Experience and opinions of Cubicle 7 releases?

czernebog · Post by **czernebog** » Sat Jul 11, 2015 10:01 am

I leafed through Yggdrasill and Qin at a Cubicle 7 convention booth a couple of years ago, and I've remained curious about them since. Does anyone have actual experience with or more concrete opinions of either game?

Both games appeared to bake the flavor of their setting into their mechanics, and I thought they might serve as reasonable examples of doing that right. Qin had a yin/yang-themed 2-die RNG I would describe as... interesting, so I'm not that confident in either game's mechanical soundness. Wikipedia says that they're translations of games originally published by Le Septième Cercle, and I don't have a general impression of their reputation.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Jul 11, 2015 12:29 pm

Huh. A 2-die yin-yang engine could be really interesting. I have no clue how Qin does it, but I could see something like splitting actions into Yin and Yang actions, like, when you attack the Yin die is dominant, and when you Diplomance the Yang die is dominant. You'd have to make people care about die dominance though, so I could see either a die size purchasing system, or having segregated modifiers or something.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Sat Jul 11, 2015 12:57 pm

My only experience with Cubicle 7 is the Laundry RPG. High production values on the books, solid art and writing; the only real thing that marred the thing was the insistence on using a variation of BRP.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jul 11, 2015 1:05 pm

The Yin/Yang dice are that your result is the difference between the dice. And doubles are counted as critical success. So you have an 18% chance of getting a 1, a 16% chance of getting a 2, and so on down to a 2% chance of getting a 9, and then a 10% chance of getting a critical success. I can't recall there being any purpose in the dice actually being different colors. I think that was just a gimmick.

-Username17

silva · Post by **silva** » Sat Jul 11, 2015 3:32 pm

I have Qin here but could never play it. I agree its rules are pretty thematic and evocative of the setting, even if I don't remember the details exactly. I've heard good things about Ygg.

Take a look at The One Ring by Cubicle 7 too. Its considered the best translation of the Hobbit into a role playing game (tip: there are no "mages"). And its beautiful too.

And while we are on the topic of heavily thematic games, may I recommend Pendragon from Greg Stafford ? Its a neat little game, with rules that perfectly capture the Arthurian legends. (tip: there are no player mages too)

czernebog · Post by **czernebog** » Mon Jul 13, 2015 3:33 am

Thanks to all for the input. It sounds like it might be worth picking up one or both of these core rulebooks, if for no other reason than the high production values and to pick them over for good ideas. The price of both has dropped recently, and it would be fun to come out of lurking mode and write a Den-style system breakdown.

It's not super-hard to reason about the numbers that Qin's RNG will produce, but, from the notes I scribbled down while looking at it in the PAX East booth, the numbers it produces are rather different than what you get from a flat or variable-sized dice pool RNG. Like with a flat RNG, the variance of Qin's RNG doesn't change with the skill level of the characters who are rolling, and, like a dice pool RNG, there is a nonlinear relationship between the difference between your skill level and your opponent's skill level and your chance of success.

My current notes say that you critically fail if you roll two of one particular value (0 or 10, IIRC), and other double rolls is a critical success. (This is supposed to represent how supreme perfection is attained from having Yin and Yang in balance.) If two characters roll critical successes, the one who rolled higher numbers wins. If you don't roll two of the same value, I believe you add the absolute value of the difference between the dice to a skill number, which is generally in the range of 1 to 10. So you're far more likely to roll some form of critical success than to add 8 or 9 to your base skill.

If these old notes and memories on how skill resolution is done are right, then the outcome probabilities look something like this, for various spreads between two characters' skill levels and assuming that non-critical numerical ties are not broken by comparing skill numbers:


Player 1 skill	Player 2 skill	Player 1 win chance	Player 2 win chance	Tie chance	Change in player 1 win chance
1	10	9.45%	90.45%	0.1%	n/a
2	10	9.45%	90.09%	0.46%	0.00%
3	10	9.81%	89.05%	1.14%	0.36%
4	10	10.85%	87.05%	2.10%	1.04%
5	10	12.85%	83.85%	3.30%	2.00%
6	10	16.05%	79.25%	4.70%	3.20%
7	10	20.65%	73.09%	6.26%	4.60%
8	10	26.81%	65.25%	7.94%	6.16%
9	10	34.65%	55.65%	9.70%	7.84%
10	10	44.25%	44.25%	11.5%	9.60%

IOW, as long as your opponent's skill is at least 6 more than yours, your chances of success hover around 10%. Compared to a flat 1d10 without these critical successes or failures, this gives a massive boost to minimally skilled characters. Without the actual rulebook in hand, I can't say if this is intentionally encouraging players to focus to boost a few skills as high as possible and leave the others within 5 points of whatever the opposition is packing. Also, it threatens the problematic situation that a teenage peasant is going to have a 10% chance of besting Guan Yu at arm wrestling --- but again, I'll have to acquire an actual rulebook to be able to make such assertions.