I’m enjoying the rules-light, redesigned nature of version 1.3. I just ran a game session that involved some information sharing, song writing, and crowd-entertaining. I think only two die rolls were needed: one to see if the songwriting was up to expectations, and one was a detect contest to notice a character’s attitude through body language, not words.

The songwriting check used a slight change that I want to put in the rulebook: I want to take “failure” out of contests. Failing should be up to the players and GM. When you make a contest, you succeed, tie, or “don’t succeed.”

My Saturday Roll20 Modos game opened my eyes a little this week:

Things get chaotic in battle!

Out of the chaos, though, came a revelation. When the initiating player announces his action, and each player takes a moment to declare a reaction, and then everyone rolls their contests, the GM gains another opportunity for storytelling. Each player is thinking, “someone did X, I reacted with Y and my roll was Z. So what exactly happened?” When the GM assembles each action and its contest result in order, a mini-story is formed that makes combat seem more dramatic.

There’s a danger here that the GM envisions the character’s action differently than the player did, so it’s advisable to pause and let players contribute during this storytelling process.

Just did a round of new character creation last night (and the following game session). The players would make me feel bad about drawing up character-concept-generation rules; they did a fantastic job without them!

We started with character concepts, which were fueled by knowledge of the campaign setting and the two extant PCs. Then I tried to bolster them by rolling up attribute scores, but they’d made most of the hard choices already.

After that, skills, perks, and equipment were a snap. Hero points are pretty intangible though, so we’re still working on how they’ll use them. One idea was to use them on attempts to convert non-believers! That one should be fun.

I had quite a mix of technologies yesterday: Modos RPG on .pdf, a random dungeon room generator on ENworld’s OGRE, and a virtual game table on Roll20.net.

I would like to have included my GM screen in Excel (4th technology), but a hard drive crash made that option temporarily inaccessible. Situations like this make me extremely appreciative of the Average Person Rule (all characters and difficulties start at what an average person could do) and of course, Rule Zero (the GM is allowed to fudge anything!).

I played my first game of Savage Worlds. It was surprisingly similar to Modos RPG, especially considering that I wrote the majority of the game without ever having played Savage Worlds. But I had a good time and liked the system.

Some reactions:

The core rules are short and sweet, but I felt a little overwhelmed once I encountered Edges, Hindrances, Bennies, “Traits,” the Wild Die, Raises, and the derived attributes (Parry and Toughness). It’s not bad – just more than I was expecting.

The hero-makers, Bennies, the Wild Die, and Aces, feel a little redundant. Each seems designed to give the players a super-feeling.

The wound system is really cool. It looks like it does a nice job of eliminating hit points from the game, and with them some needless mathematics. Also not in the game: experience points – at least massive amounts of them. Gain 5 XP, and your character gets better. Simple and good.

While I also find it awesome that RIFTS is going to become a Savage Worlds book, I think it would be much cooler to see some Modos RPG modules doing that conversion for free – paid for with love and devotion.

My online group got to try out the Ice spell. As a 2nd level spell, it’s easily twice as interesting as its 1st level counterparts, Fire and Lightning. Now I believe that the caster was using a spell implement to cast the spell, which meant that Ice required three actions. For those three actions, he got to deal d8 ice damage and penalize the target’s movement by 4. Is it worth three actions for this?

Well, first, the caster gets to deal full damage at range. Second, he limits the movement of an opponent to the extent that the GM penalizes it, or gains an advantage in opposing that opponent’s movement contests. So the opponent could have a harder time chasing or fleeing. Also, that movement penalty lasts until the caster’s next turn (or until he defends with willpower), and can be maintained. So a busy opponent might suffer the penalty for the whole conflict.

Now a low level character can’t chase his slowed opponent after using three actions, because he’d be out of actions. But his friends sure could!

Next topic: minimum casting difficulty.