Stone, Steel, and Steam - Revised and Ready to Test
markgamemaker:
Stone, Steel, and Steam is a tabletop RPG about cultures in collision. It features eight unique human civilizations on two continents with technology levels ranging from Stone Age to early Industrial to photovoltaic schizotech. They just discovered each other about forty years ago, and things are starting to get messy. The players can engage the world as characters of any of the nations, from any walk of life but most often as soldiers, explorers, or traders directly affected by or personally shaping world events.
Here is the completed game manual, and the self-criticizing release announcement about it. I've already got it lined up for some local playtesting; what I really need are critiques and copyedits of the text. 'I like how you handled/described x but I don't like this about y. I think the way z is written is ambiguous, p is unnecessary, and q is something players need to know that's not written,' stuff like that. I'd also be very interested to hear the results of other playtests based solely on the manual, that I've had no opportunity to skew.
The ideas that grew into this game began gestating in around 2000, I had scribbles and notes on paper in 2005, had things complete and cohesive enough to run rough playtests in late 2007, and it actually started coming together into an actual manual in 2009.
One one level this is 'just' a pencil-and-paper tabletop adventure game and it follows many common RPG conventions. The interesting stuff, imo, is the setting, and theoretically I could have just developed it as a setting for OGL or some other generic mechanical engine, except that I have philosophical objections to how most other systems work and wanted to make a few statements by developing my own. Not particularly revolutionary statements, but significant to me.
On another level, this game is or can be a tool to explore social and historical conflicts. I tried to make these cultures ethnologically plausible. Every quirk and feature is a response to a trauma or crisis in their history. Ask, why did the Spanish have the technology to conquer the Amerindians instead of the other way around? Then kick out the 'why' and ask, what if the Amerindians had the technology, how would this have played out? Then kick out the Spanish and the Amerindians (or any thinly veiled analogue) so we don't have the personal feelings and political baggage attached, build several cultures from the ground up, plot out how they developed and why, and set the players loose in that world. And you'll have crazy Brisco County, Jr.-style adventures, but you'll also raise questions about imperialism, colonialism, slavery, genocide, and other conflicts that can drive genuine character growth. Maybe that's a little pretentious; I don't really expect everyone who plays this game to have their eyes opened to the tacit injustices of history, and it can certainly be done with other systems.
I'm a narrativist, I suppose, and my real objective has been to craft a setting that would be interesting to tell stories in, where guns and swords are both viable options, where magic is real but not overpowering, where things make sense and the way things are is a result of plausible cause-and-effect conflicts. a game that's a little smarter and more serious than your average mass-market game, but not so artsy/esoteric/indie that it wouldn't also be appealing to a broad audience of gamers. I don't care it it's ever commercially successful; I do care that it's solid and professional and complete and can be enjoyed by like-minded people. It's a rough stone I've finally hacked out, and at this point I need help polishing it.
johnthedm7000:
Firstly I've got to say how much I admire the fact that you've actually managed to put together your RPG (even if it is in beta format). I've been working on my own RPG for going on 8 months now and am not past the second draft of the mechanics. That being said, I have some questions and comments.
I was reading over your Magic (or Praxis) section and had a couple of comments. Firstly, the magic system doesn't seem as if it's really a part of the setting-it's not mentioned as affecting the relationships between nations, the makeup of religions, or the cultures of the various peoples that populate the game world. Even if magic is subtle and not believed in with any real frequency, if magic works (at least for some people) then it will have a measurable affect on the societies it appears in. Secondly, the effects that magic can create seem somewhat limited, even taking into account the flavor of magic that appears in your game.
Weather magic, shapeshifting (such as that attributed to Witches in the middle ages by way of an animal skin girdle), hexes beyond the "wasting sickness" that your cursing seems to simulate, and blessings (such as protecting another against witchcraft, or blessing them with fertility, strength, or luck) are all (at least in my mind) appropriate as magical abilities in a world that has subtle and down-to-earth magic as a theme. But all of these are currently impossible with your current magical ruleset. I'd recommend that you expand the list of effects you can create with magic, or else give guidelines for players to create their own effects, giving difficulty examples for general types of magical tasks.
Example 1: Shapeshift. The practicioner can change their form to that of a Beast through the use of their Focus and a long ritual. This requires a Air+Praxis roll against a difficulty based on the power of the form.
Weak Creature with few abilities (Mouse, Frog) Easy
Weak Creature with many abilities (Crow, Dog) Moderate
Strong Creature with few abilities (Large Dog, Poisonous Viper) Difficult
Strong Creature with many abilities (Crocodile, Wolf, Bear) Very Difficult
While in the assumed form, your Fire and Earth scores are increased or decreased by the difference between your scores and those of the animal. This decrease only applies to physical actions. You may not communicate in the form of an animal (unless the animal in question could be trained to speak, in which case it requires an Air+Fire roll against moderate difficulty to speak a full paragraph) or use Praxis while shapeshifted. You gain all of the special abilities of the animal whose form you have assumed (such as flight for birds, incredible sensory abilities for dogs or wolves, faster speed for a horse). While in animal form, you may communicate basic concepts to other animals of your kind through body language and scent. Occasionally, the animal form might influence you to act in a certain way (such as making you stalk a deer while shapeshifted into the form of a wolf). This is resisted by Air+Water, and is of a difficulty based on the strength of the stimulus.
Example 2: Making new Praxis abilities.
Have the player describe what he or she would like to accomplish and determine what category of task it falls into. Then make a Fire+Praxis roll for physical effects, or an Air+Praxis roll for mental effects. Roll against a difficulty determined by Scope, modified by effect.
Scope:
Small (A single target, Touch Range, a few feet in area) Very Easy
Moderate (Up to 3 targets, range comparable to a thrown weapon, a few yards in area) Easy
Large: (Up to 5 targets, range comparable to a bow, tens of feet) Moderate
Huge: (Up to 10 targets, range comparable to a smoothbore gun, hundreds of feet in area) DIfficult
Epic: (Up to 20 targets, range comparable to a rifle, thousands of feet in area) Very Difficult
Effect:
Minor (A slight modification, amusing diversions easily accomplished by ledgermain or sleight of hand) +5
Lesser (A significant but still explainable modification, such as placing an odd but reasonable suggestion in someone's mind, or causing it to rain when there are already stormclouds in the sky) +10
Moderate (A significant effect that is hard to explain away as non-supernatural, such as getting rats to follow you away from a village and dance to your song, or having a lightining bolt strike randomly out of a cloudy but not stormy sky) +15
Major (A large effect that's nearly impossible to explain away, such as causing a normally healthy man to fall sick with a horrible disease, or causing your foe's weapon to weaken and rust) +20
Incredible (An obviously supernatural effect that's readily apparent to all as a function of Praxis. Changing your form, causing a healthy man to drop dead with a gaze, conjuring a spirit who takes bodily form, or suspending aging in a target) +25
Effect:
johnthedm7000:
Either of the above methods would contribute to expanding the versatility of your magic system and it's ability to mimic the wide variety of magical practices that go on in the real world (and it's obvious that you've taken a lot of your information from reinterpretations of various RL cultures, which is cool).
Regarding the fiction of your game, I'm curious as to why the less advanced societies who are stuck at a stone age, bronze age, or iron age level of technology which have had
johnthedm7000:
(I apologize for my previous post, my computer freaked out and I posted it before it was completed. Read this as a continuation of my previous post)
contact with more advanced societies with imperialist tendencies have not been absorbed into the empires of those imperialistic countries. As RL history will tell you, less technologically advanced peoples don't exist side by side with technologically advanced imperialist nations without the less advanced peoples eventually getting steamrolled, or using the technology of their attackers to fight back. If perhaps you provided reasons in the fiction why this had not taken place (such as terrain or climate that makes conquest difficult, powerful Praxis on the part of the less developed peoples, or due to the countries in question being distracted by other concerns), then this would be easier to swallow, but as it stands it hurts my suspension of disbelief. This is especially striking because other than that you've done a very good job of creating interesting societies from the ground up without resorting to cliches often found in RPG material.
Another question I have is why you chose to include an Idiom system that directly punishes characters for "evil" behavior and rewards them for "good" behavior in the form of Karma when you talk about exploring social and historical issues such as slavery, genocide, and imperialism, and driving deep character growth. While slavery, genocide, and imperialism are easy to call evil (and indeed I can't think of many things that fit the bill more closely), to leave it at that is over simplifying it. All of those horrible things that occurred in the real world, or that occurred in your RPG's setting were the result not of people who set out to do evil, but human beings who acted on very basic and primal drives and emotions. That's what's really scary about such events- that the people who perpetrate hem by and large aren't cackling megalomaniacs who kick puppies for fun, but people just like you and I. It seems counter intuitive (at least to me) for a game about exploring these issues in a systematic and deep way to have a system which offers external rewards for moral behavior and external punishments for immoral behavior.
Now the dichotomy between immoral and moral behavior is an interesting one, and I think it's something worth exploring but I would consider ways of making Karma provide rewards that aren't readily apparent in the game world, and also consider the possibility of combining the concept of Karma with something else to make a sort of "motivation system". For example, if you gave characters several "motivations" and they gained a different (but equal) reward based on whether they acted on that motivation morally, immorally, or neutrally then you free up players to easily explore characters of all moralities without worrying that they'll be punished for the system for playing an immoral character. Unless you've intended for one of the themes of the game to be something along the lines of "Those who are pure of heart will usually triumph over those who are corrupt" or something similarly idealistic, I would consider redesigning or scrapping Karma.
I don't mean to be overly harsh-I really do like your game's concept, setting, and the rules by and large and I'd love to discuss them and your reasons behind your mechanical decisions more in-depth.
Ron Edwards:
Hi,
I'd like to cast in my support for John's question about the ethics of the game. You used the term "narrativist" to describe yourself ... I am not sure whether you are using this in the sense that I, its author, defined - to embed the action into a pressing, situational, and above all compelling question that taps right into human emotions, concerns, ethics, morality, or anything related to those terms. *
If you are indeed using the term as I've defined it, then John's question is a good one. But it's not just a matter of "alignment vs. no alignment," or "rules vs. no rules." Here are my thoughts about that.
1. The simplest way to deal with such questions in role-playing is to leave them entirely non-mechanical, as emergent social and creative feedback from playing. Given many people's experience with personality and morality mechanics, I can see why they might prefer that because historically such mechanics are highly strictural and punitive. However, just because this is simplest and just because it can work, doesn't mean it's necessarily the best way. In fact, in practice it has a way of running into social clashes.
2. A number of games include what might be called "morality mechanics" (here using morality in the broadest and most story-thematic sense) without dictating exactly what is good and exactly what is evil, and definitely not casting PCs or NPCs into those roles in a fixed way. My game Sorcerer is probably the one that's received the most discussion about such things, but see also Dogs in the Vineyard, My Life with Master, and Dust Devils.
In these games, human judgment at the table is called for - preferably right there in the moment, and preferably at the mercy of a given person, rather than some kind of consensus. The consequences can be severe but also permit "bouncing back" from them, most of the time. It's also worth pointing out that these are fully free-will games, in that nothing on a character puts limits on a character's behavior for good or ill.
What I'd like to know about is exactly how the Idiom rules work at the table, by examples of what's really happened. It may be that you are working with legacy mechanics (D&D alignment, or Storyteller System Humanity) that frankly don't function well except in highly limited, highly group-specific instances. Or it may be that you have hit upon parallel mechanics to those of Sorcerer and similar games, or something that is distinct from them but also consistently functional. It's hard to tell, from reading game text. Can you provide examples, from real play?
Best, Ron
* Narrativism doesn't merely mean "to tell a good story," as that can be accomplished in the context of many other, different creative goals for play.
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