SYNERGY Role Playing Game Version 1.5

[John Michael Crovis]

Okay, guys... I've a number of your suggestions to heart and updated the PDF of SYNERGY. Now it has a little more polish... You can download it here: http://www.ravenlakegames.com/synergy-rpg

I know there are still no images, but I was going for a minimalist design. Is there anything I missed or could still be done better? Is the text clear and understandable? Do the rules make sense, from an academic point of view? Could you see yourself playing this game? Again, I look forward to your feedback.

[Onix]

The writing is far clearer. I understood it with little effort (that's a good thing).

Are the bullets needed?

[trodgers]

I haven't read it all. In fact, I just skimmed through it.

I agree that the bullet points are probably less than ideal.

I like your core mechanic. Easy and fun.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

[John Michael Crovis]

Updated to 1.51 (same link)

I did take a lot of your (Chainsaw Aardvark) suggestions, but in the end, I still kept the short-statement bullet points. In my experience, a great deal of clarity is lost when you try to pull them into paragraphs and misinterpretations can occur based on the extra paragraph verbiage. That - and bullet points just look better to me.

That isn't to say I didn't try - I did go through your suggestions and physically tried them out, saw how they looked, and agreed with most...

[Rob Lang]

Just quickly on bullet points (haven't read it yet - still judging) - roleplaying games are used in two ways: they are read through and they are reference. As long as you have a tight structure of headings, sub-headings, a contents and an index then you shouldn't need to use bullet points to allow quick access to information. A tightly worded paragraph helps the reader be sucked into game (like they would a novel) without losing any clarity. Try to maintain the flow for the person reading cover-to-cover without waffling to lose the person trying to use as reference.

Please note, I've not read Synergy yet - I'm giving this advice off the back of having seen this a couple of times before.

[SheikhJahbooty]

There was one thing I didn't like (from reading it, so take this with a grain of salt since it isn't an actual play report). Since you can't be sure who is going to lead off as GM everyone has to have something prepared before game night.

This is perhaps something that could be easily resolved with an In A Wicked Age style oracle. Something like, look at the cards that everyone played to determine who leads off as GM, and they have these significances, so riff off of that.

Although I suppose you'd have to have an oracle for each setting or genre.

I liked the whole rest of the game so much that I've been thinking this could be the base to finally use my hanafuda cards in a RPG. Like I could rank the cards by month and point value, and they could be used just the same way you use normal playing cards in Synergy. Maybe I could make a hanafuda-In A Wicked Age-style oracle, and even suggest using Chinese style dice (the dice that have pips but the 1 and 4 are colored red because of some Chinese dice game that was probably really popular at one point but I don't know it). Maybe offer some Rakugo-style guidelines so different GMs could portray the same NPCs in a manner that the other players would still immediately recognize the NPC. Something like, "The boss of the Kyoto shinsengumi always has his jacket falling off his right shoulder and his hat on backwards." In this way I could have a nicely stylized Samurai Champloo RPG that I could try to get people to play.