Tuesday, February 14, 2012

The System

I have been using Lamentations of the Flame Princess for my system for this game.  That has worked out fine so far.  For the most part everyone seems to like it, but I have a feeling that some of the stuff that I am going to want to do in the game are not going to work too well in LOTFP.

I posted a while ago about wanting a system that was what I wanted out of this game.  Of course, realistically I knew, from experience, that was a near impossibility.  It has only happened rarely in my life that a system has ever been perfect for what I wanted in a particular adventure or campaign.  A lot of them do one or two things really well and then the other third of the game is kind of crappy.  Maybe the system does not handle that situation well or the feel of the system is off.  A great example is my Deep Dark Wood campaign (quick and dirty explanation is that it was Grimm's Fairy Tales reworked into a D&D world).  D&D 4th edition was just out for a few months so we were using that.  The combat was fantastic in that game for the first few sessions.  The characters ran with it but then as the game went on a few issues arose. The biggest issue was that the game was very shallow if you were not wanting to run a big combat on a battle map with minis.  I tried converting the game to Savage World but everyone was a little unexcited about it at that point, and besides I was not running a pulpy game, and that is what Savage World does best.  Slowly we let it die in the back of our minds and we moved on.  That sound is me sighing.

Right now I have two custom systems I am working on.  I have my FAST system which is a narrative based game similar to PDQ and Fate.  I love and adore what that has become but it is not great for what I am trying to do.  Running a D&D type anything in that would be just odd.  The other has a stand in name right now called Tooth & Nail.  That names needs some explaining but that will have to wait.  It is a system designed from the ground up to be sword & sorcery.  It might just fit the bill but we shall see I suppose.

It is D&D flavored and very old school at that.  I won't know until I run it how successful I was in that.  I just know that I want to run this campaign, keep it going.  I also know that the group is not going to wait much longer for me to choose a horse to ride to town on.

In the meanwhile we have our FAST campaign starting to wrap up, four more sessions to go.  Maybe that will keep them occupied while this gets wrapped up.