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the nerve core / An interesting new system
« on: November 14, 2016, 01:58:15 PM »
Feels a bit weird to me posting about a "rival" system on these forums, but since becoming an active member of the community I thought I'd share something cool that I found out about recently.
Open Legend is an open source roleplaying system that is based around opening up as many options as possible for both the players and the GM. The author seems to have come to a lot of the same conclusions as Vincent did, things like simplified wealth so you don't have to track currency, GM moves to keep players missing rolls interesting, and a focus on story-justification for your actions rather than just "I attack". It's also in the process of ongoing development, and there's a Discord server and a forum where the author regularly takes input and provides his reasoning for creative decisions, which the amateur game-designer in me loves.
Seems pretty awesome so far. I don't think it will shift me away from Apocalypse World when it comes to post-apocalyptic coolness, fantasy coolness from Dungeon World, or other kinds of coolness from the other PbtA games, but for different settings it might be my first port of call. It's especially easy to port into existing fiction, as I found out by making a complete Hack for The Witcher and Star Wars in 2 and 3 hours respectively. You can check out the full rules - for free - here and the Kickstarter for the new Steam Punk X Dark Fantasy setting (being written by Ed Greenwood, who made the Forgotten Realms and Matt Mercer of Critical Role; I'm fanboy-ing out so hard) here. If nothing else, it's an interesting case-study since the design decisions are reasonably well documented.
Open Legend is an open source roleplaying system that is based around opening up as many options as possible for both the players and the GM. The author seems to have come to a lot of the same conclusions as Vincent did, things like simplified wealth so you don't have to track currency, GM moves to keep players missing rolls interesting, and a focus on story-justification for your actions rather than just "I attack". It's also in the process of ongoing development, and there's a Discord server and a forum where the author regularly takes input and provides his reasoning for creative decisions, which the amateur game-designer in me loves.
Seems pretty awesome so far. I don't think it will shift me away from Apocalypse World when it comes to post-apocalyptic coolness, fantasy coolness from Dungeon World, or other kinds of coolness from the other PbtA games, but for different settings it might be my first port of call. It's especially easy to port into existing fiction, as I found out by making a complete Hack for The Witcher and Star Wars in 2 and 3 hours respectively. You can check out the full rules - for free - here and the Kickstarter for the new Steam Punk X Dark Fantasy setting (being written by Ed Greenwood, who made the Forgotten Realms and Matt Mercer of Critical Role; I'm fanboy-ing out so hard) here. If nothing else, it's an interesting case-study since the design decisions are reasonably well documented.