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View Full Version : [General] Need help to chose a system



bigbaddragon
2009-07-28, 04:34 AM
As the title says, my group wants to try a new system and we would be grateful for every recomendation and experience you can share.

Group background: so far we played 3.5, G.U.R.P.S. (can't remember which edition though), Warhammer FRP and Dark Heresy. Most of the time we played 3.5 and enjoyed it fairly enough. G.U.R.P.S. was the worst gaming experience so far, mostly because of the DM at the time but even if we disregard him we still didn't like the system. Warhammer was by far the best gaming experience so far ... small set of simple rules, much fewer supplements and no need to have a caster in the party probably helped us devote ourselves to RP instead of optimization (all that and the great campaign). Dark Heresy was very pleasing too ... what could be not pleasing when you're playing hairless psychotic maniac with force sword hacking and force barraging heretics and eldar around and every now or then making the whole party hate you, especially the Tech-Priest when the Machine Spirit rejects you :smallbiggrin:.

I tossed all this informations so that those of you who played/DMed already mentioned and other systems could get a feel of what would suit my group. The things we are considering currently are new World of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu so I'm mostly looking for your opinions/experiences on those two.

Exalted is a no no ... at least two members of the group dislike it and the group counts four people.

Anything else besides already mentioned is welcome and appreciated :smallsmile:

bosssmiley
2009-07-28, 04:52 AM
Call of Cthulhu rocks, and it uses the same basic system as other classics like Runequest, Pendragon, Elric/Stormbringer.
WoD is... not so rock.

If you want some rules-light dungeon crawling try Labyrinth Lord. It's an expy of 1983 vintage (Moldvay) Basic D&D and it is love.
I presume you'll be playing Rogue Trader (*squeeeee!*) at some point?

kamikasei
2009-07-28, 04:58 AM
I've been playing some Mutants & Masterminds lately and enjoying it a lot. It's a very open system, entirely fluffless, where you're basically given a toolbox of purely mechanical powers that you use to give your character the abilities you want which you can then describe however you like. You can make nearly anything in it, although the system is designed with superheroes in mind so the powers let you achieve fairly superhuman feats pretty easily. Still, it's very flexible and refreshingly up-front about saying "here you go, make what you want of it, it's up to you not to break everything". However, note that it has no default setting or anything like that - you need to make up everything except how to adjudicate the effects of the characters' actions.

NeoVid
2009-07-28, 05:05 AM
Since you're considering WoD already, I will confirm that it is Win(TM), and with the large array of different games in the setting, you're very likely to find one that fits your whole group.

hamlet
2009-07-28, 06:50 AM
I'll add Swords and Wizardry (which, like Labyrinth Lord, can be gotten for free online) to the list of clone games. It's an excellent little book if you, or the DM, are willing to bend it to your will.

BRP (i.e., the system Call of Cthulhu is built on) has a fantasy version which is very good. Probably one of the best out there, really, and better than its Rune Quest incarnation.

West End Games D6 Fantasy is quite nice as well. Very simplex and worth the time if that's the thing you're looking for.

Outside of fantasy? Insert standard plug for Alternity here. Also, West End Games does a D6 "universal" game which is excellent. I also recommend Savage Worlds highly.

bigbaddragon
2009-07-28, 07:44 AM
Thank you for your suggestions so far, we'll look into as many of them as possible :smallsmile:

@bosssmiley: I'm unfamiliar with Rogue Trader but google did its job. What is your experience with it?

The White Knight
2009-07-28, 07:55 AM
West End Games had a number of d6 roleplaying games that you might want to check out. I've only read the Star Wars Roleplaying Game books, but I seem to recall there being others. The system is pretty mechanically simple: you have a pool of dice for each stat (like in the WoD games) and you roll and sum that many d6's against a difficulty (like in d20) to determine the degree of success/failure. It's like a supersimplified hybridization of White Wolf's d10 and the d20 system. You'll learn it in under an hour, leaving the rest of your time for fluff.

Totally Guy
2009-07-28, 07:58 AM
I've just placed an order for the Burning Wheel system.

I don't know what it'll be like really but I believe it uses a D6 dice pool mechanic as above.

Kantur
2009-07-28, 08:15 AM
West End Games had a number of d6 roleplaying games that you might want to check out. I've only read the Star Wars Roleplaying Game books, but I seem to recall there being others. The system is pretty mechanically simple: you have a pool of dice for each stat (like in the WoD games) and you roll and sum that many d6's against a difficulty (like in d20) to determine the degree of success/failure. It's like a supersimplified hybridization of White Wolf's d10 and the d20 system. You'll learn it in under an hour, leaving the rest of your time for fluff.


I definetly agree with this. All that's really needed is a good story to make it a great experience - very simple mechanics, character gen takes maybe 15-20 minutes for your first character and about 5 for any characters after that. And that's if you ignore the character templates (Smuggler, Failed Jedi, Wookie First Mate, etc), with templates it's about 5 minutes for your first character and maybe 3 for future characters as all you have to decide are skills and a name.

As you'vegot some experience with 3.5 as well, you can probably use the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars campaign guides/era rules and convert them easily for WEG Star Wars play. Only the DM really needs the rulebook, and they tend to be fairly cheap second hand on Amazon.

I've never played the WotC Star Wars game, but I would definetly recommend the West End Games version. It's exactly what you would want for Star Wars - It's simple and fast, there's still a fair amount of stuff out there for it if you want and Jedi tend to start off a little weaker than most other characters but the force skills can make up for that late into a campaign when they're reliable at using them.

eepop
2009-07-28, 09:48 AM
My group has been having a lot of fun with Alpha Omega lately.

It may not meet your simplicity requirements though. It has a lot of rules you can use, but many of them don't hurt the game much if you don't use them right off the bat. It seems to lend itself quite well to slowly adding in the rules a bit at a time.

But if you can accept the complexity, it does a lot of really cool things that I hadn't seen get a lot of play in many other games:
1) Dice mechanic is very cool. Every combat round you get 6 dice for your "to-hit" rolls so to speak. Most people get 2 actions per combat round. You have to decide how you want to split up those dice across your two actions. You can throw them all into 1 action to do something spectacular, or you can do two actions of a lesser effect by using 3 of your dice for one and 3 for the other (or 4 and 2 or 5 and 1, etc).
2) Multiple actions in a combat round. The way this game handles it is so awesome. I know several other games have allowed this, but the fact that in AO you still only get your 6 dice each round means that when you get to your 3rd action, you are reducing the effectiveness of each of those actions to a degree since you are probably only using 2 dice per action instead of 3. The amount of investment it takes to get to that 3rd action seems pretty fair too, to the point that I can see a character shooting for it, but it doesn't feel like its cost effective for everyone to shoot for it (like can happen in Shadowrun).
3) More open magic system. Its like having every spell use metamagic. So you can adjust what you are doing on the fly. But you can also write down what it takes to make a given effect and have a spell list if that works out better for you.
4) Classless point buy system for characters that uses 99% of the same rules for character creation and character advancement. All too often in classless systems, the points you use for creation and development and completely different, which means costs have to be listed twice, etc and it can get a bit confusing. AO cleared this up quite a bit.
5) Visually stunning. The art and just general layout design is A+++.