Brass & Steel: A Game of Steampunk Adventure

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Grakelin, Aug 26, 2011.

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  1. Coinneach

    Coinneach New Member

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    That would fall under our "Skulduggery" skill, a competent rating in which would enable you to steel (sic) all the brass you need.
     
  2. DarkFool

    DarkFool Nemesis of the Ancients

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    Note made. I however, was going for a gay joke regarding the term 'my brass.' however, I'll now wander off and try together a few folks to actually play this game.
     
  3. Coinneach

    Coinneach New Member

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    My response was sufficiently deadpan, I see. Glad to hear you'd like to give the game a try.
     
  4. Zanza

    Zanza Well-Known Member

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    You have been rather cynical lately Wayne, I thought you would be over the moon with your recent win against us in the World Cup.
     
  5. Grossenschwamm

    Grossenschwamm Well-Known Member

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    I actually looked for something similar to "cry baby" in Gaelic and found the name Blair. It directly translates to "the cry of a baby" as well as a sheep's bleat. Coinneach actually translates to both moss and fog, as well as Kenneth. But, I'm not sure any of that actually matters.
    I'm going to see about getting this game.
     
  6. Muro

    Muro Well-Known Member

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    That one guy from Activision we had around for a while is the closest that comes to mind.
     
  7. TheDavisChanger

    TheDavisChanger Well-Known Member

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    Wall of Criticism, Praise, Humor, and Opinion

    I'd appreciate it if we maintained a unified front before newcomers.

    Grakelin's link opened by mentioning that Brass & Steel had rules for live action play as well as tabletop play. In spite of the fact that live action role playing reminds me of Furries and getting cut out of my father's will, I read the two reviews that were posted.

    I am tired of the D20 System. I don't even game that much--only recently rejoining my group for some Pathfinder after a two-year hiatus--and I'm sick of the D20 System. I appreciate how B&S changes it up Shadowrun-style by rolling under a target number. Another thing that I found intriguing that the Wolsung gaming system incorporates is a deck of cards, and I am also pleased to see B&S making use of them to modify game play. Is the inclusion of a standard deck of cards a new trend in tabletop gaming?

    What frustrates me a great deal about tabletop gaming is how gamers foam at the mouth for magic. Although I enjoyed Arcanum to pieces and appreciate the reappearance of fantastic races in Wolsung, I've had about enough of magic. Magic just doesn't seem to fit in my ideal steampunk world. Perhaps game designers twitch as much for magic as their audience does. Perhaps magic lends the game system a necessary level of depth. Whatever the case, the majority of tabletop games to which I am exposed seem compelled to include magic on some level. I appreciate how Etherscope includes magic as a weak, but present influence on the game world. I realize that as a game master, I can simply cut the magic out of my campaigns, but I still know it was there in the first place.

    The role dreams have in B&G is an intriguing and fitting concept for the game world. Having always been fascinated with all things Astral, dreams and the dream state are as much magic as I need to be satisfied. I would be very interested in seeing how B&G uses dreams to influence the game and to see how closely the dream state relates to the concept of æther.

    Let's face it. I'm not really interested in playing or mastering a game. I'm in it for the concept. I keep up with the Etherscope, Wolsung, and soon the Brass & Steel systems because I want to understand their worlds and the rules that govern them. The more I can expose myself to others' definitions of a steampunk setting, the more defined mine becomes. Then my fiction becomes palpable and if it is good enough, maybe it grows into a campaign setting that can be adapted to any of these systems.
    To that end, the history, equipment, and flavor of any system's game world advances mine, and that is what I look for. The small sample of quirky names the skills have been given and the allusion to the humor throughout the core rules of B&G is enough to motivate me to digest this as well. I look forward to giving this a solid look.

    The thirty-, forty-, fifty-dollar price tag for source books is discouraging, but considering the mileage a gamer gets out of these books, it is probably actually a very good value. The chief obstacle for me concerning B&G at the moment is the distribution. Being low on the technology curve and unwilling to sit for hours at my computer for the purpose of reading a book, a PDF really isn't that portable or convenient for me. The $140 price tag of an e-reader is more daunting than what a real book would cost. Seeing as how many steampunk source books (I'm looking at you GURPS Steampunk) are available only as PDFs, this may be the way I need to go.

    In my opinion, the concept of a character class has destroyed role playing. Even the beloved Final Fantasy games were more fantasy adventures than role playing games because each character was pigeon holed into a very rigid role. Arcanum and the Fallouts got this right by providing a classless, point-based character creation and development system where I had incredible flexibility within the limitations of what customizations were available to me allowed me to build a character from a concept, not some predefined template. Congratulations on nailing this as well.
     
  8. magikot

    magikot Well-Known Member

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    It is starting to become the norm. D&D has Fortune Cards now, and as you mentioned Wolsung and B&S are making use of cards as well. I am sure more RPGs out there are making use of it by now too.
     
  9. DarkFool

    DarkFool Nemesis of the Ancients

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    Re: Wall of Criticism, Praise, Humor, and Opinion

    We did. You just happened to be wrong. :D
     
  10. TheDavisChanger

    TheDavisChanger Well-Known Member

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    Enough! We'll continue this in PM.

    Thank you for your time.
     
  11. Smuelissim0

    Smuelissim0 New Member

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    Sir, if you are in need of a second, it would be my honour.
     
  12. Grakelin

    Grakelin New Member

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  13. TheDavisChanger

    TheDavisChanger Well-Known Member

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  14. Jojobobo

    Jojobobo Well-Known Member

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    Re: Wall of Criticism, Praise, Humor, and Opinion

    Ever tried the new World of Darkness system? It's not D20 and it's pretty cool, and although primarily a horror setting, books like Mirrors allow you to tweak the world towards different ends such as changing things to a dark fantasy setting - basically you could just use the system and Mirrors to make your own steampunk setting if you felt so inclined. I'm pretty sure books in the Mage or Changeling lines would help to produce a steampunk setting - without classes with total free reign on your character, and you could use rules in Mirrors or Changeling to give races - though I'm not too sure about Mage as I haven't read widely into it. Just thought it might be worth a look if you're tired of D20 and wanted to mix things up a little - the whole onus when they rebooted World of Darkness was pick and choose, do it yourself so as I said fashioning a steampunk setting shouldn't be too hard from buying a few books. I can describe how the system works if you're interested, also running a quick search on the WW forums I uncovered How do I make a Steampunk Mage? and Steampunk Ideas which might serve as useful jumping off points for you.
     
  15. TheDavisChanger

    TheDavisChanger Well-Known Member

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    I haven't even thought about any Whitewolf materials in a long time. These threads you've posted might have some good leads. Thanks!
     
  16. Grakelin

    Grakelin New Member

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    nWoD is one of my favourite systems, though the combat sucks.
     
  17. TheDavisChanger

    TheDavisChanger Well-Known Member

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    What were you looking for when you happened across B&S?
     
  18. Coinneach

    Coinneach New Member

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    Re: Wall of Criticism, Praise, Humor, and Opinion

    The main reason we went with a table-top/LARP hybrid system was that we took a cold, hard look at the steampunk demographic (as we understood it.) There are a lot of people, probably the majority, into steampunk who are not gamers in the same way that most people in the SCA are not gamers. That is, they adopt a persona appropriate to a fictional/historical setting and go to "events" where they hang out with other such people, in character. We look at these people, these steampunk cosplayers, if you will, as potential gamers. We therefore decided that we would better appeal this segment of potential customers by keeping Brass & Steel streamlined and non-threatening rules-wise and appealing to what they know, which is system-less LARPing. Further to that point we decided that, unlike nWoD, we would make the table-top and LARP versions of the rules identical for seamless transition.

    Having made this determination, the decision influenced much of the design; which leads me to your next point.

    In the very early design phase, one of our number was crashing through potential die systems with his Excel-fu. Then the aforementioned determination to make the game LARP'able with the same rules used for tabletop was made. We toyed with d100 and then decided that a single die would be all that would be practical in a LARP and so we settled on d20. It was for that reason only because none of us designers has any experience with the official d20 system; similarities are obvious since there are only so many permutations if you settle on a single d20 for your die. Honestly, I don't like the statistics for a single d20, as opposed to GURPS 3d6, but that is water under the bridge. Under playtesting conditions the rules have held up remarkably well, IMO.

    The use of tarot cards as a fate mechanic was the idea of one of my partners but I like it. We felt that Brass & Steel should be imbued with the feel of period occultism, which ran to mesmerism, seances, and fortune telling, often with tarot cards. The tarot card system gets us a "fate" mechanic while giving us the period flavor.

    I can totally grok your thing with magic. Let me give you the very brief version of how B&S ended up with a magic system. Basically, we hard a hard time envisaging a steampunk world with all the gadgets and accoutrement without some sort of mysticism in action. I know you can do steampunk without magic (see Gibson/Sterling's The Difference Engine) but we wanted make the full panoply of steam-powered weird science available to players and so we decided there had to be magic, of a sort, to drive a steampunk industrial revolution. As a bonus, we've set up a looming conflict between the traditional practitioners of magic and the new industrialists who are now strip-mining the arcanists' sacred sites for the mystically-imbued raw materials with which to manufacture their gadgetry.

    It probably gives you no comfort to know that our magic system is founded in a totally un-scientific extrapolation of many-universes string theory. Magic, called Arcanism, in Brass & Steel, is the art and science of accessing the laws and constants of physics present in a parallel universe to make possible things that aren't ordinarily possible. Like I said, that's cold comfort if you just plain don't want magic in your steampunk, but at least you know that the fireballs are actually just accessing laws of chemistry that make our mix of atmosphere instantly combustible and leave NO2, laughing gas, as a byproduct.

    The Lucid Dreaming in Brass & Steel has several influences but we thought it was a good fit for a game set in 1905, what with the work being done by Freud and Jung on dream analysis during that period. We also believes it gives depth to the setting and, let's be honest, provides the hacker archetype. In playtesting and in our scenarios at GenCon we've gotten very positive feedback on the lucid dreaming. One of the scenarios at GenCon was made up exclusively of dilettante dreamers whose opium den reveries were shattered by unwelcome intelligence they simply had to bring to the attention of the authorities.

    I'm out of time so I'll try to respond to your last few points.

    I hope you'll find the setting of use in your fiction as we publish more. We think setting is terribly important for an RPG so we won't skimp on it in future releases.

    We're going to try to keep price points low for our products. We're not in this to get rich or quit our day jobs, so we're really only interested in making enough money to keep producing the game. Hopefully that works out to books priced a bit below what has become the "industry standard."

    We're revising our book right now to make use of RPGNow's print-on-demand service. Very soon you should be able to order a physical copy of Brass & Steel, if the electronic format is not your liking.

    Also, I hate character classes.

    In closing, thank you for taking the time to read the reviews and think and write about Brass & Steel. I will continue to make myself available as long as you have questions.
     
  19. TheDavisChanger

    TheDavisChanger Well-Known Member

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    Thanks for addressing my musings on steampunk in general and Brass & Steel in particular.

    I'd say you made an excellent decision to incorporate live action playing in the rules of B&S because the steampunk demographic in my locales is forever organizing crafting and costuming sessions. Based on my exposure, most steampunk folks are very hands-on so I think they'd take to table top gaming sooner than a gamer would take to creating costumes. As openly critical of LARPing as I am, I encourage people to do as they please and see the inclusion of live action rules as a great service to your target demographic.

    The D20 system is popular and has been popular for years, so it must have its benefits. From what I can tell it is simpler, more efficient, and more accessible than any system I've played before. The accessibility is a great boon for LARPers, so again you all have made a good decision by using a d20 as the chief mechanic of your system. For as little as I game, it would be unwise for developers to stray from a working formula to appease me.

    The same applies to magic. Although I've seen some interesting explanations for the inclusion of magic on a game world or a novel, none of them have actually fit 100%. Magic is simply difficult for me to conceptualize so an explanation of "magic just is" serves me just as well as a scientific account of magic.

    People are always glad to pay as little as possible for things, but nothing can be given away at a loss. As long as it makes good business sense, I say sell Brass & Steel for enough that you can quit your day job. I will probably get around to purchasing it anyway and even if I don't do anything with the world you've set up, I'll very much enjoy studying it.
     
  20. Grakelin

    Grakelin New Member

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    Been a while, so I don't remember. I think it was an organized crime themed RPG, of which no suitable one could be found.
     
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