Post by josephk in Schema comments

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Just got this as part of the bundle, like everyone else. It looks very cool and I'm looking forward to trying it out. Obviously the stakes system is the most exciting thing, but I also like the idea of rewarding players for playing off each others' cues.

A few notes and questions on the document itself, if you don't mind:

1. In some of the examples (e.g. "Rat Things" and "Hive Priests"), you talk about characters getting an extra die for being "well-equipped". However, that rule doesn't actually appear in the "Making A Roll" section. How exactly does it work, or is it an older rule that was supposed to be deleted?

2. You sometimes talk about "skills" that divide into "specializations", and sometimes talk about "fields" that divide into "skills". Is there a three-tiered hierarchy going on here (field-skill-specialization), or is one of those terminologies a holdover from an earlier edition? (See e.g. the text above the character sheet on Page 5, compared to the character sheet itself.)

3. This is more a matter of taste, but I found the descriptions of many of the backgrounds difficult to understand until I'd read the "Making A Roll" section (e.g. "you may invoke this trait to play style"). Similarly, the discussion on "Gear Conditions" comes before an explanation of Conditions in general. I personally would have found the document easier if the more general rules were explained first.

4. Is there a sample one-shot I could use to try this out with my group? I don't want to dive straight into a full campaign with an unfamiliar system.

Levi Kornelsen4 years ago(+2)

1. This is terminology from a holdover, and is just dice from having applicable equipment as a condition.

2. Same again; there are just two tiers, the granular score and the have-it-or-not bit. The clearest terminology, in tests, has turned out to be the D&Dism of "ability score" and "proficiency", which annoys me, but clear is clear.

3. Fair, that. I've had readers go both ways on that, (your way and the reverse, where envisioning the general rules is hard without knowing character bits).

4. Not *exactly,* but if you click over to my storefront, there are a few free games in various states that use forms of the general engine, some of which demand a lot less 'co-designer' work (Infected is pretty close to 'just make characters and go').

josephk4 years ago

Just spent a day reading the Infected document cover-to-cover instead of doing my coursework, and it is now the #1 candidate for my next campaign. Thank you so much!

I do notice that there are a lot Schema 7 features it doesn't use (luck points, cues, skill specialization, and conditions). Any advice on incorporating them, or would that be a bad idea?

Also, I have a list of about 75 copyediting notes on the Infected document itself, the most significant of which is that the automatic stake for the Shoot action is accidentally copy-pasted from the Surgery section. They're not directly relevant to this page, but if you're planning on updating Infected at some point then I can email them to you.

Levi Kornelsen4 years ago

I'd love 'em. levi.kornelsen@gmail.com, if you would!

And yeah, Infected is much older than Schema 7. I would *not* try to import conditions to it without a total overhaul, but cues, man... Whooo, I'd want to bring those. Luck, could go either way.

josephk4 years ago

As suggested, I tried out the system with an Infected one-shot. Since Infected uses an earlier iteration of the engine, I wanted to backport some of the features. Conditions I left out by your suggestion, but each PC got two cues, and luck points were included so that cues could have some mechanical teeth.

Bottom line: everyone at the table (most of whom have been RPing for a few years, across more than one system) were pretty pleased with the engine.

The stakes system means almost every roll comes with interesting choices even after the dice have hit the table - and also before, if the player gets to decide whether they're being Bold or Cautious, which I tended to allow.

Cues fix a central problem we've had with Fate character aspects, which is that the GM has to memorize about 20 aspects in order for them to be relevant. Moving that responsibility to the players helps distribute the load, and also makes players pay attention to each others' characters, which is great.

However, while Schema seems great in general, I don't actually think Infected was a good choice to showcase it. I'm still excited to use Infected in a campaign, but in a one-shot it didn't really shine. This seemed to be for three reasons.

Firstly, a lot of the mechanics of Infected are about resource management, which on the scale of in-universe time covered was not really an issue, leading to a lot of bookkeeping that ultimately amounted to nothing.

Secondly, a lot of the fun of post-apocalyptic games is in rebuilding from the ashes: founding or finding an enclave of survivors and helping them achieve stability.

Thirdly, a big part of the appeal of Infected (to me) is in the gradual development of the setting as the apocalypse progresses, with things getting weirder, more exotic monsters surfacing and the nature of the Roil, the Makers, Nocturne and so on being explored by players and characters alike.

In a three-hour one-shot (plus one hour for character creation), there wasn't enough time to do justice to any of that. People had fun, but it didn't feel like a complete experience.

But like I said, the engine itself made a good impression. I'm now working on another one-shot, with full Iteration 7 features. I'll let you know how it goes.

Fern Vega4 years ago

I just saw your pastebin for the racial bundle and 1) love you so fucking much 2) HOW 3) You are my hero!!!!!!!!!!!!

josephk4 years ago

You're too kind, but I think it's mostly redundant now that itch.io let you search within the bundle (and credit where it's due, it only took them about a day).

Also note that it's now out of date, as the bundle grew quite a bit.

And to answer your question, I scraped the bundle pages using a Python script. I think I've still got it - I can send it to you if you'd like.

Fern Vega4 years ago

Yes please! Thanks!!

josephk4 years ago

I've cleaned it up a bit and uploaded it to GitHub, just in case other people are interested in it: https://github.com/joseph-e-k/itchio-utils

Fern Vega4 years ago

TYSM!

Fern Vega4 years ago

Do you think you can make it so the description of the game is scrapped too? Im looking for a specific kind of keyword/genre, which is anti-capitalism or something like that.

josephk4 years ago

Updated: It now scrapes the stat block from each game's home page (genre, tags, authors, etc). The plain-text output was getting a bit unwieldy, so it's now a CSV (which you can import into your spreadsheet application of choice).

If by "description" you meant the full text of the game's dedicated itchi.io page, that's a bit trickier, as those individual pages aren't all laid out the same way so it's hard to get the script to understand which part is the description of the game and which part is other stuff. I'll see if I can work something out.

If you have any more feature requests, may I ask that you put them on GitHub (or email me at itchio.utils at gmail dot com)? I suspect other people might be getting notifications for this comment thread and I don't want to keep spamming them.