Our current favorite game to play, Scarlet Heroes! I originally was drawn to it as we tend to play 1 on 1 games and this game is geared to that type of play. We ll there are now two players and the system has held together well. It does tend to encourage the survival of characters but still has danger for those players.
I dread saying this but it does bring me back to the old days. You see my RPG life started out with the D&D white box. Back then we did not know quite what we were doing, What rules there were were pretty vague and for the most part we just made it up as we went along. Over the years the D&D rules added more and more detail and things became more codified. This is not a complaint, at the time that is just what I wanted. Eventually I moved away from D&D to Chivalry & Sorcery a system that had one of the most complex magick systems in role playing, but oddly lacked coherent systems for other aspects of the game. After many, many years I looked around at other systems of varying complexity. Faves included Basic Role Playing, Legend, Barbarians of Lemuria, Warhammer 2nd edition and even a return to later editions of D&D (including the D20 Conan Game). All have their value and each work well for certain campaigns types. But recently I decided to run a classic Dungeon crawl so I figured Scarlet Heroes would be a good fit, it was.
Now a dungeon crawl is one of those stupid ideas that I get every now and then. For some reason I have fond memories of dungeon crawls and yet I really never ran that many of them. They always seem like a fun basic adventure and I understand that the vast majority of D&D players seem to like to play them. However for me it only takes a few session of one to remind me why I do not play them. They are a very nit picky style of play. Too much detail, too much me trying to challenge the players, me trying to kill them. Also all that keeping track of treasure, equipment expenditures, you know all the little details that add flavour but slow down the game to a, well, crawl.
Yes old school gaming had players keeping track of how many spikes they had, they kept track of rations, time etc which really takes one out of the magic of the game and turned players into bean counters. So this current campaign we certainly started off with this classic style of play but the limitations of the dungeon crawl and my own desire to move beyond simple crawls quickly took over. After only a couple of sessions I started to inject sub plots into the game that had nothing to do ith the crawl but were there to set up other adventures. So now I am trying to get away from the book keeping style and move into a more broader role play style, in other words back to my typical style.
Long winded way to get to Scarlet Heroes. What I like about this game really is the lack of rules. I can play this game on the fly with little review of the rules prior to or during the game. It allows for a quick flowing game where I can just call out for checks without the dread question; Do you have that skill? I am treating it almost like Barbarians of Lemuria, where I look at the background generated by the players, and also any recent accomplishments that they have achieved to see what bonus might apply to their 'skill' check. But these skill checks are just stat roles with modifiers, very easy and quick to do.
As an example one of the players had briefly toyed with the idea of starting off the game as a cleric. after some though he elected to just be a warrior, but we filed that early concept away and even suggested that he had been a guard at a temple. Flash forward to a recent game session his companion found a religious medallion which he passed onto our warrior hero. Shortly thereafter they encountered a flock of skeleton warriors and in desperation our hero presented the medallion shouted out a prayer and made a roll to turn the undead. Well in most cases this would most likely not work, but the free form nature of our game, and the 'simple' rules and just me liking what he was doing meant he got to roll for it. He succeeded and now based on this and the early concept of the character it seems likely that he will soon become a multi class hero.
Now Scarlet Heroes is not the sole reason for this happening, other game systems could encourage this, hell just GM ruling that this can happen regardless of the rule set, but the free form feeling of Scarlet Heroes certainly encourages and inspires such behavior. Oddly just last week I mused about switching over to Warhammer end edition (I am a fickle GM) and even went so far as to start converting the characters over to that rule set but as I started to select the appropriate skills it made me take a serious look at what I was doing, so I stopped, put away the draft characters and quicly returned to Scarlet Heroes.
