The golden age of OGL CRPGs is beginning

[redking]

There are now a number of OGL CRPGs. Now there is a new one, Realms Beyond (https://www.gog.com/game/realms_beyond_ashes_of_the_fallen). This is a very positive development.

[warty goblin]

Ooh hexagons are all sexy. Color me cautiously interested.

Now we just need to switch from lots of D&D RPGs to more Dark Eye RPGs. Much cooler ruleset.

[Psyren]

Nice - and yes, the success of games like Divinity, Pillars and Kingmaker are revitalizing the genre, hence WotC officially throwing its hat back in the ring for the first time since NW.

[Eldan]

Ooh hexagons are all sexy. Color me cautiously interested.

Now we just need to switch from lots of D&D RPGs to more Dark Eye RPGs. Much cooler ruleset.

But how do you check if the players of spellcasters correctly incanted the children's rhyme every time they cast a spell?

[Zombimode]

Saft, Kraft, Monstermacht. Schlage drein, so dass es kracht! :smallbiggrin:


Realms Beyond is very much on my radar and has been for at least 2 years. Looking forward to it :smallsmile:

[Eldan]

Saft, Kraft, Monstermacht. Schlage drein, so dass es kracht! :smallbiggrin:

I honestly kind of hate older editions of TSA. The new ones aren't great, but at least they got rid of that.

[noob]

When will there be a D20 rpg that manages destruction like red faction?
I want to collapse everything then destroy the rubble to seek the monsters in it.

[Aotrs Commander]

Eeehh... I'm not sure. Default vanilla 3.5 is a bit... Lacking mechanically, so I think I'll take a case of wait and see to what they've changed altered with the classes they're doing before I get too excited. Kingmaker may have spoiled me rather (since a lot of stuff PF1 did I think was better than 3.5; I mean my approach on TT to 3.5 and PF was "yes," but...)



Especially since I am not a fan of open-world games to start with. To date, the only one that managed to hold my interest was Witcher 3.

Semi-open (like, sat KM or BG 1/2 o9r even PoE 2 to a degree) I can cope with better, definitely; but there's a reason after never finishing Morrowind, doing less of Oblivion and even less of Fallout 3, I have never even glanced at Skyrim.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Yea, 3.5 was abusable as heck, even in Core. Between the fifteen minute adventuring day brought to you by Rope Trick, Save or Lose on all three saving throws by level 5, and the ability to stack DC's... they'd need to make some substantial changes to the base ruleset for it to become remotely balanced. Like... more even than Pathfinder did.

Honestly, if I was going to make an OGL CRPG, I'd start with 5e like BG3 did.

[noob]

Yea, 3.5 was abusable as heck, even in Core. Between the fifteen minute adventuring day brought to you by Rope Trick, Save or Lose on all three saving throws by level 5, and the ability to stack DC's... they'd need to make some substantial changes to the base ruleset for it to become remotely balanced. Like... more even than Pathfinder did.

Honestly, if I was going to make an OGL CRPG, I'd start with 5e like BG3 did.

While 5e is more balanced it also does not have a bunch of specific things that were very fun in 3.5 like player characters massively overpowering low level monster hordes without needing spells or hiding or yet teleport cloaked true sight disjunction rocket tag.
By the way you get to have save or lose spells for more than 3 saves in dnd 5e quite fast: the only reason you do not get it for all the saves fast is that there is now 6 saves which arguably advantages save or lose casters since you get way less monsters with 6 good saves.

[Aotrs Commander]

Yea, 3.5 was abusable as heck, even in Core. Between the fifteen minute adventuring day brought to you by Rope Trick, Save or Lose on all three saving throws by level 5, and the ability to stack DC's... they'd need to make some substantial changes to the base ruleset for it to become remotely balanced. Like... more even than Pathfinder did.

Honestly, if I was going to make an OGL CRPG, I'd start with 5e like BG3 did.

I far less concerned (i.e. not really at all on a single player game) with balance (in regard to OP options) than I am with mechanical breath and complexity.

I think the more fundemental problem is core, non-SPLAT (which it perforce must be to be OGL) 3.5 is especially lacking. 3.5 by close overall was fine (though I saw plenty of room for improvement and had done so even before intergrating about 50% of PF1 for myself), because of all the options and base classes.

But with only eight (not even all of core), you have to hope they have taken a proper going over the feats and SIGNIFICANTLY improving the noncasters; else fighters, especially, will suck hard. (Harder, potentially, than in NWN which could use whatever it liked from 3.5.) What might have been fine twenty years ago now is not, simply because we have had twenty years of the base 3.x system going "this can be better now." Fighters being just "click monster until dead" is not really an option that's interesting to play around with. And being LEGO blocks with characters is 3.P's single greatest and most powerful asset.

I would expect that they probably know this and are making such changes, but it's no garentee, of course.



(I mean, heck, I have no problem with the 15-minute adventuring day and in fact as DM, 3.Aotrs actively expects it, so that's a non-issue.)

[Eldan]

Yea, 3.5 was abusable as heck, even in Core. Between the fifteen minute adventuring day brought to you by Rope Trick, Save or Lose on all three saving throws by level 5, and the ability to stack DC's... they'd need to make some substantial changes to the base ruleset for it to become remotely balanced. Like... more even than Pathfinder did.

Honestly, if I was going to make an OGL CRPG, I'd start with 5e like BG3 did.

The way around the 15 minute adventuring day was always easy: have the bad guys not be entirely reactive. "So, you took six days to get through the dungeon. THe bad guy left 4 days ago" is an answer you usually only have to give once as a DM.

Difficult to implement in a CRPG without annoying players, though.

[Winthur]

Yea, 3.5 was abusable as heck, even in Core. Between the fifteen minute adventuring day brought to you by Rope Trick, Save or Lose on all three saving throws by level 5, and the ability to stack DC's...

All D&D-related games on the market so far tend to simply omit the issue, truth be told. You don't need Rope Trick at all in a game which hardly penalizes you for resting after every encounter (like in BG, IWD or NWN), for instance. The amount of utility tricks we think of when we conjure the image of a "God Wizard" simply doesn't exist; casters don't fly and don't teleport everywhere at will.

Even IWD2, the game most biased towards caster and half-caster parties, had builds that you wouldn't see in tabletop simply because the expectations are different. You took 12 levels of Druid and Illusionist for martial self-buffs, and a single-classed Druid is nowhere near as optimal of a choice as it would be in a core 3.5 game.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

While 5e is more balanced it also does not have a bunch of specific things that were very fun in 3.5 like player characters massively overpowering low level monster hordes without needing spells or hiding or yet teleport cloaked true sight disjunction rocket tag.
By the way you get to have save or lose spells for more than 3 saves in dnd 5e quite fast: the only reason you do not get it for all the saves fast is that there is now 6 saves which arguably advantages save or lose casters since you get way less monsters with 6 good saves.

Base saves, even poor ones, scaled far better in 5e than in 3.5, and there were far fewer means of scaling DC's of your spells in 5e since stats were *hard capped* at 20 and PrC's don't exist to completely break classes. There's far fewer 'save or lose' effects in 5e in general, most of the effects casters throw around got nerfed substantially and/or require Concentration so you can't use more than one at a time. And unless you have some way of reliably applying Disadvantage to saving throws, your odds of successfully getting your 'save or lose' effect to stick is... dicey at best.