Re: [DL] Deadlands Reboot 2004 [Shane]

[Brett Dixon <balance@tubas.net>]

On Sunday, July 27, 2003, at 03:34  PM, Roger Bert wrote:

> Greetings.
> Ok, now you have us curious Shane. :P
> Will you tell us more than what you said in the Lost Colony Companion 
> book?
> I was going to post this in the forum but it seems to have crashed.

What's the scoop? Sme of us don't get to go to GenCon!

> I certainly hope that this reboot doesn't mean Deadlands will switch to
> Savage Worlds rules and I am not necessarily looking to buy the same
> material reshuffled into different splatbooks. I think that PEG had 
> done a
> wonderful job covering just about everything Weird West/Wasted West 
> when it
> comes to splatbooks. I think some more information on Lost Colony might
> appeal to me but you seem to have pretty much ended everything in the 
> Lost
> Colony Companion adventure.

I agree that moving/rereleasing Deadlands as a SW setting wouldn't be 
right. There's a lot of potential to cover things in interesting ways, 
and i think reprints/rewrites would be valuable, if done properly.

> I have picked up the Savage Worlds base book and it isn't very useful 
> as a
> miniatures game (since the most important rules about unit creation are
> missing) and the system doesn't appeal to my local D&D gamers for

Did you grab the unit-creation PDF of the www.peginc.com site?

> role-playing. Evernight, your first release for SW is basically a D&D
> adventure book written with SW. This puzzles myself and other local 
> gamers
> in my area because D&D in our opinion is always best played with D&D 
> rules.

from what I've read, Evernight is a bit different. Yes, it's a fantasy 
world with a lot of the same Tolkien rip-offs, but there's a lot of 
differences between that and the D&D even some of the better games I 
see.

EN is plot based. There's no real concept of 'adventurer' as a real 
profession, from what I've seen of the setting. A lot of D&D games have 
a highly improbably economy built around towns supporting adventures 
who regularly beat up orcs and other critters for cash. it's an odd 
raid/counter raid system as all of the orc's money comes from raiding 
caravans in the first place, so there's some sort of weird closed loop 
thing going. Oh, and a few orcs have pie...

A big 'feature' of D&D is the highly formalized systems for building 
magic items. Again, good games can get beyond this, but this can also 
encourage the concept of ala-carte magic item sales. Form what I've 
seen, Evernight makes magic items special! One thing that drew me to 
Deadlands, for example,w as the idea that all amgic items are unique 
and have their own story, and this seems to be a Pinnacle trademark 
(although I think EN, and SW in general, may have a few 'common' 
magical items.

Also, SW doesn't, to me, want to be played as an equipment-list 
management game like D&D often is. i ran a SW game this weekend and 
stated that I sue a slightly toned down version of the Feng Shui rules, 
especially in combat, for such things as having an item your character 
would have, or finding the rope, piece of furniture, or whatever needed 
for a stunt. For 'gritty' games this might need t be toned back, but 
it's a far cry from the stock equipment lists of D&D.

> It is what everyone is used to and everyone knows how to play (mostly)
> already. At this time I don't plan on picking up any more SW stuff 
> because I
> don't think I will be able to get anyone I know to play it. Gamers 
> like what
> they know.

This is, unfortunately, true. They just need to get convinced to try 
new things, and SW has an advantage here in that it's an easy system 
and it's great for one-shot games.

> I hope to see future original Deadlands material and adventures 
> especially
> if it is not recycled. I have always liked the Weird West the best out 
> of
> the three settings and would like to hear more information on your 
> planned
> Deadlands Reboot.

I'm interested myself...