Tabletop Report – Session 2 · 8:50pm Feb 7th, 2018
It’s time for Tabletop Report! For the uninitiated, Tabletop Report is a new series chronicling the adventures of my DnD group as I run them through a custom campaign and ruleset based off of Microsoft’s Gears of War universe.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Gears of War, and I’m totally not claiming otherwise. I just really love the universe, and have wanted to run a campaign set in it for the longest time. The system I built is entirely my own, and this game is a test-run of its viability as a full tabletop system.
This is the report summary for session 2. Prior sessions will be listed before the break if you need to catch up. Some knowledge of Gears of War‘s greater universe may be required. Now, let’s see what happened to our players after last week!
That is sounding like fun, and I'm definitely getting some solid Gears vibes from some of this which is definitely a good sign you were on the right track.
Also, I really like the card-based leveling system you have described to balance randomness and player choice (although you'll probably want to experiment some with the numbers both drawn and picked as you polish the system) because it offers a good compromise between full player control capable of breaking the game and little to no player control which reduces investment in the character. That said, I am curious how you deal with skills once they are learned. Is the card then removed from the deck (assuming there aren't multiple levels of the skill), or does it become a dead draw in the future? On the one hand I can definitely see how drawing a useless card would suck as a player, but on the other hand I can also see value in using the dead draws to increase randomness later in the game after players have established their core setup/playstyle and can thus better afford to strap on more silly/frivolous things so long as you have a complementary rule to let them draw extra cards if they get too many dead draws (you obviously don't want them to only get two cards they can use because then they don't level properly after all).
This is wonderful, and I find myself curious about the system you've designed.