Systems Hunt III: Eureka!
Okay, this is apparently the last in my series of posts about seeking a game system for a particular campaign I'm going to run. The other posts are here: ( 1, 2 & 3)
I've done some more work on this process, and have updated my list of systems that have been considered or discussed. Changes from last time are italicized. Also, I'll give a brief explanation for each of the systems having been dropped or chosen, though a bit more for the one I chose.
Fuzion was the next to go. I just didn't feel that it was as elegant as either Tri-Stat DX or BESM, and it wasn't as flavorful either. Fuzion is also too closely related to HERO for my tastes.
BESM 1e is a nice, lean, quick system as has been said, and I do quite like it in a number of ways. I'm not crazy about rolling the average of all three of your stats for attacks, though. I considered it and its offspring Tri-Stat Dx for quite a while, but eventually they had to go. One of the things that I don't care for in Tri-Stat was how as you raise the die type, i doesn't really improve the odds of the core character's success, it just lowers the odds for anybody below their level. Plus, roll-under isn't my preference. Of the two, I thought that BESM 1e was closer to what I wanted. I didn't dislike either, I just found other systems that suited me better. See below.
NWoD with some Scion imported stuff was one of my front runners for a long time, and I still think it'd be a good option for TT (maybe a bit less online play though, and probably not as good overall as Burning Wheel). It was ruled out simply because I found a better option for my particular current needs.
Mythweaver is a system that a member of this community created and pointed out to me. I do appreciate the lead on this one, though I didn't select it. It's nice to check out the work of my peers, and accordingly I'll give this a more lengthy review than the generic systems above. I didn't pick up the full version, just a free quickstart. I figured that this would give me a clear enough picture as to whether or not I would want to spend money on the game for a more in-depth review (which I only would if it knocked my socks off). It's a fantasy system peopled by elves, D&D style gnolls, obsidian oozes and so on, functioning more or less as a level-based system (though they call it "rank" this time around), and there's an interesting mechanic called the Progressive Dice System where the character's rank determines the size of die (sometimes multiple dice) that is used to resolve actions and is also used as a benchmark for target difficulties. That mechanic reminds me a bit of Earthdawn, though I personally thought that Earthdawn handled it a bit better. It's tough to give a final verdict on that part, though, as I've not read the full version. I'm not especially fond of graduated dice, though, which hurts this game's odds in my particular system quest.
The system used four physical and four mental traits as the base stats, including a slightly odd divide between Dexterity (hand-eye coordination and agility) and Prowess (physical accuracy and combat-specific accuracy). I'd think that accuracy would fit in with hand-eye coordination, which would more naturally split off from agility, but that's just a bit of a quibble. Interestingly, one of the mental traits (called Aspect) is a numeric value showing how good or evil the character is. That's right, Alignment is one of the core attributes in this game; it's a quirky thing, and its primary game effect appears to be modifiers relating to certain forms of light or dark magic. I'm not especially keen on alignment systems, so making alignment a numeric trait was a bit of a turn-off to me. It seems that this would be a bit too seldom-used to qualify as a core trait.
A definite plus is that the game has a hero point mechanic to help model Fate looking out for player characters. They're used to get bonuses to actions or to resistance values. That's fairly standard fare for hero/fate/whatever points in systems that use them, but it's worth pointing out that you can spend a Hero Point AFTER a failed roll, which is an interesting wrinkle (not unique, but interesting). They can be spent to heal the character as well. Also, the magic system is spell-based but allows for inventing spells on the fly, which is nice.
Verdict: not bad, but it's got a few things like graduated dice and a mechanical basis for alignment in it that go against my personal grain. I'm sure that as written, it functions rather well. There are also a number of other systems that I think handle fate-type points and traits better than this does as well, so it is out of the running.
PDQ is a quick, loose and lean little indie system that focuses on, well, prose descriptive qualities. It's more a toolbox for making your own system rather like FUDGE than a game system in and of itself since it doesn't have pre-defined stats but rather suggestions on possible types of character stats. PDQ is a rules-light system that (like fudge) uses words rather than numerical values to rate how good or bad a given trait is. All in all it's got potential, but it just didn't jump out at me as much as some of the other systems I looked at.
The two systems that combined to knock all of the competition out of this particular race are both descended from FUDGE, and I had quite a difficult time choosing between them. Both of these systems are pulpy, fast and powerfully focused on the characters themselves. Naturally, both require the use of FUDGE dice (d6s marked with two blank spaces, two + and two - spaces), though that's easy to manage what with things like FUDGE dicerolling programs out there - and folks that are unable to get hold of FUDGE dice can substitute D6s anyhow.
The Shadow of Yesterday is really an excellent game, and it totally deserves the praise I've heard heaped on it in these parts. This is a FUDGE-derived system that's quite good for evoking high-flying adventure and wrenching personal stuff, achingly human and definitely sexy despite its weird pulp fantasy nature. One of the guiding ideas of TSoY is "No gods. No monsters. Just People."
It's mostly a conflict-resolution system where one roll on each side can resolve pretty much any issue and where the GM is supposed to state stakes before the dice hit the table including a lengthy duel between individuals, but it also has a mechanic called Bringing Down the Pain where a player (never the GM) can declare that he's not going to accept the result of a roll and instead wants to Bring Down the Pain. Bringing Down the Pain switches from conflict resolution to task resolution, breaking the conflict into many different steps where the players can repeatedly change their objectives, methods and escalate the stakes in the conflict itself. Bringing Down the Pain is also the only means to permanently kill major named NPCs.
The game has a really nice mechanic called Keys which feel a bit like Beliefs in Burning Wheel and Spiritual Attributes in The Riddle of Steel. They're pretty quick and easy to apply though, which is nice. Basically, they're facets of the character's goals and views on the world and when the character acts accordingly, they get experience points. Eventually, Keys can be traded in if the character fulfills something major connected to them and gets a bag of extra XP, but then has to get a replacement key. Customized sources of XP for characters is a very, very cool thing that is eminently worth stealing for other games (as a matter of fact, I think I may well do that).
Another bright and shiny element in this game is that each player has a pool of bonus dice, but cannot spend these bonus dice on their own character - the player can however offer them to other players' characters at their discretion, usually either to reward the player for a really cool description or to help them pull off a really hard stunt. This mechanic is designed to foster cooperation not just among the characters, but the players. It's cool.
Characters have three distinct Pools that are each a source of what might be called hero points or fate points in other games, used to pull off cool stuff and push beyond the character's own limits. These three pools are Vigor, Instinct and Reason. They're sort of the character's attributes, but aren't rolled as a trait normally. Most of the rest is a skill system (called Abilities though).
There is also a broad list of "Secrets", which are something like Feats or SotC's Stunts. The Secrets, however, play into one of my few annoyances with the game: the magic system. Three-Corner Magic is a dynamic magic system (thumbs up so far, since I require dynamic magic systems) where there are six Foci that characters can learn, two keyed to each Pool and divided into day and night aspects, basically the light and dark end of that particular Pool. For example, Vigor's Day focus is Creation and its night focus is Destruction (said destruction, btw, is meted out with whatever sfx the player requires). While the Foci themselves are dynamic in use, they're also pretty limited on t heir own, and require characters to rely heavily on a bunch of Secrets to get much more utility and versatility out of their magic - even being able to cast ANY spell at beyond touch range required the character to have the appropriate Secret. My understanding is that in practice magic users tend to have to focus fairly exclusively on their magic advancement in this game, which I consider unfortunate given that what I want in the particular game I'm going to be putting together is for magic to tie into characters' own specialties rather than to have to be their specialty in and of itself. However, magic is just about the only part of this game that I don't love so I can forgive it - I'd just replace it with a different magic system if I were to run my game as a TSoY variant.
Verdict: Awesome. My only real gripe is the magic system. I almost chose this system for my game.
Ironically, while TSoY is the fantasy pulp and Spirit of the Century is 1920s-ish modern pulp (and much less serious in tone as well), I chose it for the system that I will use for my somewhat serious-yet-pulpy fantasy renaissance game. I absolutely love SotC in its own right, and would love to fun a pickup game in this system on its own. In fact, it's designed with playing pickup games and short campaigns in mind rather than sustained ongoing play - in fact, it does not even have an XP system at all, though it does have guidelines for advancement - one of the principles of advancement in SotC is that everybody in the group needs to advance equally if they advance at all. Anyhow Spirit of the Century is a game where players run pulp adventurers in the vein of Alan Quartermain, Doc Savage, the Shadow or Sky Captain. They have remarkable adventures filled with improbable and astounding derring-do, fighting off zombie gangsters, stopping the Evil Chinese Mastermind's plan to take over the world with his zeppelin armada then evading his gorilla assassins so they can make sure to stop Mad Doctor Brain-in-a-Jar from unleashing his latest doomsday device upon an unsuspecting world.
One of the bigger reasons that I chose SotC over TSoY is the fact that it's based on FATE instead of straight FUDGE, and so it uses Aspects (albeit in a slightly different way than "pure" FATE does - not that such a thing as "pure fate" could ever possibly exist). Aspects are player-specified prose traits that are used to impact the dramatic flow of the story. In standard FATE, characters can take the same Aspect several times if they want, since each Aspect is checked off when used and can't be used until it refreshes again. Not so for SotC - here, Aspects can't be duplicated, but there's no need since they don't check off when used, allowing the player to focus more on creating great flavor and using his Aspects to connect the character to the setting rather than worrying about losing some flavor for maximizing the utility of an individual Aspect.
Aspects are fantastic, and SotC totally revolves around this particular kind of trait, being filled with ways to manipulate them, identify them in others, add temporary Aspects to oneself, on others or on scenes etc. Yes, People are not all that can have Aspects - they're for scenes, objects and places as well. A player can spend Fate points to use his character's own Aspects to get bonuses on dice rolls or to secure rerolls if the player wasn't satisfied with how the dice have been treating them. A clever player can also "tag" the Aspects of allies, enemies, scenes and situations to get the same effect for actions involving the person in question (say, tagging my teammate's "Mountainous" trait to describe how my character acrobatically vaults off the bruiser's shoulders to land dramatically on the wing of the low-flying biplane that is strafing the Howard Hughes' workshop,and netting a nice dice bonus in the process). In addition, the GM can "compel" aspects in order to complicate things for the player in some way (having the character's Aspect archnemesis "Professor Malthusius" show up unannounced, for example, or tempting the "Hopeless Romantic" young hero to fall for a woman that's obviously bad news). The player may accept the complication, in which case he gains a Fate point and a bit more trouble in his life, or may refuse and pay the GM a Fate point to hold off the trouble for now. And yes, the GM can raise the stakes as well if they want to ("No? Well, what if I offer you two Fate Points instead? You know that you want them..."). Players will frequently try to add aspects to opponents or to scenes (like adding the "On Fire!" aspect to a scene where there's a fight raging... well, pretty much anywhere)
Character creation is sort of a lifepath process, where Aspects and Skill points are assigned along the way, but several of the lifepath stages, rather than just some particular span of time, a career etc, are previous grand adventures on which the character has embarked, which the player must title as if they were a pulp novel ("Dirk Steel Against the Cannibals From Mars!") and write a couple sentences blurb about. Once each character has a novel in which he has starred previously, he must then randomly choose the novels of two other player characters in which he appeared as a guest star, supporting that novel's hero. The player then adds a sentence or two the the novel's description and chooses a couple of Aspects that the character may have picked up along the way from each novel. I simply love the character creation process, as it gives the characters inbuilt backstories that are mechanically relevant to who they are now and also connects them to other characters in the group as well. There are also rules for creating characters "on the fly" during play and assigning them Skills and Aspects as they go.
Characters in SotC have no attributes as gamers understand the term, but they do have a variety of skills, which can include performing feats of strength and the like but for the most part are recognizable as skills one might have in another game. Also, characters have Stunts, which as I said above are pretty similar to Feats.
The basic engine is conflict resolution, and makes allowance for players to influence the narrative, particularly through the use of knowledge-oriented skills through which the player can introduce new facts and events to the narrative that even the GM might not have known about before the character did ("Oh,yes. This is a very little-known tribe I once took shelter with in the Congo. They are renowned for their generosity, but also for their deadly poisons. Keep your wits about you, gentlemen."). When a player's character suffers a setback (called either Stress or Consequences, depending on what sort of setback it is), the player himself gets to specify the form of the setback, though subject to GM approval - unless the character is being "taken out" in the conflict, IE totally defeated either morally, physically or emotionally, in which the victor can specify the form of the character's defeat.
I could go on and on about this one, but I won't. It's a great game. Check it out - there's an SRD for it here. Because I love you, I'll also provide a link to the TSoY wiki.
Now, the game I'm going to run is a bit less tongue-in-cheek and not so gleefully kitschy as SotC, but the way that it's put together is extremely well suited to my aims. I'll have to make a few changes of course, allowing for nonhumans and magic (actually quite easy to do with FATE, and there are several different magic systems in the FATE core to help me design one anyway) and the renaissance setting. I'm probably going to add in a slightly more rigorous advancement/XP system as well (maybe using something like the brilliant Keys from TSoY), and I'll probably have PCs start with a couple fewer Aspects to give them more room to grow since they won't start out as quite the globe-hopping international men of adventure that SotC characters are. These changes should not be too hard to implement, however, and that's my next project.
On the plus side, since there's an OGL for SotC I can theoretically publish my final product if I want to as well (there's a creative commons for TSoY as well, btw).
Anyhow, it's nice to have made a selection at last. I win!
If anybody has any recommendations on how to proceed with this from here, then I would love to hear them.
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Now playing: DJ Tiesto - DJ Tiesto - Trance Energy X-Mix 2003 (Party Mix)(1)
http://foxytunes.com/artist/dj+tiesto/track/dj+tiesto+-+trance+energy+x-mix+2003+(party+mix)(1)
I've done some more work on this process, and have updated my list of systems that have been considered or discussed. Changes from last time are italicized. Also, I'll give a brief explanation for each of the systems having been dropped or chosen, though a bit more for the one I chose.
- Scion/Exalted - Out.
- Unisystem - Out.
- Fuzion - Out
- Tri-Stat Dx - Out
- BESM 1st Edition - Out
- nWoD modified to import some Scion material - Out.
- WuShu - Out.
- Burning Wheel - Out. If I were running the game in a tabletop setting I'd probably use it.
- Inspectres - out
- Donjon - Out
- Mythweaver - Out
- TORG - Out
- Cortex - Out without review, as I have already picked the system I'm going to use and since the core book for this isn't even available yet IIRC.
- HeroQuest - Out
- PDQ - Out.
- Savage Worlds - Out
- FUDGE / FATE - See Below.
- The Shadow of Yesterday - Out.
- Spirit of the Century - In, in, in.
Fuzion was the next to go. I just didn't feel that it was as elegant as either Tri-Stat DX or BESM, and it wasn't as flavorful either. Fuzion is also too closely related to HERO for my tastes.
BESM 1e is a nice, lean, quick system as has been said, and I do quite like it in a number of ways. I'm not crazy about rolling the average of all three of your stats for attacks, though. I considered it and its offspring Tri-Stat Dx for quite a while, but eventually they had to go. One of the things that I don't care for in Tri-Stat was how as you raise the die type, i doesn't really improve the odds of the core character's success, it just lowers the odds for anybody below their level. Plus, roll-under isn't my preference. Of the two, I thought that BESM 1e was closer to what I wanted. I didn't dislike either, I just found other systems that suited me better. See below.
NWoD with some Scion imported stuff was one of my front runners for a long time, and I still think it'd be a good option for TT (maybe a bit less online play though, and probably not as good overall as Burning Wheel). It was ruled out simply because I found a better option for my particular current needs.
Mythweaver is a system that a member of this community created and pointed out to me. I do appreciate the lead on this one, though I didn't select it. It's nice to check out the work of my peers, and accordingly I'll give this a more lengthy review than the generic systems above. I didn't pick up the full version, just a free quickstart. I figured that this would give me a clear enough picture as to whether or not I would want to spend money on the game for a more in-depth review (which I only would if it knocked my socks off). It's a fantasy system peopled by elves, D&D style gnolls, obsidian oozes and so on, functioning more or less as a level-based system (though they call it "rank" this time around), and there's an interesting mechanic called the Progressive Dice System where the character's rank determines the size of die (sometimes multiple dice) that is used to resolve actions and is also used as a benchmark for target difficulties. That mechanic reminds me a bit of Earthdawn, though I personally thought that Earthdawn handled it a bit better. It's tough to give a final verdict on that part, though, as I've not read the full version. I'm not especially fond of graduated dice, though, which hurts this game's odds in my particular system quest.
The system used four physical and four mental traits as the base stats, including a slightly odd divide between Dexterity (hand-eye coordination and agility) and Prowess (physical accuracy and combat-specific accuracy). I'd think that accuracy would fit in with hand-eye coordination, which would more naturally split off from agility, but that's just a bit of a quibble. Interestingly, one of the mental traits (called Aspect) is a numeric value showing how good or evil the character is. That's right, Alignment is one of the core attributes in this game; it's a quirky thing, and its primary game effect appears to be modifiers relating to certain forms of light or dark magic. I'm not especially keen on alignment systems, so making alignment a numeric trait was a bit of a turn-off to me. It seems that this would be a bit too seldom-used to qualify as a core trait.
A definite plus is that the game has a hero point mechanic to help model Fate looking out for player characters. They're used to get bonuses to actions or to resistance values. That's fairly standard fare for hero/fate/whatever points in systems that use them, but it's worth pointing out that you can spend a Hero Point AFTER a failed roll, which is an interesting wrinkle (not unique, but interesting). They can be spent to heal the character as well. Also, the magic system is spell-based but allows for inventing spells on the fly, which is nice.
Verdict: not bad, but it's got a few things like graduated dice and a mechanical basis for alignment in it that go against my personal grain. I'm sure that as written, it functions rather well. There are also a number of other systems that I think handle fate-type points and traits better than this does as well, so it is out of the running.
PDQ is a quick, loose and lean little indie system that focuses on, well, prose descriptive qualities. It's more a toolbox for making your own system rather like FUDGE than a game system in and of itself since it doesn't have pre-defined stats but rather suggestions on possible types of character stats. PDQ is a rules-light system that (like fudge) uses words rather than numerical values to rate how good or bad a given trait is. All in all it's got potential, but it just didn't jump out at me as much as some of the other systems I looked at.
The two systems that combined to knock all of the competition out of this particular race are both descended from FUDGE, and I had quite a difficult time choosing between them. Both of these systems are pulpy, fast and powerfully focused on the characters themselves. Naturally, both require the use of FUDGE dice (d6s marked with two blank spaces, two + and two - spaces), though that's easy to manage what with things like FUDGE dicerolling programs out there - and folks that are unable to get hold of FUDGE dice can substitute D6s anyhow.
The Shadow of Yesterday is really an excellent game, and it totally deserves the praise I've heard heaped on it in these parts. This is a FUDGE-derived system that's quite good for evoking high-flying adventure and wrenching personal stuff, achingly human and definitely sexy despite its weird pulp fantasy nature. One of the guiding ideas of TSoY is "No gods. No monsters. Just People."
It's mostly a conflict-resolution system where one roll on each side can resolve pretty much any issue and where the GM is supposed to state stakes before the dice hit the table including a lengthy duel between individuals, but it also has a mechanic called Bringing Down the Pain where a player (never the GM) can declare that he's not going to accept the result of a roll and instead wants to Bring Down the Pain. Bringing Down the Pain switches from conflict resolution to task resolution, breaking the conflict into many different steps where the players can repeatedly change their objectives, methods and escalate the stakes in the conflict itself. Bringing Down the Pain is also the only means to permanently kill major named NPCs.
The game has a really nice mechanic called Keys which feel a bit like Beliefs in Burning Wheel and Spiritual Attributes in The Riddle of Steel. They're pretty quick and easy to apply though, which is nice. Basically, they're facets of the character's goals and views on the world and when the character acts accordingly, they get experience points. Eventually, Keys can be traded in if the character fulfills something major connected to them and gets a bag of extra XP, but then has to get a replacement key. Customized sources of XP for characters is a very, very cool thing that is eminently worth stealing for other games (as a matter of fact, I think I may well do that).
Another bright and shiny element in this game is that each player has a pool of bonus dice, but cannot spend these bonus dice on their own character - the player can however offer them to other players' characters at their discretion, usually either to reward the player for a really cool description or to help them pull off a really hard stunt. This mechanic is designed to foster cooperation not just among the characters, but the players. It's cool.
Characters have three distinct Pools that are each a source of what might be called hero points or fate points in other games, used to pull off cool stuff and push beyond the character's own limits. These three pools are Vigor, Instinct and Reason. They're sort of the character's attributes, but aren't rolled as a trait normally. Most of the rest is a skill system (called Abilities though).
There is also a broad list of "Secrets", which are something like Feats or SotC's Stunts. The Secrets, however, play into one of my few annoyances with the game: the magic system. Three-Corner Magic is a dynamic magic system (thumbs up so far, since I require dynamic magic systems) where there are six Foci that characters can learn, two keyed to each Pool and divided into day and night aspects, basically the light and dark end of that particular Pool. For example, Vigor's Day focus is Creation and its night focus is Destruction (said destruction, btw, is meted out with whatever sfx the player requires). While the Foci themselves are dynamic in use, they're also pretty limited on t heir own, and require characters to rely heavily on a bunch of Secrets to get much more utility and versatility out of their magic - even being able to cast ANY spell at beyond touch range required the character to have the appropriate Secret. My understanding is that in practice magic users tend to have to focus fairly exclusively on their magic advancement in this game, which I consider unfortunate given that what I want in the particular game I'm going to be putting together is for magic to tie into characters' own specialties rather than to have to be their specialty in and of itself. However, magic is just about the only part of this game that I don't love so I can forgive it - I'd just replace it with a different magic system if I were to run my game as a TSoY variant.
Verdict: Awesome. My only real gripe is the magic system. I almost chose this system for my game.
Ironically, while TSoY is the fantasy pulp and Spirit of the Century is 1920s-ish modern pulp (and much less serious in tone as well), I chose it for the system that I will use for my somewhat serious-yet-pulpy fantasy renaissance game. I absolutely love SotC in its own right, and would love to fun a pickup game in this system on its own. In fact, it's designed with playing pickup games and short campaigns in mind rather than sustained ongoing play - in fact, it does not even have an XP system at all, though it does have guidelines for advancement - one of the principles of advancement in SotC is that everybody in the group needs to advance equally if they advance at all. Anyhow Spirit of the Century is a game where players run pulp adventurers in the vein of Alan Quartermain, Doc Savage, the Shadow or Sky Captain. They have remarkable adventures filled with improbable and astounding derring-do, fighting off zombie gangsters, stopping the Evil Chinese Mastermind's plan to take over the world with his zeppelin armada then evading his gorilla assassins so they can make sure to stop Mad Doctor Brain-in-a-Jar from unleashing his latest doomsday device upon an unsuspecting world.
One of the bigger reasons that I chose SotC over TSoY is the fact that it's based on FATE instead of straight FUDGE, and so it uses Aspects (albeit in a slightly different way than "pure" FATE does - not that such a thing as "pure fate" could ever possibly exist). Aspects are player-specified prose traits that are used to impact the dramatic flow of the story. In standard FATE, characters can take the same Aspect several times if they want, since each Aspect is checked off when used and can't be used until it refreshes again. Not so for SotC - here, Aspects can't be duplicated, but there's no need since they don't check off when used, allowing the player to focus more on creating great flavor and using his Aspects to connect the character to the setting rather than worrying about losing some flavor for maximizing the utility of an individual Aspect.
Aspects are fantastic, and SotC totally revolves around this particular kind of trait, being filled with ways to manipulate them, identify them in others, add temporary Aspects to oneself, on others or on scenes etc. Yes, People are not all that can have Aspects - they're for scenes, objects and places as well. A player can spend Fate points to use his character's own Aspects to get bonuses on dice rolls or to secure rerolls if the player wasn't satisfied with how the dice have been treating them. A clever player can also "tag" the Aspects of allies, enemies, scenes and situations to get the same effect for actions involving the person in question (say, tagging my teammate's "Mountainous" trait to describe how my character acrobatically vaults off the bruiser's shoulders to land dramatically on the wing of the low-flying biplane that is strafing the Howard Hughes' workshop,and netting a nice dice bonus in the process). In addition, the GM can "compel" aspects in order to complicate things for the player in some way (having the character's Aspect archnemesis "Professor Malthusius" show up unannounced, for example, or tempting the "Hopeless Romantic" young hero to fall for a woman that's obviously bad news). The player may accept the complication, in which case he gains a Fate point and a bit more trouble in his life, or may refuse and pay the GM a Fate point to hold off the trouble for now. And yes, the GM can raise the stakes as well if they want to ("No? Well, what if I offer you two Fate Points instead? You know that you want them..."). Players will frequently try to add aspects to opponents or to scenes (like adding the "On Fire!" aspect to a scene where there's a fight raging... well, pretty much anywhere)
Character creation is sort of a lifepath process, where Aspects and Skill points are assigned along the way, but several of the lifepath stages, rather than just some particular span of time, a career etc, are previous grand adventures on which the character has embarked, which the player must title as if they were a pulp novel ("Dirk Steel Against the Cannibals From Mars!") and write a couple sentences blurb about. Once each character has a novel in which he has starred previously, he must then randomly choose the novels of two other player characters in which he appeared as a guest star, supporting that novel's hero. The player then adds a sentence or two the the novel's description and chooses a couple of Aspects that the character may have picked up along the way from each novel. I simply love the character creation process, as it gives the characters inbuilt backstories that are mechanically relevant to who they are now and also connects them to other characters in the group as well. There are also rules for creating characters "on the fly" during play and assigning them Skills and Aspects as they go.
Characters in SotC have no attributes as gamers understand the term, but they do have a variety of skills, which can include performing feats of strength and the like but for the most part are recognizable as skills one might have in another game. Also, characters have Stunts, which as I said above are pretty similar to Feats.
The basic engine is conflict resolution, and makes allowance for players to influence the narrative, particularly through the use of knowledge-oriented skills through which the player can introduce new facts and events to the narrative that even the GM might not have known about before the character did ("Oh,yes. This is a very little-known tribe I once took shelter with in the Congo. They are renowned for their generosity, but also for their deadly poisons. Keep your wits about you, gentlemen."). When a player's character suffers a setback (called either Stress or Consequences, depending on what sort of setback it is), the player himself gets to specify the form of the setback, though subject to GM approval - unless the character is being "taken out" in the conflict, IE totally defeated either morally, physically or emotionally, in which the victor can specify the form of the character's defeat.
I could go on and on about this one, but I won't. It's a great game. Check it out - there's an SRD for it here. Because I love you, I'll also provide a link to the TSoY wiki.
Now, the game I'm going to run is a bit less tongue-in-cheek and not so gleefully kitschy as SotC, but the way that it's put together is extremely well suited to my aims. I'll have to make a few changes of course, allowing for nonhumans and magic (actually quite easy to do with FATE, and there are several different magic systems in the FATE core to help me design one anyway) and the renaissance setting. I'm probably going to add in a slightly more rigorous advancement/XP system as well (maybe using something like the brilliant Keys from TSoY), and I'll probably have PCs start with a couple fewer Aspects to give them more room to grow since they won't start out as quite the globe-hopping international men of adventure that SotC characters are. These changes should not be too hard to implement, however, and that's my next project.
On the plus side, since there's an OGL for SotC I can theoretically publish my final product if I want to as well (there's a creative commons for TSoY as well, btw).
Anyhow, it's nice to have made a selection at last. I win!
If anybody has any recommendations on how to proceed with this from here, then I would love to hear them.
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Now playing: DJ Tiesto - DJ Tiesto - Trance Energy X-Mix 2003 (Party Mix)(1)
http://foxytunes.com/artist/dj+tiesto/track/dj+tiesto+-+trance+energy+x-mix+2003+(party+mix)(1)