Chatty DM’s Gears of Ruin
February 17, 2010
Do yourself a favour and go read about Chatty DM’s Gears of Ruin setting/concept. The Campaign Genesis article is awesome in how it breaks down the creation structure into What If questions. This had never occurred to me, and it is brilliant. It is put to great use in the setting.
Here’s the thing: it’s stuff like this that makes me want to play D&D 4E. If I’m going to do it, I need a really good reason. Now, there is no reason that one could not use True20 or Savage Worlds for Gears of Ruin, but Chatty DM used 4E, and he seems to have put the integral system functions of 4E into both the world and the character creation. That means taking the 4E out of the setting would break it, even if only a little.
Will this get me to go shell out money for the 4E books? Nope. Though if someone wants to send me review copies or something . . . [wink, wink/nudge, nudge]
I really don’t think that it would matter much. Except that I’m not sure that the SW or True20 has the extensive DM toolkit that has made Gears of Ruin so easy to create and run. Monsters with their modular-power structure and specific roles make creation easier than all other crunch-equivalent games I’ve played yet.
What I have done though, is take the basic conceit of 4e (Dailies, Surges, Skills, Skill Challenges, Cosmography) and mixed them in the big free association batch that created GoR. I’m still suprised how well it worked.