Silhouette CORE Roleplaying Core Rules
The Silhouette CORE rules are the engine to many Dream Pod 9 games – Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles, Tribe 8, Gear Krieg, and the new CORE Command. The rules bill themselves as generic, which I suppose with work they are – but in general, they are oriented towards science fiction gaming. I’ve been playing in a Silhouette campaign for a few months now, and thought I’d share the good and bad points of the system with everyone.
Format
The cover is a clean, simple blue with some graphics. The interior is black & white, with good graphic design – it’s easy to read. There’s not a lot of art, but the art that’s there (besides being mecha-centric) is of uniformly high quality. I wouldn’t call the book pretty, but it is attractive and functional. There’s a good quality index in the back. There are a lot of problems, however. The softcover binding is bad; most of my gaming group’s books have disintegrated already and there was a mass exodus to a copy shop to get them re-bound. And the editing is really, really, tremendously poor. There are endemic misspellings (Threshold is spelled Treshold more often than not), section references in the text are almost always wrong, and some tremendously important information was left out – for example, the point costs of all the Perks and Flaws. Luckily this information is on their Web site, because its omission makes the character generation rules unusable. Even being Canadian is no excuse for editing of this quality, and in my opinion Dream Pod 9 needs to take a hard look at their quality control before launching a new game line.
Content
Basics
Chapter One (13 pages) covers the rules basics. It describes the core Silhouette dice mechanic, which is a d6 die pool system. You roll a number of d6’s equal to your rank in a skill and take the highest die; then you add a bonus or penalty from the relevant attribute and compare to the target Threshold, the difference giving you your Margin of Success. There’s more to it, of course, but that’s the core concept. It’s simple and fast, which is a plus, and allows some clever implementations in several rules subsystems by being able to differentiate between “more or less dice” which affects the consistency of your result, and the “more or less bonus” which affects the range of outcome. There are ten attributes, Agility, Appearance, Build, Creativity, Fitness, Influence, Knowledge, Perception, Psyche, and Willpower. Attributes have an average score of zero; they can range from about +3 to –3 for human characters.
What you have to keep in mind in this system is that a +1 is a really large bonus. Not only does it provide quite an advantage, but things like damage scale to Margin of Success.
Character Design
Chapter Two (21 pages) is all about character generation. It describes the attributes at length and gives concrete examples of what, for example, a +2 Build means. There are also a good number of derived attributes that make good use of the primaries by taking them all into account to thwart combat min-maxers (Health is derived from Fitness, Psyche, and Willpower, for instance). Skills and Perks and Flaws are mentioned; here’s where they left out the costs for the latter. For some reason the actual skill, perk, and flaw descriptions are stuck in an appendix in the back – in a smaller font and without the pleasing graphical design of the rest of the book.
The character building rules are simple and point-based – you get a number of attribute points to spend on plusses and minuses to your attributes; plusses are more expensive than minuses give you points. Costs scale according to squares (1 point, 4 points, 9 points, etc.). Skills are bought out of a separate pool of skill points, costing the rank squared. This works out surprisingly well, making higher levels increase in cost, and the point totals always seem to work out without leaving weird numbers of points behind. Perks and flaws cost or take semi-small point values. Skills have a “complexity” as well as a rank; we decided to totally ignore this as it’s a little overcomplicated.
I enjoyed building a character in this system, and the gaming group came up with a fun batch of PCs. We went overboard on the Flaws because we decided our group concept was a bunch of semi-criminal lowlifes on the run from a powerful gangster, but the points we got from the Flaws didn’t make us overpowered in areas (a common problem with such systems). The squaring rule is what helped that; you really only had enough points for one or maybe two skills at 3 points, with some supporting 2-pointers and a bunch if 1-pointers. All the perks and flaws were well balanced, none were “free points” or super-killer abilities.
One quirk of this system is that skills cost their rank squared at chargen time, but when upping them from XP they require the rank squared per rank – so a level 3 skill bought initially cost 9 skill points, but buying that skill form XP costs 1+4+9=15 points. So you should put as many points as you can into fewer, higher-point skills at chargen and then round out all the 1-point skills you end up needing with XP.
The skill list is pretty good; some skills (like Pilot) have specific areas you have to choose and you can buy specializations. The one glaring omission was a Bluff or Fast Talk skill – they have Seduction, Intimidate, and many other social skills (there’s even a section later on in the book about running a “social only” game), but nothing to cover simple conning or lying. In previous Silhouette rules this was in a bizarre place (Perform/Theatrics in Heavy Gear 2e) but at least it was mentioned. We simply added a Fast Talk skill to compensate.
There are no sample characters in the book. This wasn’t too much of a problem since the chargen system is easy.
Action!
Chapter 3 is 21 pages of rules, covering a surprising number of topics from basic (initiative, wounds) to advanced (autofire, fatigue). The content here is good and has served us well; the one critique I have is that the information here is a little too bare bones. For example, there are no attack or defense modifiers for being prone.
Damage in combat is a flat value, multiplied by your Margin of Success. This makes the MoS extremely important; a bad Defense roll (Defense is a skill) and a good attack roll can kill you outright. There’s some cinematic bits (Emergency Dice, Genre Points) that can help alleviate it. In general, in Silhouette combat, you don’t get hit much, but when you get hit it’s an experience you can only hope to live to regret.
The only other bit our group modified was the grenade rules; these are a bit overcomplicated and want to allow for people picking up grenades and throwing them back, that sort of thing.
Weapons and Equipment
Just kidding. There is no weapon or equipment list. This is an extremely annoying omission and makes it much harder to play a generic Silhouette game without specifically buying one of their world books. Just some samples with what damage from a gun or sword or whatnot would be close to would have been a plus. Our GM had to develop a weapon and equipment list himself from other sources. This omission is the second most obnoxious thing about the book (after the editing). Who knows, maybe there was a weapon list and it got lost in editing.
Mechanical Design
Chapter Four (28 pages) is a mechanical design system. Well, not really a system per se, more like a teaser for the hopefully more coherent design systems in their other games. In our campaign we have a spaceship that’s your basic Traveller-style free trader. You would hope that constructing and then upgrading such a ship wouldn’t be too difficult. You’d be wrong; it requires a spreadsheet to build and is impossible to upgrade (upgrading isn’t even mentioned in the rules). It doesn’t help that there are no sample designs to get you into the swing of things.
Mechanical Action
Chapter Five (27 pages) covers vehicle-oriented combat, clearly showing the system’s mecha-wargame roots. The rules are good; we’ve run many a spaceship and car combat using them.
Specialized Rules
Chapter Six (23 pages) has a bunch of random rules; how to design animals and aliens, environmental hazards, drug dependency, and a variety of outer space-related issues. There’s also a section on “Reality Distortion Factor,” Genre Points, and a miscellany of other rules that don’t fit anywhere else. They have a semi-effective explanation of how to run a cinematic game included. It’s missing any real concept of “monster”, though – it would be nice to see more on how to make horrors, freaky aliens, etc.
Gamemastering
Chapter Seven (39 pages) is a long list of GM advice, covering all sorts of basics like roll interpretation, characters and plots, running campaigns, tactics, and a section on running games in different genres – they pitch their own like Heavy Gear in here, but also discuss generic fantasy, cyberpunk, horror, etc. (a page per genre).
OGL Conversion
Chapter Eight is a short (8 page) section on converting Silhouette characters to OGL, and is both complex and incomplete. I like d20 as much as the next guy, but I’m not really sure why someone would spend this much time converting anything from one to another; it would be easier to build whatever you wanted from scratch.
Appendices
The appendices are where all the skills, character perks and flaws, vehicle perks and flaws, and system perks and flaws are described in full.
Summary
I like Silhouette as a fast and easy RPG system. It’s much simpler than d20, but manages to keep a good level of realism and differentiation between characters, which is a nice change of pace. Making characters is enjoyable, and both personal and vehicle combat is cool. I’ve enjoyed playing in this Silhouette campaign. The lack of example equipment, vehicles, and characters is a glaring flaw, and the vehicle design system is practically unusable. Because I like playing in the game so much, I give the content a 4/5, but could see someone giving it a 3/5 or even a 2/5 if the problems affected them more. The book looks nice, but the editing and binding are awful, so I give the presentation a 2/5.
