The Gaming Den

I've seen several mentions regarding 7th Sea and I was wondering about general opinions concerning it. What does it do well? Where is it broken? What needs tweaking?

I really like 7th Sea. IMO, it does swashbuckling adventure about the best of any RPG I've seen.

Good Points
Traits (ability scores) are fairly equally balanced...you can't afford to dump any one score completely, as all are useful in combat.

Swordsman schools give neat tricks, allowing for different flavors of swordplay and non-fluff distinctions.

The mass combat rules are fast and fun.

NPCs are divided into Brutes (mooks; they die easy but can be dangerous in hordes); Henchmen (more skilled and dangerous, but a single solid hit takes 'em down) and Villains (built like PCs).

Firearms are dangerous as hell, but very slow to reload. Fire once, then switch to swordplay.

The default setting, Theah, is strongly modeled on 17th Century Europe. You can just say "the Castillians are the Spanish," and people get it.

Bad Points
None of the magic schools work without tweaking. In particular, most demand that you spend a Drama Die (XP + system manipulation) AND make a roll to use magic. Glamour and Sorte (fortune-telling) are both pretty useless as written.

Ranged weapons are shot in the foot by arbitrary range penalties.

While the "skill" system works, the "skill allotment system is freaky. basically, buying a "skill" gets you access to a handful of "knacks" (what most RPGs call skills) at minimum ranks, and which you can then buy up. Buying a "skill" is strangely expensive, especially when you only want one or two of the knacks.

Knacks are divided into "basic" and "advanced," for reasons that no doubt made sense to the writers. They cost different amounts to buy at character creation, but the same afterward.

There's an overarching metaplot, which annoys me somewhat.

If you follow the official events, France is simultaneously pursuing two or three separate wars with no apparent drain on their resources. At least one of these wars is geologically improbable.

NPCs in the official events sometimes use handwavium magic.

There is no reference to America-analogue or Africa-analogue, despite these two continents being really freaking important to the twin scenarios of shipping and piracy. America I can accept, but where the hell is the Dark Continent?

Suggestions

I recommend the following tweaks (am using them in my game):

~Divorce Drama Dice from XP and just hand out more XP. As written, Drama Dice can be used as bonus dice, or turned into XP; this has the unfortunate effect of punishing crazy risk-takers and rewarding cowards...the opposite of swashbuckling adventure. Spending Drama Dice should be encouraged, not punished.

~Basic and Advanced Knacks should cost the same. Seriously, "Bartending" is an advanced knack.

~Magic needs to be tweaked. The only sorcerer in our party is a shapeshifter, and shapeshifting (Pyeryem) seems to work fine without the Drama Die cost...there's still a roll for success and a chance to get stuck in one shape until dawn. I haven't taken the time to modify the other magic systems yet.

Edit: Spelling.

Talisman wrote:At least one of these wars is geologically improbable.

I am impressed with that sort of fluff.

I mean geographically improbable I get, but geologically improbable? That requires some real psychedelic action there.

I've never read 7th Sea and I never will because of some personal problems I have with AEG. However, the coolest sounding 7th Sea Hack I heard of was preventing people from spending Drama Dice as Experience Points until they had spent them as Drama Dice. That is, you have to do something dramatic and cool before you can spend all of your XP.

This put a mandate on people to perform wild and reckless behavior and prevented people from hoarding their Drama Dice. It sounded like a pretty good rules hack, and the people who used it seemed to be having fun.

-Username17

I came across the crystal keep character, sword school and sorcery summary documents? Can the material they cover from the some of the supplements be used as summarized or do I need to try to hunt down the actual book to use it?

Also doesn't panache kind of kick ass as far as stats go?

Frank: So it not an issue with products themselves?

PhoneLobster wrote:

Talisman wrote:At least one of these wars is geologically improbable.

I am impressed with that sort of fluff.

I mean geographically improbable I get, but geologically improbable? That requires some real psychedelic action there.

I typed that at 2:00 AM Christmas night. If that's the only typo, I'm doing great.

ckafrica wrote:Also doesn't panache kind of kick ass as far as stats go?

Panache is useful, but here's the breakdown:

Brawn determines how much damage you do, and is used to soak damage.
Finesse determines how well you hit, and is your all-around Dexterity stat.
Wits affects your active defense and many out-of-combat skills, and is your "perception" stat. It's probably the least valuable in combat, but the most valuable out of it.
Resolve determines how much damage you can absorb and still be functional. It's also the spellcasters' stat, and represents willpower.
Panache determines how often you act and is your charisma stat.

Panache and Finesse are probably the most valuable in combat, but you can't really afford to dump any.

ckafrica wrote:Frank: So it not an issue with products themselves?

They're one of the various groups Frank has had a falling out with. Hes actually on two cards in their cardgames. Tombstone Frank from happy times and with his head on a pike later on.

I have 18" of shelf space devoted to Seventh Sea, which, I think, barring serious obscurity (miniatures game, anyone?), is just about all of it. It's in my top 5 of role-playing games, up there with Feng Shui.

And I've never played it.

What does it do well?

Fluff. Most of it, anyway. Sometimes, it's obvious the sourcebook's authors have thrown something in just 'cause it was frikkin' awesome, dude! (nacht sorcery, I'm looking at you) and sometimes they can't write for shit (brown-covered, ugly-as-hell, with-d20-conversions books, I'm looking there now).

But when done right--like Avalon, Knights of the Rose and Cross, Swordsman's Guild--the products sing with possibility.

But that possibility sometimes goes unrealized. You can read 5 pages of 7thC fluff and say, "That was actually awesome!" and then, 5 minutes later, you can't figure out what the fuck you're supposed to do with that information you just read.

It's also fiction-heavy. If you despise gaming fiction (as I often do), you'll likely feel that as much as 20% of your cash has been wasted. But some of it's pretty good. But some of it's terrible. You have been forewarned.

There are games to play and games to read. Like Hol and GURPS Reign of Steel, this is a highly readable game.

Where is it broken? What needs tweaking?

Broken's difficult. Like Champions the system is point-based, so it's your job as GM to tell people what kind of game you're running and what sort of characters are appropriate. Eventually, it won't matter (you're supposed to gain XP like... shit, metaphors fail me, but like something that gains a lot of XP), and characters will be able to survive anywhere, but before that happens characters start out with limited options. Thus they need to be able to use them all.

Here's what needs tweaking: the basic game wants you to travel the world. Fuckin' don't. Take one nation, make everyone from there, and run that. Grab either Castille (Spain) or Vodacce (Italy)--both of which are plot-hook heavy and magic-light--and make everyone be from there. Grab a couple of the secret society books--I'm partial to the aforementioned KotR+K and Rilasciare (pronounced sort of like a drunk-slurred really scary)--and mine those for adventure ideas. Because, while the nations make up the world, the secret societies own it.

Even if you don't end up running it, the system itself is almost a textbook on mathematical world construction ("There are X nations, that means X secret societies; we need a good, bad, and indifferent extra-national organization; we need a good, bad, and indifferent influence from history"; etc.) down to where you can almost chart it, and it's fun looking at where things will go next because, although despite the intent, there's a lot of gray in 7thC.

In truth, I wouldn't even tell my players we're playing 7thC. I'd tell them, "We are playing an RPG of politics and swordsmanship in a fantasy version of early Renaissance Italy; there are only humans and if you want a magician, she (yes, and only she) is a second-class citizen who can, with vast effort, pedict the future. Your character choices are a priest of the game's version of the Catholic church wanting to reform both church and state, a low-class thug striving for social change, a noblewoman magician wanting to free herself from her upcoming arranged marriage, and an easily manipulated nobleman swordsman who is in love with a woman below his station. Pick one."

Yeah, it's perscriptive, but the world is so deep as to make this almost necessary.

Finally, I have to mention that the game's not about pirates. Without foreign trade (i.e. beyond the game's core continent), there's no reason for piracy. Most nations are self-sufficient, so there's no options (in the basic game) for gold-laden, spice-filled, unique-goods-toting ships. It's not like you can be a Somali pirate, get lucky, and hijack a ship full of tanks. You need something like the ugly, poorly written Islands of Gold or Cathay to make piracy go in 7thC. I have a buddy who digs on all things pirate, and 7thC pissed him off for that exact reason: "There's no point to piracy in the basic game, and the game is billed as a pirate game!" He's, of course, correct, but the game can do so much more that that flaw didn't bother me.

A lot of good points have been touched on. I'd add a few things:

1) Costs are linear at character generation and scaled therafter. Bad monkey, no typewriter.

2) The PCs are crap novices who have to pay through the nose for reasonably ordinary things, and all the published NPCs are special people who either break the rules in at least one way or have more points than you ever will; or both. The world is inside-out, the law is upside-down.

3) Actual swashbuckling stuff is actively punished, since there are separate Knacks for jumping, swimming, and swinging, all of which screw you if you try to perform the activity without them, or just with them too low; wtf? Swinging on a chandelier or vine should give a bonus to whatever it was you were doing, because it's cooler than not swinging on things.

7th Sea included a few cool cinematic parts, chiefly in the damage system, but the rest of the game was an exemplar of nit-picking mother-may-I bullshit. The game plays like an alpha test.

The setting is terribly unfocused, trying to reference all history between the fall of Rome and the industrial revolution, for no reason. It is better to tell a single story well than ten stories poorly.

They did add a reason for sea caravans and therefore piracy later on with the Midnight Archipelago, which wasn't too bad.

It's a shame, because a lot of the core ideas were very cool. I think there really was a decent game or three in there.

Well 7th Sea grabbed my guys attentions because Scott Lynch's Lies of locke lamora has circulated amoungst us. Not a bad book btw: G.R.R. Marttinesque in the lopping off of characters though unfortunately a tad too predictable to be in my favorites (but up there).

I was thinking of using 7th sea or GURPS as possible rules for a game situated in a Camorr-like city. We might be better off without any magic and maybe start and allow it to be picked up later. As gurps magic doesn't excite me and I don't know 7th sea's yet. probably for the best

It seems to me from glimpsing through the Crystal Keep character summary, you really do want to start characters with quite a few more points and maybe tone down XP acquisition if what people say is true

Angel: So what would you do to fix the mechanics?

Yeah, 7S has near White Wolf levels of short fiction. I generally ignore it.

I'm not sure XP acqusition is such an issue...PCs need a bunch of XP to get out of the "snot-nosed novice" phase of their existance. The published adventures I've seen seriously recommend handing out 2-4 XP per adventure...not per session, per adventure. To the tune of 4-6 sessions. That's retarded. Add this to the "reward the cowards" Drama Die problem, and...you see where I'm going with this.

You can totally play without magic of any kind. The only issue would be allowing for a PC sorcerer after chargen, because sorcery consumes 40% of your initial resources (or 20% if you never want to be good at it). You'd have to figure a cost for picking it up later.

ckafrica wrote:Angel: So what would you do to fix the mechanics?

Ach, don't ask. I grappled with that question for some time before finally deciding the house was built on sand and there was nothing for it but to try somewhere else. It's possible someone more talented (or tolerant) than I could make it work to their satisfaction. It would probably be easier to tweak Spirit of the Century to Theah than to fix 7th Sea's engine. Hell, it would probably be easier to tweak Shadowrun to Theah than to fix 7th Sea's engine.

If you really want, I'll dig up my old notes for you.

2) The PCs are crap novices who have to pay through the nose for reasonably ordinary things, and all the published NPCs are special people who either break the rules in at least one way or have more points than you ever will; or both. The world is inside-out, the law is upside-down.

Not to be a 7thC apologist or anything, but I always assumed XP was to handed out like candy. PCs are supposed to advance ridiculously quickly until they can no longer, at which point they branch out or seek out secret societies which can advance them further.

I always liked 7thC b/c it could accommodate high-XP characters, not b/c it couldn't.

Angel: If it's a file that you change search you're computer for, I'd be interested but don't bust a nut over it

Okay, found it. Cleaned it up into a Den-style rant, which was a lot of fun.

1. The Illusion of 100 points
People show up for 7th Sea chargen thinking they have 100 points to spend, but they have been lied to. At least 32 of those points are already spent for them, getting each attribute to at least a 2 (including nation bonus), which is human-goddamn-average. So 1/3 of your points are needed just to make you John Doe. 2/5 of your points are needed to make you average for your nation. This is unacceptable, because you are supposed to be a kickass individual. John Doe needs to be the baseline you graft extra coolness onto.

Of course, some character concepts involve being weak, clumsy (like d'Artagnan), irresolute, stupid, or unstylish; but those concepts are punished because having a 1 in anything means that you will spend every session until you raise that attribute (potentially breaking your concept in the process) getting less xps than other people. So unlike any system which is sane, which usually have flaws giving you a benefit in exchange for the downside, in 7th Sea having a weak attribute also comes with an extra fuck you.

People should just start with 2 in everything (3 in nation bonus stat), and if you want a bad stat as part of your concept, it should be handled like a bad Arcana - worth more build points and activated by GM Drama Dice.

2. Attributes: Fundamental Inequality
Finesse is straight-up better than Brawn. It is more useful in combat, and about equally useful out of combat. Finesse can actually just negate clumsy attacks, and Brawn needs to be able to actually just negate wimpy attacks.

Panache shouldn't even be a stat like the others. It is supposed to be a measure of how much screen time you get, and this is an ensemble show. Of course, the part where it gives you more actions in combat which is theoretically balanced against those actions being worse, because points spent on Panache aren't spent on Finesse, doesn't fly either due to trait caps at chargen. You can just invest in Panache and Finesse, and let Wits or Brawn slide, and then you hit both a lot and often. Champions puts strict limits on how much Speed differential is allowed in a game, and for good reason, and the part where one 7th Sea Hero is taking actions two to four times more often than other Heroes has to stop. If Panache is going to be an actual stat, and not something weird and metagamey, it can be the social stat, and then you can roll something besides Wits for all your civil knacks.

The 'screen time' attribute can just be set to 3 for all PCs (and major NPCs). Maybe it goes up by 1 after each major story arc, until it maxes at 5.

3. Drama Dice: Encourage the Cool
If you take nothing else from this document, take this: Drama dice become XP when they are spent, not when they are unspent.

Start of session drama dice should also probably not be tied to the 'lowest stat,' because it hamstrings build variety. Just give people 2/session and let them earn the rest.

4. Advantages: Boring as Hell
Half the advantages are just price breaks on other things. If your concept requires a lot of civil Skills, you get University (or whatever it's called); and if your concept requires a lot of martial Skills, you take Academy (or whatever it's called); and if your concept requires a lot of languages, you take Linguist; and none of these things do anything except give you a price break for being focused and probably having a lot of redundancies in your Knacks or ability to talk to people. Except, of course, that it makes someone put 'University' on their sheet, even if their character concept never went to a university. Those cost break points should just exist.

5. Skills & Knacks
The basic idea of 7th Seas Roll (Attribute+Knack) & Keep (Attribute) is that anyone can try anything, but you can specialize. That's not a bad plan, but it runs into problems as soon as you can't actually try anything and succeed because the difficulties are weighted to people who have specialized. Particularly in fighting. Also, the part where your passive defense becomes *fail* as soon as you move out of your comfort zone at all is ludicrous - you're an adventurer, you don't get to be comfortable until after you retire. Let people use their highest applicable passive defense, not their lowest.

Knacks should cost 1 HP/2 dots. If you want, the fifth dot can cost double and take a whole HP by itself, but I wouldn't bother. Advanced knacks shouldn't cost triple at chargen, you just don't get any for free when you get the Skill.

6. Arcana and Flaws: Victims of Inflation.
Arcana look like a big deal at chargen, since +/-10 is a lot when you only actually have 60 to play with. However, as you gain xp they rapidly stop being a big deal in relative terms, and you start to feel like either a winner or a sucker for having one. If the PCs began as enormous badasses and weren't really expected to get any xp, then it might be a meaningful choice, but as is... honestly, I think every PC should have one Arcana and one Flaw as mandatory equipment. It'll drive fate witches nuts, but whatever. If anyone wants to not have to deal with that, they can have neither and be less interesting. I would amend the drama dice rule above to have DD spent to negate the activation of a Flaw actually be lost and not turn into XP. Flaws are cool and we want to see them in action.

Also the Arcana which gives you +2 pseudo-Drama Dice needs not to do that. You can spend regular drama dice on it's benefits just fine, thanks.

7. Sorcery: Problematic
I think the inherited sorcery of the nobility is one of the coolest parts of Theah's setting. At the same time, the sorceries are not remotely balanced against either each other or the setting. Also, the part where you pay more now to have more potential later is bad design. The drama dice change is already helping the Pyeryem users and such, but removing DD costs would not be out of line.

8. Build Points vs XP
There are reasons to have things cost differently during chargen and after chargen, but not in this game. The easiest fix is to hand out Hero Points instead of xp. That'll make people advance quickly, but they need to to compete with the published competition. If you wanted, you could have 3 xp convert to 1 Hero Point and the PCs would advance more slowly. If you really wanted.

That's part one, which deals with chargen and advancement. Part two, which involved tearing down the dice mechanic and replacing it with a new one is probably of less interest.

I like the dice mechanic.

But thanks, Angel. I'm going to share this with my game crew and we may use some of it.

Hey_I_Can_Chan wrote:

2) The PCs are crap novices who have to pay through the nose for reasonably ordinary things, and all the published NPCs are special people who either break the rules in at least one way or have more points than you ever will; or both. The world is inside-out, the law is upside-down.

Not to be a 7thC apologist or anything, but I always assumed XP was to handed out like candy. PCs are supposed to advance ridiculously quickly until they can no longer, at which point they branch out or seek out secret societies which can advance them further.

Yeah...Not really. I've played in and ran multiple 7th Sea games (and each of them ran for at least a year), and, frankly, the stuff the characters got was more significant to power growth than XP ever was. I don't think I ever saw anyone reach Master in any Sorcery or Swordsman school, and I can only recall one Journeyman. Maybe the XP gain is supposed to be faster than what we used, but the books don't suggest it.

So I've managed to acquire some of the books and read through them and here are some of the issues I've encountered.

Region specific elements: It is frustrating to me that I want to play a sniper from Vodacce yet the "sword"schools for any ranged weapon is from another country and is therefore supposed to cost twice as much. I hate penalties for thinking out of the box. Obvious solution is to remove the cost difference.

Meta Plot: Holy shit! It's nice to have something already on paper to work with but they take it to the nth degree! You can't even start to plan anything until you've read all the bloody source books because there's little hints of things you'll want to know. I particularly dislike that they made the story progress with later sourcebooks. What the fuck am I supposed to do with this information if my players have already changed the landscape they laid down prior to my procurement of later books?(other than just ignore it but to me it defeats the purpose of putting them out IMHO)
There is also the gaping holes like this synreth stuff (only it's existence is mentioned in the core books what's it supposed to be about?), Cathay (wall of fire you lazy fucks?)and why should I even care Ussura even exists?

Sorcery: yeah... whoop di doo. Other than the secret castille fire one and the shape changing one, none of them seem likely to be much use until you get to adept or master levels so what's the point of having them as beginners. Look to me like sorceror henchmen down the line will be the course I'll take. And Sorte can just fuck right off. That'll get relegated to DM hand waving for plot effect.

Vaticine Church: fucking Vatican apologist bullshit. every church NPC I saw bar the inquisition types were heroes. Gonna have to blacken this up by a million shades.

Dice system: I'm half okay with this; I just feel attributes and knacks are backwards. The keep your attribute, your knacks are unkept, will do nothing but completely encourage players to slam all their XP into attributes rather than improving their skills. Might it not be better to switch them?

So a few secondary questions:
Do they ever come up with technology development rules (maybe invisible college?)
How similar is L5R to 7sea? Could it's magic system be ported over (and maybe it's armor and fighting schools?)

BTW Angel: If you got part 2 on the dice mechanics handy, I'd be interested in taking a look.

ckafrica wrote:Dice system: I'm half okay with this; I just feel attributes and knacks are backwards. The keep your attribute, your knacks are unkept, will do nothing but completely encourage players to slam all their XP into attributes rather than improving their skills. Might it not be better to switch them?

No. Absolutely not. If you keep Knack only, you can only ever succeed in anything you have a Knack in, and the Knacks cover really small areas of ability. People have toyed with variants where you rolled both and kept whichever was higher (or lower).

Do they ever come up with technology development rules (maybe invisible college?)

Yes, the Invisible College has invention rules. I have no idea if they're any good or not, as I never used them. I think you're probably better off just charging people for unique gadgets they've built as Advantages.

How similar is L5R to 7sea? Could it's magic system be ported over (and maybe it's armor and fighting schools?)

They have a bunch of stuff in common, more or less depending on which of L5R's 3 editions you're looking at. Some of the terminology, like raises and roll/keep will port easily; other stuff, like Rank and Air ring, will need a little work. My experience with the L5R magic system has been bad, so I don't recommend it.

BTW Angel: If you got part 2 on the dice mechanics handy, I'd be interested in taking a look.

Okay, I have a whole thing, but this was before I came to the Den, so I'll be the first to admit you might be better off getting someone to port Shadowrun instead. Can't post it now, I have to go to work. I'll put it up when I get back.

ckafrica wrote:I particularly dislike that they made the story progress with later sourcebooks. What the fuck am I supposed to do with this information if my players have already changed the landscape they laid down prior to my procurement of later books?(other than just ignore it but to me it defeats the purpose of putting them out IMHO)

The plot moving forward allows you to have things happen in other parts of the world without you having to come up with something. It's actually quite handy in practice.

Okay, my old dice mechanic overhaul. See disclaimer above.

1) No more Roll/Keep distinction.
Knack dice now add directly to the dice pool like stat dice. They're already more limited in application, there's no need to make them qualitatively worse as well. So if your Finesse is 4 and your attack knack is 4, you're rolling 8 dice to attack. More on how that roll is resolved later.

2) No more static TNs.
All rolls are opposing dice pools. Former static TNs convert at the rate of 5 TN -> 1 die. So in the difficulty was 5, it's a 1-die pool. If the difficulty was 35, it's a 7-die pool.

3) Raises are also dice.
Raises give the opposition more dice, just as if you were raising the target number. 'Free raises' give you more dice on the appropriate actions.

4) Resolution.
Both sides roll, whichever side has the highest single die wins. If margin of success matters, the number of dice the winning side has which are higher than the losing side's highest die each count as exceeding the TN by 5. If the top dice are tied, discard them and compare as if they'd never existed, repeat if necessary. If the top dice are tied and one side only has one die, the side with more dice wins (but with no extra margin of success).


The object is that anyone can try anything with at least some chance of success, since x dice opposed by y dice have x/x+y as the chance of success.

I was trying a couple of ways to fit drama dice into the equation, since the 1-for-1 exchange rate no longer gave them the appropriate amount of kick. I settled on 1 drama die spent became 3 extra dice in the pool. Then I renamed drama dice to drama points.