7th Sea: The Reboot

finally picked up my physical copy from the buddy I went halfsies on the kickstarter with. noticed they went to print without the second edition marker n it, even though the kickstarter advertised it as a second edition.

this was probably wise given that JW gave us a completely different, profoundly shit game wearing the skin of 7th sea. It's not a sequel, its a reboot.

So, here we are, money spent, complaints filed, and raises, the core fucking mechanic of the game, are still just about the stupidest, most meta-level dissociative tension-free stakes destroying resolution mechanic I've ever seen in an RPG.

Is there a way to fix this? Should we even try?

PS: the book itself is very well designed and well presented. so points for aesthetic JW, you fucking clod.

>raises

Did he read too much Savaaaage Worlds?

This is relevant to my interests but I have no suggestions beyond the inane, unfortunately.

>Aesthetic over function
You know, I should be surprised, given that the latter is what causes the game to actually function, but I'm not, given D&D 5E.

Wick's raises predate Savage Worlds and don't function the same, iirc.
In L5R and 7th Sea, the player has to specifically call a raise and voluntarily increase the target number to get better results. If you don't take any risks, you don't get spectacular results.

Never played either, what's wrong with the new version? That type seems like an interesting mechanic, if a bit meta.

I dunno what OP's problem with them is.
Some people get upset when they vastly outdo the target, but don't get anything special because they didn't call any raises.

i mean, ive thought of a few things, like making raises happen at 9 instead of 10, to make a bit mroe randomness in rolls...

allow players to designate a secondary skill and spend either up to 2 or 1/2 of all raise on that skill (whichever is lower) in a round, without the retarded improvisation penalty

double the given wealth costs for items, and then assign low, single digit costrs to items like weapons, and start keeping track of who has what. not dungeon crawl levels of shopping, but we know who has how many backup guns etc. make it so if players are clearly hoarding wealth, like buried treasure, then they dont lose half between adventures.

split villain strength into physical and mental[inc social]. buidl villains as normal, but assume the full strength of the as written system is the stronger of their 2 stats, and give them a slightly lower number for the alternate.

make villain influence only generate a pool of potential bonus dice/raises that can only be spent through once per scene/sequence. so its important to reduce a villains influence, but having land doesn't turn a cripple into Herakles.

make the first dramatic wound only offer a bonus for the first round, or the first scene in which it is gained. after that no bonus.

come up with ways for players to deal a bit more damage than 1 per raise without buying full duelist privileges, but also without making everyone a duelist by default.

these are from what i thought of a while ago, that i can remember off the top of my head.

still, the rule 0 fallacy["I can fix it so its fine"] is no excuse for this shit. the bad core mechanic is like the lack of unit collision in Rome 2: a crippling core design flaw that can never be fully fixed, only compensated for.

the new version is, you roll your die pool of d10s, and make sets of 10 or more. for each set of 10 or mroe, you get one raise.

then the gm describes the full scene and every possible bad or good thiong that could happen, and the players spend raises from their finite pool of meta points[raises] to cancel some of the bad effects and get some of the good effects.

the system requires the gm to explicitely lay out what is supposed to happen, what will happen to punsih the pcs for not following negating his stick, and what they lose for not getting the carrot. due to the probabilities with d10s, you are essentially statistically guaranteed to get within 1 raise of exactly half your initial dice pool. every time.

the gm knows this. the choices are almost already made for you. the results of each round nearly invariant. it is impossible to outright fail[the book even says if you have no raises at all you still dont necessarily fail if the gm doesnt want].

this is 7th Final FantaSEA 13: the swashbuckling railroad simulator.

>So, here we are, money spent, complaints filed, and raises, the core fucking mechanic of the game, are still just about the stupidest, most meta-level dissociative tension-free stakes destroying resolution mechanic I've ever seen in an RPG.
Reminder:
In a game about being a swashbuckling adventuring badass like Errol Flynn or Edmond Dantès, you are given an incentive to completely, utterly fail a task.

Rather than the games mechanics ones being ones that encourage daring and suspenseful risks, they are ones that are designed to be as low risk as possible.

Huh.
Yeah, I can see why that's a problem.

Seeing what the new raises are, addendum
In L5R and 7th Sea First Edition, the player has to specifically call a raise and voluntarily increase the target number to get better results. If you don't take any risks, you don't get spectacular results.

the person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing

someone needs to tell JW that even if you call something a 'risk', that doesn't mean that there is any element of risk/reward in any way.

Since I'm basically pic related at this point, in desperate hopes of stomping this thing until i get the amount of fun I was promised by the cover of the book...

who the fuck imposes a +100% resource cost[raises] penalty on someone for improvising their actions in a fucking SWASHBUCKLING GAME.

seriously, any normie plebeian Joe Q. Public quote to you "do you think he plans it all out, or just makes it up as he goes along?"

did they do no research into the genre they were trying to design towards? or did JW just have that much attachment to his incessant need to tell other people they play games wrong and only he is the arbiter of all fun? [the stories of him going to conventions, interrupting games and telling GMs that their running their own game wrong are certainly coming into focus]

You don't get it. Every great swashbuckling story has a strict script. Each word on each page is a constant that allows the story to unfold consistently. By removing risk JW has allowed gms everywhere to become swashbuckling writers without the fear of being hacks or awful by couching the story in a 'game' and distributing guilt.

So I'm a little confused here. Do the players actually roll dice at all, or is the combat resolved entirely through raises?

Because if there's still dice rolling, couldn't you just ignore the entire "DM shows a powerpoint of the combat" thing and the raises and just roll your dice for resolution?

the actual conflict/adventures/events are resolved by players spending a raise to suceed at something. at the beginning of every [arbtirasarily determined] round, or at the beginning of an "action sequence" the players decribe what they expect to try to do, the gm tells them the consequences, like exactly how much damage they will take for running through a burning doorway etc, and the skill+trait for the player to use.

the player rolls those dice. makes groups of 10 or more. for every group of 10 more more, you get 1 raise to spend for the round or action sequence. BUT. since the average roll on 1d10 is 5.5, any 2 dice are fairly statistically likely to make a set of 10, and only 10% of dice will be a raise on their own, its almost always exactly half as many raises as the dice pool rolled.

oh and the rolled 10s dot explode and get extra dice rolls until you have 5 ranks in the given skill; which is the MAXIMUM that anyone can achieve in skill ranks. you aren't allowed to be lucky until you're an unparalleled master in skill.

The only other games I know that has you spend resources in that way is GUMSHOE, and maybe Dungeon World depending on how you want to look at it.

>>no exploding dice until you're the highest level in a skill
what the fuck
everything else sounds "blegh" but this is just outright baffling. for what purpose?

because they thought of the other rank up bonuses first and needed a capstone? because someone in design wanted randomness to be as far removed from their Canadian Pacific Railway masquerading as a RPG as possible?

IDFK.but its dumb yeah?

here's an idea i had mowing the grass, mulling this shit heap over; intitute my other house rules up there, including the raises happening on a 9. then make it so you roll for initiative raises, which determine action order and number of possible actions in a round. then each action is a contested or targeted roll of the skill for a separate set of "task/whatever raises" which are the actual level of achievement.

[might as well rename raises to successes honestly. you aren't raising shit. but the base game raises aren't either so...]

damage for a normal attack is a set of damage successes rolled with skill+trait AFTER determining the hit, OR the excess succeses not rolled against by the opponents contested defense...

and this is the one that really makes me consider using these alterations...

make bonus dice awarded for description into "style dice" which always explode on a singular success, that is, explode on a 9 or a 10.

this makes the descriptive flair also encourage both story and mechanical daring risks and stylish performance.

worth noting, given how much of the task resolution that im completely gutting, that I mostly approve of the streamlined character creation process and the "point buy" stuff being brought down to a small budget of points which are fairly well priced out and easier to manage than the original game.

pps: on my own changes to damage up there, this still leaves duelists with the distinct advantage of more complicated maneuvers n shit. also, with y altered system, since number of actions and damage arent from the same fucking pool of raises, you can THEN make say, parrying without a readied action cost an extra action for the round for non-duelist people.

At least it's not Galaxy XXX.

fuck me I just remember this fucking book devotes ONE ENTIRE PAGE to the little detail of SHIPS AND SHIP COMBAT in a game about swashbuckling adventures.

oh and no boats have any stats to differentiate themselves. you know, its amazing that avalon doesn't just build endless numbers of sloops. lord knows they had to be desperate to basically invite any willing sailor to come join the navy, they could really save some and resources by making just sloops, since they're exactly a perfect match for a 48 gun ship of the line.

blinking jesus i'm starting to think the only good effect of this entire endeavor was to get lots of high quality scans of the actually GOOD 7th sea out there.

That's because Wick has a Thing for politics and landlubber drama, and tends to gloss over everything else, even if those things could contribute to politics and landlubber politics.

In Theah, the navy is politics. For Avalon, for Montaigne, for Castille because of the previous 2, for the merchant princes of Vodacce, for the Vesten [former vikings turned trade federation with an invasive Euro style currency]... seriously.

even if you ignore trade and movement from place to place, Avalon is an island. Just like real life Britain, with too many people to ever feed with its own farmland. to be able to blockade her is to be able to defeat her.

stumbled on this paragraph while re-reading the 1st edition books. compared to this, the whole "oh we don't really track wealth and most of it goes away between sessions" thing is fucking laughable.

just think of that 3 musketeers [2011] moment: "are you implying that I take money from this woman? that I cannot afford my own clothes?!" people get fucking killed over this stuff.

clearly most of it goes away because you spend it all to maintain apperances like that paragraph says it's so important.

Except theres rules for playing characters who have no social status. Im a swashbuckler not a noble, i don't give a shit what the nobles think of me.

It's titled after the Houses of the blooded mechanic, in which you actually had to wager dice.

So you spend your money carousing. Point is, you don't get to retire.

maybe I'm having difficulty understanding the exact mechanic (I'm assuming a 'set of 10' might describe two dice showing a 9 and a 1 or three dice showing 3, 3 and 4)
If the probabilities are as predictable as you suggest, which I don't know, then you are free to tailor the challenges you roll for in a satisfying way.
Simple tasks would have few to no negative outcomes to 'undo'. Moderate tasks might, on average, require you to choose between undoing the negatives or achieving some positives, and difficult tasks are of course high risk events undertaken mainly by highly skilled or desperate characters.

some people aren't fans of the idea that if you shoot enough peas enough times at a reinforced steel tank you might blow it up. I generally don't mind 10-agains but removing them is probably to reduce those random novice trounces master upsets.

That's not really the problem, though. The problem is that you're generally rolling fairly large numbers of dice, and the more dice you roll the more consistent the final sum is. And that final sum is what's actually important.

So you can make all the encounters harder, but the players are still going to know before they roll more or less how much stuff they'll be able to buy off, give or take AT MOST 2 raises.

some of this will also depend on the actual variance.
Let's say you expect your player's pool centre's at around 5, so you're expecting 3-7. If you give them five negatives to buy off for a moderately difficult task, they could roll poorly and cop some abuse, roll well and get an augmented result, or roll as expected and achieve a stock standard pass as might be expected in any other system.
I'd be curious to no exactly how consistent these results are because if you've a standard deviation of 1 raise you'll get an extreme result 5% of the time (half as much as a d20), but anything else and you're in regular territory.

I feel like you're just hear to be mad, but have you actually tried playing the game?

I mean, if you're doing it as intended, you should only be rolling dice in a situation where there is a "risk" of failure - there is a component that could go awry or affect you in some negative element. If you can do it without any of that, you just do it. Why the fuck roll the dice?

Also, sure, the GM frames consequences and opportunities (after all, he knows more about what the fuck is actually going on) but the GM doesn't intrinsically call for rolls. A player does when he decides to do a thing that - as established above - would reasonably involve some risk. At that point, when the GM says "this is a risk" you can skip straight to "ah, I'll fail" or you can roll some dice. But it's hardly railroading if you decide to do something risky and then the GM has to think of a potential consequence (because nearly every RPG in at least the last 5 years has realized just "you fail nothing happens" is boring and dumb). If anything, you're railroading the GM, because when you pull off some off-the-wall player character shit, you're handing him the bag on what the consequence is.

but the nature of the probabilities on large pools of dice combined with the gm explicitly telling you every consequence down to the mount of damage for everything, all possible opportunities and outcomes, as well as any elements that rely on timing or might have a time limit [in the book it says to tell the players when something will explode so they know when they have to get around to spending a raise, instead of you know, getting out because there's some actual risk involved in fucking around nears flaming explosive shit]

all of this plus the rule enforcing strict penalties on anyone who dares do something they didn't expect to do at the beginning of the round or action sequence[if you didn't know you would need to do some acrobatic shit in the same round as roiling to stab someone then fuck you apparently]

all of it combines into this cloudy clusterfuck of a system that does everything fucking backwards. no real unknown elements. risk and reward for chancy, flashy swashbuckling moves is mitigated and minimized, not rewarded with great success or great failure.

you aren't so much playing the role of your character, since every decisions you the player make is based around meta mechanical knowledge that the character could never ever possibly even hear about... you don't go "oh i'm pretty good with a sword and will try to stab him" and hen roll for a bit of variable performance to add to your skill number. you don't do anything like that. instead you roll for an almost statistically guaranteed number of actions to spend, then inflict damage by saying that you do.

you aren't role playing a character. you're playing a little voice of god or a gnome on his shoulder telling him what to do going "trust me. i have foreseen it."

i don't want to play a little gnome sending divine messages to someone through a brain tumor. I want to play a fucking pirate. i want to play a fucking musketeer. i want to PLAY A ROLE.

Ah, so players aren't allowed to decide their actions?

Fuck you, then.

ps: the gm isn't telling consequences for actions, hes explicitly instructed by the book to tell the players all consequences BEFORE they spend any raises to do things, so they know which things cause definite worse problems. whose gong to suffer worse consequences and mitigate the not as bad ones? no one.

also the gm does tell the players to roll. they say what they want to do, he announces if its a risk, they agree to it, then he tells then what to roll. they make one roll for their pool of raises, then if they want to do something different they lose raises for improvising. the round or action sequence is all known and mathematically fucking solved before it starts. the events are fucking pre ordained and devoid of stakes.

i should note, its a fairly fine communal storytelling game. i mean the entire thing is basically varying levels of narrative control dictated by the exchange of plot tokens.

its just wrong to sell it as a role playing game, or as a fucking 7th sea game.

Not the original user, but... if your character retires like that, wouldn't you not be playing him anymore?

I didnt say anything about retiring. Maybe i want to buy a ship, or expensive equipment, or any number of other things. Hell, what if my character is celibate and a light drinker? How am i spending "half" my wealth on carousing then?

I dunno the exact rules in 7th sea here with wealth but FantasyCraft has a similar thing with uh.."Prudence"
Basically at the end of the adventure you lose a bunch of your accumulated wealth depending on your Prudence sub-stat. Represents disciplien with time/money.

It's assumed it went into various things like partying or tithes or investing in the local church or whatever else you want [although on that last one, there's no actual mechanical rules there and I'm kind of just explaining away the relatively loosely defined mechanics]
Point is, low prudence means at the start of the next 'adventure', a lot of your money is now gone. Your character is one that saves his money? Better mechanically reflect that with getting that Prudence score up, same as high Strength on that warrior.


It's pretty much just a weird way to force constant reasons for adventuring and to prevent the "problem" of having 9999999 moneys but "nothing" to do with it. Sort of a rule-set character 'tone' constraint.

You idiots gave him a big pile of money.
He rolled around in it for months and then promptly took a shit all over your faces.
YOU are the problem and this is all YOUR FAULT.

>paying for games
who does that

applying this kind of logic to 7th sea is just baffling to me though.

like, if i have tons of money and nothing to do with it...

well, am i allied to anyone? am i a king yet? am I a personal force in politics?

maybe I make a pirate fleet, or a pirate hunting fleet. maybe i start bribing my way through the politics of vodacce. maybe I just start buying weapons and gear thats really ornate. fun fact; real world italy had a wide hilted dagger that was longer than a knife, shorter than a sword. it was in theory useful for drawing in narrow alley way fights, but was more often decorated ornately with bits of family history etc, a way of showing off. i bet commissioning one of those with gold and silver inlaid into its filigree would be a bitching use for my noble cash.

to be fair, i was only vaguely aware oh Wick's reputation in modern times. i was only familiar with him for 7th sea and L5R[which isn't my ting bu i appreciate]. plus he was advertising "2nd Edition" not "completely different thing with the same name"

plus, honestly, it puts a sub genre of gaming bag into the hobby's consciousness for a bit. who knows, maybe someone will do a pathfinder of 7th sea.

op here. currently making some characters in both new and old 7th sea to get a feel for both[its been a long time since i did much with the original].

current;ty on old. its a little unclear; does buying a swordsman school grant you a free rank in all its swordsman knacks, or just grant access to them?

They give you a free rank. However, buying additional ranks in those Knacks costs the same as advanced Knacks (3 HPs instead of 1).

And note that sorcery does NOT grant any free ranks in their advanced knacks.

A good rule of thumb for 7th Sea is that, if you have a question about character building, assume that the answer is the one that hurts the PC the most. I converted my whole game over to NEA's houserules, because they're fucking phenomenal and make 7th Sea characters actually into function, heroic, swashbucklers instead of vaguely inept tools made to be pushed around by Wick's metaplot avatars.

>a pathfinder of 7th Sea

I hope you die of penile cancer.

Actually no, buying a swordsmen school does not give a free rank in their knacks, though giving them as part of the school package is a VERY common (bordering on universal really) houserule. A school only gives you the two skills it teaches, the apprentice technique, and either membership to the guild or a free rank in a single swordsmen knack if it is a non-guild school.

There is no such thing as an advanced Sorcery knack. All Sorcery knacks are just knacks, but they can only be purchased with Sorcery Points during Char Gen. You normally get 3 for Half-Blooded, 7 for Full-Blooded, and 3/3 for Twice-Blooded.

core pathfinder is mostly fine. ignoring the magic since we're not having THAT argument here.

and if you couldn't read that and think "oh, a 3rd party spiritual successor game that furthers the development in the direction it was already going to fill the void in a market abandoned by the license holders" then you must have eyeball cancer. also brain cancer. and ovarian cancer.

could you share said houserules here, by any chance?

Yeah, here's everything I cribbed from him last time he posted them.

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...

...

...

This is more campaign-specific, but it's still a gold mine for ideas. Especially the rumination on the nature of Vesten gods.

Last thing, and aside from the PC creation rules my favorite part.

thank you sir. ill put in a good word with the captain for ya lad.

triggered

Damn straight I am. I played through the dark years of the shitty d20 conversions of both L5R and 7th Sea. The fucktards that want that shit back can eat my shit, then shit out my shit, then it their shit that is made up of my shit.

yeah i wasn't talking about a pathfinder for d20 7th sea. i was talking about someone coming along and picking up where the originals went insane and jumped off a cliff.

so you're an idiot, and didn't understand what that person meant.

Fucking hell man.