The party appeared suddenly, after a blinding flash of light. Where once they stood on a grassy field in a desert city, now the hodgepodge collection of friends in bright garb stood in an icy landscape of frozen streams and snowy trees. They were not prepared for a cold this harsh. Nor were they prepared for a fire scorched body and blackened skeletons smoking in the clearing near them.
Sam and Keane and Elizabeth wanted to investigate. Jacob and Scott and Billy all wanted to get a shelter going. Ashley and Annika wanted to make sure there was fresh water. Will wanted to keep watch. None of these people had any idea what had happened or where they were.
On the fallen body they discovered a strange diary written in an unknown language. The corpse was coated in tattoos tracing lines from finger and toe-tips all the way to his hairline. Must be some kind of wizard or sorcerer.
But just that morning these 9 people had woken up in normal apartments, gotten ready for a reenactment event, and knew nothing about magic or wizards or smoking corpses in cold snow.
Roleplaying games are an interesting diversion and escape device. Mundane life can be very ... boring. I don't get to wake up and put on a cool cape and a badass sword unless I want weird questions to be asked while I'm buying baguettes and goat cheese at Safeway. I'm not saying I don't want those questions asked but I'm unlikely to run into brigands or dragons in the Safeway Bakery section. So the sword seems unnecessary and, depending on the time of year, the cape might seem like overdressing. You know the old saying, never wear your cape after Memorial Day.
My friends and I are also what doctors and psychological professionals would call "skilled in the most noble art of procrastination and relaxation." Normal folks would call us pretty lazy. No shame in that. We certainly enjoy crashing on couches and playing board games more than we like jogging. But two years ago we thought their might be a fun way to turn health into a game and mix it with our favorite shared hobby: Tabletop Gaming.
Plenty of people have done this sort of thing before. We are not pioneers in the art of wanting to put ourselves into a unique roleplaying game with magic and swordfighting and dragons. We all became friends because we like Historical Recreation.
We ran into a problem pretty quickly though. While my friend Keane is definitely the most fit out of all of us he isn't the best fighter. While my friend Sam has the most forceful personality she isn't the most skilled in diplomacy. While Ashley is arguably very smart she has the willpower of a starving raccoon in a Chinese Buffet. Normal ability scores and skill systems wouldn't work.
Jacob has more knowledge about explosives than a person who doesn't work in an engineering field should but he struggles to remember people's names. Scott has training in three martial arts, falconry and zoo science, and various weapons but he has the appearance and physical durability of your average coconut popsicle. Will is the most skilled swordfighter but the least physically fit.
So what do we do? It's always good questions with you people. Love it.
We invent a new tabletop gaming system with new rules, new approaches to the overlap of ability and skill, new magic systems, and a way to codify the differences in all of our unique mental and physical approaches. In case you were wondering, yes, we are most assuredly crazy and have too much free time.
I'll be posting more and more about this system as time goes on but I want to give you some barebones info as we move on. This system is my pet project that I hope to one day make available for people.
1. Dice are rolled where ability overlaps with skill: After playing Fantasy Flight's Star Wars RPG series I fell in love with the idea of forming pools of dice that are rolled rather than just rolling 1 d20 to check for something. I like rolling dice. So I adapted their system to utilize regular dice instead of the custom, unique dice that they created. In my system you can have a ton of natural ability but if you don't have any trained skill to overlap it you are missing out. Every time your ability overlaps with your skill you get to upgrade your dice to higher levels. In a later post I will explain this system in depth but for now I'll put it simply: The more skilled and naturally able you are, the better you will be than anyone that only focuses on one field.
2. Magic should be dangerous and different than simple combat: I don't want players to say "I cast fireball!" My response then has to be "Okay roll to see if you hit and then let me compare to resistances and saving throws alright now roll 8d8 for damage and the damage is done let's move on to Archibald's turn where he's going to make 3 sword attacks and ..." It's fun but it's been done before. I wanted magic to be big, bad, dangerous, rare, and tied directly into the culture of the world. Electricity, gunpowder, the internet, and readily available painkillers have affected the culture of our world so magic, alchemy, shapeshifters, and devils should have an affect on the culture of any world I generate.
3. The game should feel realistic but also fantastical: Once upon a time people did get suited up in armor and swing swords at each other with the intent to kill. Once upon a time people did have to travel on foot from city to city. Once upon a time the wilderness was dangerous and deadly. But we didn't used to have sorcerers that could reattach limbs. We didn't have groups of wandering samurai hunting dangerous mutated monsters. We didn't have alchemically altered demon hunters stalking the streets at night to keep our dreams safe. Those three things sound pretty cool, right? But the first three are fun to think about too. I wanted a game that could accurately portray a world, breathing and functional, with the same kinds of rules as ours that also had to interact with magic and fantasty in a fun and interesting way.
4. Players should be able to put their own selves in the world as characters and be able to have fun: The problem with being an average person in Dungeons and Dragons is that all your ability scores are 10 and you're going to be killed by the first goblin tribe you ever meet. But the average person doesn't only have 10's for all of their abilities and the range of people are average is very large. Keane is the strongest one in the group, with Billy coming in close second, and he is considerably stronger than Ashley, the weakest of the group. That having been said, the difference between their Strength scores should be much greater than the difference between a 9 and a 10 even though they both technically fit into the average for Dungeons and Dragons. So if we wanted a system we could actually have fun with it had to be one that could incorporate the range of human ability but also have the capacity for alchemy and magic to alter physical beings. Also it had to allow for dragons to fit within the rules. I'm not making a fantasy world and not allowing dragons to exist. That goes against my religion.
That's all I can think of for now. Every Wednesday is going to be a post about Real 8 where I explain a little bit more. For now I will leave you with the origin of its name. Real 8 Table is the full name of the game. Sounds a bit like Relate-able when you say it out loud. You play it at a Table. It's meant to be a Realistic game. D8's are the primary dice rolled. Farmane out!!!
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