Hihi. I just recently submitted my first 24 Hour RPG, Shinigami Chronicles, and I'm looking for feedback. It's located here (pdf), in the 24 Hour RPG section. *bows* Domo arigato.
Welcome to your little corner of the blackhole, Lady Thief. I'll be sure to look at your game soon and visit back with some comments. It will be soon after Mother's Day though.
"Not 'a child at heart,' just childish." Penbot 2004
Hello again, I don't wanna keep you waiting for your review so I'll tell you what I've looked at so far. I jumped right to the notes to see what you had to say.
And the notes gave me a great feel for the game.
I know very little about Anime but your game is a very creative homage to this animation art. I need to look over the body of the game. But from what I've seen so far I'd give Shinigami Chronicles a 5 on a 1 to 5 scale. Based on creativeness and effort. (It's not likely that I'd ever use professionalism in grading an unpublished game design.)
And for comparison, I'd give A Childish Attempt a 2 out of 5. Or maybe a 1.5?
back to the drawing board, Penbot aka C C
Character creation: I like the numeric pool for character creation. Good explaination.
Skills: The system seems solid but the explanation has it's stumbling points. For example,
"The more successes you have (and the higher the successes), the better you did. If you fail a check, the number of successes you were
short is an indication of how badly you did."
This is redundant unless "an indication of how badly you did" is useful in describing the game action/s. i.e. Fudge
Mechanics: Good over all use of the dice pool system. It looks solid and playable. One point though, "This runs on a d6 base core mechanic, ... you only need regular six sided dice to play. But you need a lot of them." You might want to change, "But you need a lot of them" to a suggestion. More dice will make any dice pool easier. But it's still possible to use a dice pool if there is only one dice available for play.
On a whole, I thought you did a very good job of explaining the mechanics of the game. The same can be said for the rest of your descriptions. I wonder about the Secrecy Rule though? I understand why you might want to "discourage effects happy Shinigami" but this rule might place some limits on the game as well. Perhaps the fatigue rules are enough limitations on the characters.
I believe the Shinigami system could be introduced into any other setting, within reason, and used as it is. I'll summarize by saying , Shinigami Chronicles has changed my watermark idea. Shinigami Chronicles earns a rating of 8 and has knocked the watermark down to 5.5.
Now, I officially wash my hands of game review until further notice. That'll be until I get some creative writing done. Later, P.B.
Domo for rwviewing my game. I didn't really expect my first submission to be received so favorably.
With the redundancies and awkward bits in the mechanics system, my only defense is that I was rather loopy at the time. They'll be fixed presently. (I am, however, a Grammer Nazi when it comes to things people will be reading. ;P)
Thank you for pointing out that I can make the part about having a lot of dice as a suggestion. Also something that will be fixed presently.
The Secrecy Rule... I admit, I put that in based on my own players' tendency to get rather... flamboyant. Next version, I'll probably make that an optional rule.
I'm very glad that Shinigami could probably be added to any other setting, more or less; I was trying for that. I'm probably going to work on something else using the same core mechanics (once I get them playtested, and make sure that they will, in fact, work.) Hopefully, by the time I'm done with it, I'll have an entire series of games that would work together.
I think you can make the Secrecy Rule functional. I was just imagineing sittuations where the Shinigami might need to use there powers or abelities in front of a mortal and felt that the S. Rule might interupt play ocassionally. I'm getting all kinds of ideas about how it could work now. Argh, so many projects and so little time!