Simple AGE for the Old Age

If you are going out to buy the latest edition of the Engine magazine #3 you will find articles about a small experiment in the AGE families of systems. This new one is called SAGE and stands for "simple adventure game engine". The fastest way to get to the parts and existing AGE enthusiast is to flip to the last article which is a conversion guide between AGE and SAGE. Here are some of the main conversions you might be interested and some of the critiques I have for the developers choices.

Bonds Instead of Relationships, Class Theme, and Specializations

The new element in SAGE "bonds". It uses the same mechanics as seen in FAGE 2e Modern AGE with ranks and wordy themes. I think the developers liked that it represented a small boost of resources that can be spent to improve outcome. What bonds are in SAGE do are basically an additional pool of fortune points. Each bond has a rank and number. You can spend a bond point to create a fortune point to be added back to your total fortune pool or stunt point to be used that turn. Bond points are recovered fully after each encounter. As a limited resource I think bonds will be not commonly used.  While bond points are fully recovered each encounter it might be either forgotten unless a dire situation or power gamed so that all your bonds and their points are exhausted.

In the conversion guide talents and specializations are converted to bonds. I think talents are not good for bonds. They are much more mechanical and used on each turn to modify an action. Talents should be converted into abilities and talked about in the next section. While specializations have similar mechanics they have much more thematic elements to them. Classes are not mentioned in the guide, probably lost in level conversion (which is one to one). Classes also have a large thematic component and some mechanical aspects during progression. Since specializations are locked to classes one should extract the thematic elements of both into a single bond.

Abilities Instead of Abilities, Focuses, Class Combat, and Talents

The first conversion is on abilities and focuses. SAGE has an opposite approach two stats that AGE in the following way. AGE has several general categories called abilities and many sub-categories called focuses which you added together when performing an action related to a focus. SAGE does the opposite where you only have several more specific "abilities" which are more like focuses. In addition to the focus I also thing that talents and combat elements of classes and specializations belong here. Those parts commonly improve rolls and outcomes in every turn and not intermittently like bonds would be used. Therefore the most commonly used mechanics should be in the ability category. Using this direction we can put the mechanical elements of talents, specialization, and classes into one or more abilities.

In SAGE an ability is equivalent to an AGE ability plus focus. A SAGE ability is narrower like a focus. SAGE also has an optional rule called "partial abilities" where you can half your SAGE ability score to use in a related way. So both ways have a two tiered ideal of general and specific components.

Health and Combat

Health or Fortune is straight forward and is based on level fundamentally. Level between system is suppose to be 1 to 1. Combat is not as straight forward. The conversion guide only mentions weapons and not spells. It says reduce damage by 1d6 which ends up replacing dagger 1d6 with outcome 1d6. A long sword then is 1d6 outcome plus 1d6 weapon. A bit weird. I think there might be an error in this part of the system in that AGE had a 2 to 1 HP to STR type of relationship. The fortune part of the rule means you can improve 1 fortune for 1 damage but it should have been 2 damage. I think there will be some balance issues here.

Wrap Up

I have more ideas. Next I'll have a full conversion guide using these ideas with examples. I'll also fix some of the progression parts of SAGE related to the re-grouping I have done here as well.