Swords of the Serpentine by Kevin Kulp & Emily Dresner

[james_davis_nicoll]

Swords of the Serpentine by Kevin Kulp & Emily Dresner

A Gumshoe-based sword and sorcery tabletop roleplaying game.

Comments

[patrick_morris_miller]

I take it Venice was supposed to be struck through.

1d6 is a curious choice. It's like they wanted to go full diceless but didn't think people would accept a game that would not descend into arguments over whether a die was cocked.

[james_davis_nicoll]

D6s are easy to come by and using just the one minimizes necessary equipment.

[roseembolism]

It wold be just a horrible temptation to play a sorcerer who does invest those points in Command, Trustworthy and Nobility:
"No no no, it is a complete misapprehension to say Sorcery has toxic effects. In fact the use of Sorcery is beneficial to the city. We of the Eversink Sorcery Research Institute are dedicated to dispelling anti-socery propaganda, by donating funds to worthy city leaders.... "

[estrevan]

And anyway, killing gods is a noble ambition

[viktor_haag]

You aren't the only one with a primary objection to GUMSHOE being "it uses a single D6 for task resolution". I generally quite dislike "roll a single die" RPGs, although I'm so anti-D20-based games as I dislike D6 and D10-based ones. It's not particularly rational.

[scott_sanford]

There are valid arguments for preferring a probability curve to a line. Any 1d system is, well, linear. Few systems have gone for 2d, though it worked fine for Teenagers From Outer Space. A sweet spot seems to be 3d6, which is where results varied enough to be useful meet numbers of dice small enough to be convenient.

Designers can handle the single die situation other ways; perfectly good games, such as the now very vintage AD&D and the Marvel Superhero RPG, used a single die and a big lookup table.

Years ago I wrote up notes trying to make sense of the Savage Worlds task resolution system, which is just different.