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Reading Up On 7th Sea 2nd Edition

I noticed after my last post that despite being a fan of 7th Sea I had never gotten around to reading the new edition of books. Michael gets to list his “Currently Reading” as he is head honcho. So I hopped over to RPGNow and I saw this…

“After a couple of sessions I can say with great certainty, that the 2nd edition is a great disappointment. 
The rules are mishmash of FATE, Houses of the Blooded, 7th Sea 1st edition and multiple tacked on sub-systems without any cohesion. The resolution system is a marginal improvement at best. The backgrounds are artificial limitations much like classes, totally unnecessary for a fiction simulator. Story rules are a more complicated version of the first edition backgrounds. Now you have Virtue and Hubris (why do I have to have them?), Sword schoools have one rule each, and duellists are and advantage, loosing much of their flair, etc. All in al not very elegant.“

I know full well that when you create new editions of games that people know and love that you are not going to please everyone. What is the saying?  “Some of the people all of the time or all of the people some of the time but never all of the people all of the time.”

I don’t really care about this reviewers opinion too much but what caught my eye was the reference to FATE. I surprised myself by enjoying Ghost Ops recently with FUDGE at its heart is it possible that this could be my way into something FATE-like?

So right now I am reading up on 7th Sea Second Edition and I admit that yes it does feel very different but so far it seems to be different but better.

How many of you have tried the new 7th Sea? How do you feel about it?

Incidentally, does the guy in the image above remind anyone else of Leonardo DiCaprio?

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Peter R.

I have been blogging about Rolemaster for the past few years. When I am not blogging I run the Rolemaster Fanzine and create adventure seeds and generic game supplements under the heading of PPM Games. You can check them out on RPGnow. My pet project is my d6 game 3Deep, now in its second edition.

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GK Coleman

I have read through everything that has been released for 7th Sea so far, and I have been pleased overall. The base mechanic of using Raises to determine the success of an action looks very interesting (1 Raise equals success, extra Raises can be used to negate damage of other unpleasant consequences, or to take advantage of an opportunity). The expanded world of 7th Sea has also been fun to read.
I haven’t had the chance to play it yet, but I plan on running a game later this year.
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    Peter R.

    You are a bit ahead of me, I am only just at the reading stage. I read the rules on Risks and Actions today and in some strange way it reminded me of when I used to play Champions. When your attack hit you used to roll a veritable bucket of dice. Damage came in two flavours stun and body. For the stun you used to group all the dice into tens just for ease of counting and then for body you counted each dice as 1 except sixes were worth two and ones were nothing.

    The point is that wrangling your pool of dice as a player certainly added to the fun. With a large pool of dice the eventual result was not obvious at first glance. I think the new Risk/Action mechanic has that same sort of nerdy pleasure attached to the dice pool element but at the same time once you know how many raises you have for the round you can just play pretty well diceless until the start of the next round.

    So far the game has left a very positive first impression.
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