7th Sea?

I don't suppose anyone would fancy starting a 7th Sea campaign, using the Chaosium rules? I just recently bought into the Humble Bundle that gave me several of the books, but I've never played or run it before and would love to get a feel for it before jumping in to run.

Chaosium rules? As in, it has a CoC-esque edition now?

That would be the 2e rules that Wick passed on to Chaosium once he ran of money and interest.

Ah, so just the regular 2nd edition. It seems to have a controversial reputation from a game system design point of view. It'd be interesting to see someone pull off GMing it as written and as advertised, but I suspect that's a tall order.

I’d be interested. I don’t have the books or familiarity with the rules though.

Having run it for my real life group, my advice is to keep the group small. The system seems to fail with high player count (i have a group of 6 players and we didn't gel with the system). But at a lower player count (around 3) I think it could shine

I've been looking over the rules and I think it could work. If no one else is willing, I might give GMing it a shot on here, but it will be a while, as I'd need to familiarize myself with the rules. Vicky, what is controversial about it? I hadn't heard.

Keep in mind that these are second-hand retellings of the explanations of those who have played, but I've seen players, especially veteran fans, complain about the design choices, with some approximate complaints (that I remember) being:
- The strain of needing to come up with Opportunities.
- Some scene types becoming too formulaic, especially with the combat being relatively 'flat'.
- Combat schools being worth much more than their cost would indicate (when compared to non-school ways of improving combat).
- An indecisiveness between direct-narrative-control design and classical character-centric-control design or something like that.
- Some complaints about the dice mechanics that I don't fully understand.
- Complaints about the pacing and convoluted plot enforced by the player-chosen mandatory story steps (and that if you don't follow those, parts of the system stop working, so it's not a solution).

Things that bothered me when I read parts of the game:
- Magic seems overhyped for what it does in terms of actual abilities, and not worth the trouble/price (the setting premise is fine without magic, it's just that the said vs. shown impact of magic is wildly mismatched).
- The War of the Cross seems to be of such importance for half of Théah, but there's very little information about it, so it only lets PCs sigh vaguely at past events without letting them have a meaningful and knowable/'informed' impact on their present.
- The game seems not entirely coherent about the kinds of PCs it wants to have. On one hand it seems to advertise pirates and Milady de Winter as concepts, on the other it seems to intend even milder 'dark side' stuff to cause eventual loss of your PC.

Why do you make me read things I like when I don't have time?

Thank you, Vicky and Furmyr, for the responses. As I said, I've not yet had time to explore the setting in depth, particularly the mechanics, but it's always good to know what pitfalls to watch out for.

As a GM I know it's not a system for me, if I was going to run it I'd probably replace it with roll + keep, though I wouldn't mind trying it out as a player.

If I may ask, what magnitude of 'a while' are we looking at?

Probably a month or two. I'm very busy for the next six weeks (as is everyone else, I'm sure).

All I know is that I've wanted to play it for years. My son and I signed up for a 7th Sea game run at DunDraCon six or so years ago, but only one of us got in. We decided to give up the one seat we got so that we could stick together, and I haven't had a chance to play in another game until just this year, when another game was run at KublaCon Fall just a couple of weeks ago. This time, both my son and I got in. It was 1st edition, and it was far and away the highlight of an overall good convention experience for both of us.

I, too, have the 2nd edition materials from a bundle I bought years ago, but I haven't been able to get anyone interested in it enough for me to run a game in all this time, or even to read it in preparation of possibly running a game. That may change after our experience at the con, even if it is a different set of mechanics (or I may pick up a copy of 1e, too).