Airship Pirates
27 March 2012 in Articles by Captain CalamitousAirship Pirates
What more needs to be said, other than it’s an RPG?
Obviously because an article needs a little more than that I will say a bit more.
Just enunciating the title is enough to get the mind working, the imagination fires up and we have people dressed in Victorian clothes, with odd looking contraptions literally brimming with pipes, lenses and brass surrounding them. This is a game based on a band, Abney Park, and their music, it’s Steampunk and it’s proud.
I have been running a bit of this game for C7 at the odd convention and I love it, the players get into the swing of the world very easily and the system is pretty darn simple. All the dice are d6, stat+skill dice pool in red dice, add in some black for difficulty, 1 or 6 is a success on red and a negative success on black, red 6′s explode i.e. you get to roll another red die for each 6 to try and add further successes this carries on ad infinitum. If I’m honest I don’t really like the skill resolution system, it has a number of items that I have a problem with, for a start I don’t like dice pools with loads of dice, I also don’t like the statistical probabilities inherent in this system, the combat is cumbersome and I find I wing it more often than not.
I have also been running a game on a Monday night for HertsRPG I’m not sure if it’s the system or my style but the players seem a little detached from the action, I don’t normally see this kind of issue and am going to assume for the sake of my ego that the system seems to promote this.
Bearing the above in mind I have decide to convert Airship Pirates to BRP, it seems like the natural conversion to me, it’s simple, the rules are fairly clear and the experience system ties in well with the current system, I’ll be documenting the conversion over on ExSanguinated if you want to see where it goes.
Thanks for reading,
CaptCalamitous.
The Captain has been playing RPGs since '76. He regularly GMs and plays a variety of different games. He is also a vital source of obscure, yet fun and interesting card games.1 Comment to Airship Pirates
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Bucket of dice systems have always put me off, and the bit about different coloured dice for difficulty just seems like a tag on idea. So far the most fun I’ve had as GM (and occasional player) with steampunk (kinda) games has been with Unhallowed Metropolis. Still need to grab myself a hard copy of the new ed., but will do as soon as money’s not quite so tight.
Very simple skill+roll, hit a target number system. Works for damned near everything too, so very little for people to pick up before they can jump in.