I searched the forums and found nothing about it (which means either nobody ever mentioned it in any thread, or there's a problem with the search).
Anyway, the purpose of this post is to find out:
1) What kind of experience anyone here already has with the system.
2) What interest is there in running/playing something in this system here, either on play-by-post or real time chat/tabletop/whatever. Of which I may or may not be the GM, depending on how confident I feel about it and if I can find a
suckermore experienced Game Master.
3) What would you like to know about the system (I have browsed the book, not to huge detail but I think I kinda understand the basics, plus I can point to a couple other places with nice summary of the rules and actual play reports).
Either way, I think I'll start with the basics. In my own words.
What is Spirit of the Century?It's an RPG game, based on Fudge, using the FATE 3.0 rules (which don't yet exist in generic form but will someday). It uses the resolution system of Fudge, which assigns to skills values such as Good or Legendary and uses 4dF (basically d3 labelled 0, +1 and -1) to find out how well you did an action.
The setting is about pulp heroes, greater than life people like Indiana Jones or something, which are at the peak of their abilities (so no "leveling up"), which are born in a special day (in 1901, I think) and are the stars of pulp novels like "Doctor Maximus and the Octopus from Outer Space". Character creation is... interesting.
It uses "aspects", of which each hero has 10, which act both as advantages and as hooks to get the character in trouble. You spend FATE points in invoking an aspect to your advantage, or are compelled to do an action by the GM (thus gaining a FATE point, unless you spend one instead being a party-pooper and avoid the situation). Also there's Stunts, which I guess could be called "super-abilities" of some sort. You get 5.
There's a SRD
here, which is basically the entire book but with all the specific examples removed. So you don't get to read the little excerpts like "John has a shooting skill of Good, and tries to hit Ron with a pistol, and rolls the dice and blah blah blah" which, granted, make the whole thing easier to understand.
So you won't read this:
Example: Jet has the aspect “Motorhead”, which he’s explained to the
GM means that Jet has a fascination with engines, which can help him
do better when he’s working on engines, but also means that he can
become fascinated to the point of ignoring other things. Jet’s looking at a
new engine when an ambush drops on him and the group. Normally, Jet
would roll Alertness to try to avoid surprise, but the GM pushes forward
a fate point and says “Jet’s a Motorhead – I’m not sure he’s gonna notice
the ambush until it’s too late.” Jet’s player can now choose whether to
take the fate point – in which case Jet doesn’t roll Alertness, he’s simply
assumed to fail the roll – or spend a fate point, pulling himself out of the
engine and getting a chance to avoid surprise with an Alertness roll.