Quote from: CalithenaOr, fuck. Just games where players have characters and you make them fast and the overall goal of play is pretty much just to tool around in this imaginary world for as long as you feel like it.

Well, although you could easily pick and choose from the book the Domains and Attributes and Gifts you want in Nobilis, what really can slow down the beginning of the game is the collaborative nature of the chargen process along with the wide open range of possibilities for PCs: no predefined packages of splats, classes, races or professions of any kind. It's been quipped that Nob and Toon may well be the only RPGs in which you can not only have a conversation with a vacuum cleaner but also play one as your character. That's true.

But combat resolution, or taking care of any other conflict for that matter, is fast, and once the actual play is underway, it may move on at a fairly rapid pace. For instance, suppose that while investigating a Vatican conspiracy which involves the nails used in the Crucifixion, Byron the Duke of Iron (A2/D4/R0/S2) suddenly finds himself up against a disguised killer with supernatural powers.

GM: "The assassin whirls around, flinging a flurry of silver daggers at you with an almost inhuman speed. That's an Aspect 4 attack, with Penetration 1." (Since Byron can actually see the assassin's action before responding to it, he can gauge its force without any trouble. All in all, the attack has the difficulty of 5, with the miracle level of 4 representing the sheer scale of what is attempted, and the Penetration the effort put into piercing the arcane aura which constantly shields the Noble from hostile miracles. Note that this doesn't reveal to us anything about the actual attributes of the opponent: he might have Aspect 5 and keep attacking like this again and again without getting tired, or he might have Aspect 1 and spent his last miraculous resources to enhance this one strike. He might even be a common mortal with an artifact that temporarily increases his physical abilities.)

Player: "I'll throw myself to the side, dodging the daggers. That'll cost 2 AMPs." (A miraculous attack can only be successfully countered by another miracle of at least equal force. Byron's Aspect 2 alone isn't enough to get him out of the way so he'll have to exert himself, while a mundane dodge would of course be perfectly useless. The problem with this reaction is the loss of those two Aspect Miracle Points which might have been more useful afterwards.)

or

Player: "I'll conjure forth a sheet of iron that springs up from the ground to block the daggers." (By default, this Lesser Creation of Iron is a level 4 miracle: therefore Byron's Domain 4 allows him to pull off the miracle for free, and it's enough to block the assassin's attack. On the other hand, witnessing something this extravagant would probably cause any nearby mortals to flip out, which might have repercussions and unpleasant consequences later on.)

or

Player: "Meh. I think I'll just stand here and grin while the daggers are deflected by my Auctoritas." (Byron has Spirit 2, so the Penetration of this particular attack never was enough to harm him in the first place. But if he does show off in this manner now, the enemy will learn that the next attack should be that much more powerful. After all, just as Byron wouldn't have been able to decipher the attacker's Aspect, the strength of his own Spirit isn't obvious to anyone until something happens to make it so.)

If those daggers had struck Byron, assuming that he had no defensive Gifts whatsoever, the force of the attack would have been enough to cause him a Deadly Wound: against undefended but uninjured Nobles, either at least a level 4 miracle or something comparable to machine guns is usually required to damage them at all. That is, levels 0-1 would cause Surface Wounds, 2-3 Serious Wounds, and 4-5 (or anything beyond that) Deadly Wounds, but before the character will suffer from those lesser injuries he must have lost all the more severe Wound Levels before them. Until then, scrapes and scratches simply won't have any mechanical effects, and there's no need to keep track of them. The number of Wound Levels amounts to Aspect+4, divided as equally as possible into the three categories, so Byron could take two Deadly Wounds before becoming vulnerable to anything capable of inflicting only the Serious kind (say, punches thrown with Aspect 2, or mundane handguns).

Each of the three basic defensive Gifts (Durant, Sacrosanct, Immortal) successively renders the character more and more resilient in the damage ranks, so that the Durant suffer only Surface Wounds from levels 2-3, the Sacrosanct from levels 4-5, and the Immortal technically from level 6 (although in practice they heal from all injuries more or less instantly and cannot be killed under normal circumstances).

In other words, at any given moment you only have to keep in mind how much effort it would take to actually hurt you right then. Anything less serious than that is irrelevant.

I find Unknown Armies is pretty fast if you want it to be, and it's really easy to do the mechanics for characters (a little bit slower to come up with a good idea, admittedly).

Heavy Gear / Silhouette 2e ain't bad so long as you're not using too much custom kit.

Drat. Somebody already called OTE. Guess I'll just add that it can be fast, so long as the players take its looseness as, y'know, looseness, and not combat crunch to be filled in by the player. :banghead:

SW D6 and MSH, both seconded, provided you're using the templates/canonical Marvel characters, respectively.

That's all I got. Well, OK, the RPG I "invented' as a kid before I got my hands on a "real" one to play was sure fast, but it was pretty much Calvinball with Transformers.

Peace,
-Joel

D'oh! Check out EZ20 in my .sig -- it's specifically designed to facilitate pick up and play games. It's like Risus with fewer dice, d20 with less addition, and Burning Wheel with less fiddly bits.

[edit: It's free now, as will be its first officially 'finished' incarnation, but plans exist to use it in order to drive commercial products.]

Quote from: BalbinusIs it worth it?  Part of the charm of TFT is a lightning fast system coupled to tactical depth.  What's your view on DotU?

It has some tactical depth, in the sense that the movement rules and so forth are similar because it's basically stripped down Melee/Wizard, but it lacks a lot of the details.  I suppose the question is whether it contains enough tactical depth for what you want.  I do think that players could use DotU to create characters and understand the basics while the GM could use elements of Melee/Advanced Melee/Wizard/Advanced Wizard/ITL as needed to add more depth.

Silhouette has always been fast for me, even the first time that I ran the system. Of course, I'm convinced that some games just click with people better than others (and thus play faster) while most nearly any game can be fast when people have been playing it continuously for a while.