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EclecticTastes posted:So, it looks kinda like Bards are just bad Thieves, at least as far as the management layer is concerned. That's kinda disappointing. I figured they might at least get some realm-level magic, or unique diplomatic options. In the videogame, yes, part of the thing is that Bards and the Birthright-specific Magician are kind of not intended as Regents. See, if you're not an elf or have divine blood, you can't become a proper Wizard and thus cast all magic. Instead, the best you can do is become a Magician(kind of a lovely combo of a Thief and an Illusionist) or a Bard. Both classes get full access only to Divination, Illusion, and in the case of the Bards, Enchantment. If you were an actual blooded regent you'd likely choose to become a Wizard instead. Mind, in the pen and paper game the GM is also supposed to be relatively permissive in allowing players to come up with cool ideas, so for instance a Bard might arrange a festival or concert of some sort to increase income or boost loyalty in the province. When on adventuring duty they also have the advantage of being notably less squishy than wizards. Bards in the pen and paper game also are actively discouraged from rulership, because they take oaths of neutrality and if they rule a kingdom, thus "taking a side"(even if it's their own), the Bardic Colleges will refuse to have anything to do with them. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 04:27 on May 12, 2022 |
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May 12, 2022 04:19
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PurpleXVI posted:and while I don't believe the videogame features any Laela Flaertes of Tuoren is a Bard, and also who I voted for. However, since they don't actually do anything all that interesting, I change my vote to whichever Wizard/Thief multiclass regent gets the most votes. The economic power of a Thief, and the magic of a Wizard, it's the best of both worlds!
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May 12, 2022 04:24
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EclecticTastes posted:Laela Flaertes of Tuoren is a Bard, and also who I voted for. However, since they don't actually do anything all that interesting, I change my vote to whichever Wizard/Thief multiclass regent gets the most votes. The economic power of a Thief, and the magic of a Wizard, it's the best of both worlds! Oh, no, I know the videogame features bards, that was just like a sentence I blanked out on and forgot to finish about magic instruments because it's 5am and I should go to bed.
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May 12, 2022 04:28
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Ilien, with Rogr as our regent. He seems like a genuinely decent person. Let's try and keep him that way, yeah? …Is this one of those games/settings where basically committing the wholesale genocide of unequivocally innocent goblins, orcs, kobolds, gnolls, etc. (including the children) is considered the Lawful Good option? Because I know that early D&D (AD&D in particular) is "like that" and that doesn't make me comfortable. Just putting that out there.
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May 12, 2022 04:45
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EclecticTastes posted:So, it looks kinda like Bards are just bad Thieves, at least as far as the management layer is concerned. That's kinda disappointing. I figured they might at least get some realm-level magic, or unique diplomatic options. I mean it's 2e, Bards don't do much interesting beyond being a jack of all trades, adventurer-wise - unless you count 'uses the rogue XP table so they get access to 2nd level Wizard spells at a much earlier XP point than the actual Wizard does' (I loved bards, they were fun)
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May 12, 2022 05:57
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:I mean it's 2e, Bards don't do much interesting beyond being a jack of all trades, adventurer-wise - unless you count 'uses the rogue XP table so they get access to 2nd level Wizard spells at a much earlier XP point than the actual Wizard does' Don't forget their immense Lore value, which let them identify basically anything even remotely magical at a glance. You never needed to waste a spell slot on Identify when you had a Bard around.
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May 12, 2022 06:19
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EclecticTastes posted:Don't forget their immense Lore value, which let them identify basically anything even remotely magical at a glance. You never needed to waste a spell slot on Identify when you had a Bard around. True - unless you had a DM who was enough of a dic-- er, stickler for the rules that they'd say "no, your lore roll is only gonna work for things that are sufficiently famous, and none of these leather armor +2s that have been sitting in an underground vault for years count" Antagonistic DMing, wheeee
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May 12, 2022 06:39
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This thread makes me wanna play in a Birthright campaign. Though I'm not sure whether I'd prefer the original 2e with all its endearing jank, or the more streamlined, but somewhat sanitized, experience of one of the 5e conversions. Perhaps having the adventure layer run more smoothly via 5e would let the management layer stand out even more, but on the other hand, you lose a lot of that oldschool charm that comes from indecipherable nonsense like THAC0 and constant risk of instant death via Gygaxian Naturalism. Tough choice. It's an academic quandary, anyway, since nobody's running either.
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May 12, 2022 07:51
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disposablewords posted:Ilien, with Rogr. A genuinely nice person who wasn't even supposed to be here? His success or his failure would be hilarious either way. Yeah, let's kill 'em with kindness as DnD-Canada
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May 12, 2022 07:51
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Chillen in Ilien
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May 12, 2022 11:03
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HereticMIND posted:Ilien, with Rogr as our regent. He seems like a genuinely decent person. Let's try and keep him that way, yeah?
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May 12, 2022 11:14
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Looks like Ilien is in the lead ahead of Elinie by just one vote. I intend to record gameplay for the first update today, so get your votes in soon if you want to sway which nation we play as the first time around.HereticMIND posted:…Is this one of those games/settings where basically committing the wholesale genocide of unequivocally innocent goblins, orcs, kobolds, gnolls, etc. (including the children) is considered the Lawful Good option? Because I know that early D&D (AD&D in particular) is "like that" and that doesn't make me comfortable. Just putting that out there. Genuinely no. Goblins, gnolls, etc. are generally presented as being people rather than just bundles of stats to mow down, and inter-race conflicts like the one between the elves and humans are presented as being based in history and the sins of ancestors rather than simply because one side is bad and needs to be wiped out. For instance, in Thurazor, a goblin realm not in The Gorgon's Alliance but in the canon corebook, which lies just north of Dhoesone and Tuarhievel, it's specifically called out that human religions have started infiltrating the kingdom and that their temples "cater to goblins sick of bloodshed and hatred." Certainly there are more progressive settings in existence. But for as old a D&D product as Birthright is(1995), it always struck me as wild and refreshing to see things like this, alongside the delightful lack of racism or exoticism with the Khinasi.
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May 12, 2022 13:35
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Slaan posted:Agreed! Elinie, Khalilah
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May 12, 2022 13:36
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HereticMIND posted:Ilien, with Rogr as our regent. He seems like a genuinely decent person. Let's try and keep him that way, yeah?
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May 12, 2022 13:38
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Voting for Elinie, with Khalilah as our regent.
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May 12, 2022 13:46
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I appreciate the hard work you all put in to instantly make it a tie. 
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May 12, 2022 14:43
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Ilien, with Rogr as our regent. Play nice the first go around edit: HAHA Tiebreaker!
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May 12, 2022 15:19
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Torrannor posted:Voting for Elinie, with Khalilah as our regent. Am I in time to tie it again?
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May 12, 2022 23:38
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How hard was it to get this to work, Purple?
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May 12, 2022 23:40
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JustJeff88 posted:How hard was it to get this to work, Purple? Actually not very at all! There was a .iso file on an abandonware site, first hit if you google "Birthright Gorgon's Alliance abandonware" or something similar, added a mount for it in DOSBox, easily installed. Same site also has some patches, that was the hardest part not because it was difficult but because the first patch file takes forever to go through(Sierra's site has one you can just copy-paste in from Windows, though). A helpful goon also tested it out before I even started the LP and PM'd me with how they'd done it, which made it clear it was super simple. Amhazair posted:Am I in time to tie it again? I'm going to say no because I'd rather not wait another week to start this LP.
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May 13, 2022 01:26
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I'd have said Marlae Roesone should start punching and never stop, but seeing as it's down to two, I'd vote for Ilien and Rogr instead. if the vote were even still open, that is.
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May 13, 2022 02:03
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As sorely tempted as I was to vote for Elinie, i'll help lock in Ilien and Rogr.
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May 13, 2022 02:30
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It looks like it's too late for the pebbles to vote, but what the heck, Ilien and Rogr. Also, looking forward to more of the combat- from some of the quick videos on Youtube, yeah, deranged is a good word.
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May 13, 2022 03:45
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HereticMIND posted:Ilien, with Rogr as our regent. He seems like a genuinely decent person. Let's try and keep him that way, yeah? I like this - win by just being a good dude
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May 13, 2022 05:28
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Man, I forgot how utterly incomprehensible some of this action is going to be from an outside perspective, especially in the early dungeons. Fingers crossed I can make it parseable.
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May 13, 2022 10:18
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Can't say it's the most polished game out there, but I had fun with it. What's the deal with the two regents? Just so there will be options at how you play a nation, or there's more, fluffwise?
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May 13, 2022 11:59
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I know it's too late, but eh, gently caress it. I'm going to make a useless vote for the dwarves. If nothing else, just to show that someone else is interested in seeing them rule with an iron fist.
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May 13, 2022 12:47
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This game always made a lot of odd sense to me. Like, of course your adventurer is going to become a baron/duke/king, that's basically how it always went down. You kicked enough rear end, you got a title and went out on hunts/adventures while the actually competent helpers stayed home and ran everything.
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May 13, 2022 13:47
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evilmiera posted:This game always made a lot of odd sense to me. Like, of course your adventurer is going to become a baron/duke/king, that's basically how it always went down. You kicked enough rear end, you got a title and went out on hunts/adventures while the actually competent helpers stayed home and ran everything. That was one of the biggest things I missed from AD&D (alongside the class-based saves) that vanished from 3rd edition onward. Sure, the Fighter doesn't get world-altering spells like the spellcasters, but what he does get is a keep and a small army.
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May 13, 2022 14:57
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Randalor posted:That was one of the biggest things I missed from AD&D (alongside the class-based saves) that vanished from 3rd edition onward. Sure, the Fighter doesn't get world-altering spells like the spellcasters, but what he does get is a keep and a small army. Early DnD tended to assume that the Fighter was also the party face, a job that got shifted over to the Rogue and Bard from 3E onward.
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May 13, 2022 14:58
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Gun Jam posted:Can't say it's the most polished game out there, but I had fun with it. Well, both! The first thing is, yes, giving us options for who our "main" regent will be, while the other will always be our starting lieutenant, and is the canonical second-in-command of a given nation, because even with an aspect of divine ability to rule, there's a limit to how many things one person can manage to do in a day. We'll get into lieutenant actions later, but remembering to use them is part of snapping the game in half. See, not every ruler needs to rule provinces, there are in fact plenty of rulers who are non-state actors that only control temples, sources, guilds or law holdings. It's actually my one big mechanical issue with the game, if played as pen and paper, because in my experience the average party will consist of four to five people, and it gets kind of awkward if they're not all blooded rulers of some sort. A nation composed of one ruler and three lieutenants, even if it somewhat strains their gold income, often have a massive advantage against other nations if they fight them one-on-one, since the other nation really only gets two actions per turn, while the players' gets four or five. Especially due to how contesting holdings works. But we'll get to that as we break down the game mechanics in the first update.
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May 13, 2022 15:43
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Along with other stuff that vanished in 3e, everyone was supposed to get a NPC buddy who trailed just behind them in level. You had to have an impossibly bad Charisma of 1 to never qualify for even one henchman in your lifetime. That got exported to the Leadership feat, which covered not just getting that one NPC buddy but also the other low-level followers some characters were supposed to get automatically in earlier editions. (Strictly speaking, Leadership was an optional feat for inclusion, sequestered in the DMG away from the rest, but haha as if players didn't consider it part of the same kind of character shopping list as the magic items section.)
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May 13, 2022 16:34
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disposablewords posted:Along with other stuff that vanished in 3e, everyone was supposed to get a NPC buddy who trailed just behind them in level. You had to have an impossibly bad Charisma of 1 to never qualify for even one henchman in your lifetime. That got exported to the Leadership feat, which covered not just getting that one NPC buddy but also the other low-level followers some characters were supposed to get automatically in earlier editions. (Strictly speaking, Leadership was an optional feat for inclusion, sequestered in the DMG away from the rest, but haha as if players didn't consider it part of the same kind of character shopping list as the magic items section.) Most DMs banned Leadership, anyway, for obvious reasons (turns out one player having an army of NPCs to throw at every problem was disruptive to most campaigns). All these changes stemmed from a shift in philosophy between second and third editions. In early D&D, you weren't just going on adventures, you were actively playing out your character's life, which meant pursuing ambitions beyond just stopping bad guys or clearing dungeons. Up through second edition, many campaigns had a lot in common with the Society for Creative Anachronism, where players would eventually attain some manner of high office, and sessions would be as much about attending to affairs of the realm as delving into dungeons (which Birthright leans all the way into). Even those where the players focused entirely on Gygax's original vision of "dungeon until dead" usually involved building up some sort of home base and cadre of helpers just to make dungeoning more efficient*. Wizards of the Coast, however, decided that that was a lot of bookkeeping and micromanagement, and might turn some people off, slightly reducing their market share in an industry that had become quite competitive throughout the nineties (White Wolf, in particular, was threatening WotC's dominance of the tabletop games market). So, third edition was designed to refocus gameplay entirely on the PCs, with NPCs under the party's control relegated to an easily-excluded optional feat (and, theoretically, the occasional hireling). The overhaul of the mechanics borrowed a lot from the competition (a lot of people forget that Skills and Feats were added to D&D after they'd been popularized in a dozen other systems) and was overall intended to appeal to as wide an audience as they could manage. Everything became about three to six heroes wandering around saving the world, with little to no though spared for parties that might prefer to stick around and rule a kingdom. The end result was far from perfect, but it got the job done, plus, a little later, the release of the OGL caused the market to be flooded with 3.x-based games, which choked the life out of WotC's competition and they swear it wasn't intentional but it's sure as hell worked out great for them. *To go off on a mild tangent, one of the other changes between second and third edition was the nature of dungeons, themselves. Before third edition, "megadungeons", as they're now called, were much more common, or even the default setting. There was no trekking hundreds of miles between dungeons in Gygax's original vision, you literally just entered the dungeon, went as deep as you could before things got too tough/you had too much treasure to carry, then you went back up to store/sell the loot, repeat forever (if they actually got to the bottom, the party was usually ready to retire, anyway). By late second edition, this had already changed quite a bit, but this is why those early editions had a lot of rules that favored staying in one place, is because dungeons were frequently designed to support that method of play. You'd do all your murderhoboing down in the dungeon, then come up to the surface and socialize/run a fiefdom/whatever to recharge before the next delve. Primarily aboveground campaigns didn't become the norm until third edition.
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May 13, 2022 17:19
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disposablewords posted:Along with other stuff that vanished in 3e, everyone was supposed to get a NPC buddy who trailed just behind them in level. You had to have an impossibly bad Charisma of 1 to never qualify for even one henchman in your lifetime. That got exported to the Leadership feat, which covered not just getting that one NPC buddy but also the other low-level followers some characters were supposed to get automatically in earlier editions. (Strictly speaking, Leadership was an optional feat for inclusion, sequestered in the DMG away from the rest, but haha as if players didn't consider it part of the same kind of character shopping list as the magic items section.) That would've been a houserule. Not everyone got a tag-along, not everyone wanted a tag-along. Charisma determined the maximum number of people that could be coming with you, mostly to prevent - EclecticTastes posted:Most DMs banned Leadership, anyway, for obvious reasons (turns out one player having an army of NPCs to throw at every problem was disruptive to most campaigns). Yeah, that. Though there are always ways to uh...curtail such things. Sleep having an effect measured in hit dice wasn't just for the players to halve the number of hobgoblins or whatever that they needed to fight. And as the levels go up, enemy spellcasters can gain access to things like Cloudkill or Death Spell to just erase troublesome hirelings (or more likely, assuming your DM isn't a dick, to threaten to do so as a hostage tactic). And that's just the magic end; large-scale traps that would injure PCs might maim or kill NPCs. Players who care about their hirelings will eventually learn to leave them at home to take care of the castle and the vault and everything else you can't be lugging along with you 24/7, and bring them along only for thematically relevant adventures. And players who don't care tend to develop a reputation in the game world that limits who will sign up with them (to say nothing of potential alignment issues). E: Of course it also goes without saying that if the players aren't abusing hirelings, there's nothing to curtail. Fun within reason should always be allowed, above all. Felinoid fucked around with this message at 17:37 on May 13, 2022 |
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May 13, 2022 17:33
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Felinoid posted:That would've been a houserule. Not everyone got a tag-along, not everyone wanted a tag-along. Charisma determined the maximum number of people that could be coming with you, mostly to prevent - I'm unclear on what you're saying would have been a houserule. Henchmen and their availability in general? Because that's right in the description of Charisma in the PHB. Further GM-facing rules on how to actually enact them are right in the DMG. And it makes the distinction between henchmen (your NPC lieutenant there because they respect or like you) and hirelings (the low-level mass followers you're paying money for), which you seem to be conflating.
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May 13, 2022 18:42
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FWIW, you did see the start of a skill system in 2nd edition with the (optional) noncombat proficiency rules.
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May 13, 2022 21:21
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EclecticTastes posted:*To go off on a mild tangent, one of the other changes between second and third edition was the nature of dungeons, themselves. Before third edition, "megadungeons", as they're now called, were much more common, or even the default setting. There was no trekking hundreds of miles between dungeons in Gygax's original vision, you literally just entered the dungeon, went as deep as you could before things got too tough/you had too much treasure to carry, then you went back up to store/sell the loot, repeat forever (if they actually got to the bottom, the party was usually ready to retire, anyway). By late second edition, this had already changed quite a bit, but this is why those early editions had a lot of rules that favored staying in one place, is because dungeons were frequently designed to support that method of play. You'd do all your murderhoboing down in the dungeon, then come up to the surface and socialize/run a fiefdom/whatever to recharge before the next delve. Primarily aboveground campaigns didn't become the norm until third edition. I'd argue that that isn't strictly accurate, but only because second edition was itself an iteration of 1e - where the 'dungeons and nothing else really' concept was really foundational to the game. It was about halfway through 1e's lifecycle that what the developers called "Wilderness Adventures" started to become A Thing - that is to say, adventures that weren't constrained by dungeon geography. ('Dungeon geography' being a flexible term in and of itself, mind, not exclusively limited to 10' x 10' stone tunnels) 2e, which was honestly less of a "new edition" in the way we think of it today and more of a "we're condensing all the stuff from the past 73 supplements and Dragon Magazine articles into a single set of rulebooks" reshuffling - rules changed, sure, but very little that'd be considered a Major Change today - was trying to incorporate this broader milieu, which is why the settings published under 2e tended to come in Big Boxes With Lots Of Maps, as opposed to 1e's strategy of "screw it, we'll just have setting details crop up in adventure modules and let people glue them together however they want," which is why Greyhawk spent so long being an absolute mess while the Forgotten Realms, for all its many problems, was at least a relatively coherent world without much self-contradiction. So what I'm getting at is that 2e was trying to make Life Aboveground a central part of the game - it just wasn't particularly well-supported by the rules, because no one had gotten around to figuring out what those rules ought to be just yet. Essentially it boils down to D&D's roots in wargaming. 1e was, at its heart, still a wargame, just one with a smaller focus; they called it an RPG, but people were still in the process of figuring out what an RPG was. 2e had a firmer concept of what kind of a game it was trying to be, but wasn't so great at actually being that kind of game, because the concept was so new and the guidelines for how they should work were still being settled*. 3e was, to my mind, the first Dungeons and Dragons edition that actually succeeded at the scope it was trying to be - the first edition that succeeded at actually being an RPG (admittedly a combat-focused one) as opposed to being a combat simulator that you could fit some roleplaying in. *My contention, from being an impressionable teen just as White Wolf was becoming, y'know, White Wolf, is that the most important thing they did to cement their explosive growth was to devote entire sections of their rulebooks to going "here's how to run a game and challenge your players without being dicks to them;" before that, the Adversarial GM wasn't just the most common playstyle, it was the expectation. D&D, even 2e, still had a very strong current of "if the PCs all survive your dungeon, you have failed as a DM" going on.
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May 14, 2022 02:05
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:*My contention, from being an impressionable teen just as White Wolf was becoming, y'know, White Wolf, is that the most important thing they did to cement their explosive growth was to devote entire sections of their rulebooks to going "here's how to run a game and challenge your players without being dicks to them;" before that, the Adversarial GM wasn't just the most common playstyle, it was the expectation. D&D, even 2e, still had a very strong current of "if the PCs all survive your dungeon, you have failed as a DM" going on. This is absolutely the secret to the success of not just White Wolf, but every other game of that era that exploded onto the scene. Legend of the Five Rings, 7th Sea, Deadlands, they all emphasized collaborative storytelling between the GM and the players, and they were each successful enough to spawn companion TCGs. And, it's true enough that 2e was at least trying to evolve the game beyond "One dungeon, one town". You can even see it in the video game tie-ins, where the early games are a mix of dungeon crawls, quests around a single major city, and expeditions towards a villain's lair, and the later games steadily expand their scope until the Infinity Engine games have you traversing entire nations and planes of existence.
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May 14, 2022 03:09
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EclecticTastes posted:This is absolutely the secret to the success of not just White Wolf, but every other game of that era that exploded onto the scene. Legend of the Five Rings, 7th Sea, Deadlands, they all emphasized collaborative storytelling between the GM and the players, and they were each successful enough to spawn companion TCGs. I started with the Brown Box ODD back in the mid-70s (in Wisconsin no less!) and we never played 'One Dungeon, One Town' style. There was always a collab between the players and the DM, but...the Players wanted to work their characters into the world while NOT exactly stating how. The DMs (there were a number of open worlds with PCs adventuring in different games from week to week) used the characters in-game actions in plotting and games were a lot more dynamic in that there were maps and encounters, but situations were more flexible on how they were handled.
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May 14, 2022 03:34
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I started with the Brown Box ODD back in the mid-70s (in Wisconsin no less!) and we never played 'One Dungeon, One Town' style. There was always a collab between the players and the DM, but...the Players wanted to work their characters into the world while NOT exactly stating how. The DMs (there were a number of open worlds with PCs adventuring in different games from week to week) used the characters in-game actions in plotting and games were a lot more dynamic in that there were maps and encounters, but situations were more flexible on how they were handled. Well, yeah, individual groups did whatever they pleased (as I recall, Dave Arneson's own home game played in much the same way); we're speaking more in broad generalities, and also talking more about the design philosophy employed by the writers of D&D at the time. There are absolutely some more intrigue/politics-focused modules in the literal hundreds that were published during the early years of the game, but the majority of adventures were straightforward dungeons crawls.
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May 14, 2022 03:54
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