RPGs day 3: Over the Edge
May. 22nd, 2020 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishVia James Nicoll, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them.
I got into On the Edge in high school, when I was looking for a multiplayer CCG and the store was sold out of Jyhad, the horribly-named Vampire: The Masquerade game. On the Edge is set on a Mediterranean island that's home to every conspiracy you can imagine and a half dozen more. It's fun, and frequently quite funny as well. When I found out there was an RPG's worth of background source material, of course I snapped it up.
Over the Edge is a weird, weird game, which I guess is fitting given its origin as "Jonathan Tweet's weird-stuff homebrew." It's the first game I'd ever seen with "design your own skills," or with an explicitly and deliberately fuzzy resolution mechanic, or that treated psychic etc powers as just some things you can do, though probably not very well. It had some excellent GM advice along the lines of "you're all here to have fun, which might look different to different people," and it included a meta-campaign in which the characters can meet their players. I loved it.
I've never actually played OTE. I didn't even get a chance to run it until the late 2000s, mostly due to Emily's intense hatred of design-your-own-skills systems. But the "here's a WHOLE BUNCH of awesome stuff" design philosophy and the freeform approach to skills and conflict resolution has had an enormous impact on my own GMing style.
I got into On the Edge in high school, when I was looking for a multiplayer CCG and the store was sold out of Jyhad, the horribly-named Vampire: The Masquerade game. On the Edge is set on a Mediterranean island that's home to every conspiracy you can imagine and a half dozen more. It's fun, and frequently quite funny as well. When I found out there was an RPG's worth of background source material, of course I snapped it up.
Over the Edge is a weird, weird game, which I guess is fitting given its origin as "Jonathan Tweet's weird-stuff homebrew." It's the first game I'd ever seen with "design your own skills," or with an explicitly and deliberately fuzzy resolution mechanic, or that treated psychic etc powers as just some things you can do, though probably not very well. It had some excellent GM advice along the lines of "you're all here to have fun, which might look different to different people," and it included a meta-campaign in which the characters can meet their players. I loved it.
I've never actually played OTE. I didn't even get a chance to run it until the late 2000s, mostly due to Emily's intense hatred of design-your-own-skills systems. But the "here's a WHOLE BUNCH of awesome stuff" design philosophy and the freeform approach to skills and conflict resolution has had an enormous impact on my own GMing style.