|
How is your Attack VS AC math working out? I remember starting work on a unified system like this once but I got distracted years ago.
|
#
?
May 8, 2013 21:16
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 1, 2024 01:29 |
|
|
Rulebook Heavily posted:How is your Attack VS AC math working out? I remember starting work on a unified system like this once but I got distracted years ago. The idea is that an 'average' stat of 11 vs an AC0 opponent (AC9 in B/X) has the same to-hit chance as an L1 Basic character, with the enemy's AC acting as a negative modifier to the stat/target number. I'm using a stat-rolling system of 7+1d6, with +2 to the class's main stat and a -1 penalty to one other at startup. So to begin with, a fighter with 15 STR hits 75% of the time against an unarmoured enemy; possibly a bit high, but I'm still working on the numbers.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2013 22:19
|
|
|
Payndz, that sounds pretty neat. I hope you post your rules when you've finished testing them. With the Fighter's cleave thing, have you ever considered letting a fighter's overkill damage carry onto the next adjacent creature automatically? It might throw stuff out of whack since the b/x fighter is already pretty good, but it worked ok when we houseruled it into 2e. Edit: To clarify, if the fighter's fighting 4 creatures with 4hp each and they're all adjacent, in our game he'd roll to hit once. If he rolled <=4 damage, he hits one creature. If he'd rolled 9 damage, he'd kill the first two creatures and deal 1 damage to the third one. We found that by the time the fighter is regularly able to kill 2 orcs at once with this system, 2 orcs aren't causing him problems anyway. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 04:25 on May 9, 2013 |
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 04:22
|
|
|
Maybe instead of basic combat maneuvers, you can tie maneuvers to weapons. So axes have Cleave, spears have Set Spear (versus charging and incoming foes), Maces have Smash (which in RC rules is a big penalty to attack in exchange for adding your strength score to damage) and so on. Then warriors can just carry a bunch and switch as required, and maybe later learn them permanently so they end up using Smash and Cleave with any weapon they want. It's more exciting than "1-6 damage" at least in terms of weapon stats.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 04:47
|
|
|
AlphaDog posted:Payndz, that sounds pretty neat. I hope you post your rules when you've finished testing them. There's a rule in the 2e DMG (optional) that says fighters can get their level in number of attacks vs creatures under 1hd. So a 7th level fighter surrounded by kobolds can take 7 whacks, plus whatever other bonuses he'd get from specialization/dual wielding/level. I like that idea though. It makes big fat 2handers a bit more usable when compared with dual wielding.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 05:01
|
|
|
Ravendas posted:There's a rule in the 2e DMG (optional) that says fighters can get their level in number of attacks vs creatures under 1hd. So a 7th level fighter surrounded by kobolds can take 7 whacks, plus whatever other bonuses he'd get from specialization/dual wielding/level. I don't like that rule, since it makes gnolls suddenly hugely more dangerous than orcs, despite only being one HD larger. I like the ACKS solution pretty well, though--fighter types get a number of cleaves per round equal to their level. If you're fighting goblins and have good bonuses this means you can kill a ton of them each round, but it also gives you nice boosts to the number of gnolls and ogres you can mow through in a fight, as well. In this system guys with mid-level attack progressions like Clerics also get to cleave a number of times equal to half their level--I can take or leave this, since Clerics are already crazy good and Thieves are just so bad I can't even feel like I can help them.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 05:35
|
|
|
So what's the difference between BECMI and the Moldvay and whatever other D&Ds there were? I only ever played/read BECMI.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 05:42
|
|
|
There was a 2E AD&D clone in production called For Gold & Glory, but I can't seem to find a download for it anywhere  2E books are dirt cheap, though, so you can always just grab a DMG, Monstrous Manual and a couple of PHBs. There's also Purple Worm, which has every AD&D 2E core rule and a shitload of official supplements online for free. 2E supremacy Silhouette fucked around with this message at 14:08 on May 9, 2013 |
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 05:52
|
|
|
Project1 posted:So what's the difference between BECMI and the Moldvay and whatever other D&Ds there were? I only ever played/read BECMI. You can buy the pre-BECMI D&D's in pdf form from Wizards. Totally worth doing if you want to see what they looked like, they're cheap.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 06:51
|
|
|
Project1 posted:So what's the difference between BECMI and the Moldvay and whatever other D&Ds there were? I only ever played/read BECMI. This gets super complicated and I'm not sure I'm 100% clear on it, even. The BE part of BECMI had at least two big printings presented by different designers--Moldvay and Mentzer. They both are amazing for their efforts to actually communicate how to play the game clearly and effectively. Ugh, the history of effective playstyle communication is really weird, where most of the big steps forward actually look pretty ineffective to us now, but these two hold up fairly well even today. The Rules Compendium is basically a single big book that put a lot of the BECMI system all in one place, and isn't hugely different from either of those. There are also some other versions like the Holmes Basic one that I know very little about. There are lots of little differences if you really look for them (I think Clerics get a half dozen new spells in Mentzer or something), but you could really have a big group of players who all use different editions play together with minimal friction between them, I feel like. What do you mean by 'other D&Ds', though? This is all Basic D&D, which isn't quite the same as either D&D or AD&D. If you ask me this question again in 3 or 4 months I'll probably be able to answer it much more clearly. In preparation for grad school I'm slowly working my way through Playing at the World by Jon Peterson, which is a fantastic book on the history of wargaming and early D&D, but all of the info in it that's relevant to this discussion is right up in the last chapter.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 07:22
|
|
|
AlphaDog posted:With the Fighter's cleave thing, have you ever considered letting a fighter's overkill damage carry onto the next adjacent creature automatically? It might throw stuff out of whack since the b/x fighter is already pretty good, but it worked ok when we houseruled it into 2e. Fighters also get 'signature weapon' bonuses at higher levels, which are essentially proficiency (the idea was to have each fighter associated with a particular kind of weapon, so orcs would go "Oh crap! It's Bloodgrim, and he's brought a battleaxe!  ", but after reading some ideas in the Next thread I might let them be spread over different weapons.Other things I've tweaked are that clerics get Divine Powers rather than spells, which can be called on at any time without needing to be chosen in advance (ie, "Help me, Lord! I need to [heal this guy/identify the evil doppelgänger/light this dark and deadly chamber/whatever]"), and elf spells aren't just the same as wizards', but are towards the 'natural magic' side of things, making them more like druids instead of "armoured sword-wizards who gain levels really slowly".
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 08:27
|
|
|
AlphaDog posted:OK, to get sorta-2e-ish out of HM4e... This is most excellent! I'll have to twist the arms of at least 2 of the other 3 people in the group, but once they understand that Pixie Fairies are out and the spell system is re-ca-jiggered it shouldn't take too long. Thanks very much!
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 08:37
|
|
|
First there was Chainmail, a miniatures wargame adapted into a fantasy setting. From there came OD&D (Original D&D, 0e, white box) which was...rules lite isn't even the word. It was a very loose method of turning Chainmail into a more adventurer based game. There was little to nothing regarding roleplaying or doing stuff outside of combat, and even that was rather shaky and was mostly just "USE CHAINMAIL I GUESS???" From there came a few supplements, including the Greyhawk one that more or less codified the beginnings of actual D&D rules and added the thief to make the core four. After OD&D came two lines. AD&D, or Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, was incredibly rules crunchy and was Gygax's way of ensuring the people who helped him make OD&D didn't get any money. D&D since the dawn of loving time has been a method of dicking others out of their money. Many core "D&D-isms" come from AD&D, due to the WotC developers being AD&D fans themselves and cementing the AD&D-isms into place during 3e. Around the same time as AD&D, Holmes came forward and was like, yo, let me make a beginner set to get people into the game, and thus came Basic. Basic was levels 1-3 in a revamped version of OD&D, and players were expected to "graduate" to AD&D afterwards, except in reality the games were very starkly different and no small number of people hated AD&D's over-codification of everything. This lead to Moldvay re-releasing Basic along with Expert, levels 4-14 of the revamped OD&D, which covered stuff like "not being in a dungeon" and long-term campaigns. Next was the Red Box, and that's where poo poo got serious. AD&D sold well enough to be reprinted, and it was decided that there needed to be a proper beginner product since AD&D was so loving eldritch, but created better then Basic was. Thus, Mentzer came in and made revisions to the system and came out with three products: Expert remained mostly the same, Companion was added as even higher levels and the rules and ideas for domain style gameplay where the adventurers become rulers, and the always well beloved Red Box. This was popular enough that a third supplement to what was originally going to be just an introduction was brought out, Master, which covered more in depth character creation or alteration (stuff like weapon mastery or heaps of new spells) and how to deal with high level campaigns. The Red Box became the hit toy of the season and ended up, perhaps ironically, backfiring on AD&D - loving nobody played the Red Box and then looked at AD&D and went "YEP, I WANT THIS." At this point the dumbest thing happened: D&D's first edition war. Basic was seen as being for dumb little babbies and kiddies who didn't know better, AD&D was for snobbish :spergan:s who needed rules to do everything. From this era would come the WotC developers, and I already said which side they were on. Anyways, AD&D was getting a bit stale, so it came out with Unearthed Arcana, which was intended to be the fourth core book, but received a LOT of hate for being poorly written in terms of mechanics. The Basic boxes also came out with their last supplement, Immortal, which was for characters who no longer operated inside levels. This was your book for becoming literal gods. Together the whole series was given the name BECMI. Not too long after D&D went through a lot of shakeups and Gygax ended up being kicked out after like five people all tried to dick each other out of their money, which ended with ALL of them being dicked out of their money, and AD&D 2e was printed. In order to keep the Basic line going, the Rules Cyclopedia was made, which contained almost all of the first four books, but to my recollection didn't have much Immortals stuff in it. This went on for a good long time, but not in a good way as this ends with 2e ultimately growing horrendously stale and TSR going bankrupt, leading to the whole "D&D is going to die!" fear. WotC bought D&D for reasons twofold (they were nerds and wanted D&D to continue for the fans, and because Peter Adkison was tired of the stress and wanted to sell off WotC, meaning he bought as many liscences as he could to make WotC a more enticing purchase), and the AD&D crew was brought in to make a new version. This was just straight up called 3e, both for marketing reasons (to stop the divided AD&D thing and to remove "Advanced" from the name to make it more open to beginners), and because it contained pretty much no traces of BECMI in it whatsoever. Indeed, 3e was essentially the rebirth of AD&D, and ultimately the death of BECMI.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 08:41
|
|
|
OtspIII posted:What do you mean by 'other D&Ds', though? This is all Basic D&D, which isn't quite the same as either D&D or AD&D. Yeah, I meant Mentzer's version (which is what I know, and thought for a long time was THE original), and the other versions like Holmes, Moldvay, and Gygax's original set of rules. Thanks, answerers, that clears things up for me.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 09:07
|
|
|
krushgroove posted:This is most excellent! I'll have to twist the arms of at least 2 of the other 3 people in the group, but once they understand that Pixie Fairies are out and the spell system is re-ca-jiggered it shouldn't take too long. Thanks very much! The problem your group had with the Hackmaster spell rules (ie, that they are rolled randomly) is also present in AD&D and 2e. Letting the players pick their own spells when they level up is not in AD&D or 2e. In AD&D and 2e, wizards must find scrolls or spellbooks to learn spells. In 2e, specialist wizards (not mages) get one "free" spell of their specialty school per spell level (not character level) which they don't have to find in-game, and this spell is by default chosen by the DM, with an optional "Some DMs will let the player pick the spell" rule. In AD&D, the first level wizard starts with Read Magic and 3 randomly chosen spells (DMG, page 39), and as I said above must find the rest and roll to see if they can learn them. Letting the players pick their own starting spells is an optional rule in 2e, but they still don't get to choose new spells when they level up. The DM is supposed to control what spells go into the game, or else leave it up to the random tables. If you don't want to deal with Charm Person, you can just leave it out.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 09:11
|
|
|
OK, gotcha - with the Castle Greyhawk setting there won't be a problem getting spellbooks or whatever to the players and since it'll be a purely 'fun' setting I'll probably let them pick, or pick spells for them to have from a wishlist.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 09:28
|
|
|
krushgroove posted:OK, gotcha - with the Castle Greyhawk setting there won't be a problem getting spellbooks or whatever to the players and since it'll be a purely 'fun' setting I'll probably let them pick, or pick spells for them to have from a wishlist. What we used to do in 2e was to allow all wizards to pick their starting spells, and then give them one free spell per spell level that they could choose. Specialists got, per spell level, one free spell of their school and one free spell of any school, and got to choose both. All other spells had to be found in game, and everyone who DM'd (mostly me) was cool with putting in spells that people wanted.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 09:36
|
|
|
Sounds great! I'm sure my group will be much happier with this and all the other changes. Now I just have to convince them...my last GMing efforts didn't go over so well.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 10:18
|
|
|
For 2e, I don't use clerics, as they're rather powerful with access to nearly every single sphere. I prefer priesthoods from The Complete Priest Handbook. Lots of interesting ones in there, more balanced, with more thematic powers. Priests of lightning getting to Call Lightning from first level, priests of death being able to cause fear and control undead, priests of love getting charm abilities, lots of fun stuff. As a bit of a balance, I don't make priests ever take Cure ___ Wounds spells. They memorize their spells as normal, then if they ever want to cure, they just convert a memorize spell to an equal level Cure ___ Wounds. So a first level priest could take something like Light, Bless and Detect Magic (with their wis bonus) without feeling like they aren't properly acting like a bandaid. If later, someone gets hurt and needs healing, he can choose which spell to convert to a heal. For their spells, I of course allow all PHB spells to be used as normal, with other spells from the Priest Spell Compendium 'unlocked' for actions within the game, kind of like achievements in a video game. I never explicitly told my players this, but one druid got a direct damage spell, I forget the name but it's something wolfy, because he killed a group of people to defend a hidden elven sanctum. He later got the Precipitation spell for helping put out a forest fire. The sun priest got some sun ray direct damage spell for using light spells to defeat several difficult enemies deep in a dungeon as well. I just pass them a notecard with a little text saying an agent of their god visited them in a dream, and brought them knowledge of this spell, and I'll write out the text of the spell. It's their secret little bonus for good play. The priesthoods I mention above really let you make each set special, as there are so many spells in the Compendiums waiting to be used.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 14:27
|
|
|
Hey, this is a long shot, but if any thread would know, it'd be this one. I'm looking for an old (late 80s to mid 90s) adventure module. I could swear it was an official module for either BECMI or 2e, but gently caress if I can find it anywhere. It's set on a ghost ship. Not a spelljammer, a sailing ship. The captain was called "Vandeckan" or something like that, and there was a poo poo poem about how he doomed the ship or something. It came with cardboard standups of ghosts and spectres and stuff. Any ideas? Edit: found it, it was "In The Phantom's Wake". I've been looking for it for years. VVVVVVV Thanks, that's the article I used. Can't believe I never thought to check wikipedia for a list of every single D&D module ever. I mean, why would that be on wikipedia, right? Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 17:41 on May 9, 2013 |
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 17:12
|
|
|
I'm stumped, but there is a master list of pre-WotC adventures. The captain's name is a reference to van der Decken, the captain of the legendary Flying Dutchman.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 17:29
|
|
|
Ran another test of my system, and drat, Sleep is so overpowered in B/X against low-level monsters that it's not even funny. I put my four generic guys against six kobolds, four orcs and an ogre, and in the very first round the wizard took down every one of the kobolds and orcs. (RAW, there's no save.) At the end of the fight (which didn't last long), only one character had taken any damage. I think I might make it so that Sleep affects Hit Points rather than Hit Dice in my game, cued off INT+level, because as it stands it's an instant "I win" button. Caster supremacy, even at level 1! I'm probably also going to either tone down armour ACs slightly, or else make high-end stuff really expensive and well out of the reach of an L1 character, because even the ogre only managed to score a single hit thanks to the cleric and fighter having chainmail and plate. EDIT: tried the same fight with the new version of Sleep; the wizard took out all the kobolds, but it still ended as a TPK even with the ogre down, with three orcs left standing. Seems a bit swingy, but then, should L1 characters really be facing off against a monster that can potentially one-shot them? (The wizard did end up punching an orc to death after using his spells and then throwing his dagger, however, which I thought he almost deserved to survive for.) Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 18:24 on May 9, 2013 |
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 17:54
|
|
|
Payndz posted:Ran another test of my system, and drat, Sleep is so overpowered in B/X against low-level monsters that it's not even funny. I put my four generic guys against six kobolds, four orcs and an ogre, and in the very first round the wizard took down every one of the kobolds and orcs. (RAW, there's no save.) At the end of the fight (which didn't last long), only one character had taken any damage. Sleep is kind of dumb RAW, but just giving monsters a save to resist it brings it pretty well in line. It's still probably the best 1st-level spell, since it's pretty much a free 1/day 'let's skip this encounter' card the party can play, but that just means you can suddenly cram one extra encounter into the day's session.
|
|
#
?
May 9, 2013 20:40
|
|
|
In 2e, I treat it as a targeted wave that sweeps out from a point. Friendly fire is possible, so if you cast it into a melee, some of your own might fall asleep from it. It's great for planning though. Another massive 1st level spell is Entangle, for druids. 40'x40' area, save or be stuck to the ground for 10 rounds. Those that pass can only move 10' a round until their out, so if even if they pass, if they're in the middle of it it's at least 2 rounds until they get out. Have a lot of missile fire with that, and it's an easily won fight. Though I once had a session with only a druid and a bard (with Sleep). They got jumped by a group of 8 bandits and a leader. They both cast Entangle and Sleep on the same round, rooting and sleeping all of them but the leader, who promptly dropped his weapons. "Can't we just talk about this like civilized people?" Thanks to that, they got a henchman, and allies in the form of some light-hearted bandits.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 00:27
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:Around the same time as AD&D, Holmes came forward and was like, yo, let me make a beginner set to get people into the game, and thus came Basic. Basic was levels 1-3 in a revamped version of OD&D, and players were expected to "graduate" to AD&D afterwards, except in reality the games were very starkly different and no small number of people hated AD&D's over-codification of everything. This lead to Moldvay re-releasing Basic along with Expert, levels 4-14 of the revamped OD&D, which covered stuff like "not being in a dungeon" and long-term campaigns. Holmes' "Blue Box" Basic Set is a weird thing in that J. Eric Holmes wrote it only with access to the OD&D booklets - he didn't really have any direct supervision or insight from Gygax or any other TSR writers/editors, so he had free reign to fill in the margins as he saw fit. In many places, he had to infer the rules from the obtuse phrasing and structure of OD&D, which itself assumed that you had access to a copy of Chainmail and actually referenced Chainmail for things like initiative. All of that led Holmes to invent new rules (like the Dexterity-based individual initiative system) or to clarify OD&D rules in a fashion that contradicted Gygax's actual intent as later codified in AD&D. For example, OD&D doesn't actually state that Magic Missile automatically hits; Holmes naturally inferred that the spell required a normal attack roll to hit. AD&D and the later Basic Sets would all explicitly state that Magic Missile does in fact hit without an attack roll. There's also another version of the Basic Set, though it didn't go by that name: 1991's Black Box, by Troy Denning. The "Black Box" bore the unwieldy name of "The New Easy to Master Dungeons & Dragons Game", and was essentially a reworked version of the Mentzer Basic Set's rules. The whole thing was formatted in a wide boardgame-sized box to appeal to younger and more casual audiences, and came with a large map and cardstock miniatures that were integrated into the game and were central to the sample adventure. The sample adventure was actually presented in a sort of flash card format, with one step of the adventure on the front and the relevant rules text on the back; it was essentially a step-by-step walkthrough to the fundamental rules of the game. The final few years of "Basic" D&D supplements that followed were divided into the "Classic Series", which only assumed familiarity with the Black Box, and the "Challenger Series", which drew on the D&D Rules Cyclopedia. IIRC, later printings of the Black Box knocked the size of the box down from board game size to a smaller box of the same size as TSR's other boxed sets. The Black Box was reprinted in a slightly revised format in 1994's "Classic Dungeons & Dragons Game"; even though it had a new name and new cover art, it was identical in content to the Black Box save for the fact that the contents of the flashcards were integrated into the main rulebook. 1994 was also the year that TSR put out the revised 2e PHB and DMG (same content, new art and formatting), though at least in the case of the "revised" PHB/DMG you could open the book and realize that you already owned it before you bought it.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 01:24
|
|
|
One thing to note about the Black Box is that it went to level 5 instead of just 3 like the other starters.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 01:30
|
|
|
Even more confusing is that Moldvay/Cook is usually referred to as B/X, and Mentzer is BECMI. That means that if you play B/X with the later Mentzer box sets, you are playing B/XCMI.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 01:37
|
|
|
I've heard those 90s Basic sets decried as shameless cash-grabs, but according to the 30 Years... book they were very popular and, like you said, were oriented toward teaching the game.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 01:38
|
|
|
The only people who trashed the Black Box as a shameless cash grab were the people who already owned and played with AD&D or the Rules Cyclopedia - in other words, people who weren't the target audience and who wouldn't really get any use out of it themselves. Those same people tended to dismiss it as a dumbed-down children's game, because it came in a boardgame box and had a grid-based map for use with fold-up cardstock miniatures; plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. IIRC the black box sold around 500,000 copies in total.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 02:17
|
|
|
Black Box D&D is awesome. It was my first set and I still have my dogeared copy of the main rulebook, although my cover has long since fallen off and I've lost track of the map and other parts. It's honestly what I'd probably use as a core book if/when I ever run a campaign again. I'd just work up some Attack Bonus/Ascending AC tables and maybe convert Saving Throws to a single number that various classes just get conditional bonuses to.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 02:28
|
|
|
whydirt posted:Black Box D&D is awesome. It was my first set and I still have my dogeared copy of the main rulebook, although my cover has long since fallen off and I've lost track of the map and other parts. It's honestly what I'd probably use as a core book if/when I ever run a campaign again. I'd just work up some Attack Bonus/Ascending AC tables and maybe convert Saving Throws to a single number that various classes just get conditional bonuses to. Saving throws seem like such a waste in early D&D. In all the versions I've seen they stay more or less consistent in their relationships to each other across class/level, so reducing them to a single stat does seem like a good plan. When I first read them I assumed that some classes would specialize in some saves--clearly Fighters would have a great save vs. breath weapons, so you could be that iconic knight blocking a dragon's breath with a shield, and then thieves must be good vs. wands, because that'd let you be the agile guy that's really hard to draw a bead on, and maybe clerics can resist spells really well due to the blessings of their gods or something. Oh well.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 03:07
|
|
|
Hot drat rules cyclopedia is a joy to run, rolling for random encounters gives a ton of tension to dungeon crawling, I really like the "At ninth level" poo poo too, it gives the players a scrap of hope to hold on to while they get slaughtered by the cold hand of fate.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 03:40
|
|
|
Speaking of which, I know people have some problems with the Mystic class, one of my players rolled up a mystic, what's the deal?
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 04:44
|
|
|
whydirt posted:I'd just work up some Attack Bonus/Ascending AC tables and maybe convert Saving Throws to a single number that various classes just get conditional bonuses to. Do it reverse THAC0 style: cap AC at 20, cap BAB at 20. Base Attack Bonus is 20 minus THAC0. And just use stat checks instead of saving throws. Nihnoz posted:Speaking of which, I know people have some problems with the Mystic class, one of my players rolled up a mystic, what's the deal? The Mystic is the Monk from 3e+, more or less.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 04:46
|
|
|
Anyone played Dragon Warriors? I played a fair amount of that when I was a kid, but of course at that age all anybody plays is murder simulation. It was aiming for a sort of medieval superstition feel, where all the superstitions are real, rather than the Tolkien murder simulation that D&D was. Unfortunately the rules were too similar to D&D, so Tolkien murder simulation basically. You'd need the right GM to play the game the way they actually wanted to it to be played.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 05:42
|
|
|
The mystic is an odd case. The 3e monk is a direct port of the Mystic (which is a direct translation of an earlier Monk), but the glut of weird unfocused abilities that makes it weak in 3e makes it strong in RC. It never needs to stay still to get all of its attacks, and that alone makes it mobile death when it gets to the right level. Everything else, though, that's the problem. The problem with the mystic is low AC for a veeeery long time, low HP and low damage output. You can't wear armor and you're specifically forbidden all magic items that increase your AC, and your hand-to-hand damage starts at d4 and doesn't even go past d6 until you're at level 5. Basically, unless you are using Weapon Mastery rules and take an AC boosting weapon, you're going to be hit as often as a wizard - but you're expected to be closer to the front - and your damage will stink. You can use thief abilities, but you get them even slower than the thief already does because you need more experience to level. And to top everything else off, your fist never gain attack or damage bonuses as you level, just "effective" ones for damaging some enemies. Basically, your solutions are to specialize in Staff (with weapon mastery) and rely on thrown weapons, which are the only ranged weapon the mystic gets multiple attacks with. (Or master torches and use them to defend and to throw for extra hilarity.) If you're running a Mystic, don't forget the Striking/Wrestling maneuvers which are a huge equalizer for an unarmored Mystic against anyone wearing any kind of protection.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 06:04
|
|
|
whydirt posted:Saving Throws to a single number that various classes just get conditional bonuses to. Swords and Wizardry does this. At first I was put off by a single save number, but then I realized that I don't actually give a poo poo about having 5 numbers for that on the sheet, (or 3 for that matter). I think a single number with caveats may become my preference. I want to hear more about peoples experience/opinions with roll under. Did a one off dungeon with d20 roll under for skills and enjoyed it, but I was a little concerned about it's solvency over the course of an extended campaign. i.e. Because attributes rarely change my players expressed concern that they wouldn't feel like they were growing over time. (We're all used to 3rd and 4th ed though.)
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 06:33
|
|
|
DalaranJ posted:Because attributes rarely change my players expressed concern that they wouldn't feel like they were growing over time. (We're all used to 3rd and 4th ed though.) Yeah, it does set a really specific tone for your game. I kinda like that low level characters can contribute every bit as much as high level ones with skills, and that the big advantage high-level characters is survivability--to mix genres pretty messily, it makes sense that Han Solo would be as likely as Random Stormtrooper to get blown off the side of a cliff by the wind from a Roc's wings, but it also makes sense that Han Solo would be the one to miraculously survive and get to use the fall as a prompt for further adventure. I like games where high-level characters are just low-level guys who have survived so much poo poo that they've become pretty dangerous and hard to kill, though, so if you're playing a game where high level guys are just all-around Better than low level guys I wouldn't recommend flatly using stats as skills.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 07:37
|
|
|
DalaranJ posted:I want to hear more about peoples experience/opinions with roll under. Did a one off dungeon with d20 roll under for skills and enjoyed it, but I was a little concerned about it's solvency over the course of an extended campaign. i.e. Because attributes rarely change my players expressed concern that they wouldn't feel like they were growing over time. (We're all used to 3rd and 4th ed though.) Saves are stat+level/2, rounded down. So at L1, if you've got a stat of 7 (the absolute minimum with class modifiers), you have to roll 4 or under to save, but with a class high of 15 it's 8 or under. At L6, a stat of 15 gives a save of 10 and a stat of 18 a save of 12, while at L12 an 18 stat saves with 15 or lower. It's roughly in line with B/X, though I'm still thinking that save-or-dies should be used as little as possible just because "you had one bad die roll, and now you're dead. Tough poo poo" is a crappy mechanic.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 08:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 1, 2024 01:29 |
|
|
Rulebook Heavily posted:The mystic is an odd case. The 3e monk is a direct port of the Mystic (which is a direct translation of an earlier Monk), but the glut of weird unfocused abilities that makes it weak in 3e makes it strong in RC. It never needs to stay still to get all of its attacks, and that alone makes it mobile death when it gets to the right level. If the class a little underpowered that's better because our party's mystic has literally 14 HP at level 2.
|
|
#
?
May 10, 2013 18:52
|
|