NichG
2011-04-20, 09:52 PM
I've often felt the Planescape setting didn't quite fit with how D&D is structured. You're dealing with philosophical questions, the underlying nature of reality, and beings and places that represent concepts. When you meet a balor on the street in Sigil, you don't generally draw your sword and start chopping. You might even go and challenge it to a game of riddles if you don't have a strong attachment to your soul.
On the other hand, the 7th Sea system is really good at this. It's a system that is more horizontal in character advancement than vertical - there's not so much of the 'dirt farmer to god slayer' trope. Magic is a lot more subdued (though its very idiosyncratic to the world) and more thematic than D&D magic (which is a big grab bag of I Win). Equipment is less important, and mostly its just little cool things.
So awhile back I made a system that converted Planescape into the 7th Sea mechanics. Since then I've made a couple revisions after running two year-long campaigns in the system.
First of all, the current version:
Player's Guide: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ngutten2/www/7thscape_playersguide.pdf
DM Guide: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ngutten2/www/7thscape_dmguide.pdf
There are still a couple things I don't think work very well, and so I'm thinking of making a new revision of it. For those familiar with 7th Sea, I'd like to suggest a few mechanical changes in this thread and get opinions on how they'll affect the game.
The biggest change I'm thinking of is to make all Skills completely active in nature. That is, you never roll a skill roll to resist something, that's always a raw Trait roll. However, your skill instead of your trait determines how many dice are kept. Now traits give you general performance and consistency over a wide variety of skills, but your investment in a skill is what determines the maximum you're likely to achieve.
This requires Traits and Skills to be re-balanced as far as cost. In the new system, Traits go from 1 to 8*. If you're at a certain rank, it costs a number of xp equal to the next rank to raise the Trait (so it costs 8xp to go from rank 7 to rank 8). Skills cost 2xp times the new rank, and cap out at 5 (or 6 in special cases).
*: Specific advantages could increase this, so in principle you could have up to 10, but it'd be in rare cases like Traits going to 6 in normal 7th Sea.
When you're resisting with a raw Trait roll (Trait k Trait), the TN is set by 10+Skill roll, since Traits will tend to be higher.
Obviously I have to decouple dramatic wounds from Resolve or fights will go forever, so instead you have a Dramatic wound track with 2 wounds and you can increase the number of wounds in your track for 5xp,10xp,15xp,etc. There would also be a similar track for Belief Dice (the equivalent of Drama Dice) and Action Dice.
It also bears mentioning that the exceed-10 mechanic is a little different here, requiring 2 unkept dice above 10 to convert into 1 kept, so you don't get as sharp a jump when you boost beyond 10kX. When I do the statistics, +1 to a Skill is worth about +7.2 to the roll result on average, and +1 to a Trait is worth about +1.4, and that roughly holds between Xk2 and Xk6.
On the other hand, the 7th Sea system is really good at this. It's a system that is more horizontal in character advancement than vertical - there's not so much of the 'dirt farmer to god slayer' trope. Magic is a lot more subdued (though its very idiosyncratic to the world) and more thematic than D&D magic (which is a big grab bag of I Win). Equipment is less important, and mostly its just little cool things.
So awhile back I made a system that converted Planescape into the 7th Sea mechanics. Since then I've made a couple revisions after running two year-long campaigns in the system.
First of all, the current version:
Player's Guide: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ngutten2/www/7thscape_playersguide.pdf
DM Guide: https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ngutten2/www/7thscape_dmguide.pdf
There are still a couple things I don't think work very well, and so I'm thinking of making a new revision of it. For those familiar with 7th Sea, I'd like to suggest a few mechanical changes in this thread and get opinions on how they'll affect the game.
The biggest change I'm thinking of is to make all Skills completely active in nature. That is, you never roll a skill roll to resist something, that's always a raw Trait roll. However, your skill instead of your trait determines how many dice are kept. Now traits give you general performance and consistency over a wide variety of skills, but your investment in a skill is what determines the maximum you're likely to achieve.
This requires Traits and Skills to be re-balanced as far as cost. In the new system, Traits go from 1 to 8*. If you're at a certain rank, it costs a number of xp equal to the next rank to raise the Trait (so it costs 8xp to go from rank 7 to rank 8). Skills cost 2xp times the new rank, and cap out at 5 (or 6 in special cases).
*: Specific advantages could increase this, so in principle you could have up to 10, but it'd be in rare cases like Traits going to 6 in normal 7th Sea.
When you're resisting with a raw Trait roll (Trait k Trait), the TN is set by 10+Skill roll, since Traits will tend to be higher.
Obviously I have to decouple dramatic wounds from Resolve or fights will go forever, so instead you have a Dramatic wound track with 2 wounds and you can increase the number of wounds in your track for 5xp,10xp,15xp,etc. There would also be a similar track for Belief Dice (the equivalent of Drama Dice) and Action Dice.
It also bears mentioning that the exceed-10 mechanic is a little different here, requiring 2 unkept dice above 10 to convert into 1 kept, so you don't get as sharp a jump when you boost beyond 10kX. When I do the statistics, +1 to a Skill is worth about +7.2 to the roll result on average, and +1 to a Trait is worth about +1.4, and that roughly holds between Xk2 and Xk6.