Geeking Out: The Accelerant Ruleset

I had a serious geek out moment yesterday. I was speaking with the author of another larp blog about a game system and he pointed me in the direction of the online ruleset. I read over it and found that it was amazing, easily the best boffer larp set that I have ever seen. The core rules and effects fit neatly into 28 pages of text. The math is simple and the flavor potential is huge. I love the Accelerant rules set. I am going to go ahead and post the link and then I will look at a few of the things that make it so great.

The first thing I must dispense with is the question I will get, why is the book 179 pages long when you said the rules fit into 28 pages? The answer is that all of the core effects and combat mechanics fit into 28 pages, the rest of the book is fluff specific to the system that I linked. The limited number of effects might seem to some NERO lags as a detriment, I am here to tell you it is not. Having as many takedowns and durations as NERO is a mistake. It heightens the learning curve of the game for vitually identical effects. In the Accelerant system, you can be Drained by fire, or drained by law, these are both drain effects with different roleplay. The fact that the effect and the cure remains the same but the flavor can change even more than in NERO is probably my favorite part about this system.

Low math is probably one of the greatest concepts that has come about ins some recent boffer larp systems. In the past the math for combat has always been fairly high, characters in NERO regularly swing 10s or 20s. In a low math game all swings are for 1s except for special attacks. The Accelerant system is low math, vitality stays fairly low even in more powerful characters, which serves to make combat more dynamic. People are up and down more, more of the combat is decided by special skill use and many of the skills that are used are refreshable after combat. This type of system has several benefits, the lower math makes it far easier to keep track of health and conditions. 5 vitality and 4 armor is far easier to keep track of than 50 body and 40 armor. The refreshable skills allows for a different sort of scaling, a damage over time scaling rather than a total effect scaling. Because a character does not have a hard limit on healing and curative effects, the limiting factor for plot becomes how often players are attacked rather than how many takedowns the NPCs have. This allows for a more action packed game and a simpler feel, faster respawsn and more frequent battles = harder.

This system is very customizable, as you can see from the Madrigal ruleset a great number of classes and spells can be created using the effect,flavor system laid out. These classes can be similar but have a totally different feel based on the flavor of the effects that they use. The same is true of both NPCs and traps. NERO and the other big larp systems tend to have a fairly large number of effects but a small degree of flavor, in this system the reverse is true.

With the combination of simple math, limited effects, a simpler scaling system and great flavor, I believe this ruleset would lend itself to running amazing games. Oh and the best part, apparently the cost is significantly lower than the royalty based cost of NERO international. If I were going to start a new campaign or convert an old campaign to new rules, this would be on my shortlist of rule systems to consider.

Please read through the rules, let me know what you think!

Edit: Tim posted a link to the Madrigal Ruleset, which includes the Accelerant rules as well as their own stuff. To view just the Accelerant rules, follow this link.