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I kinda liked what they did in the Long Price books. Magic exists, but it's extremely rare. As in, there are only like a dozen magic users in the entire world, because training to become one takes years (and is only allowed to the second sons of noble families - it's complicated), and the first time you attempt to bind a magic god-spirit to yourself chances are you'll screw up and get turned into a human pincushion instead. Furthermore, even if you do manage to bind a spirit, they'll keep fighting to get free for the rest of your life, and once a specific spirit has been bound it can never be bound the same way again, by anyone, for perpetuity. The result is city-states monopolizing their magic-users (if they have one) and making sure the spirit binding gets passed to another before the original holder dies. Meanwhile, all they really ever use magic for is civic stuff - the spirit in the first book can remove seeds from things, so they use it to dominate the cotton trade by removing the need to pay workers to do the fiddly task of de-seeding the cotton (not having invented the cotton gin yet, y'see).
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Mar 4, 2015 21:46
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Another thing that D&D worldbuilding just totally ignores: Every second-rate magic user has access to Charm Person. This would radically, radically change society, down to the core. Just start thinking about this. Think about commerce, diplomacy, hell even courtship.Evil Mastermind posted:Oh man I remember one of the King's Quests games had a bit where you had to stop a cat from killing a mouse (an event that happens within seconds of your first entering a screen, and with no indication that you can or should do anything about it), and if you didn't, you couldn't complete the game because you needed the mouse hours later. King's Quest 5: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder. That was in the 1990s btw.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:47
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On knock chat, it has the simplest, most obvious fix. Just make it loud.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:49
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Evil Mastermind posted:Oh man I remember one of the King's Quests games had a bit where you had to stop a cat from killing a mouse (an event that happens within seconds of your first entering a screen, and with no indication that you can or should do anything about it), and if you didn't, you couldn't complete the game because you needed the mouse hours later. Don't forget the part where you have to eat something and if you eat the wrong thing you can't beat a Yeti later. I think it was a choice between chicken and a pie. You had to keep the pie so you could pie the yeti.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:52
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Another thing that D&D worldbuilding just totally ignores: Every second-rate magic user has access to Charm Person. This would radically, radically change society, down to the core. Just start thinking about this. Think about commerce, diplomacy, hell even courtship. 
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Mar 4, 2015 21:56
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Another thing that D&D worldbuilding just totally ignores: Every second-rate magic user has access to Charm Person. This would radically, radically change society, down to the core. Just start thinking about this. Think about commerce, diplomacy, hell even courtship. Yeah, I'm envisioning the dictatorship of the proletariat that would emerge after crushing wizards and smiling.
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Mar 4, 2015 22:01
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Evil Mastermind posted:Well, another part of the magic problem is that D&D only really treats magic primarily as a weapon used to blow poo poo up in combat, with everything else feeling like an afterthought. I think this is wrong. If you look at the old school spell lists, it's pretty plain that magic was not at all treated like a combat-only device, and you can see that in the conversation about obsoleting thieves. I think you mean that designers only seriously considered the applications of magic in the game world during the combat section, mostly because monsters have spells I assume. The implied fluff maybe mentioned haphazardly how magic would effect the world outside of skirmishing combat. Like, "Think about how the presence of dragons and mages would effect the building of towers! Use your imagination!" (There were rarely articles in Dragon magazine that actually did this, like one on siege warfare in the Blood War. But this was rare.) The fact that mages had spells was treated more as a unique thing. Wizards had the cheat codes to the game everyone else was playing, and very few people could get access to those hacks. The world really seems to assume that magic is rare enough that aren't more than a few spellcasters in even the largest cities. Like, one scroll shop and one healing temple. But I think the video game-type economy where a magic shop and a temple are needed in every town probably pushed players' assumed notions further and further away from The Way Gary Played. That's part of the reason Eberron felt so timely, like it had been just at the edge of the zeitgeist for a while.
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Mar 4, 2015 22:02
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And this is why in my home campaign I also got rid of charm person and all other mind-altering spells like geas and detect thoughts and whatnot. I couldn't reconcile the effects of such a minor bit of magic on the world, plus anything that cuts down the wizard's ability to just make the plot go there way is good in my mind. One player made a very good case for why illusions should get cut too, but I figure that as long as they are actual false images/sounds that you can make a save against, they can stay since they're not actually messing with anyone's head. In-universe the justification is that the mind is just too complicated to much around with because people are special.
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Mar 4, 2015 22:02
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Evil Mastermind posted:GURPS was sadly not an appropriate system for Discworld. It's a setting that needs a looser ruleset. I loved when they published a Discworld adventure in Pyramid that straight up tells you to use Over the Edge. The GURPS stats are listed as an afterthought.
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Mar 4, 2015 22:04
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Level 1 wizards also have access to Disguise Self (and Alter Self with level 2 magic). You cannot trust anyone to be who or what they say they are.
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Mar 4, 2015 22:05
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The general thought of "Well the wizard COULD memorize Knock and Invisibility and all that, but why would he step on the thief's toes? Why not just let the thief do it?" misses a very important question: Why not just have two wizards? This sorta came to it's full end in 3.x, where your party could be a cleric, a druid, and two wizards, and you've basically superceded the fighter and the thief entirely. It's the same imbalance that means you can't make a party of a fighter, a rogue, a ranger, and a paladin. I'm reminded of when I used to be a Pathfinder fan and posted on the Paizo forums, and had an argument with Sean K Reynolds about the cleric; he insisted again and again that the cleric needed to be powerful enough to replace the fighter "in case nobody rolls a fighter or in case the fighter doesn't show up that day," and ignored every question of "so what happens if the cleric or wizard don't show?"
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Mar 4, 2015 22:14
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Kai Tave posted:I didn't even think it was that controversial that AD&D2E was the Bad For Thieves edition, even fans of 2E pretty much agree that playing a straight-class Thief is a sucker's game in that one. My first ever PC in any RPG ever was a 2e Thief. It's a wonder I got into this hobby at all after that.
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Mar 4, 2015 22:28
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Okay, working on a longer post about how AD&D doesn't work, but it really doesn't work when you start tearing out chunks of the resource management/metagame rules. In the meantime though I checked the descriptions of Knock in AD&D, S&W, Dark Dungeons and LL and yeah, that spell description is sometimes straight up bullshit. I've been away from D&D for a while and had a recollection (undoubtedly one of my DM's house rules) that Knock worked on a single door/portal/container, not a radius. Interesting to note some of the variances - Labyrinth Lord's description states that "Any secret doors must of course be discovered first. The door does not relock itself or become stuck again on its own. Knock does not raise barred gates or similar impediments (such as a portcullis), nor does it affect ropes, vines, and the like." S&W and DD don't mention Portcullis, and the S&W description seems to imply a more efficient spell - no casting twice to unlock and unbar a door. But yeah, the AD&D write up is bullshit; "It causes secret doors to open. The Knock spell will also open locked or trick-opening boxes or chests. It will loose shackles or chains as well. ... In all other cases, the Knock will permanently open locks or welds - although the former could be closed and locked again thereafter. It will not raise bars or similar impediments (such as a portcullis)." The Portcullis fetish though finally makes the prominence of Bend Bars/Lift Gates make sense to me though. D&D World is a land of Portcullis and sometimes barred Portcullis. chaos rhames posted:On knock chat, it has the simplest, most obvious fix. Just make it loud. 
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Mar 4, 2015 23:02
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The Wizard could silence it, though. That's not funny or . That's a thing that the Wizard can do (and yet again, fucks the guy with the Move Silently skill. Who would that be, I wonder?)
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Mar 4, 2015 23:32
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Serf posted:In-universe the justification is that the mind is just too complicated to much around with because people are special. I like this because, besides being a clean and easy way to resolve the removal of an undesirable mechanic, it's also a mystery that you can use for your campaigns. How and why are people special?
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Mar 4, 2015 23:36
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Waffleman_ posted:Adding on to this, the game is designed by Clay Gardner, who created OVA! Very neat.
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Mar 5, 2015 00:37
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AmiYumi posted:So, should we expect the cards sometime in late 2017? Considering you can apply this to a ton of Kickstarters, probably.
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Mar 5, 2015 00:42
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I would think that solving the problem of permeant Magic is just a blanket rule that says "magic can only be sustained through concentration and/or active "casting", exceptions to this require an enormous amount of skill, time, and reasoners." That way your magic light rock becomes an object of value and wonder, rather then just a street light. But again, I guess my preference is always low magic settings.
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Mar 5, 2015 00:47
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I actually think, and I am being fairly serious here, the balancing mechanism for the wizard in earlier versions of Dungeons & Dragons was the fact that anyone who always played the same character class was seen as a boring jerk, so everyone got to be the mage once in a while, or had to be the cleric/thief once in a while. It really is great to think back to how the cleric was actually seen as the worst class for nearly every group I ever played with, despite it magically ascending to be the best class somewhere along the lines when I was not paying attention. Probably again due to the social contract nature of the cleric's job being HEAL EVERYONE ELSE, STOP MAKING YOUR OWN DECISIONS Also when I think back, a lot of campaigns I have played in were in settings where it was seriously challenging to find new magic-user spells--another way the gamemaster could obviously toy with how overpowering wizards were in the particular setting. I had one friend who honestly did a decent job balancing classes in 3rd Edition merely by allowing PCs to play large characters, since once you can take a greatsword and move it up one size category for racial size and one size category for whatever that stupid feat was (monkey grip?) you are doing like 4d6 base every attack and actually starting to put out enough damage to compete with the wizards. Well, for a few more levels than before, anyway. Sometimes it seems like a purely ideological dilemma. I have absolutely no problem with completely unbalanced games, because the game is always secondary to the people I am playing it with. But similarly of course I am intrigued by balanced games, rather than complaining they are not true to whatever vague idea of gaming I developed at age 8. Basically Captain Rat we should talk more about Apocalypse World
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Mar 5, 2015 00:53
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Quarex posted:It really is great to think back to how the cleric was actually seen as the worst class for nearly every group I ever played with, despite it magically ascending to be the best class somewhere along the lines when I was not paying attention. Probably again due to the social contract nature of the cleric's job being HEAL EVERYONE ELSE, STOP MAKING YOUR OWN DECISIONS
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Mar 5, 2015 01:10
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Rythlondar is an old, old, multi-DM campaign and it is a fun read if you're into how that sort of thing played out. It's really "D&D" at first with adventuring and deaths and stuff, but what fascinates me is how it peters out toward the end, and having a couple of high level clerics is what really tipped the balance. Suddenly there is a source of resurrection, and then you have a high-level character or two shepherding new characters through the hard parts of the game. (It actually reminds me of Neverwinter Nights on AOL, where everyone almost everyone of note was a dual-classed paladin/wizard, and they would take you to go fight dracoliches at level 1, and you'd hide around a corner while they did the work.) I don't want to spoil the ending, but it really seems like a big middle finger from the DM and is also old school D&D as heck.
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Mar 5, 2015 03:42
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Quarex posted:I actually think, and I am being fairly serious here, the balancing mechanism for the wizard in earlier versions of Dungeons & Dragons was the fact that anyone who always played the same character class was seen as a boring jerk, so everyone got to be the mage once in a while, or had to be the cleric/thief once in a while. Sorta. It was more that the idea of people having a single DM who ran strict adventures once a week with everyone playing the same consistent characters wasn't actually planned. OD&D - pre-AD&D D&D - operated strongly under the idea that people are going to have a whole stable of characters running in different games with different GMs. That's why the whole "Monty Haul" or "roll your stats in front of me" exists - a DM that lets someone cheat on attributes or gives off tons and tons of magic items was potentially unbalancing other games because the whole idea is that your character just wanders to different adventures. It's why healing times were so long; you weren't supposed to just shrug and fast forward a few months, that player would go "Ok, then while Bigby and Rigby are resting to heal off their wounds, I'm going to play my fighter Digby..." This also ran concurrent with gold as XP. If you had to bring in a level 1 character to a level 5 group, they could actually just pool up a bunch of cash, dump it on you, and power level you up! The main thing to remember is that D&D was a big G Game first, and one that resembled early online games more then anything else, what with the idea of having several "alts" to go with your main character and your friends having other alts and everyone mixing and matching along. The whole "roleplaying" thing came long after the idea. So one balancing mechanism for the wizard was simply that you probably weren't going to be playing it every game. Sometimes you'd bring out your fighter, or your dwarf, or your cleric (but basically never your thief because those were terrible). If you look at the aforementioned Rythlondar (and you should, it loving owns), you see characters kinda move in and out of the action as their players make other characters. Of course, the other balancing mechanism was that wizards had a bunch of annoying poo poo to deal with, like potentially starting off with completely useless spells and never gaining a good spell (randomly rolled treasure!), or being essentially unable to rest inside of dungeons (roll random encounters every ten minutes - and you want to rest 8 hours?)
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Mar 5, 2015 04:07
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I've always wanted to try Iron Heroes to get around the whole issue of dealing with Wizards/magic-users in D&D (and the RPPR campaign made it sound fun as all hell), but not only is it 3.5-based*, it's also written by one Mike Mearls. * particularly, good monster/encounter creation in d20 games seems to be rather difficult and never fast
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Mar 5, 2015 04:16
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I've rethought my statement on the ending to Rythlondar, and maybe it isn't a middle finger, but simply an attempt by and early DM to rein in characters who could no longer be challenged. The way it was done seems unnecessarily harsh, but basically everyone hates level draining, and it was put into the game for the same reason. That brings up an interesting idea, though. There are various ways to perform a "hard" shutdown on a character, and I think level draining was intended as a "soft" shutdown, but are there other methods to ensure higher level players are appropriately challenged? Eternal escalation seems impossible to balance and ultimately boring. 4E had epic destinies and that was cool as it kind of gave players a final goal, or some closure.
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Mar 5, 2015 04:20
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gradenko_2000 posted:I've always wanted to try Iron Heroes to get around the whole issue of dealing with Wizards/magic-users in D&D (and the RPPR campaign made it sound fun as all hell), but not only is it 3.5-based*, it's also written by one Mike Mearls. Iron Heroes is one of those games that sound great on paper but the execution is all over the place. It's full of amazing ideas and some stuff that if you squint looked similar to some stuff that would later, through the game of telephone, wind up in 4E. That said it's also got all kinda of balance and mechanical wonkiness and at the end of the day it's still based on 3.X d20. Like, I won't say it's poo poo because it's not poo poo, not by a long shot. For the time it came out it was rather ambitious and at least paid some lip service to a lot of cool ideas...and I think with like two or three more revisions it could have been something genuinely excellent instead of just okay. It's also kind of mind-boggling to read through Iron Heroes and then read through D&D Next with its tepid martial classes, it's like night and day.
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Mar 5, 2015 04:20
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Kai Tave posted:Iron Heroes is one of those games that sound great on paper but the execution is all over the place. It's full of amazing ideas and some stuff that if you squint looked similar to some stuff that would later, through the game of telephone, wind up in 4E. That said it's also got all kinda of balance and mechanical wonkiness and at the end of the day it's still based on 3.X d20. Like, I won't say it's poo poo because it's not poo poo, not by a long shot. For the time it came out it was rather ambitious and at least paid some lip service to a lot of cool ideas...and I think with like two or three more revisions it could have been something genuinely excellent instead of just okay. Iron heros really needed a second edition
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Mar 5, 2015 04:53
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Captain Foo posted:Iron heros really needed a second edition This is the straight-up truth. I know that some other person had plans to release like a revised edition with some errata incorporated into it and I can't remember if that ever came together or not, but the fact that Iron Heroes never went on to get super polished and tightened and generally improved because there's so much potential there.
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Mar 5, 2015 05:02
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Captain Foo posted:Iron heros really needed a second edition I remember a brief strange moment during the Next playtest when it was imaginable that that's what non-casters in 5th e would look like. Then they moved it back to one option for fighter.
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Mar 5, 2015 07:13
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I picked up FantasyCraft (after reading about it here) and it seems to be what you guys are looking for: D&D where noncasters have poo poo they can do and the rules actually function mostly as intended. It's not much more complicated than its predecessor, if at all. Also, there are rules for buying a keep with the fame you earned saving a town and one of the PC species is literally a dragon.
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Mar 5, 2015 08:11
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FantasyCraft is a really good game but it's dense and fiddly as gently caress. Like, people say that 4E is "high crunch" but it really, really isn't. 4E is a simpler game than Magic: the Gathering, the essential components of character creation are pretty simple to parse (each power is self-contained, explains what it does using codified keywords, you only ever get at most like one or two a level if that), and combat is fairly simple in practice (Move, Minor, Standard actions, one of each, you can trade down, roll d20 plus mod to hit, deal damage, effects, done). 4E's fiddliness comes from a combination of A). feats being completely insufferable to slog through and B). lots of combat modifiers stacking up. FantasyCraft's fiddliness comes from a whole bunch of stuff that's woven throughout the game and requires a great deal more page-flipping to come to terms with and successfully integrate. Character generation has, in my experience, a steeper learning curve and to the best of my knowledge there's no nice, convenient character builder to let you just go "okay I'll take this, this, and this, done." It's a game that I appreciate for what it is, but I doubt I'm ever really going to get into it.
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Mar 5, 2015 08:18
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Not only feats, magic items are a pain in the rear end to browse as well. Maybe even worse. And rituals. And also powers if you're trying to make a wizard post-Essentials.
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Mar 5, 2015 08:24
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My Lovely Horse posted:Not only feats, magic items are a pain in the rear end to browse as well. Maybe even worse. And rituals. And also powers if you're trying to make a wizard post-Essentials. Magic items I'll grant you, rituals I never felt were really on the same level as either of those two. Powers can generate analysis paralysis I suppose, but at the same time 4E is very receptive to "oh this one looks cool, I'll pick this" without then clubbing you over the head three sessions later shouting "YOU DUMB rear end in a top hat, YOU hosed UP!" Like yeah, there's charop, but you can get by without caring about it and still not be dead weight.
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Mar 5, 2015 08:38
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ProfessorCirno posted:OD&D - pre-AD&D D&D - operated strongly under the idea that people are going to have a whole stable of characters running in different games with different GMs. That's why the whole "Monty Haul" or "roll your stats in front of me" exists - a DM that lets someone cheat on attributes or gives off tons and tons of magic items was potentially unbalancing other games because the whole idea is that your character just wanders to different adventures. It's why healing times were so long; you weren't supposed to just shrug and fast forward a few months, that player would go "Ok, then while Bigby and Rigby are resting to heal off their wounds, I'm going to play my fighter Digby..." Large parts of this seem to be false; fanzines and other publications from the period talk about lack of interchangeable characters due to the near universality of inconsistent house rules and interpretations. Most seem to embrace it.
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Mar 5, 2015 12:01
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Evil Mastermind posted:Oh man I remember one of the King's Quests games had a bit where you had to stop a cat from killing a mouse (an event that happens within seconds of your first entering a screen, and with no indication that you can or should do anything about it), and if you didn't, you couldn't complete the game because you needed the mouse hours later.
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Mar 5, 2015 12:36
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Kai Tave posted:This is the straight-up truth. I know that some other person had plans to release like a revised edition with some errata incorporated into it and I can't remember if that ever came together or not, but the fact that Iron Heroes never went on to get super polished and tightened and generally improved because there's so much potential there. Yeah, the errata fixed the armiger to not be completely worthless and a couple of other things that I no longer recall. That was awesome because INDOMITABLE WALL OF IRON is basically the A+ #1 name for a choice of something to pick for your character, even exceeding the glory of NOT TO BE hosed WITH
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Mar 5, 2015 15:27
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Does anyone have anything to say about AMP: Year One? It's by the Part-Time Gods people and apparently uses a system based on that, and I'm always looking for good supers systems.
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Mar 5, 2015 15:39
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Lemon Curdistan posted:Does anyone have anything to say about AMP: Year One? It's by the Part-Time Gods people and apparently uses a system based on that, and I'm always looking for good supers systems. All metas fall into one of nine categories: Blasters, Bulks, Elementals, Ferals, Mindbenders (mind control), Psychs (other psychic powers), Shapers, Shifters, and Travelers. Then each of those has five or six sub-types, and each of those sub-types has its own small power tree. It's designed to be like the Heroes TV show (or at least season 1), where everyone only has a few powers and people are just starting to become aware of the existence of metas. I'd say it's in teh same category as Icons in terms of just picking powers and going. e: although one problem I do have is that there are a bunch of powers with goofy names like "Were you trying to hit me?" or "Play Chicken", which lets you keep going if you've had a major part of your body lopped off. It's not a problem per se, but it still trips me up a bit. Evil Mastermind fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Mar 5, 2015 |
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Mar 5, 2015 16:03
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ProfessorCirno posted:Sorta. It was more that the idea of people having a single DM who ran strict adventures once a week with everyone playing the same consistent characters wasn't actually planned. This is actually a playstyle I'd like to try: everyone starts with a bunch of 1st-level characters and just picks one for their first adventure. If your character gets damaged to the point where normally you'd spend a couple of weeks in town recuperating, you just bring a backup character to play in the meantime. Between forays into the dungeon the DM checks whether rooms the PCs have already cleared out become repopulated. It'd actually be perfect for a game with irregular attendance: Gary can't make it this week, but that's okay 'cause Dave's schedule cleared and he can now make it to the game with his 2nd-level Cleric in tow. The last bit though I'm pretty sure is not how it's supposed to work in old-school D&D: XP for gold recovered is pretty clearly supposed to be divided equally between the group regardless of how they actually divvy up the treasure. The benefit of being a 1st-level character in a high-level group is that the rest of the group can handle tougher encounters than a first-level group, meaning that the monster XP rewards are greater but also there's bound to be more treasure on those monsters. Also, another feature of old-school D&D I've never experienced personally is the idea of hiring retainers who level up with you (at a slower rate though because they only get a half share of all experience gained) who could later mature into a character of their own. The idea of each 1st-level character getting a free 0-level human, elf, dwarf or halfling follower at first level (and getting to roll their stats as they would for their own character) who would then "graduate" into a fully-fledged 1st-level character upon gaining a certain amount of XP is kinda fun.
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Mar 5, 2015 16:10
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Evil Mastermind posted:I haven't played it yet, but I like it. It's a good middle-of-the-road supers system, where all the powers are prebuilt for you. Think more Icons than Champions/M&M. This sounds somewhat like Double Cross, except potentially without the layout nightmare that is the Double Cross rulebook, so I'm down with that. I'm also okay with pre-built powers and nonsense power names - I'm not convinced by Icons, but mostly because of the weird mishmash of Fate and other stuff. If I'm honest, I'm probably looking for something that lets me do X-Men/Runaways/Young Avengers stuff, and this sounds like it might do the trick.
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Mar 5, 2015 16:37
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Lemon Curdistan posted:This sounds somewhat like Double Cross, except potentially without the layout nightmare that is the Double Cross rulebook, so I'm down with that. I'm also okay with pre-built powers and nonsense power names - I'm not convinced by Icons, but mostly because of the weird mishmash of Fate and other stuff. Actually, yeah, I'd say it's like DX but less complex and with clearer rules. You just pick powers and go. And it can totally do Runaways/YA.
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Mar 5, 2015 16:44
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