Well, Whartson Hall has just finished an adventure in They Came From Beneath the Sea. We’re planning to have a fuller discussion of both system and setting at some point, but we did find the system something of a barrier: My own thoughts:
- Dice pool makes it harder to work out probabilities. As a GM, how hard should you make a task so that the PCs have a reasonable chance of doing it? As a player, how much of your limited resources to make things better should you commit before the roll? Here’s a chart I drew up. probs.pdf (7.4 KB)
- A setting like this wants you to be doing wild and wacky stuff. But in the quest to find distinctive mechanical rewards for playing in genre, there’s the thing that gives you more dice, there’s the thing that gives you more successes if you get one on your own, there’s the thing that removes penalty levels but doesn’t give you a bonus if you get the penalty down to zero… look, tell me this is a setting in which I should be quipping, I’ll quip. I don’t need a special reward that’s only for quips to encourage me to do it, and too many of these things came down to “find the item on the great long list that’s more or less a fit to what you want to do”, which kills the pace.