This review is more a rating of the system than the setting. If you consider that a grave flaw in a review, you can skip this one, now.
I can't honestly figure out why people like 7th Sea, other than its setting. Meditation on the arrival of the D20 Swashbuckling Adventures has me quite glad because, even if you can ignore the setting flaws (and I find I can, tho' I'm very aware they're present), I don't think it is fair to call 7th Sea a good game. The longer I play it, the clearer it is that this game is massively flawed and survives more on virtue of having a CCG backing it up and fine art rather than any virtue of the game, itself.
This review won't even touch on the setting very much. I do find fault with the setting, however. They have stolen too much from Europe to leave out what they have left out; putting Theah as "a different world" is dissembling when most of Thean history is merely a rehash of European medieval history with the names changed (and changed slightly, at that -- we're literally talking nonsense like Carelman for Charlemagne and the like). But that is ignorable even if you have a fair bit of history under your belt (as I do).
What isn't ignorable is the fact that the mechanics of the game suck. I thought about using a different word, but suck is perfect. The 7th Sea rules suck.
The suck in the beginning because they have an absurd character creation process. Despite a generally poor lay out that plagues the D10 7th Sea books in general, which makes character generation (especially for new players) a chore equal to visiting a dentist for tooth extraction without novocaine, what highlights the absurdity of the system is their skills.
In 7th Sea, you buy skills, each of which includes certain knacks. The knacks (which would be called "skills" in just about any other game, as they include the information that you use to make actual rolls with) are divided into basic and advanced knacks. Generally, when you buy a "skill" you get rank 1 (out of 5 ranks) in the basic "knacks" (there are a few exceptions but they're irrelevant to this discussion). So, when you take the Criminal skill you get Gambling, Shadowing and Stealth all at rank 1. Let's say your character concept is a gentlemanly cat burglar -- so, naturally, you'll be wanting skills like lockpicking, which are advanced knacks of the criminal skill. Therefore, to get lockpicking, you must necessarily become at least passingly proficient in gambling -- even if you never intend to use that skill with the character. You must get it.
There are lots of examples of this. Before you can get "Sincerity" (the knack that allows you to lie) you must get the Dancing knack. Clearly, before you can lie you must be able to dance!
While there is some rhyme and reason to this structure there isn't that much. To play a burglar, you're going to end up with a lot of weird skills on your sheet. It gets worse if you're trying to play a con man -- you'll probably end up getting COURTIER as a skill even if your character has never been above the level of street trash.
The second really big boggle with character creation is in order to play an adept swordsman you've got to spend 25% of your initial points for character creation. It literally isn't worth it to get a sword school. You're better off spending those points in Traits and bumping up your Footwork and then, hundreds of XP down the line, picking up a sword school when you're maxxed out in Finesse, Wits and Panache (those being traits in the game) as well as the "basic" sword and knife knacks. The amount a character should pay for a sword school should be dramatically less than it is -- from 25 hero points to something like 10 or even 5 points.
The second major boggle is the way combat runs. The rules are witty and clever, but in practice they're a major pain in the ass.
It all has to do with the way you roll dice and the number of rolls you have to make.
The dice rolling conventions in the game are: you take a number of 10 sided dice equal to the Trait (Brawn, Finesse, Wits, Resolve or Panache) that governs the use of a particular knack and the number of dice of the appropriate trait and you roll them. So, to attack a person with a sword you would roll your Finesse in D10s plus your Fencing (Attack) knack in D10s. Therefore, if you have Finesse 4 and Fencing (Attack) 4 you'd roll 8D10.
You don't add all of them together to get the amount you roll. You only count the number of dice equal to your trait. So, in the above example, I would roll 8D10 but only count 4 of the dice because attacking is covered by the Finesse trait.
Any die that rolls a 10, furthermore, you get to reroll and add to your total for the roll. If the reroll rolls a 10, you keep rolling until you stop rolling 10s.
That's a fair amount of effort to roll dice. It'd be bad enough to have to count up all the dice, but what you have to do is pick out the number of dice to roll, roll them, and select out the highest numbers and then add them together. For non-combat rolls, where rolls are reasonably infrequent, this isn't a big deal. In combat, it slows things down in several different ways because of the number of rolls a person has to make.
You have to make a roll to hit. They have to make a roll to defend if you hit them. When you hit them, you roll damage (using the same "roll a bunch but count a few" system) and the other person has to make a roll to see if your damage inflicts a dramatic wound. It's a lot of rolling with a clumsy dice rolling convention and it turns fights into drags -- particularly because a fighter in 7th Sea can take a lot of damage before dropping.
Equally bad is the system for determine who goes when. To determine who goes when during a combat turn, each player rolls the number of dice equal to their Panache trait. The numbers on the dice indicate what phases your character acts during.
So, if I have Panache 3, at the beginning of each turn I'd roll 3D10. If I rolled a 5, 4 and 9, I'd go on phases 4, 5 and 9. The game suggests keeping those dice face up, in order from lowest to highest -- they even include a place on the c-sheet to put 'em.
Of course, any experienced gamer realizes what a pain in the ass it is to keep dice face up on a given face for more than six or ten seconds as more dice hit the table and people reach for chips and coke. It is also one more step where players have to roll dice, organize the roll in their mind in a particular order, too. It's one more thing that I find clever, but slows down the fight -- and when trying to represent the whirling cut-thrust-parry of cinematic swordfighting, slow is deadly.
(There are other issues I have with the initiative system that I'm not getting into, here, for the sake of brevity. This review is long enough as it is.)
The third and, perhaps, biggest problem with 7th Sea is . . . ultimately, all characters have to be swordsmen.
I'm playing in a pretty high end game. My C has spent 280 experience points -- a huge number. Since I'm playing a swordsman I don't feel so bad but . . . .
In the game, there are people who are playing magicians who have literally run out of places to spend experience points on magic. If you were playing a "pirate" or an "explorer" or a "scientist" you would run out of places to spend XPs even sooner. Eventually, because the system is close ended, you're forced to spend XPs, basically, in sword schools because sword schools and the mechanism of grand mastery are the only place a person can pour and pour and pour XPs into. Everything else is, fundamentally, finite and close ended.
Which sucks. It sucks that if you want to play a theif you can only ratchet up your theif skills so far before you've literally run out of places to spend your XPs. And while 280 XP is a *lot* of XP, a person could get them pretty swiftly in a year's worth of play and easier still in a couple of years. It sucks that in EVERYTHING but swordfighting you eventually top out and, inevitably, have to spend points on something else and, eventually, that something else is swordfighting. It's a massive design flaw that a person can't keep spending points to be a better magician or better sailor or better explorer or better scientist or better theif.
Fourth, the organization of data between the Player's Guide and Game Master's Guide is hideous.
Both books contain information that clearly belongs there. In the PG you learn how to make characters and some of the rules. In the GM's Guide, there is information on the secret societies and making villians. Fine and dandy.
But in the PG there is not information about the various social customs of the various nations in the game world. For some inexplicable reason, this information, that is absolutely vital to players if they're to play characters from a particular nation, is completely left out of the Player's Guide.
Likewise, most of the actual rules are in the GM's Guide, which means that when making characters players are in the dark as to the best way to do most things. "If I'm playing a gambler, should I have a higher Wits or Panache? They both sorta seem to apply . . . ." Well, too bad the gambling rules aren't included in the Player's Guide!
This also means that during the game, the GM has to hold a lot of hands about a lot of rules and setting information. It leads to long intervals when the GM has to inform the player about things that the player, honestly, should know -- and WOULD know if they didn't hide half of what the players need to know in the GM's Guide! It's horrible organization, at best, and a not-too-subtle attempt to force players to buy the GM's Guide if you're feeling more cynical.
So, given that the character generation rules are confused and they have a silly skill system, that combat is slow and looses the rapid fire flow needed to simulate fencing and the ridiculous XP system that forces players to be things other than they want their character to be, and the miserable organization of information between the Player's Guide and the Game Master's Guide I have to say that the rules for 7th Sea suck. The only reason this game is popular is a testament to the coolness of Renaissance role-play over the standard medieval fantasy fare that we've been subjected to for a generation.
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