The Forge Archives

Character Creation:

Species:  The first thing you do when creating a character you must know what species he will be part of. At this point if your game master has not created species for the setting you as the player should take the time to create a species detail it in as many words as you must. After doing that you will have 25 words to highlight through the description to emphasis things that would have an important impact on the game. When you highlight your words you must highlight the entire sentence, the name of the species does not count towards your limit. Any words not used here will be rolled over into your background words.

Background: The next step in creating a character is to determine what experiences made them who they are. You are going to want to write up a detailed background of your character and just as with species you will have 125 words to highlight as well as any that roll over from species. Again the characters name will not count towards the max count.

Phrases: A phrase is some thing drawn from a characters past experience which will be emphasized as some thing important in the characters life. Phrases come in two major forms positives and negatives. Negatives will be things which have no upside to them what so ever and cause the character nothing but problems. Positives may have negatives inherently bound to them specifically but nothing that affects nearly every aspect of a characters life.
On a second note negatives and positives can be viewed in three different forms called scopes, general, ordered, and refined. General phrases cover brood spectrums such as sword play, thievery, teacher. Ordered phrases have some limits bound to them but not to specific, things such as light swords, breaking and entering, and teaching mathematics would be considered ordered. Refined are things described right down to the very specifics, such as rapiers, acrobatics, and geometry teaching.
When creating your character you will get 10 phrase ranks to either create separate phrases or by spending extra phrase ranks you can raise the value of a phrase. General phrases will cost 3 total phrases for each rank, ordered will be 2, and refined will be 1. If you need more phrases by taking negatives the same way as positive phrases you will gain that many positive phrases to work with.

Specialty Phrases: Any actions that could not be taken by a normal person no matter the setting will fall under these nine phrases which can be combined and checked against a difficulty to create special effects. These phrases will be, correspondence, entropy, elements, life, matter, mind, prime, spirit, and time. Each specialty phrase will cost 2 phrases.

Stats: Stats measure the basic characteristics of a person forming a general idea of their pure raw capability. The stats used will be brawn, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, personality, and willpower. Each stat will start at 8, 7 being the average for a normal person. By lowering a stat by any number of points you may put those points back into any other stats. You will have three more stats to record, minor wounds, mortal wounds, and fate. All of these stats will begin at zero.

Equipment: Referring to the Equipment section each character should have 48 points to distribute to all of his equipments stats, as well as 10 phrases. Using the rules, and logic you may create varied weapon's, vehicles, animal companions and such.

Game Play

Session start: Each stat will begin the game with a number of d6 in its dice pool equal to it's rate. At the beginning of every session if your dice pool is under the stats normal value bring it back to its starting, if however it is more than its starting then you get to keep the extra dice.

Rolling the dice: When you take any action you must declare how many dice you will be using. On a roll of 1 you take a dice away from you fate, on a 6 you may add a dice to your fate, on a roll of 2 or 4 add these to determine success rate, on a 3 subtract one from your stat pool, on a 5 add one to your stat pool.

Mundane actions: when taking a mundane action you must chose the number of dice in the related dice pool to roll never rolling more than the stats total. Any phrases that relate to the action will add a number of dice equal to their ranks, these dice will not add to fate or subtract from stats. When the gm sets difficulty he should use the following method, and yes players get negatives and positives for bad or good narration of their actions.
Penalties, is not familiar with action-2, distracted -2-4, long range-2, difficult-0-12, half mortal points gone -2 per point beyond, no description, poor/no description -2-4.
Positives, +2 per extra turn taken to perform, +2 per fate point burned, good description +2-4, aided +2 per person.

Special actions: By mixing the special phrases the character has as well as maybe those an item may have you will create an effect. First step is to figure out what phrases will make up the effect average out the phrase rank and add those dice. The only difference between a normal action and a mundane is that generally with magic or high tech things like nanites, when you fail your difficulty rate you take a number of minor wounds equal to your failure.
Negatives, all are the same except for area -2-6, shaped -2, no foci -2(like a magic wand nanites, or a ritual), how much it goes against natural order -0-10.
Positives, foci +2, used often +2.

Opposed actions: When to things are acting against each other the gm gives each a difficulty rate which ever force passes their difficulty by the most wins the action.

Advancing: At the end of each session the players will keep a journal of their characters adventures, and the gm will award a number of words they can highlight. For every 20 words they gain they get a new phrase. When a character ends a session with twice his stats value in dice he will raise the stat by one point and empty the pool.

Combat

Initiative: each person should have a small stack of cards numbered from 1 up to what ever their stat  is. They are then shuffled at the beginning of combat each person flips a card the person with the highest goes first and then the person below them.

Attacking: an attack counts as an opposed roll.

Number of actions: Each person may take any number of action they desire. However each action beyond the 4th takes a cumulative -2. Defensive and reactionary actions count towards this.

Damage: When taking damage the attacker may add any number from the related stats pool, as well as any appropriate phrases in dice. The player will then roll and the opponent takes a number of minor damage equal to the attackers roll. The enemy will then roll a number of dice they choice from brawn, if they roll over their mortal wounds they take no damage but those wounds will stack with any new ones. If the person fails the roll they take 1 mortal, for every 6 they fail by add another mortal. You have a number of mortal equal to your brawn.

Equipment:

Stats: Items have stats just like characters an may add dice from those pools to any relevant roll. The only difference is that when rolling 3, and 5 take away from the item to show it degrading. Also the only way an item will gain fate is by some one trained (having a relating phrase) repairing the item, for each point they succeed bye they add one fate which may them be added to a stats pool. Keep in mind that items have hp and brawn to avoid being broken just like characters. When a person wants an animal companion or some thing along those lines they build it as per an item but it will be treated in game like a person.

Phrases: Example positive phrases for items would be things like, slashing, bludgeoning, protective (for taking away from damage). Negative phrases might be, short, inaccurate, cumbersome.
Please enjoy the system and be logical about creating things.

Hi there,

First, what's your name? I didn't notice it in the other threads, though maybe I missed it.

Second, woah! Slow down. We've got posts flying all over the place here, and most without a real title -- it's generally a lot easier for everyone if you preface your posts with the name of your game. As Ron said, the Forge moves slowly at times. You've got three write-ups, two of which are just a day apart. If the game is that up in the air, and you're shuffling things around just in your own head, you might want to hold off for a while; wait until your thoughts settle down. Posts on early-stage development can be fine, but it also helps if you have specific questions, say about what's giving you trouble: no one knows this game as well as you do, and we need some focus in order to start thinking about it.

Third, I guess, is that I still don't have a clear sense of what your game is about.  Maybe I missed it when I skimmd the other threads, but what makes this game different? What do players do in it? What's the basic goal here? Without knowing that, there's no way I can really evaluate how effective any of your rules are, or imagine how they'll work. I could guess, based on what I see, but it's better if you just spell it out.

First off my name is Seth Bashwinger I think I mentioned it may have forgotten. Any how I apologize for the many posts I got confused and thought that each time I posted it would stay in the same thread if I put a subject up. So when I went to skim through the thread I thought it had not posted right, so posted once again then realizing that it creates a new thread.
I apologize aside, the update in the system so quickly is because I started a play test group a little bit ago and have tweaked it after seeing in game some off set things.
Second the games core book will not focus on a genre or setting, it will be geared towards presenting the rules, giving examples of play including items, species descriptions, so on and so forth. There will be two sections on role playing one on the art of playing, and one on the art of gming. Supplements will be provided later which will not add to the rules as much as present in-depth rich settings full of plot hooks and such.

Hi Seth!

If you've got actual playtesting uner your belt, you should absolutely write some of that up and post it to Actual Play here. That would help us a lot when commenting on the design. You don't need to go into infinite detail, but try to focus on what the players did, and how things worked/didn't at that level, rather than describe in-game events alone.

Quote from: preludetotheendSecond the games core book will not focus on a genre or setting, it will be geared towards presenting the rules, giving examples of play including items, species descriptions, so on and so forth.

That's cool. You might want to look at some older threads regarding publishing rules/setting (there have been quite a few). Various people have raised good points on why tying the two together may work best, both from a rules and design point of view, and in terms of sales.

By the way, are you planning on selling commercially? If so how? (Just curious -- there's no right answer.)

QuoteThere will be two sections on role playing one on the art of playing, and one on the art of gming.

Hm, okay. Seems early to be talking about this but are these going to be about RP in general or specific to your game? Of course it depends on your intended audience, but I would suggest that a generalized explanation is probably unwarranted -- most potential buyers (or free downloaders or whatever) will already know what RPing is, broadly speaking. If it's advice specific to your game...great!

Allright I never thought to put it up there lol. Um well the role play things are not going to be telling what role playing is I am setting them up to promote good role playing, instead of rules lawyers, and number crunchers. So yup I have some college work to do and then I will start posting up the game sessions, see you guys later.