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If that's the one used with Shadows Over Sol, I surprised myself by liking it quite a bit. Will check this out.
 
Saga Machine is a system that is also used by the Shadows Over Sol, Against the Dark Yogi and Dime Adventures games. It’s a rules-medium system with an emphasis on both ease of play and clever character options.

At its heart, Saga Machine consists of eight basic stats and two central mechanics: actions and consequences. From there, the core is supported by various subsystems, each tailored to the specific genre and themes of the game in question. In the case of Age of Ambition, there are systems for magic, social status, influence, combat, trading goods, leading organizations, etc. The Age of Ambition incarnation of the system also has 18 skills, some of which are optionally divided into specializations.

By default Saga Machine uses a standard deck of poker cards, although an alternative d10-based mechanic is included as an appendix. The mechanic is simple: Add the character’s stat, plus the value of the card flip, and compare this total to a target number. Higher is better. When a skill applies, it will provide a modifier to this flip.

Consequences are Saga Machine's way of representing lasting effects in the system. These effects can be placed on either characters, objects or the scene itself. For example, tripping another character may result in a “prone” consequence for the target, setting a forest on fire results in an “on fire” consequence for that forest, etc.

That's the overview, anyway. You can read more about it on our website if you want all the details.
 
Hmm. That sounds cool, actually. And I liked Against The Dark Yogi well enough. I might back it, depending on how my finances for next month turn out to look.
 
OK, here's a question for you.
What do you achieve by the use of cards?
 
I think cards are an elegant way to maintain state in a roleplaying game without a lot of bookkeeping or memorization.

A single card holds a lot more information that a die does. It can be in your hand or on the table. It can be face up or face down. It has both a value and a suit. And quite frankly, I like the tactile feedback you get from holding them.

In Age of Ambition each player has a hand of cards that represents their character's Luck. You can play a card from hand if you you don't like the result you got off the top of the deck. You can think of this as pushing your luck and your luck slowing running out as the cards in your hand dwindle.

The game also uses the occurrence of jokers played off the top of the deck as a pacing mechanism to dole out critical failures and to refresh luck.

Finally, the game uses a card's suit both to determine damage and as a way to create flushes, in which the values of multiple cards add together. To be fair, this latter mechanic is not too dissimilar from the "exploding dice" or "acing die" mechanics in a lot of games.
 
The Trophy KS launched today and is already doing well.

Trophy Dark is a neat horror storygame based on a group of adventurers traveling into a forest and ruins and finding their doom.

Trophy Gold is a cool storygamey take on dungeon-crawling (heresy!) including excellent advice on adapting old D&D and OSR modules to the system, with some recent OSR modules done as collaborative examples.

Trophy Loom I’m less familiar with, it is some kind of setting material for Trophy.

I’ve got the zine versions of Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold and they’re a excellent storygame take on the horror and dungeoncrawl.

Since I already have those in pdf I’m trying to decide if I should take the dive for the hardcopies, Trophy Gold is the most tempting, if they include more adventure adaptations than what I already have I may not be able to resist...
 
I’ve got the zine versions of Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold and they’re a excellent storygame take on the horror and dungeoncrawl.
Have you had the chance to play them? What are the rules like?
 
I think cards are an elegant way to maintain state in a roleplaying game without a lot of bookkeeping or memorization.

A single card holds a lot more information that a die does. It can be in your hand or on the table. It can be face up or face down. It has both a value and a suit. And quite frankly, I like the tactile feedback you get from holding them.

In Age of Ambition each player has a hand of cards that represents their character's Luck. You can play a card from hand if you you don't like the result you got off the top of the deck. You can think of this as pushing your luck and your luck slowing running out as the cards in your hand dwindle.

The game also uses the occurrence of jokers played off the top of the deck as a pacing mechanism to dole out critical failures and to refresh luck.

Finally, the game uses a card's suit both to determine damage and as a way to create flushes, in which the values of multiple cards add together. To be fair, this latter mechanic is not too dissimilar from the "exploding dice" or "acing die" mechanics in a lot of games.

Okay, but let's assume I respectfully disagree with everything you just said... :tongue: Is the optional dice system from AGTDY: Campaign Options still workable?
 
I think cards are an elegant way to maintain state in a roleplaying game without a lot of bookkeeping or memorization.

A single card holds a lot more information that a die does. It can be in your hand or on the table. It can be face up or face down. It has both a value and a suit. And quite frankly, I like the tactile feedback you get from holding them.

In Age of Ambition each player has a hand of cards that represents their character's Luck. You can play a card from hand if you you don't like the result you got off the top of the deck. You can think of this as pushing your luck and your luck slowing running out as the cards in your hand dwindle.

The game also uses the occurrence of jokers played off the top of the deck as a pacing mechanism to dole out critical failures and to refresh luck.

Finally, the game uses a card's suit both to determine damage and as a way to create flushes, in which the values of multiple cards add together. To be fair, this latter mechanic is not too dissimilar from the "exploding dice" or "acing die" mechanics in a lot of games.
OK, you have managed, I think, to actually make a nice argument for using cards, regardless of whether we agree or disagree with your decision:thumbsup:!

Now let me turn this around. If someone, like Baeraad Baeraad (presumably) was dead-set on using the dice, would he miss on a lot of the system's options:shade:?
 
Okay, but let's assume I respectfully disagree with everything you just said... :tongue: Is the optional dice system from AGTDY: Campaign Options still workable?

The optional dice system from ATDY: Campaign Options is still viable and in fact is included with Age of Ambition as an appendix.

Now let me turn this around. If someone, like Baeraad Baeraad (presumably) was dead-set on using the dice, would he miss on a lot of the system's options:shade:?

Personally, I think the cards work really well and I encourage people to give them a a try before making up their minds. But as Baeraad asked, there is an alternative dice-based system in the back of the book for people who find cards are not their thing.
 
I think cards are an elegant way to maintain state in a roleplaying game without a lot of bookkeeping or memorization.

A single card holds a lot more information that a die does. It can be in your hand or on the table. It can be face up or face down. It has both a value and a suit. And quite frankly, I like the tactile feedback you get from holding them.

In Age of Ambition each player has a hand of cards that represents their character's Luck. You can play a card from hand if you you don't like the result you got off the top of the deck. You can think of this as pushing your luck and your luck slowing running out as the cards in your hand dwindle.

The game also uses the occurrence of jokers played off the top of the deck as a pacing mechanism to dole out critical failures and to refresh luck.

Finally, the game uses a card's suit both to determine damage and as a way to create flushes, in which the values of multiple cards add together. To be fair, this latter mechanic is not too dissimilar from the "exploding dice" or "acing die" mechanics in a lot of games.

I dig it. But one of my all time favorite RPGs (Marvel SAGA) is card based, so it’s not a very hard sell for me.

Good times. I’ll take a closer look.
 
I dig it. But one of my all time favorite RPGs (Marvel SAGA) is card based, so it’s not a very hard sell for me.

Good times. I’ll take a closer look.

Thank you!

(Marvel SAGA and Dragonlance FIfth Age SAGA were two of my first RPGs, so they've been very influential to me.)
 
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Personally, I think the cards work really well and I encourage people to give them a a try before making up their minds. But as Baeraad asked, there is an alternative dice-based system in the back of the book for people who find cards are not their thing.

Well, to be honest, it's less that I have anything against cards per se and more that I mostly play online, and online dicerollers are a lot more common than online card dealers. And honestly, even if I did play IRL, I absolutely suck at shuffling cards. Dice have the advantage that it's very hard to do permanent harm to them by being hamfisted. :tongue:

But as long as the alternative is still there, I am satisfied. :smile:
 
Have you had the chance to play them? What are the rules like?

I haven’t played them yet, just got them a month before the KS ironically.

They are very rules light, the base of play is Cthulhu Dark but with a stronger storygame influence in terms of the structure of play: Trophy Dark is based on descending into darker and darker circles of horror, a corruption mechanic, a PvP mechanic, fighting is likely to lead to death and your characters are unlikely to survive, it is explicitly a one-shot game like Ten Candles. Fans of that game or Cthulhu Dark should enjoy Trophy as a sorta hybrid of those games.

Trophy Gold tweaks a lot of this, so combat is more survivable but still quite dangerous, characters have a bit more traditional details like equipment and weapons, the structure is looser and more open to multi-session play. But it does have meta mechanics that will dissuade more trad players, it is definitely the dungeoncrawl re-imagined for the storygame crowd. For instance there is a mechanic based around gathering/expending gold to accomplish certain narrative effects, tokens to accomplish goals, etc.

But the approach to adapting dungeons is very interesting and could be used in anygame, they introduce a way to boil a dungeon down to specific thematic elements that you then organize into bullet point charts by section and randomly roll to determine when the PCs encounter them, etc. It gives the dungeon a thematic structure while also boiling it down and randomizing it for quicker play.

There is also a very cool bestiary system as well where the monsters are kept very mysterious and strange and the characters track the details of them through play, building the details of the bestiary as they progress.
 
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Well, to be honest, it's less that I have anything against cards per se and more that I mostly play online, and online dicerollers are a lot more common than online card dealers.

That's totally legit and something I've noticed as well.
 
That said, it IS easier to find card dealers that handle poker decks, at least. But yeah, that’s been a dealbreaker for us with at least one virtual tabletop I looked at.
 
The game reminds me of Symbaroum, right down to them using its the exact same layout and fonts.
 
This looks really interesting. A French PbtA RPG called Libretes in which you play gangs of children in a wasteland city.


The thing that fascinates me the most is the change to the core mechanic whereby if the player plays it safe then they are also accepting minor bad things too. To increase the chance of success without such things, they have to risk complete failure more. This is almost identical to the tension in the mechanics of Dread with the Jenga tower pull. Take agency and risk death or give up agency and let less serious bad stuff happen.

Plus the first major supplement adds an Evangelion angle to the whole thing :grin:
 
Like the Idea of Trophy Dark/Gold. Remind me of Deadwood the videogame (BTW, could it support a more modern adventure in the depths of Poland with AKs instead of swords?). And Libreté I've already seen in the PbtA thread (looks awesome too).

Voros Voros and Skywalker Skywalker , you're making it difficult to keep my budget in check.
 
The game reminds me of Symbaroum, right down to them using its the exact same layout and fonts.

The designer says that Trophy Dark started as a hack of Symbaroum into Cthulhu Dark so that makes sense.
 
Like the Idea of Trophy Dark/Gold. Remind me of Deadwood the videogame (BTW, could it support a more modern adventure in the depths of Poland with AKs instead of swords?). And Libreté I've already seen in the PbtA thread (looks awesome too).

Voros Voros and Skywalker Skywalker , you're making it difficult to keep my budget in check.

Trophy Dark is very open to being reskinned in a modern setting.

The circles of horror structure is called an Incursion and they had an open contest for people to design Incursions, the best of which are going to be included in the new book.

I checked some of them out and one of the best takes place in 20th century Appalachia for example.
 
If you are running a Kickstarter, or know of one you can't find in here, add a post about it and link to the project. Try to make sure the project is not already included in here.

Include the project end date and dollar goal.
 
I'll start off:

All Us Gamers RPG Core Module : On Aptitude - Target Date Tue, February 11 2020 7:47 AM AEST. Goal AU $800.

The Inner Core Rules for All Us Gamers RPG are available as a free, downloadable pdf at DriveThruRPG. Its central mechanics is The Dice Engine, which takes character "aptitude" and task difficulty to define dice roll targets and dice pool size. The results will be in a range from Disaster to Incredible Success.

The On Aptitude module provides a more in depth way to define your character so that your characters aptitudes for an action can plug straight into The Dice Engine.
 
They even got rights to use the stuff from the Netflix show. free preview of the system.
 
I liked the show fine. Was not inspired to run a game set in that world, seems rather limited.
 
This was the first I had heard of it.

I don't end up using most game materials I buy, so they are mostly for reading entertainment value. I liked the first season of the show, but I'm not into the world enough to pay $50 to get a copy of it (I only buy print copies).

That's true of most TV/movie rpgs, to be honest. The only one I have bought in a long, long time was the Aliens RPG. I did that mainly because I think it might be a draw if I run it at conventions.
 
A friend in another group who was pretty excited about it noted what seems to be a huge flaw: It's a roll under system with shrinking die types. You autofail if you roll the highest number on the die. The best die type is a d4...which means you have a 25% chance of failure if you are rolling the "best" die type. So, unless he's missing something, there's a pretty notable flaw in the system design.

I thought roll under with shrinking die types sounded unintuitive, and I've never seen the show so I have no basis for caring about the setting.
 
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