... what am I talking about?! Of COURSE you can beat `em. That's what that great big club you're carrying is for!

As those of you who have seen Option have probably surmised, my play style of choice is immersionist sim heavy games with relatively little combat. Magic is cool, but not neccesary. This is almost diametrically opposed to most of the rest of my friends who game. They're fans of D&D, which I don't particularly like.

Anyway, having now realised that I'm very unlikely to succesfully get them to enjoy my prefered style of gaming, I've taken a different tack. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing well. i.e. My way.

And thus I bring you Rage. A game of dashing heroism and epic battles. A game of glittering beauty in which heroes of legend clash in tales which will echo down through history. A game of bloodshed, beating people up and dancing upon their looted corpses (Disclaimer: Game contains no actual rules for dancing).

Your primary abilities in Rage are called Beat, Stand and Wuss. As you get more pissed off you acquire Rage dice, which add your power but increase your chances of going off on one and ending up doing something crazy and stupid. Err. that is, more crazy and stupid.Combat is vicious and bloody: You lose limbs, get gaping body wounds and generally have vast amounts of unpleasantness occuring to you. But that's ok, because you inflict the same amount of unpleasantess and then some right back at them.

For the rules so far, see http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~drm39/rage.pdf

Seems no one's interested, but just to say that I've updated the pdf and will probably be making more changes to it over the next few days. Unless there's any particular interest I won't beother to announce future changes. Just mentioning this one to prevent confusion.

You funny thing, you haven't asked any questions, of course nobody answers you. What do you expect? Closer to hundred people have read your post, though.

Other than that, good for you that the game design's working. Do write about it in Actual Play if you get an opportunity to playtest. Not every design has to be a difficult one.

Gah. Forget my own head if it weren't suspended in a life support vat. I had intended to ask questions, but obviously I seem to have forgotten to do so.

First of all there is of course the obvious and highly useless question of `what do you think?'. I'd love to hear any general opinions people have on the game.

More specifically I'd like to hear thoughts and or suggestions on the following:

I'm worried about the Rage mechanic. I think the protracted Raging might prove to be rather infuriating for the player involved. One way to deal with this would be to just draw a Rage card immediately and follow through on that without any delay, then return the character to normal afterwards.

The current system of the GM creating the Enemies is clunky. I'd really like something more streamlined. This ties in with the problem that the system for introducing new characters is also clunky. I'd rather not have to keep track of Loot values if I can avoid it, but I can't think of a good way of doing without.

The movement rules are an irritating D&D leftover. You have to count up exact squares, you end up thinking `oh damn, I just can't reach him' and there's general hassle of this nature. I would like to remove this. Unfortunately if I just say `you can move as far as you like' this seems to remove a good deal of the point of having the board.I feel the board is important to the game and thus would quite like to keep it in there.

Allowing people to control space, e.g. via something attack of opportunity like, might work. I'm leery of this though because the AoO rules can be irritating. It would need to be simplified.

Hmm. That's all I can think of for now.

Now where did I put that vat...