Nuclear Beasts

The Shadow of Yesterday

Been looking over the rules for The Shadow of Yesterday. A fairly nice ruleset, very rules-light and very "all areas of expertise are equal", much like Dogs in the Vineyard. A few thoughts...

• Too much metagame stuff for my taste. The gift dice, for example, are a cute mechanic, but they're entirely player driven. If you're acting in character, you'll never use them because your character is unaware that they exist.
• "All areas equal" is a nice design goal, but too prone to abuse for my group. I'd need definite guidelines for stuff like how hard it is to use "Sway" to convince a foe to, say, 1) Stop hitting me, 2) Hit someone else instead, or 3) Commit suicide.
• Too narrow of a result range? That I'm not sure about. It has two ways of applying bonuses... boosting the total of the roll or giving you extra dice. Since you only use the 2 highest dice, there's a tradeoff there... the more bonus dice you already have, the less benefit you'll see.
• Limited advancement. Linear advancement limited only by automatically retiring a character if they ever roll a 22+? Ugh. Might as well play D&D and automatically retire folks when they hit 20th level.
• Haphazard advancement. I dunno, the whole "if your character doesn't care about what he's doing he won't get better at stuff" mechanism just turns me off. I think Riddle of Steel did this too, but there you could also use the Key for a bonus. I'd rather see characters who were better at things that they cared about than ones who got better at unrelated things because they were "being true to themselves". Apparently, getting players to actually stick to their character's motivations is a big problem in many groups, but I tend to end up with groups where staying in character is the norm. I might ought to try it at some point, though... just to see if any noticable improvements appear.
• Treating all forms of damage as almost the same. Dunno. I'd have to see this in play. What pool you can spend to better "soak" the effects of damage will vary according to the type, but your basic rating won't. I suppose you could have Secrets like "Durable: +1 to Stay Up vs Physical Harm" but it might be better to have 3 ratings... I'm not sure.
• I might be able to steal some magic system ideas, though.