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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9814669" data-attributes="member: 4937">As fantasy heartbreakers go, it's pretty well done - at least at the level of reading.  It is a hodge podge of ideas stolen from other game systems ("Blades in the Dark" looms large as it seems to over almost all recent game designs) and it is interesting reading a fantasy heartbreaker that doesn't entirely default to D&D as its core assumptions.  This isn't merely "D&D plus some other stuff".  But it might be "Blades in the Dark and Ironsworn" plus some other stuff.For me it hits a bad spot between abstraction and simulation where the level of abstraction is not so high that the game is simplified, but too high to really feel like the abstractions are anything but gamist.Like you I'm inclined to want to see this as something like a complex version of "Oregon Trail" played solo and not so much as something that I want to run.  But my interest in turning this into a computer program is dampened by just how much of the text is littered with exhortations to apply GM fiat.  Also, there are hints "Darkest Dungeon" is one of the mechanical inspirations behind all of this.Which means it is hitting right in another bad spot of me, which is you have the appearance of having procedures for handling any situation but the procedures aren't trustworthy enough to run a game off of, and so really the GM is left to resolving a lot through fiat and judgement calls.  If the end result of a procedure is, "If this doesn't make sense, do something else instead", you might as well not have a procedure.For example, reviewing the social combat rules, I do think this is the best attempt at social combat rules I've seen, and I like how he's treating the NPC's hit points like a clock and you have to win before the clock runs out.  This is a good example of modifying the rules for a conversation to make them more like a conversation and less like the logic of combat.  But for all that, this is again in that not so sweet spot of providing a procedure complex enough to slow play down but not robust enough really feel realistic and so in practice you are relying heavily on fiat not just in setting up each interaction correctly but in ruling on everything that happens.As another example, his "inflation" rules creating not only local but regional price spikes are cute, but utterly unrealistic in the vast number of cases.  Why should depleting the supply in a village that can sell 10 units of supply have any effect on the prices on a nearby metropolis that can sell 160 units of supply?  There are no modifiers on the effect of inflation but distance, but it should be obvious that depleting the supply in a metropolis impacts the village considerably but not the other way around.  To make this work you need other modifiers that take into account relative population.  Also, is it really realistic that a hamlet with population of 10 has only 1/16th of the available supply of a metropolis 1000 times its size?  There is more gamism here than simulation.That said, am I probably going to start thinking about social interactions in terms of a clock now, at least in the abstract?  Yeah, that does solve a real problem I've had running social interactions where it's not clear when or how to stop the interaction when progress isn't being made.I do love procedures or "mini-games" as I've tended to call them in the past.  I like the idea of this better than I like the implementation, but I also love on some level how he's mining some of the best mechanics out of modern fantasy games and blending them with OSR and does have some interesting insights of his own.  So, interesting reading but would never run this.</blockquote>

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