So, we played out Deadlands classic game today, our conclusions, in short: Great setting, horrible,
horrible system.
The session had 7 players in the Posse and me as the Marshal. We got everything set up - a poker set, 4 decks of cards, maaaany sets of dice and even some whiskey and beans. We immediately found out that the table needed for this game is about two times the one we had, but never mind. I had to print out 10 pages for myself - Several tables, a combat cheat sheet and some other information. So, we set out to play The Last Stop, a Deadland adventure aimed at beginners.
The adventure was cool enough, many awesome concepts and the writing was pretty excellent all around. In genera, the world is
very cool, it's full of awesome fluff and has some great potential for pulpy-mystery story lines. For those not in the know, read the summary in the wikipedia article. It's this cool blend of horror, steam punk and the wild west. The book is full of atmosphere (even in skill names, with the shooting skill called Shootin' and such.), even the names of some of the rules are cool, like The Big Round Down and such. The game started out, players were talking, it was pretty fun, thing were moving nicely... and than the rolls came. The game slowly grind to a halt as we all had to try and play around one of the most horrible set of mechanics I've ever seen.
All that awesome adventure and setting? We could never really focus on all that because of the system. if anyone here believes that the system or crunch is not important, this game shows how much it is. Everything is so slow, so cumbersome, so... awkward, that you can barely focus on any of the role-playing because you have so many numbers and so many different parameters and props going around.
For starters, this system, has no less than three types of completely different tools needed - at least 5 sets of D20 dice (ideally,
per goddamn player), about a 100 differently colored poker chips, at least 2 decks of 54 playing cards (if you have a spellcaster you need more) - and that doesn't include recommended but not mandatory stuff like miniatures and five differently colored paper clips. The basic idea is that each trait you have is actually the type of die you need to roll, and how much you have in a skill (aptitude) is how many of that die you roll. If that sound horribly cumbersome and idiotic on paper, it's even worse in practice - every player is constantly looking at what die and how many of it to roll, and the insane amount of rolling makes every action takes forever while everyone is calibrating the information. Also, no system should ever, ever, make you add together 3-4 rolls and than divide the sum by 6. Let alone do that every time you do damage.
And the modifiers, and the "if - than"s, and the tables... The system made some great effort to get players to role play, with a nice edges and hindrances system and getting you in the mood, but it's all useless because in the actual game, we barely even got to know the character or what they were because we were too busy with the mechanics. The battle was so slow, we didn't even describe our actions just to get things moving.
I think one of the lessons here - A system is important. It might not make the game, but it can definitely break it. Maybe the system would have worked better with 3 players, but I don't see any way in hell to make this system not get in the way of your game.
We also got a more positive experience from a short My Life with Master play we did, which I'll write about soon
