7th Sea Second Edition - My Opinions

So, despite my attempts to remain neutral, it is clear that the new edition of my favorite game has been a disappointment to me. It is true. And today, I shall go into some of the reasons why. Fair warning, this is not intended to be an unbiased review. Much of what follows is one hundred percent about my own tastes, preferences, prejudices, and, yes, biases.

7th Sea Second Edition - The Session

As mentioned, I ran a session of 7th Sea for Charm City Gameday. As part of the review of the game, I wanted to do a post-mortem. Also, because it's been a while since I ran a con game.

Short version: It went really, surprisingly well. The group was engaged and attentive. The scenario I made up clicked. The system mostly worked as intended.

7th Sea Second Edition - A Review

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to run a 7th Sea session at Charm City Gameday. It was interesting, illuminating, and a lot of fun. Mostly, it required that I read pretty deeply into the system so that I was prepared. Now, of course, I have a lot of Thoughts(TM) that I want to share.

Rather than bludgeon you with a single epic post, I'm going to break it up into three. Today, I'm going to give a basic review of the game. I'm mostly going to stick to the facts, trying to give you enough information to make up your own mind. The next one is going to be a specific post-mortem on the intro session, noting some of the surprises that came up, and the things that worked and didn't work. Finally, I'm going to do a bit that explores my own personal reactions to the game, that likely won't be as fair and balanced as this review.

System Wank - Ads and Disads

Lots of systems out there feature various ways to make your character better, along with various ways to represent flaws.  Most of them function essentially the same way.  I want to call out the system that completely changed the way I thought about them, and in some ways how I thought about RPGs in general.

FATE, first seen by most of us in Spirit of the Century, approaches the whole issue from a decidedly different angle.  Advantages and disadvantages both serve one single purpose: grabbing the spotlight.  One way lets you shine by winning, the other by failing.  Unifying the mechanics as Aspects is undeniably brilliant.

System Wank - Initiative

Last week, Rob Donoghue posted a summary of a few different types of initiative systems as part of his musings on his new system.  Which reminded me of the next mechanic for my System Wank series: the best initiative system I ever used.

(In retrospect, I totally should have ripped off that Best Thing I Ever Ate show from Food Network.)

The 7th Sea game introduced me to a number of really interesting mechanics.  An argument can certainly be made that Wick, Wilson, et al., did more to bring indie ideas into a mainstream game than actually creating novel mechanics.  (Of course, the same can be said about Da Vinci's exhaustive encyclopedia of inventions, and look where that got him.)  But, so far as I know, their initiative system is unique.

Spirit of the 7th Sea

Today's post is about how to use DFRPG to do 7th Sea. And I'm rambling and spitballing, so don't expect a lot of organization. I already did some of this work using SotC as a model. DFRPG opened up a couple new options, though.