Entry : Steel on Steel (was: Our Steel is the King's Law)

[Joshua BishopRoby]

Ingredients: Team + Steel + Law
Time Framework: 10 one-hour sessions

Players create a team of Muskateer-ish swordsmen who enforce the King's law. Each session, one player assumes a GM-ish role, presenting a group of accused criminals hiding from or fleeing justice. Players work together to apprehend or otherwise "deal with" said criminals. There is a finite range of tactical options available on any given turn (advance, lunge, feint, whatever) and players try to predict each other's moves and work as a coordinated team. Correct guesses give positive modifiers, incorrect guesses give negative modifiers (or I may just make that the resolution system itself). Players cannot discuss their plans outloud because, well, the badguys might hear them.

Highly tactical, I'll need to inject some character-building and team-challenging material like secret agendas, sympathies with specific criminals, and the like.

What's the consensus? Is this one worth pursuing?

[Graham Walmsley]

[adgboss]

[Joshua BishopRoby]

[Joshua BishopRoby]

[quote="Joshua BishopRoby"]You pick a move based on your current tactical situation]

And of course after brainstorming for ten minutes I come up with nearly thirty different maneuvers, way more than is feasible for this scheme -- correctly guessing what somebody else is doing out of a set of thirty will have a pretty low frequency.

I can split them into Basic and Advanced maneuvers, though. If everybody starts with the ten basics, and you (as a team) learn one advanced maneuver per session, that limits the set to eighteen at the very end, and most of them will only be applicable in context... that might work. If I can cut down the first ten, that might help, too.

[Joshua BishopRoby]

This is quickly becoming a board game. =P

[Doug Ruff]

[Joshua BishopRoby]

[shehee]

Well, I'm not sure where this is headed, but I'd love to play a game with cool fencing.Here's my thoughts, if you want em:

First, something nitpicky on my part, I liked the previous name. With absolutely no offense meant, Steel on Steel doesn't give me the right image. Our Steel is the King's Law is perfect. It's THE phrase that defines the game. Well done, with your first instinct, in my opinion.

Second, maybe you could assign those maneuvers to a deck of playing cards without the face cards. Somehow a player will aquire these cards, through roleplay, and in a fight has to use only the cards he has. With cards, you could assign the four previously mentioned categories to the suit, and you could work out a simple and easy to remember system of numbers that correspond to those maneuvers. For example, evens are parrys, odds are thrusts. But a higher number thrust takes precedence over a lower, so they have to counter with a parry or a higher thrust...

Eh, I have no swordplay experience whatsoever, but maybe it will help...

Ryan

[Jason Petrasko]