Ethos
Dumnonni Ethos
The game is in essence about interaction between characters, the people of the game-world. It is about narrative and action.
We want this action to be governed by three guiding principles:
1. Drama: It should look good.
2. Pathos: It should effect you emotionally.
3. Jeopardy: There must be real risk of failure.
The skill of crew and players as actors is largely responsible for ensuring the first two; drama and pathos are created through improvisation. The third, jeopardy, is harder to determine or resolve by improvisation alone: How do I know whether I will succeed at this task? Who wins the contest? Will they beat me? And so on. Because of this we have a framework of game rules to provide guidance in resolving such questions.
The Dumnonni game system has developed over a long period and is rules-lite compared to many other systems. Our goal is simply to have just enough rules to enable players to understand what their character is capable of, and to allow contests to be resolved, but not so many rules that the game-mechanics get in the way of the heroic story.
Our rules take as their guiding principles an excellent German system, which has only three rules:
1. If you can do it then you can do it.
2. If you do something to someone, be it hitting them with a sword or casting a spell at them, you should expect them to react, but should not expect or know what their reaction will be.
3. If someone does something to you it is your responsibility to react appropriately.
The areas where we feel it necessary to expand upon this, and provide more developed rules as mechanisms to allow the judging of success or failure, are combat and Wyrd use.
Player character sheet form is here.
Please take a moment to read our Conduct Policy.
