Recent content by Oly

If you're looking for wargaming type rules then what you get from the Free Companies will disappoint, that's not the sort of area that the rules set out to cover. The FC rules set out to give you a system with which you can paint the backdrop of a large battle with pretty sweeping strokes while...

Have you seen the battle system in the Free Companies book? I’ve seen several mass combat systems and that is, I believe, my favourite system. It’s not a war game, it doesn’t run the battle in detail. What it does provide is an abstract system for dealing with the flow of a battle. It then...

It can work, but I think it depends on the style of the game. 7th Sea, in which mostly everything is human, made it quite clear that minions all used the mook rules and moved and acted as a group. So it was really rather clear that the two groups of ten pirates were one hit mooks, behind each...

One hit mook rules don’t necessarily invalidate a combat rule chapter, 7th Sea managed wonderfully with one hit mooks and then the proper detailed combat system for more important NPCs. It may not be to everyone’s gaming tastes but a lot of people are big fans of it. However there is a...

A maths/rules heavy system is, in my experience, a slight detriment to roleplaying at moments when that system is in use, for example during combat. And that, I find, is due to the increased time that players and the GM are having to think "rules", I want combat to be quick and so that time has...

A player can choose to reduce the value of a trait if they want to, so they can take control back or steer their character away from being so honest, they can cause a fall from grace if they so wish. They can also force the trait to change by acting a certain way thus accelerating things. As...

I believe that it was I that brought up Pendragon as an example of a game with rules light combat. The way you describe the system isn't quite right. Yes there are opposed traits (e.g. Honest & Dishonest) but you're not forced to act in accordance with them unless you've chosen for them to...

I'll throw my hat in with that argument. In games where you have a lot of rules to handle a situation, for example combat or social situations with some games, players can tend to become distracted by working out the mechanics of what they're getting up to rather than the "cinematic" or...

I've always tried to keep the mass battles uses the Free Companies' narrative system to be as simple as possible. Remember that a "unit" often represents over 1000 men and doesn't comprise a single type. Where there are small battles of less than a 1000 men there's only one formation. There...

I'm not a D20 hater, as I've said repeatedly I like the system and have GMed long Star Wars and Conan campaigns using it. However when compared to all the other systems that I run it is more complicated, I don't see that as a bad thing just a statement of fact. Yes we could leave a lot of the...

When I say "understood" I mean that the players know all that there is to know about the combat system. They know every option that their character has and how it works. They don't need index cards with rules summaries on them and there's no flipping through books. After 10 or so years of...

Stormbringer is more complicated and detailed than CoC, it being tuned up for a fantasy melee combat heavy RPG, so I think that it is listable. Pendragon is basically the CoC BRP system tweaked even further so as to be turned into a D20 based game. Yes there's some complexity but it's still a...

It's not a bad way, if a system can include the entirety of the combat system (with examples) for which there are not then lots of exceptions and additions (via feats, talents or whatever) in less pages than D20 then I think it goes a fair way to show that the system is "lighter" than D20 is. I...

No it is not a rules light game, at least not by any objective standard that I can think of. I've just lent over to my bookshelf and counted the combat pages for a number of my favourite systems. Original Star Wars D6: 6 Call of Cthulhu: 7 Stormbringer: 9 Fudge: 19 Pendragon: 20 (including a...

I would have said a similar thing, until I considered the Delta Green reprint for CoC which includes dual stats both for CoC BRP and D20. By all accounts that I understand it sold incredibly well and the "bad blood" that exists between BRP and D20 is really rather OTT and worse than any that...