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For those of you who are following along with the various Kickstarter threads , there was quite a few people talking about 7th Sea. It's safe to say that the last twelve months have been an explosion of 7th Sea-ness. Today's news inspired me First, a bit of Background: What is 7th Sea: 7th Sea is a game (originally created by John Wick. No, not that John Wick, a real-life person named John Wick) that can best be described as "Psuedo-European swashbuckling fantasy as viewed through the lens of The Princess Bride and Errol Flynn Movies, thrown into a blender and hit Liquefy". It came out in 1999, and used a variant of the Roll and Keep system used in Wick's other big name RPG (Legend of the Five Rings). It was pretty innovative for it's time, but had some setting flaws (like, for example, in a game that practically demanded ships here there and everywhere, the main continent had all the nations except for one, and there literally was no new world to be discovered, so there was no reason for ship traffic.). But it was well loved, there was about 15 books released (detailing the nations of the 7th Sea World, and even bringing the timeline forward), until the publisher of 7th Sea, Alderac Entertainment Group, made a fatal mistake. They attempted to hitch their train to the D20 license shooting star, actually selling L5R to Wizards of the Coast, and making d20 versions of L5R and 7th Sea. This went over like you'd probably expect, and in 2004-05, the 7th Sea System went dormant. So, we're talking about a dead game in this thread? But just like all the good pirate stories, you can't keep a good game down. John Wick (yup, him again), announced that he had purchased the rights to 7th Sea from AEG (who were getting out of the RPG business), and announced a kickstarter for early 2016, with a modest goal of $30,000. That goal was smashed within an hour. Smashed to itty bitty pieces. By the time the April kickstarter ended, the campaign had become the most-funded pen and paper RPG kickstarter EVER (outstripping even such luminaries as Onyx Path's World of Darkness 20th anniversary editions and Exalted third edition). A grand total of $1,316,813. So, if the kickstarter just finished in April 2016, we're talking about what, a 2017 release? 2018? Try August 2016. That's for the physical books, believe it or not. The PDF version that is going to print has been released to backers already and their goal is to be selling the books at GenCon 2016. That's a four month turnaround for writing the book, editing the book, printing the book and SELLING the book. And the core book is pretty drat good too (and pretty). For non backers, the PDF version will go on sale in late June 2016. Ok, so what's all this other poo poo you put in the title? Well. it seems like everyone has seen the news about how successful it's been and said "I want some of dat". When AEG sold the rights to Wick, they received a license to make a card game (there had been a previous 7th Sea CCG, which died shortly before the pen and paper RPG did). In June 2016, Wick announced that they had licensed the rights to make a 7th Sea video game to Nocturnal Studios, and a single player 7th Sea video game RPG (in the style of Torment: Tides of Numenera) entitled "7th Sea, Voyage of the Fortune's Star" would be kickstarted later in 2016. Sounds good, but there's always flaws. Hit me with them. Well, Like everybody else in the gaming industry, John Wick has flaws. One is that he has an affection for his pet characters (if you ever want to waste a couple hours, ask a L5R grognard about Wick's love of Bayushi Kachiko. Actually, don't. It borders on creepy).. and Wick had been known at times to encourage an adverserial style of Game Mastering (he released two books of GM advice, called "Play Dirty"). Indications are though, that he has learned to tone it down somewhat.
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Jun 14, 2016 22:40
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(reserved for descriptions of the nations in 7th Sea and a bit about the systems)
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Jun 14, 2016 22:40
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So having just found out this was a thing and missed all the hype, here are my post-reading-the-book-but-pre-reading-what-other-people-think thoughts on it. It's a gorgeous product and I think it's more interesting/better than the first edition of 7th Sea. That said it definitely is still a (pretty good) John Wick product that relies on its group being interested in cooperative storytelling, because while the pdf is gorgeous and the basic dice system better than the old Roll-and-Keep, the rules could definitely have benefited from tighter editing. From both a clarity and balance standpoint. So despite liking it I'm now going to point out (some) of its flaws. There are multiple places where things are only suggested by implication, seem to be vestiges of earlier rules that were omitted, or you'll need to make value judgments. Examples: the action sequence example implies you (can or must?) use Brawn instead of Finesse when putting together a dice pool using a two handed melee weapon, but this is not mentioned or suggested anywhere else in the text. Another example: Exploding dice are only explained in the skills summary and tells you that whenever you roll a 10 for a pool using a skill you have at rank 5 you "roll an additional die and add it to your total." The problem is that "total" is a totally undefined term- you're trying to put together raises, which you get by pairing together any number of dice so that their total is 10+ (or 15+ at skill 4 for two raises). There is potentially a huge difference between a 10 causing you to roll an extra dice and add it to your pool and rolling an extra dice and adding it to the "total" shown on the dice that rolled a 10 (how dice exploded in the old Roll-and-Keep). Also not addressed: whether or not dice that you add due an explosion are capable of exploding themselves (the importance/relevance of which varies greatly depending on how you think exploding works). You've also got the usual thing where rules were clearly thrown in without consideration for mechanical balance. Examples: quote:*I can take an Arcana that once per session lets me know a Brute Squad's type (i.e. what kind of mooks they are) or a Villain's basic stats and advantages. That's a pretty cool thing, if a bit situational. There's another one that (again, once per session) lets me add bonus dice equal to an opponent's Fear rating to my pool. Again, cool but situational. Or instead I could take an Arcana that once per session lets me convert every dice in a Risk Pool to a raise (which is basically like rolling non-exploding 10's on everything). Hrm, that one seems a little bit better. Also holy poo poo Corruption is an insanely bad mechanic and probably should be scrapped. For a game that's all about cooperative storytelling and goes out of its way to make death/incapacitation rare or optional, a "death" mechanic (from the player's perspective) based on random chance sticks out like a sore and overly punitive thumb. There's sort of a justification when it comes to true out-of-genre Villainous acts that you're explicitly warned about committing, as a risk of going "dark side" because you poisoned the town well doesn't seem completely inappropriate. But it falls down completely when it's used as a balancing mechanism for some of the Sorcery Mechanics. Sanderis suffers some issues with its minor favors not being properly mechanically defined when they should be, but having the Major favors be absurd power that incurs a minimum 10% chance of losing your character instantly is just dumb. (And the game doesn't really address how Sanderis works after someone becomes a Villain- it's implied that the contract is voided and the deivas fucks off, but since they can literally blow up cities some extra clarity on how this works would have been greatly appreciated). This is a lot of complaining and there is genuinely good stuff here (i.e. the way Risk Pools and the basic mechanics work is genuinely cool, swordsman schools appear to have gone from being overpriced/bad/fiddly to extremely powerful and tactical while simultaneously being easy to run, they did a good job with most of the Advantages in giving characters strong and defining abilities), the pdf is very nice looking, the fluff is less dumb than last time around [though it's not detailed in the corebook at all, there is apparently an actual New World to go to this time around!], etc. It's just frustrating because the good comes alongside some of the same mechanical and clarity flaws that you'd expect from a 90's RPG/previous John Wick products. The whole thing is improvisational/collaborative and fundamentally solid enough that I'm confident I could run a fun game of 7th Sea while easily working around the obvious dumb stuff- it's just that a lot of the obvious dumb stuff shouldn't be there in the first place!
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Jul 8, 2016 04:01
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Have you sent those observations to Wick? They're still soliciting corrections as far as I know.
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Jul 8, 2016 12:12
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Lightning Lord posted:Have you sent those observations to Wick? They're still soliciting corrections as far as I know. I didn't back the Kickstarter, it's got a commercial Drivethru RPG release and the latest Kickstarter update says the core book is "done" and that discussions with the printer have gone well, with the intent to have the first books physically made in less than two weeks. I don't know much about publishing, but what I do know would lead me to believe we're well past the soliciting feedback stage (for anything but errata anyway).
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Jul 8, 2016 15:31
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The Kickstarter for the cRPG was launched last week. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1861515217/voyage-of-fortunes-star-a-7th-sea-crpg
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Sep 27, 2016 16:20
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It seems reasonably solid overall. That said, it seems like the designers thought sorcery was way, way more powerful than it actually is. This goes double for fate witches, who... have to kiss people to use all of their spells? That's actually a very serious drawback.
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Sep 27, 2016 19:06
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