Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Von Ether" data-source="post: 7668544" data-attributes="member: 15582">If your a player, SW already has you covered.As for your GM, they can pull up a seat here.Our jobs as GMs and game designers are not really to be "movie directors" or "storytellers," but to be illusionists who never reveal our tricks to our audience. Kevin knew a long time ago that player perception is what really counts with an RPG. That's why his games have always had great art, awesome visuals and a low price tag, as he kept selling the same 50 pages of rules over and over. And if you think about it, even parts of those rules were really the same templates, just tweaked for flavor. Perfect example, MDC damage. With one sentence and a new keyword, he created an overlay that makes players feel like they're piling on real damage when it's just structural damage. Also, magic vs Psionics. Really they are the same system with points and power tweaks to further create the illusion of a "difference." These ideas were so good, that SvW incorporated similar concepts in the early days of the game.SvW has Heavy Armor and Armor Piercing as a nod to levels of damage that hurt a tank while laughing at Glock, thus a MDC mode is already baked into the game. And in Rifts, "Psionics" is more like Akira and X-men than Babylon 5. So SvW's core Super Powers Arcane Background would be much better fit AND has a different enough template to say that it's actually more a different system than PPE vs P-ISP.It would probably even be smart to give the Power Points from the two different Background different names so that players who want to be a Wizard Psi-Knight can't double dip. And Rift players love the double dip. And here is where Game Mastering in the 21st Century is a big help to SvW. I've tried in the past to use things like super hero game as universal systems, but those backfired. Not because the systems didn't work out, but because the players perceived a disconnect between a setting and the rules. A disconnect that d20 seemed to be immune from, but that's another long post.As a SvW GM in a time where you can cut and paste from PDFs and print up Player Guides from home, having a GM create a custom power list is straight forward.  For example, <a href="http://www.godwars2.org/SavageWorlds/SavageSpellbook.pdf" target="_blank"> Zadar's Savage Spellbook Fan PDF</a> shows that every power is actually 5 more powers once you use Trappings. So if a player never sees the core list, most of them think they have radically different powers because Finnigan's Hot Fingers (Flame Bolt) sets things on fire while Swam Shaman's Summoning (Insect Bolt) does double damage to unarmored enemies.  SvW GMing "crime" is that it shows too much what's behind the curtain where players can see it. Though you can't fault PEG's logic, which is that by sticking to the brown wrapper versions in the published books, they can ensure a more cohesive game design across the board and let people who want to dimension hop do so with ease.If SvW Rifts uses their magic tricks right, lots of new players will never know the difference either.</blockquote>

Verification