  Total 24 Coins, each Sailor has an Importance of 4 and can be killed with 4 Coins apiece.  This is the most basic way to do it.

2) Master / Sub Component:  This would cost 1 Coin to establish the Role of "Sailor", 2 more to make it Sailorx3, and 1 more to officially set this as a Master Component.  Total of 4 Coins.  Then 6 different Sailors could be Created each with the Role of "Sailor" (giving them access to the Sailor x3 Trait of the Master) for 1 Coin each and a name for 1 Coin each.  This would cost a grand total of only 16 Coins, but each Sailor would have an Importance of only 2 and could be killed with 2 Coins apiece.  The benefit here is two fold.  One, many more skilled Sailors can be cranked out for only 2 Coins apiece.  Two, additional Traits can be added to the Master Component which would then be available to be drawn on by any of the Subs.  Note that in order to actually destroy the Master Component itself, first all Sub Component Sailors would have to be eliminated.  Then the Master could be eliminated IF the player was able to justify how all Sailors in the world were killed (mass Sailor Genocide).

3) Normal Group solution:  A single Component called "Group of Sailors" (or something similiar) is Created.  This would cost 1 Coin for the "Sailor" Role, plus some number of Coins for the Group Trait.  The actual number of Coins required is variable.  If the game had been using entire armies than a Group Trait of x10 might represent a battalion of 1000 men.  A squad of a mere 6 men might only warrant a Group x2 Trait.  Here you were using a 1:1 ratio so you had GroupX6.  Given that 1 Sailor was Created with the Role itself, to get 6 Sailors you need 5 more.  Plus 2 Coins for the additional ability.  So to get "Group of 6 Sailors x2" normally would cost 8 Coins. (1 for the Role, 5 for the Group Trait, and 2 for the additional skill).  This Group would have an Importance of 8 and so could be eliminated entirely with 8 Coins.  3 Coins could be used to reduce the Group Trait, describing the death of 3 of the Sailors.  The remaining "Group of 3 Sailors x2" would have an Importance of 5.

4) Named Group:  Janet's somewhat unorthodox solution was to give all 6 of the members of the Group a name, which would add 6 Coins to the cost and to the Importance of the group for a total cost of 14 Coins.  Describing the death of individual members of this Group gets a little bit trickier.  Its not really enough to reduce the Group Trait by itself, without also simultaneously crossing out the corresponding name.  Thus, eliminating this Component piecemeal can be a little difficult and is one reason I wouldn't recommend building Components this way (and is why I suggested requireing Janet to Create a Rules Gimmick to do this, as a way I'd introduce to try to discourage these types of Components...but that's just my own personal preference not an official rule).

It seems like what Janet actually did was to pay for each individual members skill seperately (which she didn't have to do if the Component was all 1 big group) but not pay for a seperate Group Trait.  This all comes down to the "how meticulous, how fast and loose" a group wants to play.  My personal preference...I'd probably put the action on pause to figure out the accurate price...but that's just the accountant in me.  Saying "yeah, that's close enough for us, let's keep going" is also perfectly valid...so I wouldn't stress too much over whether Janet's cost was calculated a little off.

5) the last method I can think of is a hybrid, using the Master / Sub Component technique, but then making the Sub Components groups.

By the way, Charles was our GM and he was at GENCON with us.  He didn't work the booth but he stopped by a lot.  I'm pretty sure he played a few demos.

I think I remember him.  Have him mention one of the things he did in the demo and I'll know for sure.

[Mike Holmes]

I've seen the situation that you describe in the big complication exactly before. In one of the early playests, there was a bomb that was going to go off. A problem can start to occur when players start to state how it is that the Trait in question will be used, but not pay attention to where the action in the complication is going. That is, one player employed a character's Flight Trait to say that he was going to fly away with the bomb. This after another player had already stated that another character was trying to disarm it. This seems odd, as dice for completely unrelated actions were being employed to solve the same problem.

Again, this requires a multiple pool solution to resolve. Something that we'll have in the add ons. If not, I'd challenge those dice being added at all. That's another complication, and should be handled separately. That said, one can make a nested complication of this. Wherin the second declared is resolved before the first (programmers will understand how this works). In this case this can be a better way of handling such.

Another problem in this particular case was one of scale. The way you converted from D20 created a situation where every character had more Traits than you'd often see in Universalis. That is, an archer usually has an Archer trait (x1 but left unstated). A good archer might have Archerx2. But just as often he has Aim (see the examples in the book). The point being that what you encountered is the D&D power granularity in action.

Worse, they have according to your conversion as many skills as they have Class Skills. This is simply more definition than a character usually gets in Universalis. Heaven forfend you actually encounter anybody at level 10 or higher. This will lead to collosal pools. Especially when players get creative in their activations.

What I would have done would be to give characters one trait per level. Or something like that. The fact is that D&D's gamism trranslates into a level of detail that Universalis is simply not meant to support. This sort of detail does not lead to better stories, so it's not usually included.

That said, you can do it. The system will work. But then just don't be surprised at the fifty dice pools. They will show up. As long as you don't mind rolling, the system will continue to function. You're just going to have huge amounts of Coins to explain the outcome after every complication (I suppose you should give a D&D style description of a fifteen round combat!).

In general, this is a potential problem with using an existing universe. Try to balance out the facts with the skills. When you consider that the fact that there is magic in the world costs the same as each level of Bill's Quickdraw skill, you start to see how the scale of the story is affected by the creation of traits. Or rather, if you had started out with just a few Coins, you'd never have created all those details in a million years of play. When converting, consider that. Ratings should be related to what you could have spent making the world, if you had spent some time doing it.

The one last thing that I'd mention is that, having been a game in progress, I'm willing to bet that the players had emotional investment in certain characters and sides. If you answered Ralph's question before, I apollogise, but I have to ask again, what did you do with the PCs? My point is that if players have biases from play of a "normal" RPG, then those biases are likely to show up in play of Universalis over that campaign. Players should either try to mitigate this with appropriate Gimmicks, or at the very least try to agree to keep the effects of these biases to a minimum. That said, I prefer the former. The "PC" Gimmick should be instituted, for example, almost certainly.

Without those precautions, play of thios sort is likely to get quite mixed up in it's priorities.

Mike

[Tony Irwin]

For simplicity what I would have done is make Armsman a Role so that Armsman x6 would, in fact, cost 6 Coins.  I would then have used the Class Skills as a guide for the types of things the Armsman Role could be applied to but likely wouldn't have treated them as seperate Traits (except for ones the character was especially noted for which I would have bought seperately).  This would limit the number of dice that would go into a Complication since "Armsman" could only be drawn on once, not once per skill.

Damn that is clever! That works perfectly for our ongoing L5R game. Currently we've been taking the character class name as the role and then everything in the skill package gets it own trait. That leads to confusion...

Tweedledee: "My role is Kaui Engineer so I get to add a dice to help me disarm this trap (cos that's what they do in L5R), and I've got Traps as a trait so that's another dice from that",

Tweedledum: "Hey but I thought we gave them the trait because that's what they do."

Using the skill package to define the role rather than inspire traits is a much better approach, makes it cheaper to build character classes and also stops dice pools building up too quickly eg

Tweedledee: "Lets see, our Matsu samurai have defence, kenjutsu, battle, and archery as relevant traits. So Im getting 4 dice for this little tussle and an extra one cos fighting is what samurai do"

Tweedledum: "Fair enough, Im spending 10 coins to have 10 new Matsu samurai run into the room. Someone pass me 50 dice"

Actually role creation as you suggest it would make character advancement much more palatable. When skill packages are used to define the role rather than the traits then its not so bad to take the role multiple times to represent ranks/levels. My Matsu Samurai x2 can take an extra 2 dice in a situation where defence or kenjutsu or archery or battle would be useful. You can only activiate your role once in a complication so you're only getting 2 dice even though your role may have four different aspects that make it suited to the complication at hand (like our Matsu buddy in a fight).

Sweet :-)

I don't know of anyone else whose actually ported their actual PCs back and forth between games.  Thats a first (that I know of) and a pretty cool idea.

Oh my god I need to pee! That is so cool! I believe this Thursday (when Im hoping to introduce the 5 coins for a pc add on) we'll give that a shot! (although ironically some of the characters we've created in Universalis have been getting refered to in our regular L5R sessions)

[Valamir]

In an older version of Universalis where we actually had seperate "Traits" and "Skills" instead of having everything handled the same, you could buy entire "Skill Packages".  The actual skills that were part of the skill package were left to retroactive justification.

...sure Kurgal the merchant can ride a camel...he spent some time running carravans to dul'agin... type of thing.

Thats pretty much how I envision role working...the extent to which you can push the Role "package" depends on the group.

For your purposes you might want to be very strict and actually list out available "Classes" and what skills (from the L5R packages) go with each, thereby saying "A role of X lets you do any of these 6 things"