“Submachine Gun: The Submachine-Gunning”
As Dave and Yanni prepare to go off to Indy for GenCon, we’re tossing out a relatively short round-table with three of our hosts. In this episode, we talk about D&D Next, then about skill and magic systems in role-playing games in general. We come to the following conclusions:
- We like skill systems that let heroic characters do stuff
- We like magic systems that are open-ended, not ones that make you pick from pre-generated lists of spells
Also, at one point, Dave refers to “Old School Revolution” – it’s actually “Old School Renaissance” [Sorry. –Ed].
(I appear to be becoming the “Burning Wheel Guy” for the comment sections of several rpg podcasts. Anyway…)
So, here’s my elevator pitch for the BW skill system. I while back, I was running a game, and one of the PC’s had gotten into a feud with a bunch of death cultists, who were hold up in their death cult lair thing in the basement of a pawnshop. And because the PC in question wasn’t really a combat oriented character, he decided that the best way to smoke them out would be to descend into the sewer systems, steal plumbing supplies from some Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, and make an untrained Plumbing test to cause the sewers to back up and flood the cult’s basement hideout. He failed, but i ruled that he still accompolished his goal; rather, his consequence of failure was that it took him so long to set all of this up that the tides came in (the sewers dumped into the harbor), flooding his carefully charted path back to the surface, meaning that he’d have to find a new way out (through territory controlled by angry sewer cannibals, no less). Anyway, I thought this was a cool example of BW’s abundant skill system encouraging creative problem solving, leading to some fun play.
Incidentally, despite the metric fuckton of skills that Burning Wheel has, Swiming isn’t one of them; anyone with a decent Speed stat is assumed to know how to swim.
Open magic systems do bring us to the problem Blake pointed out in my most recent article: “For some players, the creativity spills over or bursts the container, so their fun in the game is essentially unrestricted. But other people need the book to tell them what they can do: omission is as good as forbiddance to them.” A magic system that lets you come up with literally anything at any time is like a Green Lantern ring, stupidly customizable and incredibly powerful but not much good if you’re stuck with analysis paralysis. It’s fun for some people and miserable for others, running into the Twisp-and-Castby style “it’s not for you” approach that we can afford now that the market is broad enough.
I’ll also say that the Mage campaign I played was definitely in the “tell me what you want to do and I’ll tell you what it requires” camp, and it was really neat. The idea that Mage contains a magic system that seems designed for freeform magic but expects you to pick from a spell list is…disconcerting.