Of course, it has to be done with the full buy-in of the players, or it will seem like the GM is just being arbitrary. I think the odds of such “environmental factors” influencing the situation should be lower, say 20% or less maybe. That is, before the attempt, roll a d10. On 1-2, a negative complication has arisen. On 9-10, a positive complication occurs. Complications modify the DC by +/- 1d5. This give each potential check a little bit of drama, while showing that you’re not “out to get” the players.

Does it complicate things? Perhaps a little. But I like how it adds that little bit of uncertainty to the situations. A player with a ridiculously high skill can still fail due to forces beyond their control. Players with really low skill can still “have luck on their side” and succeed where they normally wouldn’t. And the addition of a single die roll to add a little drama to the situation is more than outweighed by the possible story benefits.

I use a primarily D10 based system so 10% of the time we get these flukes where chance does odd things while still letting the players be in control of their dice.

Let see character skill and skill rolls from a different perspective. Let see it as the skill will always allows the character to succeed. The skill roll is that random factor that tells us if any random factor is making it harder or just as easy as it should be to succeed with the task.

Let say that you’re about to climb a wall. The default state is that you will succeed but the GM demands a roll and the skill roll fails. Perhaps the wall was really hard now when thinking of it? Perhaps it had guards on top of the wall? By explaining the failed roll, the GM can “raise the difficulty” retrospective just by describing why it fails.

What does this mean, really? It could mean that it’s strange to even give modifications in the first case. You still got a random factor (the dice) so why bother with modifications? What was the point of giving a positive modification if the roll failed anyway? Doesn’t that mean that the modification was pointless?

But to go back to my original point. What is a die roll? It’s noting more than the difficulty of the action. It’s more obvious in BRP systems (roll die equal or lower than the skill). If you roll 40 with 1d100, that’s the difficulty of the action. Your skill must meet that requirement (40% or more) or it’s to hard for you.

You can take this one step further. The GM can roll the difficulty and the characters must match it with their skills. “The difficulty is … *roll* … 40%. Who will succeed?”. It’s almost the same thing as the GM rolling all the skill rolls, but seen from another perspective.

I personally prefer relationships to not be emphasized mechanically, unless there’s an unusual in-game/setting reason to do so. (Example: Part Time Gods, where losing humanity is an important part of the game: less human = more god-power.)But you know, different strokes and/or folks.(Example: I prefer J-strokes in the stern, but draw-strokes in the bow of a canoe. Apparently, I prefer literal interpretations of metaphors as well.)

I’m actually going to be switching systems on purpose (with malice aforethought)soon. As a part of my NYNG pledge, I’m going to run a one-shot using some Savage World pregens I’ve made. Then run another adventure using The Puddle with the option to use the same characters. I intend to just let the players do the conversion since generating a Puddle character is essentially writing a paragraph. I think it will rather elegantly show the difference between the two systems. Plus, it’ll show me pretty specifically what parts of the characters are most important to the players.

Having players build the same characters in the convert-to system seems like the best way to do it; though, it may take some time in a system new to all involved.

In another Stew tie-in these games’ll be set in the microsetting that I created using Martin’s Dice Drop method.

Anyway past, current, and future details can be found at my blog –> http://violentmediarpg.blogspot.com/ .

One of those elements was the magic level. The setting went from being low magic to average. This was a consequence of 3ed’s clearly spelled out rules for magic item creation. In 2ed (and earlier) the mechanics for creating items were pretty close to nonexistent. That made it easy for me to hold that the process was mysterious to learn and hard to practice once learned. Most of the items found in the game were relics from a previous age. With 3ed players saw that first level characters could create simple magic items and that more advanced items simply required more of the appropriate currencies.

The second element that changed was that the differentiation between divine casters of different faiths decreased. There had been some significant plot points in the campaign that hinged on clerics of deity A having the ability to do X but not Y while faith B was handy at Y but couldn’t do much of X. With the new system those differences not only changed in type but became less significant. The players joined me in not getting hung up on the continuity problems.

Both of these problems I could have patched by introducing house rules, but the point of the system change was to get away from having to rely on so many house rules to make the game playable for the type of storytelling we wanted.

I love Savage Worlds but it’s magic system sucks palantirs compared to D&D or Pathfinder. There doesn’t seem to be any real feel for what is making the magic go. Novice level spells run the gamut from so weeny as to be a joke (e.g. Elemental Control) to so destructive they should be on a medieval SALT treaty (Whirlwind). Seasoned level spells often lack oomph (Fly stands out here).

The real time this lack of whatever makes itself felt is in any setting with Weird Science where the truth is that ionce a player sees his/her options, they will plump for the same four types of device over and over again. It isn’t possible, for example, to make an Ornithopter worth the bother in Deadlands:Reloaded without heavily hand-waving the rules.

In my opinion, drawn after speaking with other GMs, I don’t think anyone plays the SW Weird Science rules as written (which means they need rewriting badly).

I was able to switch my group from 4E to SavageWorld-Fantasy without too much problem. In addition, re-creating characters using that rules set invigorated some of them, and we got much more customized characters out of it.

We were also able to get more Action scenes in per-session with a faster rules set. And we had less rules questions in general once folks got the hang of the Wild-dice.

It was a good exercise in learning to pick the right rules for the game. Knowing what your game’s rules do, and what they were designed to accomplish is important.

It’s not too late for corrections. In fact, the authors and I are reading the whole book again over the next few days with an eye to catching stray issues like this. I’ll add this one — thank you!