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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grendel_Khan" data-source="post: 8308410" data-attributes="member: 7028554">I would truly love to read your take on it, since I am very possibly way too much of a grump about it. I'm both very impressed at the degree to which they thought through what it would take to really capture the full Dune experience--warts and all--in a TTRPG, and pissed that they didn't just say, Hey, forget being faithful to low-action books that read like a play without stage directions, and let's have you play mercs or criminals something because this is getting hella abstract. To me it's almost like a Fate or PbtA game without the tight narrative focus/playbooks that can make those work well. Most everything in the game is an "Asset" one of kind or another, and you use those to create "Truths," which could range from filling a room with smoke to planting a false rumor. There are people who really like it, so maybe I'm unduly weirded out, but what really bugs me is the way it goes from very abstract and narrative about virtually everything (you can probably do a thing because your character is passionate about it) to....this:[ATTACH=full]138434[/ATTACH]I misspoke before when I said your body and such are assets. Those are separate zones, whereas a weapon or personal shield is an asset, so you'd move your knife asset into the target's zone, but that's probably going to be blocked by a knife in their guard zones, and this creates a situation where essentially all duels involve dual-wielding and...man I just hate it so much. Also leads to rules like this:                                                "If you find yourself without any other weapons, you automatically receive an ‘Unarmed Attack’ tangible asset with a Quality of 0, allowing you to strike and grapple without the use of a weapon."             So you can't just attack unarmed, the system has to define not having a weapon in a given hand as an Asset that is mostly bad.I mention all this not just to randomly dunk on Dune, but because, imo, it's a good example of how a dueling subsystem can get wacky as hell. Granted, I think the larger system contributes to that, but there it is. And a Dune RPG really does need some good dueling rules, because of the whole thing about personal shields and lasers turning them into nukes. I just don't know if this is the way to do it. I think if I were running Dune I'd rather break out the Street Fighter RPG every time a duel happened.(apologies for the off-topic tangent everyone...can't really pretend this is related to the thread)</blockquote>

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