[freeroleplay] Yags update

[Samuel Penn]

Hi all,

It's been a while since I've had time to say much on the list, but
the workload and stress is dropping off now, so it's probably about
time for me to give a quick update on what I've been doing as far
as free gaming is concerned.

Yags got horribly sidetracked after I decided to write up some stats
for some truly heroic samurai type characters, and decided it didn't
have the mechanisms in place to allow it. I've done a lot of tweaking
to the combat system, to both simplify it (mostly trying to tie down
terminology) and also make it more flexible. There are some new rules
describing oriental martial arts, with a new way of representing
special combat actions (called manouevres) such as throws, grapples
and disarms.

Anyway, there's now some genre specific rules for Bushido and Modern
settings. The latter has an experimental character generation system,
which is a lot more flexible than the standard fantasy one. I'm not
changing fantasy, since I believe a rigid set of backgrounds fits
a medieval/fantasy setting quite well, and also helps people understand
the sort of characters it's possible to play.


The core system has had a bit of tweaking, renaming a couple of the
main attributes so I could be more specific about what they represented:

Health:  Was called stamina, which sometimes meant confusion between
         whether to use stamina or will for fortitude. Also had the
         same initial letter as Strength, making it difficult to list
         attributes with a single letter.

Empathy: Was charisma, which suggests representing how nice you are,
         and meant that noticing people's emotions could be perception
         or charisma. Empathy is now entirely understanding other
         people, and perception never comes into it. Strength of
         personality is always Will. Empathy also says nothing
         about how nice you are (it just makes it easier to tell if
         you're upsetting or boring someone).


I've also been working on the list of starting packages for
the Habisfern setting, making them more consistent and fleshing
out the descriptive text.

I've also added the concept of Traits, which represent aspects of a
character's personality (bravery, greed etc), and which are campaign
specific (e.g., a Bushido campaign might use Honour and Duty, whilst
a horror setting might have Insanity, Curiosity and Bravery).

Currently, I'm working on the Habisfern magic system, having given it
a big overhaul and more or less decided on how I want it to work.


Finally, I've been playing a bit with a computer game implementation
of Yags. The basic skill and combat resolution stuff is there and
working, and the idea is to use it in a web based adventure game
called Kingdoms. It's currently got as far as displaying a map and
allowing you to move a character around (and punch cows, though not
kill them, since the world is still a utopia and the rules for death
haven't been written yet). When I have something that's worth logging
into, I'll let people know.

Links:

Yags: 
    http://www.glendale.org.uk/yags/rules.html
    (the 'Combat' and 'Habisfern Characters' rules have changed the most)
Other Yags genres: 
    http://www.glendale.org.uk/yags/genres.html

Some notes on Kingdoms: 
    http://www.glendale.org.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=kingdoms:kingdoms

Plus a screenshot: 
    http://www.glendale.org.uk/~sam/kingdoms.jpg



-- 
Be seeing you,                         http://www.glendale.org.uk
Sam.                        
              IM: samuel.penn at jabber.org or samuel.penn at gmail.com