and how did anyone see Vampire as a leap forward, anyway
I guess I could try to gove an answer, maybe (and I ain't even a Vampire - The Masturbation player). It had, for its time, some fresh mechanics, although they were, shall we say, not NEARLY as flawless as some say.
I think all variants of the StoryTeller system does. CthulhuTECH has the interesting property that exactly half of your skill increases will (almost) double your chance of a critical failure.
In one of my (yet-to-be-finished) pen&paper RPGs, there's a dice pool system that doesn't have that drawback. It may have others, but as far as I can tell it makes you more likely to succeed as your dice pool expands. It does, however, not HAVE ctiticals of any kind (although, in general, failure will lead to a MASSIVE loss of hit points and maybe death, so I guess all failures are critical in that sense).
Nope. Revised Storyteller has botches on at least one 1 and no successes, and also fixed target numbers (otherwise botches still become more likely with more dice if the target number is high enough), and the new system's got "dramatic failures" but nothing tells me what the mechanic is there.
Aha! They've actually run the numbers, then! CthulhuTECH has botches if "half or more of your d10 (rounded up) is 1", so going from d10 to 2d10 takes crits from 10% to 19% (similarly for each odd n to n+1 dice).
I obviously half-remembered this conversation because I just read CthulhuTech and had a look-see for this post to mention it as a followup to our conversation about Vampire.
The CT system does better than that; a Critical Failure can also be a success. With enough dice, a Critical Failure can even also be a Critical Success.
They seem to have been inspired by Vampire's wrong-headedness all over the shop: a wanky name for the gamesmaster, five levels of skill proficiency agonisingly described for each skill in case you haven't caught on that 1 is minimal proficiency and 5 is superb (and, ha, some bags on the side for skills that don't work like that), each character has two descriptive words (in this case a Virtue and Flaw that are _totally disconnected_ from the formal advantages and disadvantages system), general aura of teenage emo...
... and frankly they seem to have missed the point completely. A mashup of everything from Lovecraft to _Evangelion_ is going to be extremely hard to take seriously, so why try? If you want Call of Cthulhu, try Call of Cthulhu - the whole lingering menace and hopelessness is a lot easier to convey if you don't have giant robots! I wanted _Gekiganger III_ and the big C whaling the crap out of each other with beam sabres.
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I guess I could try to gove an answer, maybe (and I ain't even a Vampire - The Masturbation player). It had, for its time, some fresh mechanics, although they were, shall we say, not NEARLY as flawless as some say.
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In one of my (yet-to-be-finished) pen&paper RPGs, there's a dice pool system that doesn't have that drawback. It may have others, but as far as I can tell it makes you more likely to succeed as your dice pool expands. It does, however, not HAVE ctiticals of any kind (although, in general, failure will lead to a MASSIVE loss of hit points and maybe death, so I guess all failures are critical in that sense).
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The CT system does better than that; a Critical Failure can also be a success. With enough dice, a Critical Failure can even also be a Critical Success.
They seem to have been inspired by Vampire's wrong-headedness all over the shop: a wanky name for the gamesmaster, five levels of skill proficiency agonisingly described for each skill in case you haven't caught on that 1 is minimal proficiency and 5 is superb (and, ha, some bags on the side for skills that don't work like that), each character has two descriptive words (in this case a Virtue and Flaw that are _totally disconnected_ from the formal advantages and disadvantages system), general aura of teenage emo...
... and frankly they seem to have missed the point completely. A mashup of everything from Lovecraft to _Evangelion_ is going to be extremely hard to take seriously, so why try? If you want Call of Cthulhu, try Call of Cthulhu - the whole lingering menace and hopelessness is a lot easier to convey if you don't have giant robots! I wanted _Gekiganger III_ and the big C whaling the crap out of each other with beam sabres.
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Also:
The very easy to learn rules-light system ... will have you playing the game with friends only fifteen minutes after opening the book.
Only if you can resist the temptation to read all the WORDS in it first.