Spirit Of The Century - opinions after session 3
After several years, I finally managed to get something resembling a Spirit of the Century campaign started.
Session 1 - I had a museum robbery as part one of a daring adventure.
Session 2 - One of the players couldn't make it. Found a free adventure that could be pressed into a prequel adventure.
Session 3 - Player still busy so I threw together a follow-up to session 2.
It's very much about learning the system for me. Session 1, I wanted to have a big rumble, but the fight seemed to be taking forever, and we were just exchanging punches; which is not much fun. Decided to wrap that up early, and offer a concession. But the PCs were pretty solidly in the lead here... Decided to let the players win. Let them interrogate the NPCs. Get the plot going. Later another player tried to seduce another NPC. Realised in hindsight that was a good opportunity for a "social conflict".
For session 2, I decided to reduce the amount of stress points to speed up combat. This seemed to work reasonably well. Also had a chance for social conflict when a certain player decided to seduce the big bad. What the hell! I rolled with it. Didn't really take enough advantage of manoeuvres or zones though. Was also in a bit of a rush at the end.
Session 3 involved a rather rushed game that I threw together the previous night. Plot hooks were a bit clumsy. On the plus side, we did have an unexpected drinking contest. Except both parties had too many stress points due to their general buffness. Still, it worked well using the conflict rules again. Added some manoeuvres, partly to make the combat interesting. Also forced some consequences. Conflict still took a bit long though. Had to wrap up more quickly than i wanted to and didn't resolve the plot as well as I wanted.
Turns out consequences are interesting. Even though the player won the contest, he had a drunk consequence (which went down to a hungover consequence the next day). Winning doesn't come free.
I really need to impress on players the importance of Manoeuvres. An uncontested roll gets a free +2 on the next roll, and makes the conflict more exciting.
My main criticism:
Spirit of the Century's variations on FATE Core break the system! Wish I'd realised this before. Turns out this predates the FATE Core. Looks like this is a problem that was addressed rather than a working system that was broken.
The stress track is too long.
This can be fixed by making the stress track shorter.
Players skills are too good. It doesn't give the players a lot of opportunity to tweak character stats later on. I'd rather have fewer skills at lower levels, and only 5 aspects with some sort of rapid progression. FATE Core has much weaker starting characters. The idea is these are heroic characters but this essentially makes them overpowered at start. It doesn't really work thematically either. Good pulp characters are not super-heroes. They're flawed and limited.
Fixing that would involve NERFing the player characters. Not really something I want to do. This entry was originally posted at https://luckykaa.dreamwidth.org/635395.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Session 1 - I had a museum robbery as part one of a daring adventure.
Session 2 - One of the players couldn't make it. Found a free adventure that could be pressed into a prequel adventure.
Session 3 - Player still busy so I threw together a follow-up to session 2.
It's very much about learning the system for me. Session 1, I wanted to have a big rumble, but the fight seemed to be taking forever, and we were just exchanging punches; which is not much fun. Decided to wrap that up early, and offer a concession. But the PCs were pretty solidly in the lead here... Decided to let the players win. Let them interrogate the NPCs. Get the plot going. Later another player tried to seduce another NPC. Realised in hindsight that was a good opportunity for a "social conflict".
For session 2, I decided to reduce the amount of stress points to speed up combat. This seemed to work reasonably well. Also had a chance for social conflict when a certain player decided to seduce the big bad. What the hell! I rolled with it. Didn't really take enough advantage of manoeuvres or zones though. Was also in a bit of a rush at the end.
Session 3 involved a rather rushed game that I threw together the previous night. Plot hooks were a bit clumsy. On the plus side, we did have an unexpected drinking contest. Except both parties had too many stress points due to their general buffness. Still, it worked well using the conflict rules again. Added some manoeuvres, partly to make the combat interesting. Also forced some consequences. Conflict still took a bit long though. Had to wrap up more quickly than i wanted to and didn't resolve the plot as well as I wanted.
Turns out consequences are interesting. Even though the player won the contest, he had a drunk consequence (which went down to a hungover consequence the next day). Winning doesn't come free.
I really need to impress on players the importance of Manoeuvres. An uncontested roll gets a free +2 on the next roll, and makes the conflict more exciting.
My main criticism:
Spirit of the Century's variations on FATE Core break the system! Wish I'd realised this before. Turns out this predates the FATE Core. Looks like this is a problem that was addressed rather than a working system that was broken.
The stress track is too long.
This can be fixed by making the stress track shorter.
Players skills are too good. It doesn't give the players a lot of opportunity to tweak character stats later on. I'd rather have fewer skills at lower levels, and only 5 aspects with some sort of rapid progression. FATE Core has much weaker starting characters. The idea is these are heroic characters but this essentially makes them overpowered at start. It doesn't really work thematically either. Good pulp characters are not super-heroes. They're flawed and limited.
Fixing that would involve NERFing the player characters. Not really something I want to do. This entry was originally posted at https://luckykaa.dreamwidth.org/635395.html. Please comment there using OpenID.