Adapting Spirit of the Century

[jhkimrpg]

I am getting into the details of how to adapt Spirit of the Century to our campaign "Dragons of the Yellow Sea". Background information on the campaign can be found on my nascent web page and on the Campaign Wiki. Basically, I'm mixing Korean history and the Temeraire novels by Naomi Novik for the campaign. They are roughly a take-off of

Comments

[inkylj]

The point about scale seems reasonable, although I'm not sure just adding or subtracting a number is going to work better mechanically than just saying people can't do much against dragons (short of having some special item, like a gadget with the Maximization advantage). I guess you also need something to handle dragon<->ship interaction, where the sides seem more equal.

It seems like you'd be better off assigning a penalty to an unarmed person facing a guy with a sword or gun, instead of just making the weapon do more damage, or else a competent bare-handed fighter will still have little to worry about against a less-competent person with a gun (since the gun person will hardly ever win the roll, so their damage bonus won't matter).

Hmm, what if you always had to take a consequence if you lost a roll to someone with a sword or a gun? Just a few hits from one of those would finish you in that case, while you could still go for a while if it were just a fistfight.

[jhkimrpg]

Given that it's remote 1860s Korea and most hand-guns are still fairly primitive (there are still flintlocks around), I don't think it's unreasonable for a skilled unarmed fighter to have a good chance against an unskilled gun-wielder.

Also note that dragons vary widely in size. So a well-armed man could have a good chance against a Jade Dragon, which is barely larger than a horse. A bunch of guys with a cannon could well cripple a larger dragon -- so it's not just ships.

The taking a consequence each time seems workable, but I might have some slight variation. Basically, I want something that has several steps of scale rather than just binary -- i.e. fist, sword/gun/Jade Dragon, small dragon/mounted gun, etc. I'd like Endurance and scale to matter for the person getting hit. Hm. Still pondering.

[palmer_kun]

The easiest way to speed up grit and damage is to make everybody take damage like minions - hit point style rather than stress style. You can still plink a big baddie to death one point at a time, the same as now... but a single big hit, especially later on, makes far more of a difference