My local group completed our spring time SotC mini-campaign, took our summer break (where we didn't get enough one-shots due to real life) and are now starting a Reign campaign that should go on through next spring.  We've switched GMs to a guy who ran a fairly entertaining Paranoia one-shot but otherwise I only know him as a player.  So we shall see.

Also, we're playing in a campaign setting that was part of a longer campaign in the past that I didn't participate in.  It's a pseudo-Japanese/oriental setting where we will all represent a single house.  Other than that, I don't know much.

We did the one-roll technique for character generation.  I actually couldn't make it to the chargen session, but I just spoke with the GM on the phone and he gave me the results.  I have to say, I have had pretty satisfying characters in the last couple years, so the itch to realise my own concepts has been itched and I quite like random character generation.  I got a guy (or gal) who was a beggar, a cutpurse and finally a monk (equivalent of the Sorceror in Reign), with a skill in cooking, an obscure knowledge of some kind and a formative experience with a failed caravan run.  From this I will try to build my guy.  I find it all quite inspiring to have that kind of structure to build on.

The One-Roll Engine (ORE, as it is known) still seems a bit foreign to me (you roll a number of d10s based on your stat + skill and look for matching numbers) but intriguing, so I'm psyched to see how it will work in play.  Everyone who has used it around here says it works great once the dice hit the table.

Oh yes, the Company rules.  This is the part that intrigues me the most.  We won't be using them at first (the GM is new to the system as well) but we will ease into it.  Our house will be our company.  Quite psyched!

Sounds interesting.   I'd be curious to hear how the ORE works out.

Tharr's the link from when we played Reign.

I thought the one roll chargen was a damned hoot too.  Honestly, our game spawned from me showing Jeff and Storn how cool it was and us building a campaign off of what they rolled.

Starting characters feel a little whiffy to me.  I dunno, tell me what you think.  I would have liked my starting characters to have a little more dice to toss around.

The XP system felt really flat, especially after Burning Wheel.

But the ORE system is nifty as hell, lots of fun, fiddly bits to play with and I think starting with a vague concept (we're all a noble house) and building from there works pretty well for Reign.

Yeah, I'd like to hear more, too, Walker. Good, bad, and ugly of how it works out in play.

Thanks for your interest.  I'll definitely keep you posted, probably not on the details of the campaign, but just on my general impressions of how the system works for me.

Paka, we're definitely going in the opposite direction than what you guys did.  I just printed out like 40 pages of campaign background!  :eek:

But it's all from an old campaign and I think the group has evolved a lot since then.  It's a new GM taking over this time and it is set 50 years ahead of where the old one ended.  So I think we'll probably be laying out the road a bit as we move forward and all those pages are just to get a general sense of the world.

And yes, I had a bit of a whiff-worry when I saw that you start out with 2 dice in your stats. Fortunately, I rolled 3 sets, 2 of which had a width of 3 (I think I got that right, meaning 3 of the same number), so that gave me some stacking in skills.  I'm definitely going to be strong in Dodge, at least!

"Starting characters feel a little whiffy to me. "

No that's impossible! According to the designers. Meh.

(Of course when they get over being whiffy, you'll get all the fun of never ever being whiffy. It's very very granular.)

Quote from: walkerp;244697Paka, we're definitely going in the opposite direction than what you guys did.  I just printed out like 40 pages of campaign background!  :eek:

Setting, like so much shit in this hobby, is a season to taste kinda gig.  If your group rocks out and loves reading 40 pages of campaign background, awesome.

In the groups I usually play with, we like to have enough to inspire us and get us all on the same page and figure out the rest at the table.

It sounds like the setting document you are printing out was created through play, which is neat.  If groups keep decent notes in a complicated campaign, I think that many pages of notes is pretty easy to pile up.  Was the old campaign something you played in too or are you jumping in?

Quote from: walkerp;244697And yes, I had a bit of a whiff-worry when I saw that you start out with 2 dice in your stats. Fortunately, I rolled 3 sets, 2 of which had a width of 3 (I think I got that right, meaning 3 of the same number), so that gave me some stacking in skills.  I'm definitely going to be strong in Dodge, at least!

Let me know how the whiff turns out when the dice hit the table.

Quote from: walkerp;244697Thanks for your interest.  I'll definitely keep you posted, probably not on the details of the campaign, but just on my general impressions of how the system works for me.

That's exactly what I want to hear, not campaign logs, but just enough info to contextualize how things work out in mechanics and around the table.

Okay, gang, sorry for the delay.  I played last Tuesday and it was a lot of fun, but I didn't engage the system enough to have any real concrete conclusions about it yet.  My character is a monk who has sworn non-violence, though I can run and dodge like a mofo.  I spent the one combat hiding under a wagon and successfully dodging the few attacks that came my way.

Some observations and inconclusive thoughts:

I think multiple actions really works well with this system.  You take the lowest skill of the two you want to perform, subtract a die and roll.  I have 7d in both dodge and run.  I can therefore attempt to run and dodge, using 6d, which gives me a decent chance to get two matches and thus succeed at both.  I don't know, it just feels kind of elegant.

I and another player felt like we were just going kind of willy-nilly with turn order, declaration of actions, rolling and resolution.  We wanted to have a specific order of declaration and everyone involved rolling all at once, and then adjudication based on width.  I think this is just us breaking out of older habits, so we'll see how it goes in the next section.

So the campaign is going fine.  The level of world detail wasn't a problem because the GM focused the first session on us and the things going on immediately around us.  

My big problem with Reign is the layout of the book.  It's way too text-y for my tastes.  I'd like a nice page with a more graphical representation of chargen, with references for page numbers.  I never know where I'm supposed to find anything.  

We're playing tomorrow, so we should be able to get into the system a little more.

The declaration order was a hang up for us in my one and only Godlike game session.  I think in time it would be something easily adjusted to though.  I'd love to give it another try.  Sadly my ORE books are way down the pile of things my group seems interested in.

Okay, we're getting more used to the idea of simultaneous combat.  A couple of the players are not locking into it as precisely as I would like, but I'm just extremely anal about order and things like that.  Overall, I think this last session we adhered much better to the idea of everybody declare potential actions, everybody roll, then work out order of events and successes.

We're still scratching the surface, just because there hasn't been tons of conflict and dice-rolling yet, but Reign is so far the coolest implementation of simulating the simultaneity of combat.  It gives you a much stronger feeling of the total chaos of multiple people with different, violent goals.  Quite neat, actually.  I'm digging it and want to roll more.

Here's an example.

So we catch up to the couple we were pursuing on the trail.  They are riding a small wagon pulled by a single horse.  Our magician makes the ground underneath them into mud so they are stuck.  The guy runs off and the woman is still on the reins, trying to get the horse out of the mud to pull her and the cart away.

I jump into the mud and try to unbuckle the horse from the cart.  As I do this, the woman jumps on to the horse and swings at me with her Wakazabi (or whatever the short samurai sword is called).  Our samurai, who was in front of the horse, has some combat maneuver that allows him to draw and intercept super fast.  He tries that.  I attempt to dodge.

We all roll.

She gets 3xsomething.  I get 2x5 for my dodge.  He gets 2xsomething for his intercept.  I can't remember the exact numbers but the way it worked out, his intercept was just enough to make my dodge effective.  Without him, she would have hit me.  I just pictured in my head one of those hyper-edited, split second samurai moments where her blade comes flashing down, a look of fear on my face, his thumb on the hilt and his blade comes out, a ringing sound and her blade is just deflected enough that I manage to swing out of the way.

Quite neat.  I'm looking forward to more of that kind of stuff.  Outcomes could be quite interesting, I imagine and the simultaneity seems more "realistic" without sacrificing the fun.