Player: The 7th Sea Rules Oops!

Though I haven't been GMing, we have been gaming. We're playing 7th Sea, which my husband GMs and which I absolutely loooooooove!!! We've been playing this particular system for 12 years, but it seems like we're constantly learning something new about the rules. Or, re-learning something old. That's where we are right now.

Recently, we realized that somehow, through the years, we've gotten away from one of the most important system rule. As a result, many of our characters are way overpowered with regards to their skill knacks. When he mentioned it to me, I sort of freaked. We were going to have to re-work dozens (and eventually hundreds) of characters. Writing characters isn't my favorite thing, so rewriting them isn't going to be either.

You see, there's a rule that states that you can use the dots from a skill knack, plus only three dots from the same knack under a different skill. So, if, say, my character Evita has five dots in stealth from Criminal, four dots in stealth from Guide, and three dots in stealth from Spy, she could only use the first five from the Criminal skill and up to three from one other place. So, three from either Guide or from Spy, but not both.

Right now, though, we've been using all of them. It made our characters über at pretty much whatever they did, it raised the target numbers to an unreasonable level, and made it harder on the GM. But, in my opinion, characters did feel appropriately heroic, which is sort of the point of the game. Matt, however, has decided that we're going back to the game rules on that particular issue--we do have some house rules that change the way we use the basic rule set, but not many. I fought it, of course, but I'm starting to come around.

With everything scaled down, and it is substantially so, the characters still feel epic, the game is sped up substantially because we're not counting an ungodly number of knack dots, and everything's still running pretty smoothly. Still, this is the first time we've found something we screwed up that affected so many of our characters. Normally, they're small things, like the number of drama dice that can be taken as experience. This, though, wasn't small. Isn't small. But, I think I'll manage and eventually I'll get used to it.

The only really big problem I have is that scaling back this way means we're basically capping characters. You can only advance so far before you run out of things to spend experience on. Though the system doesn't purport to have a cap, this rule creates what I'm calling a "glass cap."  Just because we can't see it right away, and just because the rules don't explicitly say it's there, doesn't mean it isn't. Rather, it's an invisible wall you hit when you run out of places to go that make sense. That's the part the really bothers me. Caps are not my friend. I dislike them in every system, this one particularly so because I enjoy it so much.

So, that's where we are now. We're playing characters we enjoy, working off the system rules in their proper order, and the games have been amazingly fun. My husband is a really great GM. I'm off for now, but if you play 7th Sea, check out my 7th Sea website: http://project7thsea.electronicescape.com and let me know what you think.

So what about you? How does your group use house rules? Does your GM give you a say in the creation of house rules? I'd love to hear!