Second Draft: Our Steel, King's Law [was Steel on Steel]

[Kuma_Pageworks]

To dekludge the original title: Our Steel, the King's Law! Or even Our Swords, the King's Law! I think it's the 'steel' throwing the title.

I'll review a bit more of the PDF in a while.

[Joshua BishopRoby]

[Graham Walmsley]

Hi Joshua,

I read through the PDF at work today. I liked it a lot: the fencing mechanic is great.

The central mechanic is so strong that most of my notes were rather subjective, so take them with a pinch of salt.

Minor point, but I'm not sure about the Night Lords. My problem is replay value, really: we play through one campaign of Our Steel, then we want to play it again and we have to capture the Night Lords again? I'd prefer the crime syndicate be decided by the players at the start of the game.

What's the setting? It looks like France, but there's some Spanish and Italian words in there. I'm guessing the setting is France in an era where European nobles travel freely from court to court.

It took me a few read-throughs of the main mechanic to grasp it. There's some terms like "the acting Criminal" used, when I wasn't sure who the acting criminal was.

Instead of "the player may elect to use one of his Descriptors [to gain a bonus]" how would you feel about "the player may narrate in one of his Descriptors"?

This is probably me talking bollocks, but I have a feeling that there's little way for the narration to influence the central mechanic. The mechanic powers the narration - the players go through the mechanic and then narrate what happened - but there isn't much of an opportunity for narrated events to feed back into the mechanic. Have I missed something? Am I worrying about nothing?

On a French note, Antonio de Basch could be renamed Antoine du Bas, and then you've got "Lower" in there as well.

It's looking very good.

Graham

[Joshua BishopRoby]

Thanks for reviewing it, Graham.

The language changes I'll take a good look at. I'm sure it can be revised to better.

As for the Night Lords and the setting, they're both barely detailed so as to be easily replaced. I expect the second time you played this game you could easily say you were after some nobles who were conspiring against the King or whatever you like. Or switch around the setting to make it some Italian city-state or something.

The mechanic does determine the narration, yes, but not absolutely. Keep in mind that you are picking maneuvers based on your character, both so that you are predictable and also if, in case the other players don't anticipate your action, so you can back it up with a descriptor.

But I can't change the names. ;)

[Mathias Jack]

[Graham Walmsley]

[Joshua BishopRoby]

It's something that will have to be playtested, but the ten-session limit is a cap to the geometric progression of difficulty and collecting the Advanced Manuevers. Eleven (or more) criminals spaced out over the twenty-step position line will be very, very difficult to capture, even by four Watchmen with all but two of the Advanced Manuevers (without Moulinet, which requires sabers, and Envelop, that requires cloaks, most likely). It will require some significant teamwork to pull off and quite frankly I don't expect that most games would actually "win." Going past the tenth session would proceed into insane difficulty levels, without much differentiation of play since the players are no longer picking up new manuevers.

The game simply tops out at or around session ten. Hence the in-fiction reason is that you've rounded up the last of the Night Lords, and the job is 'done'. Having said that, though, I can probably emphasize that aspect a little more in the text -- making the tenth session always Treason Against the Crown and explicitly making it the 'round up the last of them, they're all hiding in X location.'

Mathias, have at it. I'd be interested to see how you adapt it.

[spaceanddeath]

Hey Josh....

Yopur game is posted under the wrong name:



Might want to get that corrected.

[Joshua BishopRoby]

[spaceanddeath]