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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PCIHenry" data-source="post: 5519797" data-attributes="member: 14863">Hello, Glad your interest was piqued!  I would if I had any clue how. I just spent 20 minutes fiddling with it and nothing ever showed on the Preview. If you can make it work, PLEASE feel free to do so!Alright, let me describe it for you.We wanted a system that would feel much more organic - personally ever since 1st Edition when I started playing back in '78 or so, I never liked the "one side goes, then the other side goes".So we created "The Clock". Now, you can use paper to track or a plain d12, but we created a cheap little gadget that keeps track of your "ticks". Here's how it works. You only roll Initiative once per combat. That gives you the place where you start on the Clock.  Let's say you roll a 4. The GM starts the Master Clock at one and starts counting off. When he gets to 4, you take you action. Let's say you swing your gladius at the Voiceless One attacking. Your gladius attack (let's keep this simple and say no weapon maneuvers or tricks are being used) costs 4 ticks. You make your attack and advance your Clock to 8. When the Master Clock reaches 8, you go again. Spells have a similar cost, but some (rituals) can be interrupted.Now before you roll your eyes and say, "Won't work, too clunky" - we first thought the same thing. However, after a lot of playtesting (which I'll get to below), we found that by the third combat, things were flowing fast and furious. One thing that I wanted to avoid was the apathy effect that I saw time and time again in most 3.5 games that we ran for Arcanis, particularly when running high level combat. People would tune out, walk outside, get a smoke break,etc because it took too long for someone's turn to be completed. Here you get to do one (or two if you include move and attack) things then its BAM! the next person's turn. It may not look great on paper, but it really does work. Players are engaged, which was one of our goals. And frankly it does feel very organic, at least to me. That is more a matter of taste and perception, I would think. It is a Tactical game, as far as the need for minis, a combat map, etc but I like to run cinematic games, so even with all the maps, minis, and clock I give it a cinematic feel regardless. Tweakable? I would say so. Our rules are so flexible, there's not much that can't be done. And if you want to make things less tactical, toss out the Clock, eliminate maneuver costs, go to rounds and there you go!Heroes can die, but we would prefer them to die Heroic deaths, so we do have a Stamina/Wound system that tends to get people "Vanquished" rather than out right dead. We also use Fate points that allows a dead Hero to be "just barely breathing".Glad you asked. Besides the internal playtesting that went on for a year and the play test groups (6) that continued for two years, we had the advantage of having the entire world-wide Chronicles of the Shattered Empires players. All 1500 or so Arcaniacs, played the game for almost a year now through various scenarios. We found some minor things that we tweaked and changed, but the core mechanics were solid and survived that Trial by Fire.As far as types of gamers, we have new players in their teens and twentys all the way through their fifties, I believe. CSE has always had a large percentage of women who play, perhaps because of the emphasis we put on role-playing  and outside the box thinking. For example, our scenarios award XP for NOT killing an adversary and talking your way through an encounter as well. No problem. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about our game. We're very proud of it and hope you'll give it a whirl, especially if you're attending Origins or Gen Con. We'll have Chronicles of Arcanis: World of the Shattered Empires as well as Witch Hunter: The Invisible World intros and full blown scenarios available. Best,</blockquote>

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