Return to the Weird West… and RAGE

Now that my classes are finished for the semester (I just have to plow through all the marking!) I'm thinking about getting our Weird West campaign back on track again. I made a new DM's screen yesterday and while thinking about what info I want to put on the inside, in a relatively small amount of space. I want some artwork on MY side of the screen, so even more incentive to keep things brief.

I've also ordered a bunch of unopened packs of RAGE cards! RAGE is the World of Darkness Werewolf themed CCG and one of my favourite examples of great RPG design… even though it's not technically an RPG. It does an excellent job of presenting the rules and info in a concise, visually appealing manner and can create some fun emergent narratives if you have the players explain how each new card adds to the story.

With both of these things in mind I'm thinking about updates to the rules we're using to make things more efficient and bring in some of the new ideas I've had over the last year.

For example the original Monk was it's own character class. Now I'm thinking it's an option that gets added to one of the base classes instead.

Martial Artist: No weapons. Fighting: +2 levels. Unarmed Combat: d4

This actually fits better with my original Knights of Cydonia concept a bit better as well.

Instead of listing all this other stuff that rarely gets used I'll take that space to better present the unarmed fighting rules - which apply to all characters.

Non-lethal Combat: Half stamina loss is temporary and regained after the fight. The target is knocked unconscious when reduced to 0 stamina.

Unarmed Combat: d2. If damage is more than half of remaining stamina, the defender is stunned and loses their next action. A stunned target hit by another attack is knocked unconscious for 1d4 rounds.

Jesse the Huck Finn style "kid" character's slingshot would use the non-lethal combat rules. I was always a bit uneasy about how we were using regular attack and damage rolls for that before.

This is all concise enough to fit on RAGE style cards now, including artwork, which I like very much… :)