I don't really want to steer this too heavily toward effective systems for a Wheel of Time game, not because I wouldn't like to, but because I feel that on some level it's disrespectful toward readers who aren't familiar with tabletop role-playing games. From what I've gathered, this message board is more or less intended to be about theories and discussions that everyone who has read the wheel of time novels can participate in.

With that being said, however, there is a Wheel of Time d20 supplement out on the market. I'll use that as the basis for some of my explanations and leave the system discussion to this post and this post alone.

While I agree that your typical d20 system isn't fit to contain the Wheel of Time, I wouldn't discount the d20 system entirely. My friends and I have heavily revised and overhauled the d20 system by marrying concepts from additional supplements such as Big Eyes Small Mouth, The Black Company, Mutants and Masterminds, A Game of Thrones, The Generic Universal Role-Playing System, Blood and Fist (a lesser known d20 martial arts supplement), d20 Modern and D&D 4th Edition.

The trouble is picking the parts of the aforementioned systems that I want to keep and working to create something that holds to continuity. Essentially, I am working to build a system around the Wheel of Time using some of the basic frameworks provided by anything and everything that is d20, rather than attempting to cram the world of the wheel into a system that can't contain it.

I have never taken a look at Ars Magica, but I'm certainly interested in anything and everything that will give me ideas. As it stands, a great many of the issues that you and others have brought up, such as shock values, the codified nature of spells and a slew of other things have already been addressed and corrected. There are a surprising number of fascinating mechanics that work to implement solutions to these factors effectively in a d20 game.

I played Legend of the Five Rings for a while, but I didn't overly enjoy it. It was sweet and simple and the elemental theme was sort of neat, but the mountains of ten sided dice, the endless tallying of numbers and the limited selection of skills was all sort of a turn off for me. On a side note, my gaming group has adopted the term "explosion" (when a player rolls the highest possible result on multi-sided die and is rewarded by rolling it again and adding that number to the total) from that game setting and have made efforts to implement it into some of our current games.

If you or anyone else would like to take a look at some of the ideas I'm developing -- or if anyone feels that they have valuable input regarding tabletop role-playing and the wheel of time, you can feel free to contact me at the following e-mail address:

agelesspattern@aol.com


Thanks!