Editing Pendragon (section)

==Rules==

The characters will have a large number of statistics, the core of which being their personality traits which are a set of thirteen opposing traits for things like Modest/Proud and Temperate/Indulgent. Each pair of traits will have 20 points allocated between them, almost all of them being determined by your character's culture and faith.

Then you have passions, things that drive your character such as "love for king," "love for family" and "seriously, fuck those Saxons. Next one I see I'll bash their fucking face in, I swear on me mum I will!"

You also have skills which range from the typical fighting skills like swordsmanship to more niche things like playing the lyre. Non-fighting skills are actually important for not running your estate into the ground and attracting a wife and having a happy marriage, the latter of which is important for reasons we'll get to in a minute.

You also can have magic if you have the right supplements and you can alter your culture and faith as well so you could be from Aquitaine (Southern France), Byzantine (Eastern Roman Empire successor state based modern in Greece and Turkey) and Zazamanc (basically North African Berber). There are also rules for playing a Lady of the Court (if you're not keen on playing a knight or you don't have a male heir, again, more on that in a moment) or even having faerie blood in you (which is not as fun as it sounds since fucking church bells can really screw with your character).

Each game session covers one in-game year (though sometimes you may need to do two sessions to cover that one year if you're on a particularly harrowing quest but need to stop for the night or something). The total number of sessions before the campaign is complete is about 90-100 sessions, so typically well over one year of IRL gaming. At the end of each session is the Winter Phase where your characters wine and dine with other knights and nobles, set up alliances and agreements, tend to your holdings, get married and have kids.

Because of the length of time it's expected for the game to go (right about 82 years), you're supposed to build a line of heirs to pick up and carry on the family legacy. It's fully possible to play a pagan knight under King Uther who dies, his Catholic son then taking up the family arms to try and carve out their own petty demesne before bending the knee to King Arthur, his daughter then going off to Camelot to rub shoulders with the ladies-in-waiting at court only to fall in love and marry a faerie knight and have her son become a Knight of the Round Table who goes questing with Galahad for the Holy Grail only to later see King Arthur ushered off to Avalon. That's just one path, but all sorts of crazy shit can crop that can make all that change.

The whole system is also based on a simple [[Roll under|roll-under]] mechanic for any of your traits and usually opposed rolls for your skills. It's not hard though the character sheet and rulebook could do more to make things look a little easier, especially when it comes to contested rolls or special maneuvers. 

If you don’t like your chances, you can call on one of your passions and make a roll testing on said passion. You get a nifty bonus if you succeed, a hefty bonus if you [[Critical|crit]] (doubled effective skill!), and a slight penalty if you fail. This is why having strong passions is almost always worth it, even if they sometimes drive you to do unwise things.

Another nice quirk of a system for the roll-under mechanic is that you not only want to roll under your skill/passion, but also get as close to the number listed as possible (preferably even rolling the number listed) and doing so is the way they do criticals. This means that as you gain glory and go through the numerous winter phases and your skills and passions increase and decrease, so to does your critical roll number. You can theoretically get a scale over 20, meaning you will automatically succeed on all non-contested rolls and instead rule to see if you crit, with the skill-20 being the new crit range; this is, to put it mildly, extremely difficult and luck based for player characters, but beware of the NPCs that have 40s.

Magic(only in the fourth edition it had actual mechanics) was... Problematic, to say the least. Evocative, faithful to the source, perfect for the setting... But that was the problem. Why? Because, to cast a spell without problems, you had to prepare for *weeks*. And the spell was cast at the end of those weeks. The "common" casting method involved, instead, an average ritual of two hours, followed by the spell, after which you had to sleep for weeks or suffer accelerated aging. So, do you see? Magic was too perfect for the setting, running the risk of turning the PC magician into almost a NPC that went in and out of the game. Concerning spells themselves, they involved average, "mythical" effects, like enhanced healing, foretelling, illusions and conjurations. Still, awesome for the setting, giving magicians an interesting style, that prevented them from turning into living artillery. Luckily(or not), in every other edition they decided to give magic only to the DM, turning it completely into a plot device to use sparingly.