Editing 7th Sea (section)

==Edition History==
7th Sea was released in 1999 by Alderac Entertainment Group. The game used a [[d10]] system designed by Rob Vaux, John Wick, Jennifer Wick, and Kevin Wilson. It would win the Origins' ''Best Roleplaying Game of 1999'' and met with some initial success. An updated core book was released in 2005 that changed the game to a [[d20]] system. The [http://www.alderac.com/7thsea/resources/7thsea_compendium.pdf 7th Sea Compendium] is a free pdf for the revised edition of the game maintained on Alderac's site. This is intended to allow players with the first edition book to play the revised edition.

A large number of supplements were released for both editions. The main lines for these supplements were nation books and secret society books, each detailing a specific nation or non-governmental organization of Theah. Seven quest modules were also released for first edition, while revised edition got a collected adventure book.

Second edition was [http://johnwickpresents.com/updates/a-special-jwp-announcement/ announced] November 2015 and the [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnwickpresents/7th-sea-second-edition/ kickstarter] was successfully funded in March 2016. The [[kickstarter]] raised $1,316,813 and is the most backed RPG on kickstarter ever, both in terms of number of backers and funds raised. Core rules were due for release in October 2016, but actually released in ''June'', [[awesome| ''ahead'']] of schedule, with eleven sourcebooks scheduled for regular release dates after that.

Unfortunately, on November 5th, 2018, John Wick announced to the Kickstarter backers that the entire staff of JWP had to be laid off due to financial difficulties for the company. JWP was, for all intents and purposes, now a one man show. John promised to continue working on the remaining sourcebooks still out for writing/production, but the already delayed splats for Second Edition were caught in limbo for months, until Chaosium publishing bought up the line and hired him on as lead writer.

===Rules System and Notable Changes===
Resolution is accomplished via a "roll and keep" [[dice pool]] system that would be very familiar to fans of ''[[Legend of the Five Rings]]'', rolling stat + skill + miscellaneous modifier, and keeping stat for most basic checks, with 10s [[Exploding die| exploding]].  As in ''L5R'', weapon damage is calculated according to weapon, adding a number of dice equal to the Brawn stat to the weapon's native pool of damage dice and keeping a number of dice specific to each weapon.  Most weapons keep two, including most "fencing weapons," with large weapons and firearms keeping three, and small and concealable weapons keeping one.  "Raises" can be called to increase the target number by increments of 5 each to achieve additional effects, like unkept damage dice, and some abilities, advantages, and schools offer "free raises" which can either lower target numbers by five per or to add additional effects without increasing the TN.

The original edition had some novel ideas for preventing [[Linear Build Quadratic EXP| the traditional pitfalls of its system]], such as having advanced knacks be more expensive at character creation and cheaper afterwards, otherwise keeping similar pay-tables for purchasing later on, and having ''all'' five stats be important to combat, to prevent [[Dump stat| picking one you don't care about and ignoring it to have more points to spend on the rest]].  It wasn't perfect, and it still had many built-in perverse incentives, but it was a damn sight better than anything that's ever used [[White Wolf| the Storyteller system]].

Brawn was needed for making Wound checks and damage rolls (most weapons are melee weapons or don't let stats affect damage rolls, like firearms and bows, and even the rare exception, the Goodfellow archery school, still uses Brawn), Finesse governs all to-hit rolls, Resolve was needed for having a high pool of Dramatic Wounds and resisting Repartee, Fear, poison, and various mind-affecting sorceries, Wits was needed for all ''defense'' rolls and passive defenses, and Panache granted an action each round per point.

However, by far the biggest problem was the Drama Die system, whereby all XP-equivalents were earned at a very slow rate in a byzantine and confusing system, could be destroyed by enemy maneuvers, and were needed for extra dice on important rolls.  And the GM gets a huge pool of them to fuck with the players each session, while the players' come back the honest way (read: hard and slow).  Also, because you always roll stat + skill but keep stat, high stats break the game, and the system does tend to fall apart at high levels of play, while at low levels of play the cost of sorcery or a swordsman school in this supposed "swashbuckling and sorcery" setting were brutally high, particularly given how weak and useless many sorceries feel "out of the box," and the starting character points are ''very'' stingy, all-but forcing players to ignore the "positive" Arcana they had to spend points for and instead gain points by taking a "negative" Hubris, which the books, written from a bit of an old-school mindset, instruct the GM to exploit via that huge pool of free Drama Dice to fuck with the players constantly.

It was also, for better or worse, a [[dice pool]] game, and like all dice pool games task resolution was very random.  Starting characters feel weak and useless, high-level characters break the game once they start keeping more and more dice.

Later, like most RPG properties of the 90's, it received a mediocre d20 adaptation in the 2000's, under the "Swashbuckling Adventures" label.  It wasn't ''awful'', but it wasn't great either, and large portions of it didn't have much input from the original creators.  Notably, the setting/secret society books for Cathay, NOM, and the Sidhe were both published under this label, while including rules for both the d20 and original systems.

The second edition keeps the five main Traits, trims skills down to just 16 total (as a start, expect more later), and reuses the Trait+Skill system.  Past this point, it diverges heavily.  The new system tries for a more 'storytelling' flavor, so it disposes of the older "roll X keep Y" system altogether, and bases everything off a 'raise'.  Raises are calculated by choosing your Trait+Skill pairing, rolling all the dice associated, and then grouping them up to get a total of 10 (or more) for it to count as a single raise.  Raises are then spent to perform an action of some sort.  The GM is expected to give you some idea of what to spend raises on though.

A simplified flow of play boils down to:
# The GM states the issue and fleshes out things a bit: "It's a dining room, with a large table in the middle, overhung by a chandelier held up by a rope tied to a hook nearby.  The rugs and hanging tapestries are engulfed in flame.  There is a small desk near the door in the back, with several papers on it that are beginning to smolder.  You need a raise to get across the room, two raises to avoid any damage from the flames (2 wounds total, 1 per raise), and one raise if you want to grab the papers on the way out the door."
# The player(s) pick how they want to approach the solution: "I want to roll finesse (3) and athletics (3).  I rolled 10, 9, 8, 7, 5 and 1, so that's (10),(9+5+1) and (8+7) so 3 raises total.  I want to spend one on crossing the room, one on not taking damage, and one on grabbing the papers."
# The GM can accept that, or add extra restrictions depending on events, and provides the player an opportunity to narrate: "Alright, how does it happen?"
# The player details their action: "Marcel sprints to the rope tied to the wall, grabbing it and slashing it free from the wall.  The chandelier crashes to the table, yanking Marcel into the air on the end of the rope.  He swings, landing on the edge of the tabletop and has to roll off it, through the wreckage of the chandelier to come to his feet by the desk.   A quick swipe of his hand and he and the papers are through the door and away from the flames, wincing from the burns from the roll."
# The GM closes up the scene, and/or sets up for the next one: "Works for me.  You spend a moment slapping your smoldering clothing with your hands, then another moment slapping the now smoldering papers, before noticing the signature of Cardinal Incensio on the bottom of a letter."  'What's the Inquisition doing writing to a nobody Vendel merchant?' "Good question...what do you want to do about it?"

Another notable change is that sword schools have dropped the leveling system they had, instead once you have the school, you get all the associated maneuvers all at once (and so far they're not the mix of useful, okay and OMGWTFBROKEN that the old system had).  Similarly, magic is now (usually) a system of "pick 2 abilities, and get given one drawback/geas" per point of sorcery.  You can still be a pretty little butterfly-sue, but the setting is far more grimbright then the old system.  An example: You can still play your Eisen noble knight with all the drakeneisen bling, but be aware that it's irreplaceable, is only really helpful against monsters and undead, and marks you as a target by everyone from the Eisenfursten princes down through to the good-guy 'Die Kreutzritter' monster-hunters (who will 'politely' get you to give up the weapons or join until death parts you from said drakeneisen, provided you will said drakeneisen to the society).