[WW] Re: Systems [Veering OT]

[Michael Robert Blair <pellinoire@yahoo.com>]

I have been running Deadlands since it first came out.
Part of the problem was that I was not running it all
the time and was thus not as familiar with it as I
might have been. The last time I played it was really
the last straw, there were an awful lot of die rolls
that seemed surpurfluous in the big firefight with the
cyborgs. The thought was surely one die roll and a few
modifiers would be sufficient for all this?

We rotate GMs so that you do a scenario (at the moment
we are doing a very elderly CoC campaign and loving
it) then someone else runs something before returning
to the campaign a month or two later.

Other Systems
I have been playing since 1984 and have bought a lot
of systems over the years. Not all of them get played
and some get shelved after a single session (and one
(Underworld) is not played because a player's mother
watched 'Beauty and the Beast').

I quite liked Alternity but we always seem to go back
to STOCS or CoC. GURPS has wonderful sourcebooks and a
simple mechanism but it gets buried under far too many
modifiers so I have high hopes of a streamlined GURPS
V4. They do have basically the right idea though, put
the complexity into character creation and simplify
the actual game.

Feing Shui is very referee dependent. The only
campaign I played of it was a nightmare, the referee
had no feel for the setting and was the worst choice
stylistically - 'anal retentive' I think the Freudians
term it... he just could not wing it.

The White Wolf system could be good, I have not bought
a book for it since the incomprehensible Mage V1 but I
have heard nothing to make me want to go back to that
world of angst. The problem with the system appeared
to be that there were two different ways of doing
things, adding/removing a die or changing the target
number and no one was clear on how they related.
Forgive me if this is unclear, I am unclear on it.

In the words of one of our group 'Just use Cthulhu'.

The Ideal system is simple, realistic and flexible.
Simple: One mechanism. Easily learned. A minimum of
modifiers.
Realistic. Sensible results.
Flexible. I want a system that can go from the gritty
realism of the trenches of the Great War to a wall
jumping Matrix setting.
Oh yes, it does not use cards or counters.

Does the perfect system exist? I don't think so, but I
live in hope.

Michael


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