I finished my game

[J. Backman]

I finally finished Theatrum, my small, narrative role-playing system. You can download it here (~155k pdf). And here's a character sheet (~25k pdf). Comments are welcome.

[Jonathan Walton]

The Good Stuff

-- Your PDF is a model for clarity, presentation, and design.  Nicely done.
-- I like what your did with "Animus," making it a combination of experience and a "resource distribution"-style attribute.  Not revolutionary, but a nice touch.
-- Overall, the system looks to be clean and intuitive.  No major breaking points, except perhaps in the case where many Aspects all seem to apply to a single roll.

Concerns

-- From my brief reading of the text, it looks like all rolls in Theatrum are unopposed.  Is this correct?  Any thoughts as to why you made this choice?  This is not a criticism, just a question.
-- There doesn't seem to be any incentive to choose "negative" Aspects, besides your words about "characters should be 3-dimensional and not all-powerful gods."  To me, this doesn't seem to be enough.  There are many ways to get around this (required a number of "flaws," paired traits ala Torchbearer, gaining Animus when hindered ala Nobilis, etc.), but something else might be needed.
-- Your division of the different types of Aspects seemed a little... I don't know... arbitrary.  Is there really that much of a different between a Body and Mind Aspect?  Then why make that distinction?  Is it just supposed to help players create "balanced" characters?
-- The system seems to default to "Failure" which seems a bit strange.  If the character rolls no Sucesses or Defeats, he/she still fails?  Isn't that a bit pessimistic?  Depending on what kind of setting I was playing with, this might be the first thing to get axed by the house rules.
-- More dice is not necessarily better.  If all you care about is 1's or 6's, more dice just leads to the stronger possibility of extremes, not a higher liklihood of success.  Since this is the case, why would I want to roll more dice?

Hope some of this is of help.  What program did you use to do layout, by the way?  It's really sweet and clean.

Later.
Jonathan

[J. Backman]

-- Your PDF is a model for clarity, presentation, and design.  Nicely done.
-- I like what your did with "Animus," making it a combination of experience and a "resource distribution"-style attribute.  Not revolutionary, but a nice touch.
-- Overall, the system looks to be clean and intuitive.  No major breaking points, except perhaps in the case where many Aspects all seem to apply to a single roll.

Gee, thanks Jonathan! I especially appreciate what you say about the PDF-design, since the project was mainly done for my book lay-out / page design portfolio.

-- From my brief reading of the text, it looks like all rolls in Theatrum are unopposed.  Is this correct?  Any thoughts as to why you made this choice?  This is not a criticism, just a question.

That's right, all rolls are unopposed. Main reasons for this being so: only one player rolling the dice speeds up the game, and since the game uses quite a lot of dice, opposed dice rolls would be a pain.

-- There doesn't seem to be any incentive to choose "negative" Aspects, besides your words about "characters should be 3-dimensional and not all-powerful gods."  To me, this doesn't seem to be enough.  There are many ways to get around this (required a number of "flaws," paired traits ala Torchbearer, gaining Animus when hindered ala Nobilis, etc.), but something else might be needed.

Yes, perhaps. I haven't really thought about that, mainly for one reason: I personally trust my players enough for them to make their characters human (or flawed) enough.

-- Your division of the different types of Aspects seemed a little... I don't know... arbitrary.  Is there really that much of a different between a Body and Mind Aspect?  Then why make that distinction?  Is it just supposed to help players create "balanced" characters?

Dividing aspects into different categories is just there to make things more organized. Nothing to do with balanced characters. If the players want, they can just make a general list of their characters' aspects without putting them into category A or category B.

-- The system seems to default to "Failure" which seems a bit strange.  If the character rolls no Sucesses or Defeats, he/she still fails?  Isn't that a bit pessimistic?  Depending on what kind of setting I was playing with, this might be the first thing to get axed by the house rules.

Getting no successes or no defeats was originally a draw. However, that was dropped because playtesting suggested that draws were quite rare and in most cases the player either got a failure or a success.

-- More dice is not necessarily better.  If all you care about is 1's or 6's, more dice just leads to the stronger possibility of extremes, not a higher liklihood of success.  Since this is the case, why would I want to roll more dice?

I don't know about you but I love the feeling of power I have when rolling 100D6... Umm, that's about the best answer I can give. (Actually, the likelihood of success does grow when rolling more dice).

Hope some of this is of help.  What program did you use to do layout, by the way?  It's really sweet and clean.

Theatrum was the first document I did with Adobe InDesign 2. I'm *very* pleased with the program, the possibilities it offers are very broad.

[Jonathan Walton]

I personally trust my players enough for them to make their characters human (or flawed) enough.

I really wasn't worried about my players either.  My point was that many traits could be taken either as "positive" or "negative" aspects (which is why Torchbearer lets you "flip" traits under certain circumstances), and there seemed to be no incentive to focus on the "negative" aspect.  For example, take the trait "Beserker Rage."  It could be a postive Aspect in some circumstances (combat) and a negative Aspect in others (social situations).  Is this supported by the current system?  If so, you might want to mention that traits could influence different types of conflicts in different ways.

Getting no successes or no defeats was originally a draw. However, that was dropped because playtesting suggested that draws were quite rare and in most cases the player either got a failure or a success.

I agree that it's not that likely, but if you're rolling small numbers of dice, it could happen often enough to make a difference.  I just think making the system lean towards character success would encourage players more.  It's just a suggestion.

Actually, the likelihood of success does grow when rolling more dice.

Well, technically, the likelihood of some kind of Success does increase, since you have more dice that might rolls 1's.  But, the likelihood of Failure increases at exactly the same rate.  So the split between Success-Failure stays at 50-50, with some number taken out for "draws."  Do you see what I'm getting at?

Theatrum was the first document I did with Adobe InDesign 2.

Kick ass!  My college has the license for InDesign 1.5, which is what I've been using to layout Storypunk.  I love the program too, and will definitely have to purchase my own copy once I graduate and move elsewhere.

Later.
Jonathan

[Mike Holmes]

This point is not very clear in the text, Jonathan, but you are incorrect. The way it works successes are more common with more dice. The problem is with the wording of the Major Failure condition which states that a majority of dice being 1 is a failure. That should say the majority of dice without any other dice coming up a 1. IOW, and result that has at least one roll of a 6 is a success of some sort. Failures only occur if there are no 6's rolled, and Major Failure only occurs when that's true, and the majority of the dice rolled are 1's.

However, another problem is that, as it is currently, the chances of a Major success decrease rather than increase as the number goes up. In fact, it's never higher than the 1:6 when rolling one die. A simple fix would be to make it so that a Success was a Major success if more victories were rolled than defeats. The problem with this is that it makes Major Success occur nearly 50% of all successes, and again more dice are not of benefit.

Instead, what you could do is roll again on a Success with half as many dice (round up), and read a success on that roll as a Major success. Laborious, but it's the only way I can think of to ensure that the Major Success curve retains a positive slope. Can anyone else think of one?

BTW, so what if draws are rare, Mr. Backman? It's still cool to allow the possibility.

Also, while we're at it, why do you disallow increasing abilities in play? For a game that seems as "metagamey" as this, one would think that it would very much make sense to allow development in play.  

Mike

[J. Backman]

Kick ass! My college has the license for InDesign 1.5, which is what I've been using to layout Storypunk. I love the program too, and will definitely have to purchase my own copy once I graduate and move elsewhere.

It's an excellent program -- I suggest you also try out the newer versions (2.x), they have a lot of improvements over 1.5.

This point is not very clear in the text, Jonathan, but you are incorrect. The way it works successes are more common with more dice. The problem is with the wording of the Major Failure condition which states that a majority of dice being 1 is a failure. That should say the majority of dice without any other dice coming up a 1. IOW, and result that has at least one roll of a 6 is a success of some sort. Failures only occur if there are no 6's rolled, and Major Failure only occurs when that's true, and the majority of the dice rolled are 1's.

You're right. I think I'll have to rewrite some of the text to make this clearer.

However, another problem is that, as it is currently, the chances of a Major success decrease rather than increase as the number goes up. In fact, it's never higher than the 1:6 when rolling one die. A simple fix would be to make it so that a Success was a Major success if more victories were rolled than defeats. The problem with this is that it makes Major Success occur nearly 50% of all successes, and again more dice are not of benefit.

Instead, what you could do is roll again on a Success with half as many dice (round up), and read a success on that roll as a Major success. Laborious, but it's the only way I can think of to ensure that the Major Success curve retains a positive slope. Can anyone else think of one?

That's also true, the probability of major successes does decrease and I thought about this quite a lot. One solution would be to remove all Major Successes from the game but that would really make it unbalanced. Also, I don't think that rolling again to get a major success would be a good idea, even though it does make the chance of a major success increase when rolling more dice -- too many dice rolls for my tastes.

BTW, so what if draws are rare, Mr. Backman? It's still cool to allow the possibility.

Ah, just a personal preference. Maybe I'll include them again in the re-write -- I'm doing a version with art and more examples, and probably some new rules.

Also, while we're at it, why do you disallow increasing abilities in play? For a game that seems as "metagamey" as this, one would think that it would very much make sense to allow development in play.

Again, a personal preference. I had a few rules of increasing abilities in play permanently (i.e. not just boosting them with animus), and for some reason it didn't work well in the game. However, I'm thinking of adding that one as an optional rule in the re-write.