"When you play the game of thrones you win or die, there is no middle ground."
—Queen Cersei, A Game of Thrones
One of the primary concerns in the SIFRP game design was to keep the mechanics and game play simple, to make sure gaming veterans and folks new to roleplaying games alike can pick up the rules after a few minutes and jump in to tell stories of their own in the Seven Kingdoms.
We kicked around a lot of ideas at the start, with different die-sizes, dice pools, die plus modifiers, and a bunch of other mechanisms, and while we were tempted to explore using different-sized dice—such as bunches of eight-siders—we eventually retreated from the more arcane concepts and embraced the simplicity of the classic six-sided die. Using the old six-sider removed the barrier of components from the game, since just about everyone has a pile of these lurking in boardgame boxes and, if not, they can find them almost anywhere, from drug stores to hobby shops. Plus, it's a lot easier to add up six-siders than a bucket of twenty-siders, and so it was a fairly easy decision to build the system around these tried and true cubes.
The Roll of Dice
Whenever you roll dice, you test an ability. A test is successful when the sum of the dice equals or beats a difficulty, and is a failure if it is lower than the difficulty. (There are margins of success and margins of failure, but that's a discussion for later.)
All tests relate to one of your abilities. The number associated with the ability (called its rank) tells you how many dice to roll. So if you have rank 2 Agility (average), you roll two dice, or rank 5 Fighting, you roll five dice. These dice are called "test dice" and when you roll them, you sum the numbers shown on the dice to arrive at the test result.
So, let's say you're going to climb the wall to get to the top in the hopes of finding the mechanism to throw open the castle's gates. The Narrator suggests Athletics is the most appropriate ability, so you roll a number of dice equal to your Athletics rank. In this case, you have a 4, so you roll four dice. Say you get a 6, 5, 3, and 2. Adding them up results in a 16.
Bonus Dice: In addition to test dice, you may also get to roll additional dice called bonus dice. These extra dice differ from test dice in that they aren't added to find the test result, but instead improve your chances at getting a better test result. You roll bonus dice along with your test dice and keep the highest dice equal to your test dice. So, let's go back to the previous example. Say you gained two bonus dice to your Athletics test to climb the wall. In this case, you'd be rolling a total of six dice and keeping the best four rolled. So if you get a 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 2, you drop the 2s (the lowest two dice) and sum the rest for the result of 18 (a bit better than the previous 16).
Modifiers: Sometimes you have modifiers to your tests, bonuses or penalties applied directly to the test result, rather than the number of dice you roll. Modifiers come from circumstantial or situational factors. You might gain a modifier for poor vision, being injured, or having help from an ally.
Penalty Dice: Finally, there are penalty dice, a drawback imposed by wounds, flaws, certain actions, and so on. Having a penalty die forces you to drop one test die when you are adding up you test result, starting with the lowest remaining die. You apply the penalty die after you roll and after you drop any bonus dice. So, using the bonus dice example, if you also had a penalty die, you'd have to drop the 3 die on your roll, reducing your result from 18 to 15.
The Role of Dice
As mentioned, whenever you attempt something with dramatic consequences or when the outcome of the action is not certain, you test your abilities. A test is a roll of the dice with the aim of exceeding the action's Difficulty. The number of dice you roll is determined by the most relevant ability, so if you try to stab a Gold Cloak with your sword, you use Fighting, or if you're trying to scale a keep's wall, test Athletics. Testing abilities is easy once you get the hang of it, with a few simple steps.
1. Declare the Action
Before you roll the dice, decide what it is you want to do. The Narrator determines whether or not the action even requires a test. As a rule, if the intended action has no significant risk or no consequences for failure, there's no need for a test, though the Narrator is the final word on what requires a test and when. Actions that might require tests include—but are not limited to—fighting, climbing, jumping, recalling a bit of useful information, addressing the king, sailing a ship through inclement weather, and so on. In short, if the action's outcome isn't certain or may have dramatic consequences, it probably requires a test.
Example: Nicole's character, Lady Renee, happens upon a pair of conspirators discussing their plans to kill her father, Lord Tybalt. Clinging to the shadows, she strains to hear their whispers.
2. Choose the Ability
Once the Narrator decides if a test is necessary, determine the appropriate ability. Abilities are flexible, allowing both you and the Narrator to use a variety of methods to overcome challenges in the game. A particular action may use one ability in one set of circumstances, and another in a different environment. For example, you might use Persuasion to bluff your way past a guard or Status to fall back on your notoriety and standing to remove the guard from your path. Even though these are two distinct methods, the intended outcome is the same—getting past the guard.
Generally, the Narrator determines the ability, but you do have some say in what ability you'd like to use. Just state what you want to use and how you intend to use it, and, if reasonable enough, the Narrator ought to allow it. Obviously, using Language to scale a wall or stab an enemy is ridiculous, so common sense must prevail.
Example: Since Renee eavesdrops on the conversation, the Narrator decides the relevant ability is Awareness.
3. Set the Difficulty
Once the ability is determined, the Narrator sets the test's Difficulty. The Difficulty describes the complexity and challenge of the action. To help assess how hard a task is, a Difficulty number has a descriptor, such as Routine for Difficulty 6, Challenging for Difficulty 9 and so on.
Example: The Narrator considers the scene. It's dark so Renee can't see the conspirators, can't read their body language. They're also a bit distant and whispering. The Narrator decides the Difficulty is Formidable (12).
4. Roll the Dice
Knowing which ability to use and the Difficulty of the task, you roll a number of test dice equal to the ability. Many times, you may roll additional dice in the form of extra test dice or bonus dice.
Example: Lady Renee has Awareness 3, giving her three dice off the bat. However, she also has rank 2 in Listening, a specialty of Awareness, so she has two bonus dice. She rolls five dice, but only adds up the highest three.
5. Sum the Dice and Apply Modifiers
Once you roll the dice, sum the highest results equal to your test dice and add or subtract any modifiers. The total is the test result.
Example: Nicole rolls five dice (three test dice and two bonus dice from her specialty) and gets a 6, 6, 5, 2, and a 1. She discards the two lowest dice--the 1 and the 2--since they count for her bonus dice, and adds up the rest, getting a 17 as her result.
6. Compare the Result with the Difficulty
Now that you have a result, compare it to the action's Difficulty. If the result equals or exceeds the Difficulty, you succeed. If the result is less than the Difficulty, you fail.
Example: The test Difficulty was Formidable (12). Since Nicole beat the Difficulty with her 17, she succeeds!
7. Describe the Outcome
Once the outcome of the test is determined, the Narrator describes the results, providing any relevant consequences of success or failure.
Example: Nicole's roll was good enough for Renee to hear most of the conversation, which the Narrator summarizes. Although both conspirators are careful to keep their identities concealed, Nicole now knows how they intend to go about their treachery and with this information Renee may be able to stop their foul plan!
Первые три статьи от Robert J. Schwalb о ролевой системе SIFRP, которую для для Дж. Мартина и его эпопеи "Song of Ice and Fire" придумала "игростроительная" фирма Green Ronin.
Источник -
цитата
A Vision of Ice and Fire
Robert J. Schwalb
This summer, Green Ronin is releasing A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, a brand-spanking new roleplaying game for George R. R. Martin's remarkable saga of betrayal, conflict, treachery, love, death, and destiny as told in A Song of Ice and Fire. Fans of both roleplaying games and the novels likely know this isn't the first attempt at capturing this detailed and engaging world for use in adventure gaming. Dragon Magazine published a couple of articles describing how to adapt Dungeons & Dragons for use in this setting, and Guardians of Order produced A Game of Thrones, a massive tome that adapted the d20 System and the Tri Stat system for use with this popular world. Fantasy Flight Games also publishes a collectable card game and a fine board game, all set in this world. With all the stuff already out there, it wasn't without extensive discussion, debate, emails, and hair-pulling that we finally came up with the design, vision, and structure for what would become A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying when Green Ronin Publishing secured the rights to publish a new game based on George R.R. Martin's work.
Tackling Martin's world was in some ways similar to working on The Red Star, The Black Company, and Thieves' World, and in others, astonishingly different. On the one hand, there's a certain process involved in sifting through pages and pages of text, scouring dog-eared novels in search of an elusive nugget of information: a description of a specific castle, place, or character hidden between stretches of character development and dialogue. Each discovery is rewarding and exciting, but also deeply satisfying, teasing out the secrets of an author from his words. In this regard, the work was very much the same. Sure, there are all sorts of websites, wikis, and message board postings, and each was useful in its own way, but any adaptation must exhaust the source for all its mysteries to avoid errors born from misunderstandings and erroneous documentation regarding a place, character, or plot development.
Where the process differed was that in addition to collecting, cataloging, and presenting the necessary information for gamers to use in their games, SIFRP (for short) used an altogether new game system, one created from scratch to best emulate and handle the needs of the property. We could have returned to the Open Game License, or used our own True20 rules, but, for a variety of reasons (one of which was the impending release of the 4th Edition of D&D), we opted to build something to capture and mechanically reflect what made Martin's novels so compelling in the first place. We wanted a game for the types of stories, adventures, and experiences one might expect in exploring the lands of the Seven Kingdoms, while also individuating our game from those fine efforts that came before.
To this end, Steve Kenson, Chris Pramas, Nicole Lindroos, and I exchanged a flurry of emails, engaged in numerous chats, and eventually gathered around a table in Seattle and hashed out the mechanics. The result was an interesting fusion of ideas, a broad range of visions from different perspectives and expectations, everything from a diceless system to a super-crunchy "simulation" style game. My own crunch-tastic inclinations met with some tempering from a more flexible and freeform approach that embraced the story more than an exercise in simulation.
Another thorny issue was figuring out how players would interact with the world, whether we would adopt a traditional RPG approach—one character per player, of any occupation or background—or to utilize a troupe-style approach, where players would control noble houses and work together, or against each other, depending on the developments of the story as it unfolds in the game. On the one hand, players often prefer maximum freedom in character design, but on the other, the more concessions we made toward providing flexibility in this area, the more we risked diminishing or negating the lack of "script immunity" faced by the protagonists in the novels. Our discussions drifted at all points along the spectrum, and in the end, we came up with an interesting compromise, wherein we provided a possible link to bind the characters together, but also allowed for just about any kind of play style so gamers of all stripes could use the game in whatever way they liked.
These sorts of discussions led into other areas, from which we derived a number of precepts that were more or less followed until the end of the design process. We wanted the learning curve to be low to make the game appealing to a broader range of players, but without sacrificing the depth of game design in order to retain those gamers that prefer a more mechanical approach. We also wanted a game robust enough to address all levels of society, from nobles to the lowliest of smallfolk. SIFRP needed a game engine to handle combat, intrigue, and warfare simply and without becoming tangled up in a lot of complex rules. SIFRP also needed to support just about any play style, from bands of adventurers prowling the ruins of lost civilizations in search of fabulous treasures (old-fashioned door-kicking, monster-slaying, treasure-stealing fantasy), to complex struggles fought using diplomacy and treachery in the shadow of the Iron Throne (a far more appropriate sort of game in keeping with the novels). The game needed to handle the clash of armies, the brutal and bloody skirmishes of a mist-shrouded forest, and the splintering of lances before roaring crowds at one of King Robert's tournaments. A tall order to be sure, but these, among other elements, were central to our thinking as we hammered out the mechanisms that would drive the game forward.
Over the next several weeks, we'll be highlighting the various game systems to reveal the mechanical and narrative elements at work in the game, explaining the design and development decisions that went into the making of Green Ronin's newest roleplaying game. So keep checking back for updates as we march forward to the release date. Until then, remember the words of House Stark...
Сижу за решеткой в темнице сырой ... В смысле - решил я под конец рабочего дня "прошвырнуться" по новостям. Захожу на главную страницу нашег сайта, смотрю в раздел "Планы издательств, слухи, сплетни" и вижу:
Роман вышел в издательстве «Популярная литература» (в том же оформление, что и у «Метро 2033» и «Гастарбайтера», т.е. нестандартный формат, мягкая обложка). Тираж 100 000 экз.
Вышла
Хэх, думаю, "Популярная литература" решила копать фантастику "дальше и глубже". С творчеством Кирилла Станиславовича я знаком поверхностно, читал только "Путь шута" - роман вроде неплохой, но не проникся. Потому и подумал сначала, что это новая книжечка. Интересно...
Стал копать - дошел до Увидел на самом верху красивый баннер с загадочным черепом на самом видном месте. И тут в голову полезли "вредные ассоциации" - в первую очередь с - уж больно "хрустальный череп" в обоих названиях бросается в глаза...
Полез дальше - на том же сайте есть , прочитав которую, можно подумать, что издатели нашли для нас "нового Лукьяненко":
цитата
Затем вышли две книги писателя – "Завещание ночи" и "Война за "Асгард", удостоенные едва ли не всех премий в области российской фантастики. Мрачные пророчества о фашистском реванше и история бессмертного чудовища имели колоссальный успех.
Став знаменитым, писатель выпустил еще две книги и решил вернуться к своему первенцу – "Завещанию ночи". Для новой публикации он отточил до блеска все сюжетные нити романа и дополнил их новыми подробностями.
цитата
По мотивам романа снят одноименный восьмисерийный телевизионный фильм со звездами российского кино. Историю вечной борьбы, последний акт которой состоится в современной Москве, сыграли Константин Хабенский, Виктор Сухоруков, Сергей Жигунов.
И есть...
Стоп. Мотаем назад. Что атм написано? "Став знаменитым, писатель выпустил еще две книги и решил вернуться к своему первенцу – "Завещанию ночи"." Опаньки. "ПопЛит" опять решил заняться "гробокопательством от фантастики" и "раскрутить" уже давненько изданный роман? Вот он, кстати, в первом издании - "Завещание ночи". Без всяких черепов в титулах. 2001 год, 8000 тиража.
Те на волне интереса к новому "Индиана Джонсу" издатели протаскивают уже готовый, не слишком известный, хотя и изданный 7 лет назад, роман, который не является лучшим у автора (не зря ведь популярность Бенедиктову принесла "Война за "Асгард"")- те в очередной раз пытаясь вытащить "литературный проект" за счет маркетинга и рекламы ... Интересно, удасться ли хоть отчасти повторить успех "Метро"? Ведь "работа с Глуховским" происходила примерно по такой же схеме... Только вместо козыря "интренет-проект" имеем козырь "Хрустальный череп", да и "бонус" в виде того, что автор все таки уже довольно известен, в отличее от Глуховского.
Посмотрим, посмотрим ...
Жаль только, что все это все меньше и меньше походит на литературу ...
Ролинг, Браун, Донцова, Акунин, Лукьяненко, Глуховский, Бенедиктов .... Эх, тут вот уже Олдей в куда-то в эту же стопку запихивают. Глобализация-с, так ее.
Как говорил небезызвестный Лев Гурский, он же доктор Р.С. Кац, он же Роман Арбитман - "А вы — не проект?"
PS1 У "ПопЛита" (ну или у тех людей, кто владеет этим издателем) есть, оказывается, дежа свое онлайн-ТВ:) Специально под книжку товарищи выложили "На взгляд" Кирилл мне вполне понравился. Может и книжка неплоха, но ...
PS2 К слову - "а в это время" "Мир фантастики" как "Книгу недели" новый сборник Бенедиктова "Точка лагранжа".
PSS. "Метро - 2033" у меня на полочке пылится. Покупал для жены, сам читать пытался, но дальше 20 страницы не пробрался.
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