PDA

View Full Version : Best Tabletop RPG



Jason
2020-12-02, 04:43 PM
We've got a thread on Worst Tabletop RPG you have ever played, how about one for the best?

You might restrict your praise to "the best of its genre" or "the best edition of this particular game" if "best overall" is too broad.

And "played" usually means to me that you generated a character and played in at least one session with a group of other players. Or ran at least one session as the GM. Basically, this isn't the "best tabletop RPG you ever heard about or read but never played" thread.

I will start by saying that I think The One Ring did an excellent job of letting its players feel like they were in a Tolkien novel, and is a better RPG than the older MERP (which is nice, but took some liberties with the setting and needed lots and lots of charts to play) and certainly it is more Tolkienesque than any version of D&D. So that game gets my "best RPG set in Middle-Earth" award.

Grod_The_Giant
2020-12-02, 05:37 PM
I'll put forward Mutants and Masterminds 3e. Not so much for sheer coolness of the power creation system--and it's very cool--but for the experience. Especially once you start getting into the swing of power stunts, I give the game mad props for allowing comic-book-logic solutions to not only work, but to be optimal play.

The Dresden Files RPG wins on presentation. The books are beautiful, and they fold in the fiction delightfully-- it's presented as a homebrew game being developed by one of the series' supporting characters, with another character and Dresden himself chiming in with sass and clarifying questions "hand-written" in the margins.

Batcathat
2020-12-02, 05:49 PM
The Dresden Files RPG wins on presentation. The books are beautiful, and they fold in the fiction delightfully-- it's presented as a homebrew game being developed by one of the series' supporting characters, with another character and Dresden himself chiming in with sass and clarifying questions "hand-written" in the margins.

Agreed. I haven't even played it (and honestly don't really remember much about the actual system from when I read it) but the presentation is indeed all kinds of awesome and very much in line with the books.

Gnoman
2020-12-02, 06:11 PM
GURPS, hands down. There's RPGs that do individual genres/settings better, but GURPS works well enough - and the ability to very easily bring in whatever you want to make the game you want is priceless.

DigestPantheon
2020-12-02, 06:14 PM
I'd say Dungeon World was one of the best for getting new players into the hobby. The fact that it's very rules light means it's easy for new people to jump in without having to do too much homework.

Jason
2020-12-02, 06:20 PM
I haven't ever played Dresden Files, but I would say Paranoia (WEG's 2nd edition, with the Mongoose XP edition as a close runner-up) wins my "Best Presentation" award. It's a comedy game, and the rulebook is actually very funny to read. Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. The Jeff Holloway art perfectly fits the tone of the game too.

KaussH
2020-12-02, 06:22 PM
Depends what i want to do honest.

Gurps is great for worldbuilding and settings. Easy to build, not to same same, and 99% of the gurps books balance each other. ( world of darkness gurps and bunnys and Burrows as notable exceptions)

Fate and its variations, great for pick up games and cons.

But.....

To sit down and play for pure joy, original deadlands. Dice, chips, cards, its a geek tool box tossed at the wall and made to stick. ( note, before savage worlds, i mean old school) player and Marshall:)

LtPowers
2020-12-02, 06:24 PM
You may not believe this, but I always felt most comfortable in D&D 4e.

WEG Star Wars is a close second.


Powers &8^]

Jason
2020-12-02, 06:26 PM
GURPS, hands down. There's RPGs that do individual genres/settings better, but GURPS works well enough - and the ability to very easily bring in whatever you want to make the game you want is priceless.

GURPS would win my award for "Best at simulating nearly anything". You can play an intelligent blueberry muffin with just the basic books. It's a very well-put-together system too, and their books have the best indexes in the industry.

I might like more tailored games for some settings (like the afore-mentioned The One Ring for Middle-Earth), but GURPS is my go-to for something that doesn't have an RPG already.

Duff
2020-12-02, 06:41 PM
I'd say Feng Shui. Interesting settings, combat is interesting, characters pretty much do what it says on the tin. There's a lot to like.

Edit to add - It's odd. I generally hate "pick an archetype" character generation. I'll go the most "Build it all step by step" option available when there's a choice offered.
But they offer enough archetypes with good enough ideas that I found more options I wanted to play than I had time for.

Vahnavoi
2020-12-02, 07:07 PM
Out of the ones I own and play, my vote goes to Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

The core rules are basically an obvious rule patch to B/X D&D. That's it. It's not fancy but it's simple and functional. Put next to other RPG rulesets I own, it's sort of like putting a well-made knife next to a bunch of cheap multi-purpose tools. Sure, you technically can't use it for as many things, but it does what it's meant to without breaking.

The art and the supplements then go to demonstrate that you can do a lot more things with it than people give it credit for. It has edge. :smallamused:

This said, it's possible LotFP will be dethroned by 2nd Edition of Praedor. I don't know yet, the game's not officially out untill 8th of this month so I haven't been able to hold games with it.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-02, 07:29 PM
Unknown Armies. It's an amazing take on both horror and urban fantasy, the setting is brilliant, the magic is fun to use, and the system in the Third Edition is perfectly formulated to reflect the changing attitudes of people getting desensitised to stimuli by raising five basic Abilities while lowering another five as you gain more hardened notches. It takes the tendency of players to seek to use their highest skills and uses that to facilitate roleplaying. As you get more detached violence, secrecy, and just being antisocial in general begin to look like better options.

Combat is lethal and not recommended, but I see that as a plus, magick primarily does things weirder instead of better than technology (although that's not strictly true for Avatars), and magick brings alongside it restrictions, insanities, and focus that playing a mundane character is totally viable.

DataNinja
2020-12-02, 11:59 PM
Lancer, for best tactical RPG. Even discounting the amazing tools it has for character and encounter creation, or the excellent presentation, it's an incredibly solid tactical game.

You have so many choices, but it's hard to make a completely deficient character - and even if you do end up doing stuff you don't like, it's easy to switch stuff around. Group composition matters a lot, for both PCs and NPCs - the NPCs in particular are some of the best designed that I've seen. All of them have a purpose, and just changing out a few - or even the map or the SitReps - can drastically change how an encounter plays out.

The Situation Reports are amazing, too - six are provided to give different objectives, and the game is built around those. An encounter that doesn't seem scary at all when it's just a slugfest can be absolutely terrifying when you're having to stop them occupying an area. It helps make movement and positioning so much more important, too. Support as a role is extremely well-tuned in Lancer, rarely reeling like a dedicated support build is missing out compared to their damaging allies, since they're enabling so much.

I could gush more, but... I guess summary is, the numbers are good, options are diverse, and even small tweaks in a PC or enemy composition - or the maps or mission types - can lead to some wildly different and fun games.

Oh, and I guess Giant Robots are a plus, too. :smalltongue:

Delta
2020-12-03, 06:44 AM
You may not believe this, but I always felt most comfortable in D&D 4e.

I'm with you so far as I'll agree to that if I want to run a game focused on "Go into the dungeon, smash everything up, gather the loot and leave, rinse and repeat", D&D4e would most definitely be my system of choice.

2D8HP
2020-12-03, 08:26 AM
King Arthur Pendragon (usually just called Pendragon), whether the 1985 or 2016 version, finest FRP game ever.

If you don't have the patience/time for a prolonged character creation "mini-game" then the 1977 "blue book" version of Dungeons & Dragons, it's 48 pages are all you need.

Democratus
2020-12-03, 12:10 PM
But.....

To sit down and play for pure joy, original deadlands. Dice, chips, cards, its a geek tool box tossed at the wall and made to stick. ( note, before savage worlds, i mean old school) player and Marshall:)

I'll second this.

Original Deadlands was the most thematic, immersive game I've played.

Mechanics based on playing cards. Spell casting as "poker against the devil"...just chock full of awesome.

Runners up would be Amber Diceless, Nephilim, Fading Suns, and Call of Cthulhu. All of these based on immersion rather than mechanics. :smallsmile:

Quertus
2020-12-03, 12:14 PM
Best?

2e D&D hands down rates highest for "greatest fun per unit time", "best stories", and "best characters" from systems I've played. The character creation can be really quick and trivial, *or* you can scratch that creative itch and delve into kits, Skills & Powers, or even the tools in the DMG, to create a more complex build. Sure, you have to wade through Gygaxian prose, save vs obfuscated verbiage, and see past bad GMing advice, but it was worth it.

WoD was impressive in how it told a story with its books. No, it's not what you think. The original books were cool, with Werewolf having claw marks literally torn through the hardback cover. As time went on, the books grew more boring. Channeling was hit the hardest, as it went from fun full color pictures to grey scale mundanity as time passed. You could feel the story of the world ending just from the feel of the books.

WoD Mage had the coolest idea…

Older editions of ShadowRun were great from making a fast character seem *fast*. None of this Celerity ****, where you take extra actions in extra turns after everyone else - no, the guy with 34 initiative gets to go on 34, then on 24, then on 14… *then* you get to go on 6 (and then he goes again on 4). Pity that newer editions botched that.

Marvel facerip introduced me to the idea of power stunts.

And, of course, the homebrew Paradox (think Rifts, but good). Alright I struggle to describe the mechanics in a similar light, I will say that they enabled the greatest range of characters and stories of any system I've seen (yes, that includes things like Heroes, M&M, and GURPS, whose characters all felt samey in comparison, IME).

Special call out to 2e D&D for the Wild Magic Wild Surge table, Wand of Wonder, Bag of Beans, and random treasure table (4 entire books worth of random magic items, btw!), and Warhammer Fantasy for the d1000 random mutations table. Those were so fun!

EDIT: so, reading over this, should I want to make a homebrew optimized for me, it should have… the "simple to complex" character creation of 2e D&D… the range of characters of Paradox… the initiative of early ShadowRun… the ability to mold reality and make power stunts… and the publication history of WoD. And *lots* of random tables. I'm not sure whether to feel :smallamused:, :smallcool:, or :smalleek:.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-03, 12:36 PM
WoD Mage had the coolest idea.

My problem with Mage has always been that I played Unknown Armies first, which not only felt like it has a more solid system but felt like it just plain did 'Mage but better'. There was no need for a Technocracy, as Adept magick is limited and restrictive enough that you just can't stand up to mortal authorised. The linking of magick to a consensus reality worked better, as it was only one idea or forward even though the universe had done consensualist elements anyway (mostly to do with the invisible clergy and being explicitly humanocentric). Plus the Adept schools are just cooler than Mage's Traditions, as I said in my earlier post you can play a film wizard. Or a booze wizard, those are always popular.

KaussH
2020-12-03, 12:57 PM
EDIT: so, reading over this, should I want to make a homebrew optimized for me, it should have… the "simple to complex" character creation of 2e D&D… the range of characters of Paradox… the initiative of early ShadowRun… the ability to mold reality and make power stunts… and the publication history of WoD. And *lots* of random tables. I'm not sure whether to feel :smallamused:, :smallcool:, or :smalleek:.

As a side note, i sort of do that with 2nd ed dnd. I make people roll d10 for basic initiative, and if you have more than one attack you roll more, smaller dice. So 2 at is d6+d6
3 attacks is d4 3 times,
4 is d3 4 times.
Maxes out at 10/ post 10 and not perfect, but it does give that fighter speed feel . You have 3 attacks so go on the 2, 4, 7 in a round.

Martin Greywolf
2020-12-03, 03:50 PM
FATE Core. Not only can you model any setting you can think of, you can use it to simulate different stylistic genres. Want to play Pride and Prejudice? Add Gossip stress tracks. Want to have a sanity meter? Add a sanity track. Your players are on board with the game genre if you followed the rules, so they will have aspects that will make them funnier in a comedy, or more grizzled in a noir.

Sure, there's not a thing that it does especially well, unless you look into specific conversions (eg Dresden files), but all that you need to fix that is moderate level of system mastery and understanding what pacing and bell curve is. My proudest achievement with it is probably making a Naruto conversion in it that 1) was as consistent as possible with the verse (elemental techniques weaknesses to each other and all), 2) could handle the kekkei genkai jank and 3) was fun and easy to play.

zarionofarabel
2020-12-04, 03:15 AM
Mythras!!! This and it's offshoots like M-Space. Definitely my favorite system by far. For me the rules absolutely click and with a wealth of other D100 systems to steal stuff from it's IMHO the best system ever designed!!!

A close second would be Luke Crane's games. Burning Wheel, Torchbearer, and my absolute favorite of the bunch Mouse Guard!!! Who wouldn't want to play cute little mouse knights? Mean people, that's who! Seriously though they are amazing at reinforcing the idea that the players should drive the narrative!

A distant third would be the Ubiquity system, powering games like Hollow Earth Expedition and All For One: Regime Diabolique. I see it as a weird love child of D&D and the White Wolf games. It is simple, fast, and easy to use and is great for games where you just want the system to get out of the way. Ubiquity has a fair number of titles covering multiple genres and is a fun game to play.

Pelle
2020-12-04, 04:30 AM
Into the Odd. Simple and easy, condensed down to the most essential parts of what you need to play. Also evocative and easily adaptable.

Satinavian
2020-12-04, 05:16 AM
I will say Splittermond.

Nothing it does is particularly innovative but it is still the best system i know, combining a lot of good ideas/mechanics that work and avoiding a lot of the pitfalls. It is a system written by people who know how to write rules and thus has managed to not fall over its own design principles.

Imbalance
2020-12-04, 07:44 AM
I was into tabletop skirmish games for decades, and video game rpgs from decades before that to present. Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition has provided some of the most interesting gaming experiences to date.

LtPowers
2020-12-04, 05:16 PM
I'm with you so far as I'll agree to that if I want to run a game focused on "Go into the dungeon, smash everything up, gather the loot and leave, rinse and repeat", D&D4e would most definitely be my system of choice.

Not my preferred mode of play. I never had a problem with 4e's non-combat mechanics.


Powers &8^]

Pex
2020-12-04, 05:36 PM
In no particular order:

D&D 3E
D&D 5E (Yes I do like it :smallbiggrin:)
Ars Magica
GURPS (Supers)
Pathfinder 1E

LibraryOgre
2020-12-04, 06:33 PM
I think modern Hackmaster does the crunchy D&D genre the best; low power, relatively low magic, but with an integrated skill system. It's got some rough patches that I itch to fix, but it's solid.

I also have to give a shout-out to Savage Worlds for Flexibility. You can have it play as most anything, and it's a quick system to teach and improvise settings in. It lacks the depth of something like GURPS or HERO, but it's deep enough without losing speed.

Jorren
2020-12-04, 08:01 PM
Best:
Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green

Honorable mention:
Traveller
Tribe 8
Urban Shadows

Faily
2020-12-05, 09:51 AM
In no particular order:

D&D 3E
D&D 5E (Yes I do like it :smallbiggrin:)
Ars Magica
Pathfinder 1E

Same for me mostly.

3.5/Pathfinder1 are systems I can easily come back to and play a lot of different adventures and campaigns. For me, it is my natural go-to in most cases for RPGs.

Ars Magica is just one of those games that I think are well-designed and done so exceptionally well to the narrative-theme of the game. My issues with the system is minimal overall, and almost only minor quibbles that don't ruin my experience.

D&D5e is not my game of choice, as I overall find it a little bland and too simplistic for what I prefer for D&D. However I acknowledge that it is a very well written game-system. The writers had a very clear vision of what they wished to accomplish and I feel the creation was executed well to fulfill that vision. The game-design is pretty top-notch mostly, even if it's not in a style I prefer. The barrier of entry to learn D&D5e and to play it decently is very low, which I consider a plus as it makes it much easier to introduce new players from all backgrounds to it, and there's not much optimization to think about to make players stumble into the traps that my other favorites like 3.5 and Pathfinder has. I consider it a very good game, if not among the top 3 of games on the market currently, even if it's not my personal favorite or preference.

Ignimortis
2020-12-05, 11:31 AM
Frankly, I've turned over in my mind every RPG I've played ever, which isn't a long list, and I remember massive flaws with every single one of them.

d20/3.5/PF1e have terrible class balance and questionable design choices in some areas, D&D 5e is just a worse 3.5 in most regards, VtM is a mess which needs almost a complete rewrite, Shadowrun 4e/5e is also a complete mess, which needs a massive rewrite (which I've almost finished, and it took me a year and a half), and other systems that I haven't played extensively also had glaring flaws.

I've had fun with every single one of them, though. I suppose that's what matters, and it's hard to gauge which one was the most fun in all those years. So I'll say this - the best TTRPG is the one that my favourite GM happens to run at the moment. When someone can turn a poorly-written, hole-ridden system into a fun experience despite not knowing every rule and trying to cleave closely to the setting, that's genius.

Quertus
2020-12-05, 12:30 PM
D&D5e… is a very well written game-system. The writers had a very clear vision of what they wished to accomplish and I feel the creation was executed well to fulfill that vision.

Are you sure? Seems to me that they intended to make fodder still relevant at high levels… then were surprised that fodder was still relevant at high levels, making Minionmancy stronger than they had anticipated.

noob
2020-12-05, 01:12 PM
Dnd 5e is not well written: it is so vague you might as well throw the manual somewhere else and make up your own rules as you go(I mean most people when discussing 5e rule dysfunctionality saying "hey the rule is vague enough I can misinterpret it sufficiently to remove the dysfunctionality" should probably do the "throw manual away and make up their own rules" move)
And that is despite the fact that 5e is a very rule heavy rpg: the least you expect from a rpg with that many rules is to not be super vague.
But the great thing is that most 5e players never read the rules of 5e (just like most players in 3e) so if you take in account the fact that people do not read the rules then the way the rules are written is irrelevant.
5e rules are bad but it does not matters unless you play with the rules at which point it is horrible because something as simple as following the rules takes herculean efforts or massive amounts of misinterpretation if you do not want to do things that are inconsistent with the rules.
The best way to play dnd 5e is ironically to play it without knowing the rules at which point it is great because you go on epic adventures in fictional worlds.

Ignimortis
2020-12-05, 01:49 PM
However I acknowledge that it is a very well written game-system. The writers had a very clear vision of what they wished to accomplish and I feel the creation was executed well to fulfill that vision.

I feel like they would've been served better by getting a few sacred cows out of the way and stopping at level 10 or 12. Most things past that point feel very artificial or unsuitable for whatever 5e tries to be, including Ancient Wyrm dragons, high-end demons, spells past level 5 or 6, and anything in general that doesn't have orcs, giants and low-to-mid grade undead as something dangerous not through sheer numbers.

LibraryOgre
2020-12-05, 01:55 PM
I feel like they would've been served better by getting a few sacred cows out of the way and stopping at level 10 or 12. Most things past that point feel very artificial or unsuitable for whatever 5e tries to be, including Ancient Wyrm dragons, high-end demons, spells past level 5 or 6, and anything in general that doesn't have orcs, giants and low-to-mid grade undead as something dangerous not through sheer numbers.

Part of what I like about Hackmaster is, while it's a 20 level system, it's also got "smaller" levels, so it really tops out at what AD&D would consider 10th level or so.

WanderingMist
2020-12-05, 02:03 PM
Dnd 5e is not well written: it is so vague you might as well throw the manual somewhere else and make up your own rules as you go(I mean most people when discussing 5e rule dysfunctionality saying "hey the rule is vague enough I can misinterpret it sufficiently to remove the dysfunctionality" should probably do the "throw manual away and make up their own rules" move)
And that is despite the fact that 5e is a very rule heavy rpg: the least you expect from a rpg with that many rules is to not be super vague.
But the great thing is that most 5e players never read the rules of 5e (just like most players in 3e) so if you take in account the fact that people do not read the rules then the way the rules are written is irrelevant.
5e rules are bad but it does not matters unless you play with the rules at which point it is horrible because something as simple as following the rules takes herculean efforts or massive amounts of misinterpretation if you do not want to do things that are inconsistent with the rules.
The best way to play dnd 5e is ironically to play it without knowing the rules at which point it is great because you go on epic adventures in fictional worlds.

I was pretty sure throwing rules out was normal behavior for any tabletop game. Also, yes, very fun when you're new and have no idea what's going on. We've only played 4 sessions so far though and the druid's already escalated a bar fight into riot by throwing an explosive (which was supposed to be a clue we were following) into the middle of it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
But you wanna know a great RPG?

Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf.

I can lay out the entire ruleset right here:

Each player has 5 HP.
Shia LaBeouf has 2x # of Player's + 5 HP.
Each player gets to bring 1 item with them, other than a loaded firearm/communication device/something to trap him.
Any time you are attacked/do something dangerous, roll a d6. If you roll higher than your current HP, lose 1 HP.
If you lose all your HP, you die and it gets added to Shia's pool if you haven't managed to also destroy your body.
You can sacrifice 1 HP to guarantee an action works.
If Shia dies in some way that is not losing HP (falling, thrust into an explosion, etc.), he can sacrifice 2 HP to turn out not to be dead.

The two times I've played it were great fun:

First time, I play a marine biologist named Jack Chan, whose equipment was a water bottle that he thought contained a rare jellyfish (it did not). My group consisted of two other people, one I don't remember, and the other guy was Amish. We were at an amusement park at night.
Things of note:
Accidentally turned the protective fence into an electric death machine when we knocked over an electricity line.
Used water bottle to open safe by placing it on top and watching the vibrations change when the tumblers clicked.
Used money from safe to lure Shia underneath bumper cars where we had a weedwhacker running.
The Ferris Wheel of Acrobatics +3: None of us were at full HP and we continuously made checks to jump between cars on a rotating Ferris Wheel (always the next one down, never doing back up) while Shia continually failed.
The Toss of Destiny: I successfully throw a weedwhacker to one of the party while straddling a Ferris Wheel car. He proceeds to fail to throw my water bottle back and we lose it for good as it shatters on the ground.
After leaving the Ferris Wheel (our biggest mistake) luring Shia to try and get hit by a rollercoaster by using the guy who was stabbed by garden shears as bait. He killed the guy before the coaster went off and then I sacrificed myself by using my last HP to grab the electrified fence and him when he charged at me. This kept him dazed long enough for the Amish man to escape and swear off technology forever.

Game Two:
My character brings a backpack. The others bring a knife, and a sword. It's an old farmhouse. We explore the grounds after we hear the gate creak shut behind us. We check inside the house and find the bodies of an elderly couple in one of the closets. Then Shia attacks. We flee to the barn. I find some bones from slaughtered animals and taunt him by spelling his name with them. We explore the barn. I find some matches in the attic. When we get back out, the bones have been rearranged to my name. One of my allies stabs Shia with the sword but fails to get the sword back out of Shia, so now Shia has a sword. There's a bad fight, everyone loses most of their HP. I take cover behind a truck and maneuver my way into a small shed, which happens to have an air compressor which I am thankfully able to turn on. The noise lures Shia as I use the last of my HP to start a fire with the matches which causes the air compressor to explode. We all died and it turned out the shut gate wasn't even locked and we could have left at any time.

SwordCoastTaxi
2020-12-05, 02:32 PM
Marvel Superheroes (advanced): Best Supers system
• Runner-up: Mutants & Masterminds (2e)

The Arcanum (2e): Best Sword & Sorcery system
• Runner-up: D&D Rules Cyclopedia

Shadowrun (4e): Best Sci-Fantasy system
• Runner-up: Uncharted Worlds

GURPS (4e): Best Horror/"no powers" system
• Runner-up: FATE

Jason
2020-12-05, 03:08 PM
I feel like they would've been served better by getting a few sacred cows out of the way and stopping at level 10 or 12. Most things past that point feel very artificial or unsuitable for whatever 5e tries to be, including Ancient Wyrm dragons, high-end demons, spells past level 5 or 6, and anything in general that doesn't have orcs, giants and low-to-mid grade undead as something dangerous not through sheer numbers.

D&D5 is well aware that the "sweet spot" is levels 5-10, with 11-16 playable but starting to get out of control with the powers the players get. Just look at how level progression vs. xp works and you'll see it's designed to get you to 5th level quickly, and then keep you between 5 and 16 as long as possible.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-05, 04:29 PM
D&D5 is well aware that the "sweet spot" is levels 5-10, with 11-16 playable but starting to get out of control with the powers the players get. Just look at how level progression vs. xp works and you'll see it's designed to get you to 5th level quickly, and then keep you between 5 and 16 as long as possible.

Then honestly why even have levels 16-20? Oh yesh, because we're not allowed divine hamburgers.

AvatarVecna
2020-12-05, 04:53 PM
Mutants & Masterminds 3e comes closer to the mechanically-pure "works for basically any setting or power level or campaign" kind of system, and it's trivial to make people more powerful in variety without having them actually punch up (something a lot of other similar systems have an issue with by default).

NigelWalmsley
2020-12-05, 05:20 PM
I was pretty sure throwing rules out was normal behavior for any tabletop game.

Then why is 5e 1,000 pages long? If I'm going to throw out the rules anyway, give me something I can digest in an afternoon. There's certainly room for "rulings not rules" as a paradigm, but trying to sell that for a game that has three separate core books should not fly.


Then honestly why even have levels 16-20? Oh yesh, because we're not allowed divine hamburgers.

Exactly. If the "sweet spot" is levels 5-10 just make that the whole game. Regardless of how good the game is at whatever you think is the sweet spot, including content just because you feel obliged to even though you know it's not good is bad design.

Also, 5e doesn't really do anything that E6 3e doesn't do better, so it's hard for me to justify calling it even the best edition of D&D.

noob
2020-12-05, 07:27 PM
Then why is 5e 1,000 pages long? If I'm going to throw out the rules anyway, give me something I can digest in an afternoon. There's certainly room for "rulings not rules" as a paradigm, but trying to sell that for a game that has three separate core books should not fly.

5e is 1000 pages long so that when you decide to not read the rules you suddenly feel clever for saving hours that would have been spent reading vague rules and trying to see how to interpret them in a coherent way.
So you paid for that feeling of cleverness when you let the rulebooks books collect dust in a corner and only use novels written by your favourite fantasy author for inspiration.

Luccan
2020-12-05, 07:43 PM
I think it took less time for this thread to get to bashing other people's choices than the one that's supposed to be about calling games you don't like the worst thing to ever happen in the industry.

------------------------------------

Even though I wouldn't always want to play it and my experience is limited, (and it certainly has issues) the Rulescyclopedia version of D&D is really nice for being everything in one book. If you just sit down with that you have an entire game in about 300 pages. And you need like 5 of them for any character not casting spells. There's options for making the game more complicated as well, if you like, and in an interesting move it has suggestions for converting between AD&D. It's very appreciated in comparison to modern D&D which splits its core rules over two books at least. Much as I personally like 5e, the split in rules between the PHB and DMG causes real problems

SwordCoastTaxi
2020-12-05, 08:28 PM
Mutants & Masterminds 3e comes closer to the mechanically-pure "works for basically any setting or power level or campaign" kind of system, and it's trivial to make people more powerful in variety without having them actually punch up (something a lot of other similar systems have an issue with by default).
Compared to the clean, well-designed codex of 2e, M&M 3e is junky and ugly. It was rushed, with Green Ronin hoping for the Marvel license that eventually went to MWP (Marvel Heroic RPG).

M&M 3e was disappointing. Re-reading 2e brought me back to the game, as a secondary option.

But, enjoy.

Jason
2020-12-06, 02:09 AM
Even though I wouldn't always want to play it and my experience is limited, (and it certainly has issues) the Rulescyclopedia version of D&D is really nice for being everything in one book. If you just sit down with that you have an entire game in about 300 pages. And you need like 5 of them for any character not casting spells. There's options for making the game more complicated as well, if you like, and in an interesting move it has suggestions for converting between AD&D. It's very appreciated in comparison to modern D&D which splits its core rules over two books at least. Much as I personally like 5e, the split in rules between the PHB and DMG causes real problems
I like the Cyclopedia. 1-36 levels, most of the monsters that appeared in the BECMI line, and even a bunch of world background and maps. It's a very good compilation. It even has the War Machine mass combat system from the Companion set. BECMI is the version of D&D I started with, so there's probably a nostalgia factor involved for me.

EggKookoo
2020-12-06, 06:35 AM
D&D 5e is pretty good, once you internalize the quirks and sacred cows.

But no game impressed me out of the gate as much as Mayfair Games DC Heroes. The mechanics and presentation fit the subject matter (superhero action) better than any other game I'd played. The gameplay was fun, the dice meant something, but it wasn't excessively swingy. Combat felt organic. It allowed heroes of different power levels to play together, although the character-creation rules wouldn't let you make a tank-mage like Superman by default anyway (you could if you started with enough APs). It was the first game I played where the manuals made an explicit distinction between mechanics and how those mechanics were meant to be interpreted.

If it had a flaw it was that combat required the GM to cross-reference your attack bonus with your opponent's defense values to determine your dice target, and then if you hit do it again to determine the effectiveness of the attack (basically how much damage you did). But that in and of itself wasn't too bad if your GM was on the ball, it just slowed things down a little.

Jason
2020-12-06, 09:46 AM
Exactly. If the "sweet spot" is levels 5-10 just make that the whole game. Regardless of how good the game is at whatever you think is the sweet spot, including content just because you feel obliged to even though you know it's not good is bad design.That's basically asking "why have options most gamers won't use?"
The answer is "some do use them, and gamers like having lots of options."


Also, 5e doesn't really do anything that E6 3e doesn't do better, so it's hard for me to justify calling it even the best edition of D&D.
Never heard of it before, but from what i see online, E6 sounds like an attempt to fix something my group never really noticed was broken. I guess we never worried about power balance between classes in 3.5 as much as some groups did.

NigelWalmsley
2020-12-06, 10:11 AM
I think it took less time for this thread to get to bashing other people's choices than the one that's supposed to be about calling games you don't like the worst thing to ever happen in the industry.

That's because the worst games are things everyone can agree are terrible. No one is a FATAL stan. But whatever "best game" you pick is going to be a game someone doesn't like, because even big and successful TTRPGs have flaws. It's just less provocative to say "the flaws in this thing you know has flaws are worse than you think" than to say "this thing you think sucks is actually better than things you love".


That's basically asking "why have options most gamers won't use?"
The answer is "some do use them, and gamers like having lots of options."

The tradeoff is not "levels where the game doesn't work well" versus "blank pages". It's "levels where the game doesn't work well" versus "more content at the levels where the game works well". If Barbarian 11-20 is dead content, the game is better off having an Alchemist or Cavalier class that goes from 1-10 instead.

iTreeby
2020-12-06, 06:06 PM
Blades in the dark is probably my favorite. I like how the burden of creativity and narrative power is split between the players and the GM fairly equitably. Playing that game made me a better dm.

MrStabby
2020-12-06, 08:04 PM
For me its D&D 5th edition.

Sometimes its hard to tell if its the edition, or the group or just the level of maturity we have reached - but my best (and to be fair also most frustrating) experiences have been witht he edition.

I think it comes down to a good balance between rulings and rules. Rules are light enough that it is easy to get into and in those early sessions its just a min to look things up. The rough class structure is simple enough and where the power comes from is transparent enough that it is easy to homebrew or make campaign specific rulings that will actually improve rather than harm the game.

Play-speed is good; you never need to wait too long for your turn once your group gets the hang of it.

The downside is the limited content. Characters feel mechanically the same, not helped by the subclass balance being poor. For most classes there are one or two subclasses that are more attracive (more powerful or just cooler than others). I have never seen a Devotion Paladin for example, despite being pretty powrful, simply because they are less cool to players than the other paladin options. This, and the relatively narrow spell list, means its hard to build a table of mechanically rich and diverse and effective characters.

In a wierd way 5th edition gets both better and worse the more you play it.

Quertus
2020-12-06, 08:39 PM
But no game impressed me out of the gate as much as Mayfair Games DC Heroes. The mechanics and presentation fit the subject matter (superhero action) better than any other game I'd played.

Is that the system that looked a lot like Mutants & Masterminds, but more… streamlined?

Razade
2020-12-06, 09:45 PM
Masks: A New Generation for super hero stories honestly. Powered by the Apocalypse is a great generic system, its Hacks are good for what they do but Masks is the most polished mechanically of all the ones I've played. That includes Apocalypse World. As with every Hack I've seen of the PbtA system, it's only good at doing what it's made to do, but if you want young adult hero drama without concern over power levels than Masks is the absolute best system.

Quest and TinyDungeon are both really solid D&D substitutes. I especially like Quest though I haven't had a chance to actually play it yet. Read the handbook several times though and I really look forward to GMing it.

Pex
2020-12-06, 10:46 PM
In a wierd way 5th edition gets both better and worse the more you play it.

I understand completely.

EggKookoo
2020-12-07, 08:44 AM
Is that the system that looked a lot like Mutants & Masterminds, but more… streamlined?

I haven't played M&M and a quick Wiki look makes me think they're not related.


DC used a concept called Attribute Points (APs), with which everything mechanical was measured. Your PCs Strength was a number of APs, your weight was APs, distances were in APs, even time was in APs. And APs were interchangeable. So, for example, if your Strength was 8, you could lift up to 8 APs of weight. If you lifted 7 APs, you could throw it 1 AP distance. If you lifted 6 APs, you could throw it 2 APs distance.

There was a page (or two) in the book that listed out what the different APs correlated to in real-world measurements so the GM could describe the consequences of actions in a relatable way. DC used MEGS, which meant that each AP was twice the value of the previous number. So 8 APs of weight worked out to about 6.5 tons, but 9 APs was 13 tons. The game did this to account for having a large spectrum of superhero capability. Most regular people had Strength scores (etc.) of 1 or 2. I think Batman had a Strength of 5 where Superman had a Strength of 25. In the above example, a PC with an Strength of 8 could lift something weighing 6 APs (about 1.5 tons) and throw it a distance of 2 APs (40 feet). You could use the same system without the exponential increase, though. That just gave it a good mainstream superhero flavor.

You built your hero with a point-buy system where you used points to buy APs. The higher a given attribute was, the more expensive further points in that attribute became, as is typical with point-buy stuff. You also bought superpowers with points. You could take disadvantages and drawbacks to recoup points for further spending, or take advantages at the cost of points.

Like many games, combat had a "did I hit?" phase and a "how much damage did I do?" phase. This is where the two charts come in, and it gets into how your PC's attributes silo into different categories. Your PC had nine attributes. They're divided into physical, mental, and magical groups, and then in each you had an Acting, Opposing, Effecting, and Resisting Values. It sounds more complicated than it was, so for example your physical attributes were Dexterity (both Acting and Opposing), Strength (Effecting), and Body (Resisting).

To make an attack, the GM would look at your Acting Value and compare it to your target's Opposing Value. For a fistfight (physical) that would just be Dex vs. Dex. There was a chart that compared Values up to 50, and the GM would cross-reference the AV and OV to get a target number. You would then roll 2d10 and add them together. If you reached that target number, you hit. You also got to reroll any time the dice came up doubles, but if you ever got double 1s, you auto-fail. If the attack was psychic/mental, you'd be using your mental attributes (Intelligence, Willpower, Mind), and if it was magical you'd use the magical attributes (Influence, Aura, Spirit). It was possible to go "across" groups (like make a physical attack against a target's Spirit) but typically things stayed "within group."

If you hit, the GM would then compare your Effecting Value to the target's Resisting Value on a second chart, which revealed how much damage you did. Physical damage was deducted from the target's Body. Psychic/mental damage was deducted from the target's Mind. And magical damage was deducted from the target's Spirit. These did not reduce their max values, so they worked like hit points in something like D&D. If any of your Body, Mind, or Spirit hit 0, you fell unconscious. If all three hit 0, you're dead. I think excess damage taken to an attribute already at 0 would come off one of the other, but I don't recall the exact rule there.

Critical hits were handled by something called a "column shift." When the GM consulted the AV/EV chart (the "to hit" one) and told you your target number, and you rolled significantly in excess of that target, the GM would count the number of columns in the chart to the right of your target until coming to the column in which your result would hit (or, rather, until hitting the first column in which you wouldn't, then backing up one, if that's easier to understand). The number of times the GM "shifted" columns would then carry over to the EV/RV chart (the "how much damage" one) and the GM would shift the same number of columns, increasing the result. So getting as really high result on your 2d10, or getting doubles, could carry over to big damage.

The chart thing throws a lot of players, probably many with PTSD over early-gen TTRPGs (like D&D 1e) with boatloads of charts. In practice, DC's charts were not even a speed bump. Combat flowed smoothly, especially after the first round and the GM had a handle on everyone's Values. And getting doubles and column shifts were always exciting.

Finally, superpowers. Like everything else, superpowers used APs. In many cases, from a mechanical standpoint, a power would just replace your base attribute. For example, you might have Energy Blast. Attacking with Energy Blast still used your Dex as your EV, but you'd use the APs you had in that power instead of your Strength as the EV (and you could attack at a range equaling the number of APs you had purchased in the power). Force Field, on the other hand, replaced your Body as the RV on the EV/RV chart (but you still lost points off your Body if you did end up taking damage). Other powers were more complicated and didn't result in a kind of attribute stand-in, but even then they all typically worked by providing or manipulating APs in some way.

There's a lot more. The game had rules for social encounters, maintaining a secret identity, a skill system (which also used APs), variant build rules (e.g. the "Batman Option"), and so on. It wasn't the deepest game system but it was very good for what it set out to do.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-07, 09:07 AM
At the end of the day every time I read through a description of DC Heroes I'd rather play M&M3e or Champions. M&M even uses the same quadratic scale principle, although with static point costs because of the inherent limits when creating characters.

But yeah, when you get down to it, effects based powers are just nicer because they're less limiting. Also having a Heat Vision power and a Ice Spikes power and a Necrotic Bees power feels like wasted space when they could all be Ranged Killing Attacks (or in M&M damage effects with the ranged modifier).

EggKookoo
2020-12-07, 10:00 AM
But yeah, when you get down to it, effects based powers are just nicer because they're less limiting. Also having a Heat Vision power and a Ice Spikes power and a Necrotic Bees power feels like wasted space when they could all be Ranged Killing Attacks (or in M&M damage effects with the ranged modifier).

DC didn't go too nuts with esoteric one-off powers. In fact, powers were also used for conventional technology. Planes flew using the same Flight power Superman does. Cars use Running like the Flash. A handheld energy blaster had Energy Blast. The power described the mechanical effect, not the "source" (for lack of a better term). It's something I wish D&D did more with spells, but I also get that doing it that way imparts something of a tech/SF feel rather than "once upon a time" fantasy feel.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-07, 10:41 AM
DC didn't go too nuts with esoteric one-off powers. In fact, powers were also used for conventional technology. Planes flew using the same Flight power Superman does. Cars use Running like the Flash. A handheld energy blaster had Energy Blast. The power described the mechanical effect, not the "source" (for lack of a better term). It's something I wish D&D did more with spells, but I also get that doing it that way imparts something of a tech/SF feel rather than "once upon a time" fantasy feel.

So it's effects based, except with a bunch of additional effects because energy blast and heat vision are so different?

I mean, I still don't see a reason not to use HERO (assuming everybody in the group is okay with heavy Char Gen, otherwise it would be M&M). Then again these days I'd much rather play Wild Talents over D&D or M&M anyway, it's fine to like DC Heroes but I've personally never seen any description that makes it sound better than WT and it's Attack/Defence/Utility power construction.

EggKookoo
2020-12-07, 11:16 AM
So it's effects based, except with a bunch of additional effects because energy blast and heat vision are so different?

Apparently Mayfair had to accommodate a lot of DC's IP rules. There were some issues with how strong characters could be compared to Superman, for example. I'm sure the inclusion of specific, signature powers like Heat Vision and Super Breath are part of that. But yeah, HV is mostly redundant with Energy Blast -- the latter even allows you to give it a damage type of "heat" and project it from your eyes. But the AP costs are the same. One difference is for Attribute Linking (where you link the power to an Attribute instead of giving it its own AP value). Energy Blast links to Body whereas Heat Vision links to Intelligence, which is not only a mental attribute instead of physical, but it's in the same silo as Dexterity. I guess the implication is that accurately hitting your target with HV relies more on quick thinking and awareness whereas hitting with EB is more about raw physicality, even if you're shooting your EB through your eyes. Sure, it doesn't make a lot of sense but you could probably just ignore HV entirely.

I don't mean to imply DC was flawless.


I mean, I still don't see a reason not to use HERO (assuming everybody in the group is okay with heavy Char Gen, otherwise it would be M&M). Then again these days I'd much rather play Wild Talents over D&D or M&M anyway, it's fine to like DC Heroes but I've personally never seen any description that makes it sound better than WT and it's Attack/Defence/Utility power construction.

When I was introduced to DC, probably back around 1987 or so, my only other direct superhero TTRPG experience was Villains & Vigilantes, which was a mess. A lovingly-crafted one, but a mess nonetheless. I also had experience with D&D 1e, RuneQuest, and Call of Cthulhu. At the time, given the state of the art as I was immersed in it, DC Heroes came across as almost revolutionary.

Dragonsonthemap
2020-12-08, 10:35 AM
For me its D&D 5th edition.
[snip]
In a wierd way 5th edition gets both better and worse the more you play it.

Gonna start off with this because I think 5e's the best version of D&D I've played. I actually think D&D and Pathfinder have both steadily improved with each edition (at least from 3rd onward; I've not played the various 1es or 2e)

That being said, I want to say the best version is Adventurer, Conqueror, King, which is an OSR game that leans heavily into the old idea that PCs should eventually grow into the rulers of domains. It's a very good OSR game, but it has lingering issues, especially in its bestiary and its (admittedly clever) effort to make the race-as-class format of early D&D work, that prevent it from quite getting there.

Beyond D&D, though, I'm actually going to say that I've been playing Lancer recently and absolutely fallen in love with it. It can only do weird sci-fi giant mecha games, which is a pretty big limitation, but never have I seen a system do its thing so well. It's the most fun I've ever had just playing a system, without feeling like I need to houserule or homebrew half-a-dozen fixes per campaign.

This being said, I've not actually gotten a chance to play either Unknown Armies or Ars Magica, both of which look like wonderful system on a readthrough, at least.

Cluedrew
2020-12-08, 07:50 PM
In no particular order:

D&D 3E
D&D 5E (Yes I do like it :smallbiggrin:)Wait; What!

Anyways, for my own candidate of best tabletop role-playing game... unfortunately all the systems that have really impressed me I haven't gotten much opportunity to play them. I really enjoyed reading the rule-book of Blades in the Dark and it had cool ideas but I don't know how well it comes out in a proper campaign.

So I am going to say something probably very controversial: I think 4th is the best designed edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Now this is in terms of achieving its design goals - most problems with the system seem to me of being a problem of choosing the wrong goals. Put a different way, it did a very good job of being what it was aiming for but no one actually wanted that. Other editions by comparison feel confused, 5e feels like it is playing it safe some of the time instead of making all the changes it should have. Maybe that still wouldn't make 4th the best overall but I think it is something worthy of some credit.

NigelWalmsley
2020-12-08, 11:36 PM
4e includes the Skill Challenge rules, which fail at every part of what they were designed to do. They were supposed to encourage participation, but pooled failures punish it. They were supposed to allow a range of outcomes, but have a pure success/failure output. They were supposed to encourage dynamism, but the difference between easy and hard checks was smaller than the difference between specialized and non-specialized skills. They failed at basically every design goal they had and were re-written multiple times without addressing the central problems

There are nice things you can say about 4e. I've said some of them, and will again. The system genuinely did have a lot of good ideas for how to move D&D forward. Its conceptions of character progression, monster roles, and encounter design were better than what came before (and, frankly, since). But it was not particularly good about hitting those targets. I think if you spent a year or so having a team of designers hammer at 4e, you could get a very satisfying game. I'm not entirely sure that game would be something I would call D&D, but I could imagine it being very good.

Cluedrew
2020-12-09, 08:43 AM
Yup, every time I say something pro-4th people bring up skill challenges. I have since figured out:
4th edition skill challenges are broken.
The rest of the game must be not be as broken if this is the primary example of the problems of 4th.

Quertus
2020-12-09, 09:11 AM
Yup, every time I say something pro-4th people bring up skill challenges. I have since figured out:
4th edition skill challenges are broken.
The rest of the game must be not be as broken if this is the primary example of the problems of 4th.


I mean, it's *hard* to get *more* broken than that, so one would presume even <insert least favorite real-world system here> would "not be as broken".

Also, they made the mistake of labeling it, not just "D&D" (which most people complain about), but an "RPG". :smalltongue:

I think the most recent flaw that I'm enjoying is that, by RAW, you can play classes from earlier editions (yes, sure, that's just bad wording / editing, but I love picking on 4e).

As a D&D-adjacent skirmish war game, I would find 4e… boring, tbh. High setup cost for little to no gain. I might not complain about how samey the playing pieces feel at that point, though.

So it depends on whether "fun" is a prerequisite for good design / whether you consider part of their design goals to be to make a fun game or not as to whether 4e was a (partial) design succeeds.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-09, 09:34 AM
Yup, every time I say something pro-4th people bring up skill challenges. I have since figured out:
4th edition skill challenges are broken.
The rest of the game must be not be as broken if this is the primary example of the problems of 4th.


To be fair they fixed Skill Challenges in a layer book. It's just nobody bought it.

Kind of wish I still had my 4e. It's a significantly better RPG than 5e.

Honestly, my biggest complaint about 4e is that it tried to tell me that I need to buy at least three books every year just to own 'core'. If it could have not done that I'd have loved it, but I was a teen/uni student without that kind of money.

Jason
2020-12-09, 10:14 AM
Yup, every time I say something pro-4th people bring up skill challenges. I have since figured out:
4th edition skill challenges are broken.
The rest of the game must be not be as broken if this is the primary example of the problems of 4th.


"Broken" and "enjoyable" are two different things. Much of 4th ed was not broken at all - it did exactly what it wanted to and the mechanics functioned just fine. Not much of it was what I or my group would call "enjoyable", however.

"Broken" is close to an objective perspective (though a lot of people throw around "broken" when they mean "it's not how I would do it"), but "enjoyable" is purely a matter of personal taste.

Morty
2020-12-09, 10:30 AM
Yup, every time I say something pro-4th people bring up skill challenges. I have since figured out:
4th edition skill challenges are broken.
The rest of the game must be not be as broken if this is the primary example of the problems of 4th.


It's very telling and pretty unfortunate that even in a positive thread dedicated to people's favorite RPGs, it's impossible to express a preference for 4E without someone coming in to say it's actually bad and/or not D&D.

Jason
2020-12-09, 11:08 AM
It's very telling and pretty unfortunate that even in a positive thread dedicated to people's favorite RPGs, it's impossible to express a preference for 4E without someone coming in to say it's actually bad and/or not D&D.

Well hey, maybe 4th ed was exactly what you wanted. Go play it! Don't let my saying "I didn't like it," stop you.
And on the plus side, you can probably find the books for pretty cheap these days, maybe even unused copies, and I know you can buy them for reasonable prices on DriveThruRPG.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-09, 12:00 PM
It's very telling and pretty unfortunate that even in a positive thread dedicated to people's favorite RPGs, it's impossible to express a preference for 4E without someone coming in to say it's actually bad and/or not D&D.

See the poster below you.

But yeah, 4e receives a massive amount of hate. I'd have understood if WotC sent people round to burn people's old books, but I'm fairly certain that never happened. Mine were untouched at any rate.

Morty
2020-12-09, 12:42 PM
See the poster below you.

But yeah, 4e receives a massive amount of hate. I'd have understood if WotC sent people round to burn people's old books, but I'm fairly certain that never happened. Mine were untouched at any rate.

Even if they had, 4E has been dead for years and 5E reigns supreme. So it feels like grave-dancing at this point. Or gatekeeping.

noob
2020-12-09, 12:46 PM
I personally think 4e was not wrong to do whatever it did.
I mean it offers most of the cool stuff from table top games(npc interaction, actually breaking stuff in interesting ways (I have never seen a computer hack and slash have simultaneously a tactical battle system and environment destruction) and so on) and have tactics that are potentially very interesting (which is the great thing about some videogames) and it have a simple streamlined resource management system with rather low amounts of book keeping (just mark encounter and dailies as you use them and on a short rest unmark the encounter ones and at the end of a long rest unmark the dailies and the encounter ones).
And it is the only dnd edition where short rests are short enough that you can place them without needing the gm to bend the narrative hard.
And it also allows to have characters of the strength you want if you are building right which is appealing to the optimisation community and also a way to cater to people who wants different amounts of power.

Jason
2020-12-09, 12:47 PM
See the poster below you.

But yeah, 4e receives a massive amount of hate. I'd have understood if WotC sent people round to burn people's old books, but I'm fairly certain that never happened. Mine were untouched at any rate.
Popular games get in trouble when they change too much.

You should see some of the things Traveller fans said about the 3rd edition of the game - Traveller the New Era - back in the early '90s. Over the course of the MegaTraveller game GDW burned down the setting - at the time easily the most detailed setting in a sci-fi RPG - and then released a new version set "after the end" with their house rules set (the one they used for 2nd Edition Twilight:2000, Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, and Dark Conspiracy).

The fans were not pleased. More with the setting changes than the rules, but many didn't like the rules changes either.

Every version of Traveller since - and there have been about 8 of them, counting ports to other rules systems - has ignored the whole metaplot that destroyed the setting either by setting their version earlier on the timeline or in an alternate timeline where it explicitly didn't happen (which is what the GURPS version did).

By the way, Mongoose 2nd Edition Traveller is my current choice for "Best sci-fi RPG". It's not without its flaws, but there are a lot of good adventures and good sourcebooks to work with in the current line, and it does a great job of presenting the classic setting.
The old GURPS Traveller stuff was really great too.

NigelWalmsley
2020-12-09, 06:06 PM
Yup, every time I say something pro-4th people bring up skill challenges. I have since figured out:
4th edition skill challenges are broken.
The rest of the game must be not be as broken if this is the primary example of the problems of 4th.


People bring up Skill Challenges because it's an easy example that should be unambiguous. The designers laid out specific goals for Skill Challenges, then did not meet those goals. It's open-and-shut in a way that, say, talking about how grindy combat is isn't. You could argue that 4e combat was well-designed if you felt that combat taking a really long time, but being nearly deterministic and involving few meaningful choices was, for some reason, a good thing. You can't do that with Skill Challenges, because the designer set up their target, then missed it.


To be fair they fixed Skill Challenges in a layer book. It's just nobody bought it.

Did they? Back when the 4e Edition Wars raged, 4e fanboys repeatedly insisted that the latest iteration of Skill Challenges totally fixed the fundamental problems with pooled failures, but all the times I bothered checking they were never actually right.


But yeah, 4e receives a massive amount of hate. I'd have understood if WotC sent people round to burn people's old books, but I'm fairly certain that never happened. Mine were untouched at any rate.

The 4e marketing campaign was very aggressive in its hostility to earlier editions, and the 4e fanbase likewise. WotC may not have burned anyone's books, but it's absolutely not the case that people are hostile towards 4e for no reason.

Morty
2020-12-09, 06:10 PM
The 4e marketing campaign was very aggressive in its hostility to earlier editions, and the 4e fanbase likewise. WotC may not have burned anyone's books, but it's absolutely not the case that people are hostile towards 4e for no reason.

You should really stop to appreciate the irony of saying that while aggressively going after people expressing their sympathy for 4E more than five years after it was firmly replaced by a new edition.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-09, 06:32 PM
You should really stop to appreciate the irony of saying that while aggressively going after people expressing their sympathy for 4E more than five years after it was firmly replaced by a new edition.

And a more poorly designed one. As bad as Skill Challenges were I saw them used much more than supposedly integral parts of 5e, like the bolted on 'roleplaying mechanics' that basically say 'if you convince your GM you're not breaking character and ask really nicely you might get a reroll token'.

Like, hit dice are a mess as well. We had this nice mechanic in 4e called Healing Surges which regulated healing, ensured it came out in nice big chunks, and only had a few for players to count. And then 5e comes and decides to needlessly complicate it by changing it to a bunch of dice you can roll and giving you a lot more to track at higher levels, and decided it wasn't needed to regulate healing. I liked HSs, they worked for me.

But this is my point, the anti-4e crowd seem to be against people liking it. There might have been problems with the design and marketing but there are for every game and edition, and unlike 5e the designers of 4e decided that you didn't need magic to do cool things.

Quertus
2020-12-09, 06:38 PM
It's very telling and pretty unfortunate that even in a positive thread dedicated to people's favorite RPGs, it's impossible to express a preference for 4E without someone coming in to say it's actually bad and/or not D&D.

To be fair, in this particular case, specific claims were made about 4e hitting its design goals, and specific comments were made about *exactly how* that is patently false.

(Myself, I have to continue the running gag of hating on 4e, so that you'll know that I'm not an imposter, and won't vote to throw me out the airlock.)


To be fair they fixed Skill Challenges in a layer book. It's just nobody bought it.

Yeah, I'm not buying it, either. Citation needed.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-09, 06:44 PM
Yeah, I'm not buying it, either. Citation needed.

Not sure. Remember how I said nobody bought the book?

Discouraging participation was at least removed when the failed checks limit was replaced by a round (i.e. everybody can act once) limit. I believe there might have been some reworking on core skills versus bringing in other skills but again, I didn't have money for books. The first change solved most of my issues with them anyway.

NigelWalmsley
2020-12-09, 06:57 PM
You should really stop to appreciate the irony of saying that while aggressively going after people expressing their sympathy for 4E more than five years after it was firmly replaced by a new edition.

I would, if that was remotely what was happening. But it's very obviously not. No one is saying that you can't or shouldn't like 4e. In fact, people are saying things like "I personally think 4e was not wrong to do whatever it did." or "Well hey, maybe 4th ed was exactly what you wanted. Go play it! Don't let my saying "I didn't like it," stop you." or "There are nice things you can say about 4e. I've said some of them, and will again. The system genuinely did have a lot of good ideas for how to move D&D forward.". Even "Skill Challenges didn't meet their stated design goals" doesn't mean "you are a bad person for liking 4e and I hate you", regardless of what you seem to think. It just means they didn't meet their stated design goals. It doesn't even inherently make them bad. Maybe you like the way Skill Challenges work. But if you remember the claim that was initially made, it was that 4e met its design goals, and in Skill Challenges it factually did not.


Discouraging participation was at least removed when the failed checks limit was replaced by a round (i.e. everybody can act once) limit. I believe there might have been some reworking on core skills versus bringing in other skills but again, I didn't have money for books. The first change solved most of my issues with them anyway.

I believe the question is supposed to be understood as "what book did this happen in". Then someone could, theoretically, go look that book up and maybe update their position from "Skill Challenges didn't work" to "Skill Challenges didn't work until <late-period 4e book> was released".

Quertus
2020-12-09, 08:47 PM
I believe the question is supposed to be understood as "what book did this happen in". Then someone could, theoretically, go look that book up and maybe update their position from "Skill Challenges didn't work" to "Skill Challenges didn't work until <late-period 4e book> was released".

Yes, thanks. :smallwink:

I was trying to ask, like, 3 questions at once, making it hard to see that I wanted to know both *what* and *where* the change was.

Morty
2020-12-10, 08:11 AM
But this is my point, the anti-4e crowd seem to be against people liking it. There might have been problems with the design and marketing but there are for every game and edition, and unlike 5e the designers of 4e decided that you didn't need magic to do cool things.

The idea is that if every positive mention of 4E is met with "well, actually", people will give up. And it has worked, not just with 4E.

NigelWalmsley
2020-12-10, 08:22 AM
The idea is that if every positive mention of 4E is met with "well, actually", people will give up. And it has worked, not just with 4E.

Jesus, dude. If you want to go talk about how 4e is great, there are spaces for you to do that. There's a 4e board here, and I at least have no interest in going there and telling the people who use it that their game sucks (and I am willing to say in no uncertain terms that anyone who does do that is being unreasonably aggressive). But if you come into a thread about which games are good, you should not be surprised that praising a game that was historically very unpopular is controversial.

CharonsHelper
2020-12-10, 08:28 AM
Agreed. I haven't even played it (and honestly don't really remember much about the actual system from when I read it) but the presentation is indeed all kinds of awesome and very much in line with the books.

Wasn't Dresden Files RPG basically the pilot version of Fate?

While I'm not a huge fan of Fate myself, I will say that I can see Fate's metagame mechanics working well there, as (as much as I love the books) the Dresden series is not totally consistent on power levels of characters vs magic etc. even from scene to scene, much less book to book. Butcher gets around it somewhat talking about emotions powering magic - but only somewhat.

Jason
2020-12-10, 09:22 AM
The idea is that if every positive mention of 4E is met with "well, actually", people will give up. And it has worked, not just with 4E.

If it helps, I don't think 4E has been mentioned at all on the "worst tabletop RPG" thread.

137beth
2020-12-10, 09:33 AM
Jesus, dude. If you want to go talk about how 4e is great, there are spaces for you to do that.

Yes, including this very thread, which is supposed to be people talking about their favorite games, not dunking on other people's favorite games.


Anyhow, I don't think I can pick a single favorite game for myself, because I like different systems for different things. Instead I'll point to one of my favorite rules-lite systems which is good in ways that I haven't seen in other systems: Word Mill's Mythic Roleplaying (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16173/Mythic-Role-Playing). I like that it works both with and without a GM, and that you can either play it with an existing setting or use it to generating a campaign setting on the fly as you play.

For my favorite version of D&D, I'd say 3.5. The reason is that, for the most part, I'd prefer a system to have either
1)Characters that are very mechanically distinct, or
2)For the system to be very rules-lite overall.

No version of D&D from AD&D onward does (2) (I am not familiar with OD&D so I won't comment on it.) I'd actually say 1e is the most complicated of the versions of D&D I am familiar with: I can't imagine how someone can look at that big table of which weapons have advantages against which armors and think it is somehow simpler than attack bonus vs AC used in later editions.

But 3.5, IMO, does the best job making characters mechanically distinct with subsystems. The rules for using a wizard with spell slots are wildly different from the rules for a Binder, or a Warblade, or a Psion. That keeps me interested in 3.5 in a way that doesn't happen in other versions of D&D.

LibraryOgre
2020-12-10, 09:36 AM
Jesus, dude. If you want to go talk about how 4e is great, there are spaces for you to do that. ... But if you come into a thread about which games are good, you should not be surprised that praising a game that was historically very unpopular is controversial.

The Mod Ogre: Actually, given that there is a concurrent thread about which games are bad, ****ting on someone else's choice of great games could be taken as threadcrapping.

Jason
2020-12-10, 12:29 PM
For my favorite version of D&D, I'd say 3.5. The reason is that, for the most part, I'd prefer a system to have either
1)Characters that are very mechanically distinct, or
2)For the system to be very rules-lite overall.

No version of D&D from AD&D onward does (2) (I am not familiar with OD&D so I won't comment on it.) I'd actually say 1e is the most complicated of the versions of D&D I am familiar with: I can't imagine how someone can look at that big table of which weapons have advantages against which armors and think it is somehow simpler than attack bonus vs AC used in later editions.

But 3.5, IMO, does the best job making characters mechanically distinct with subsystems. The rules for using a wizard with spell slots are wildly different from the rules for a Binder, or a Warblade, or a Psion. That keeps me interested in 3.5 in a way that doesn't happen in other versions of D&D.

I agree that 3.5 did a good job of making the classes mechanically distinct.
The question of whether 1st or 3rd editions are the most complex is not an easy one to answer. I would say some of the subsystems for each are more complicated than the other. Nobody I know ever tried to use those weapon type vs. armor type rules, and they don't come up when fighting monsters anyway. Handling all the skill points and synergy bonuses and masterwork tool bonus and circumstance bonus and which ones don't stack and such in 3.5 is definitely more complicated than calculating what your 1st ed thief has to roll on %d to open a lock. But on the other hand, late 1st edition hardcover like the Wilderness Survival Guide included lots of new mechanics with tables and tables of modifiers for stuff like climbing a wall.

Ignimortis
2020-12-10, 12:44 PM
But 3.5, IMO, does the best job making characters mechanically distinct with subsystems. The rules for using a wizard with spell slots are wildly different from the rules for a Binder, or a Warblade, or a Psion. That keeps me interested in 3.5 in a way that doesn't happen in other versions of D&D.

+1 to all of this. It's a part of why I maintain that 3.5 had struck gold, and then WotC has repeatedly walked away from it muttering about being after copper, instead of trying to clear the seam.

Jason
2020-12-10, 01:05 PM
+1 to all of this. It's a part of why I maintain that 3.5 had struck gold, and then WotC has repeatedly walked away from it muttering about being after copper, instead of trying to clear the seam.

The success of Pathfinder shows pretty definitively that 3rd edition still had a lot of life in it when WOTC ended the line.

Delta
2020-12-10, 01:36 PM
I mean, it's *hard* to get *more* broken than that, so one would presume even <insert least favorite real-world system here> would "not be as broken".

If you honestly think it's "hard" to get "more" broken than 4e core skill challenges... you must not know a lot of RPG systems.

Now, I would never argue they work well or are enjoyable, but if I made a list of the "most broken rules subsystems" I ever encountered, I'm not sure 4e skill challenges would even crack the top 100, to be honest.

Pex
2020-12-10, 02:03 PM
If it helps, I don't think 4E has been mentioned at all on the "worst tabletop RPG" thread.

The question was what are the worst ones you "played". Since I never played 4E I didn't mention it.

Perhaps it wasn't mentioned because no one in the thread played it. :smallyuk:

Delta
2020-12-10, 02:11 PM
Perhaps it wasn't mentioned because no one in the thread played it. :smallyuk:

Since it has been mentioned in this thread by people who have also posted in the other thread, that seems highly unlikely ;)

Telwar
2020-12-10, 02:24 PM
IMNAAHO, there is no one "best" TTRPG.

The ones I truly enjoy all have serious flaws, but it's not like any other game doesn't also have serious flaws as well.

So, that being said, I have four, in no particular order:

D&D 4th edition - As I reveal myself to be a leper, I still like how 4e worked, and really wish they'd kept a lot more of it in 5e. Sure, the math didn't work *quite* as well as they wanted, and it looked weird, but it played beautifully, so long as people actually paid attention during the turn and thought about things. Maybe that's asking too much, I dunno.

Shadowrun 4th edition (20th Anniversary edition) - In spite of the corporate shenanigans, Shadowrun is still my favorite setting, and SR4 is the most usable version of the mechanics they ever published. Previous editions had die mechanic shenanigans that made statistics difficult ("...so I have to roll a 35 on a d6?"), and subsequent editions added things that weren't terribly useful. It's still ridiculously crunchy and has a lot of weird subsystems, but that can be a good thing.

FFG Star Wars - I honestly didn't expect to like this game as much as I did. It had a ton of character customization, and the improv requirement can be as much of a hindrance as a benefit, depending on the group. Even having to get special dice isn't actually that bad.

13th Age - It's like a rules-lite 4e, with a lot of the feedback on 4e taken into account. I enjoyed the hell out of it, even if it doesn't get any actual support, and the default setting is weird, and the Icons don't make any damn sense. Take the latter two out, use another setting, and it works damn well. OTOH, you still have to be comfortable with homebrew.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-10, 02:54 PM
If you honestly think it's "hard" to get "more" broken than 4e core skill challenges... you must not know a lot of RPG systems.

Now, I would never argue they work well or are enjoyable, but if I made a list of the "most broken rules subsystems" I ever encountered, I'm not sure 4e skill challenges would even crack the top 100, to be honest.

Yeah. They're somewhat clunky and don't do what they say they do, but I've seen a lot worse (to pull an example brought up in smoother thread, Fatebinding in Scion 1e. Or any Cyberpunk netrunning system ever).

EggKookoo
2020-12-10, 03:13 PM
This thread is making me want to try out D&D 4e.

Jason
2020-12-10, 03:18 PM
IMNAAHO, there is no one "best" TTRPG. I agree with you on this part of your post. It might be better to think of "best cyberpunk RPG" or "best high fantasy".

For the rest of your post you have pretty much picked my least favorite versions of each game. I much prefer D&D5 (or 3rd), Shadowrun 3rd, and Saga edition Star Wars to the versions you like best. To each his own.

I never played 13th age though.

Delta
2020-12-10, 03:25 PM
Yeah. They're somewhat clunky and don't do what they say they do, but I've seen a lot worse (to pull an example brought up in smoother thread, Fatebinding in Scion 1e. Or any Cyberpunk netrunning system ever).

Honestly, almost everything in Scion 1e qualifies as "more broken than skill challenges" in my book. I truly love the idea, the setting of Scion, I even loved playing it (with massive houserules, informal agreements not to derail the game and GM handwaving), but damn, that is one massively broken system.

Xervous
2020-12-10, 03:42 PM
This thread is making me want to try out D&D 4e.

If you reskin it as a mecha or Ironman-suit game the mechanics feel a lot more appropriate. It’s a skirmish game with cooldowns and resource management. Skills have about as much thought put into them as with 5e so it’s easy to get them to do what you want. Knowledgeable GM can solve combat slog issues and there you have it. Go punch some kaiju or whatever.

KaussH
2020-12-10, 04:01 PM
Wasn't Dresden Files RPG basically the pilot version of Fate?

While I'm not a huge fan of Fate myself, I will say that I can see Fate's metagame mechanics working well there, as (as much as I love the books) the Dresden series is not totally consistent on power levels of characters vs magic etc. even from scene to scene, much less book to book. Butcher gets around it somewhat talking about emotions powering magic - but only somewhat.

Keeping in mind i liked the game, the non accelerated version of it was like fate, with a large dose of complex tossed in. Most the time i see fate moded fir this and that, its pages. This is whole chapters of added stuff.
That said, once you know it, it does the world nicely i think.

Jay R
2020-12-10, 04:03 PM
Overall, the best system is nearly always the one that the GM is really excited about, and really knows the rules cold.

Having said that, many games are good for one or two things. If those are the things you're interested in, then that's the best game.

When I want to play musketeers, nothing is better than Flashing Blades. It's class-based, with actual classes (rogue, soldier, gentleman, and noble). There are five different dueling styles, and they actually affect how your character fights. You cannot improve a skill except by using that skill. And it feels like a swashbuckler movie. Its biggest flaw is that it's an early 1980s game, and built around male characters. I invented another class to help fix this -- Actor. [Seventeenth century actresses existed, and were pretty much free to travel or do anything else.]

For super-heroes, the best is Champions. I can design pretty much any kind of superhero, and the GM can set the level of powers easily. Its biggest flaw is that character creation requires a lot of arithmetic, and so does playing certain character types. My experience is that I will usually have to design one or two other players' characters, after which they can have a lot of fun. But you must have one player (and preferably the GM) who can do simple arithmetic quickly and enjoyably.

For Arthurian knightly adventures, the best is Pendragon. It is incredibly well-researched. Besides having the usual stats, a character has virtues and their opposite vices. If you have a Modest score of 14, then you have a Proud score of 6. When one goes up, the other goes down, and they change based on your actions. You also have Passions, starting out with Love of Family and Loyalty to your Liege. Over time, characters grow up, get knighted, get married, raise children, and then the children are the adventurers.

TOON is just chaotic fun, which you cannot take seriously. Everybody knows what a cartoon character is supposed to be like. Once you re-train all your players to stop trying to avoid losing all their hit points, the game gets as zany as your imaginations. [If you lose all your hit points, you Fall Down with X's in your eyes, and walk back onscreen three real-time minutes later.] And you get a bonus Plot Point if you make the Animator laugh so much she can't keep running the game.

For being able to game with pretty much any group who shows up, the best is Dungeons and Dragons. Which edition? Depends on how old most of your players are. But it's the game that most of your players will already know. [In evidence of that fact, I have not described the game. I don't have to.]

And Chivalry and Sorcery is the most immersive, lush, vivid, detailed, and glorious unplayable mess ever published.

Quertus
2020-12-10, 04:49 PM
If it helps, I don't think 4E has been mentioned at all on the "worst tabletop RPG" thread.

Ye gads, have I failed at being a caricature of myself? How can I teach by example what I mean by the difference between "character" and "caricature" if I don't do the caricature right?


For my favorite version of D&D, I'd say 3.5. The reason is that, for the most part, I'd prefer a system to have either
1)Characters that are very mechanically distinct, or

But 3.5, IMO, does the best job making characters mechanically distinct with subsystems. The rules for using a wizard with spell slots are wildly different from the rules for a Binder, or a Warblade, or a Psion. That keeps me interested in 3.5 in a way that doesn't happen in other versions of D&D.


+1 to all of this. It's a part of why I maintain that 3.5 had struck gold, and then WotC has repeatedly walked away from it muttering about being after copper, instead of trying to clear the seam.

Interesting.

So, because treasure was random, and Wizards got 0 spells outside treasure, I found great difference between characters in earlier editions, where the party with Fly, Fireball, and a Vorpal Blade was very different from one with Haste, Invisibility, and a Bow of Doubling.

For me, 3e felt samey - optimize for high numbers and maximum tools. While 2e felt more diverse: what tactics *this* party can use will be vastly different from what tactics *that* party utilizes.

So, what makes 3e feel more diverse than "everyone optimizes" to you? What is the 3e gold that you admire?


If you honestly think it's "hard" to get "more" broken than 4e core skill challenges... you must not know a lot of RPG systems.

Now, I would never argue they work well or are enjoyable, but if I made a list of the "most broken rules subsystems" I ever encountered, I'm not sure 4e skill challenges would even crack the top 100, to be honest.

The word "broken" was used in the context of replying to someone who said that "4th edition skill challenges are broken", after having claimed that 4e met its design goals, and being shown 4e skill challenges as a rebuttal to that position.

Thus, in context, the word "broken" means "fails to meet the design goals - and, in fact produces something akin to the opposite result".

4e designers intended skill challenges to get everyone to participate. They mistook "rolling the dice" for "playing the game", and then built a system which actively encouraged everyone not tied for highest modifier to not roll.

If my plan to feed the hungry consisted exclusively of stomach pumps and blood draws, I'm not sure that it would be as far afield of its stated goals as 4e skill challenges were.

That's what I meant by "broken".

Care to list one of those 100+ "more broken" rules? Because I've not really heard any further afield from the designers' stated goals than skill challenges were.

Morty
2020-12-10, 05:05 PM
This thread is making me want to try out D&D 4e.

I wish I'd got to play it more before it disappeared off everyone's radar. Sadly, I spent years disliking it and then it was too late. Now I'd need to run it if I wanted to try it... which is already the case for several other systems. So it goes with games other than the currently-dominant version of D&D.

Delta
2020-12-10, 07:26 PM
Care to list one of those 100+ "more broken" rules? Because I've not really heard any further afield from the designers' stated goals than skill challenges were.

I already have mentioned several on this page alone. Pick a random page including rules in Scion and chances are you find something that completely breaks the game to such a ridiculous degree if it were ever used with purpose at the table. Epic Dexterity alone is so horrifically broken that creating a meaningful fight in the game for multiple characters with more than one rank difference in Epic Dexterity is flat out, mathematically impossible, and once you get into the "mid power range" of the game, even a one rank difference starts making anyone but the character with the highest level in the group a meaningless spectator at best, an immediate casualty at worst, and we haven't even stacked stuff like soak and weapon stats which also gets completely out of whack on top of it.

If you haven't played Scion, imagine D&D where some classes at certain levels got stuff like +20 bonuses to hit, damage, AC and/or saves while others don't.

Dexterity is just the worst offender of the bunch since its effects are so immediate on one of the core features of a game about epic legendary heroes fighting epic ancient monsters, but every single Epic Attribute in the game is "more broken" by several orders of magnitudes more than 4e skill challenges in that they literally break the game, most of the time, beyond the lowest levels it is simply impossible to use them as designed and still have a meaningful game, while I can and have used the 4e skill challenge rules many times without handwaving or houserules or anything without the game immediately breaking apart at the seams.

I'm pretty sure between White Wolf games (they needed a 250 page errata to make Exalted 2e an even moderately working system...) and different Shadworun editions alone, you could easily find dozens if not hundreds of specific rules mechanics that are considerably more broken in any reasonable definition of the word than skill challenges (which of course still doesn't make them good or well designed)

Duff
2020-12-10, 07:48 PM
I've ranked the games I've played. The less prominent the game generally, the less often I've probably played it and the more likely my experience will be influenced by how much I enjoyed the particular game; that might be a great (or bad) GM, a character I enjoyed or a party that just "clicked"

Ars Magica
Pendragon
Feng Shui
Inominae
Call of Cthulu
C’Punk
Ironclaw
Shadowrun
Bunies and Burrows by Gurps
Twilight 2000
Dragonquest . I ran it for years and I’d scrounged the internet for house rules, combined editions and flat out made up rules enough that in the end it was called Duffquest by my players
Darksword RPG
Mechwarrior
SLA – OK, My fondness here is probably influenced by the way my character kinda broke the starting premise of the game
Buffy the vampire slayer
Dark Conspiracy
Victoriana
Stormbringer
D20 Modern (spies setting)
Pathfinder
Vampire/mage/changeling/werewolf – modern and dark ages
D&D 3/3.5
Witchcraft
D&D – BECMI
D&D 2nd ed
Traveler (2-3 editions, but I don’t remember which. One was the one where your character may not survive creation – probably 1st ed?)
Teenagers from Outer Space
D&D 1st ed
The d20 Starwars game
Castle Falkenstein
Killer
Toon
Delta Green
Game of Thrones
Runequest
Tales of the floating Vagabond
Firefly
Over the edge
Ringworld, by Gurps
carwars, by Gurps
fantasy by Gurps
D&D 4
TORG
A superhero one with a very Marvel-y feel., but I can’t remember the name
Tunnels and Trolls
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
Paranoia
Hunter planet - Might be mostly GM related
Rolemaster (rollmaster) and it’s ancestor MERP -
and it is really hard to get an authentic Fellowship experience (except Boromir, you can do a very convincing Boromir, just not quite so far into the book).
Dr Who RPG

Ignimortis
2020-12-11, 12:06 AM
The success of Pathfinder shows pretty definitively that 3rd edition still had a lot of life in it when WOTC ended the line.

It does, but Pathfinder disappointed me repeatedly (most recently with 2e), because all Paizo do shows they're not really learning from mistakes WotC has already made, and keep banging their head on all of the same walls. 3e does need a cleanup, but Paizo have dismissed that in lieu of "backwards compatibility", and then released 2e, which seems to have made some of Starfinder's blunders, and some of 4e's blunders, with being obsessed with balance and trying too hard to shoehorn things into working when you do them just right, instead of streamlining them.

Meanwhile WotC have dropped all pretense of mechanical diversity and oversimplified 5e to the extent it's a game where you don't really feel much difference between playing most classes — you have "full spellcaster", "noncaster" and "1/2 caster who uses spells to support their combat capabilities, basically being a hybrid". Sure, those classes have other distinctions, but 5e is unapologetically combat-focused, and combat methodology is pretty much divided between those three archetypes.



Interesting.

So, because treasure was random, and Wizards got 0 spells outside treasure, I found great difference between characters in earlier editions, where the party with Fly, Fireball, and a Vorpal Blade was very different from one with Haste, Invisibility, and a Bow of Doubling.

For me, 3e felt samey - optimize for high numbers and maximum tools. While 2e felt more diverse: what tactics *this* party can use will be vastly different from what tactics *that* party utilizes.

So, what makes 3e feel more diverse than "everyone optimizes" to you? What is the 3e gold that you admire?


Well, for starters, the fact that I don't have to play a wizard/sorcerer if I want to play a magical character, and I can go about it in different ways. Do I just want to blast people like no tomorrow? Warmage has that covered. Do I want to be an at-will magic user who never runs out of tricks, even though those tricks are rather limited? Warlock comes up. Do I want to mess about with a magic system that had to be fixed by the creator after the book was published, but seems pretty fun narratively? Shadowcaster.

And then we get into martial adepts, incarnum, and other stuff invented for 3.5/PF1e. That was basically the only time I remember in D&D's history when it wasn't just spellcasting or limited points of X per day/rest for all classes. New subsystems were the norm.

My modus operandi could differ majorly on the base mechanical level - martial adepts are my favourite classes of D&D simply because they dispense with long-term resource management outside of HP and make the game revolve around action economy management - it feels basically breaking one of the game's load-bearing walls and finding out that it doesn't matter.

Sure, I would agree about 3e's desire to make everything mathable, like magic items and such, being somewhat unhealthy — personally, I would tone down the magic mart and WBL significantly in return for making actual math bonuses that matter, the Big Six, baked into level progression. But even then 3.5 somehow struck that weird equilibrium nobody was able to replicate since - the game feels deep enough that you can find multiple optimization levels on which it works just fine, and not having that +1 to your to-hit, or even those +4, won't actually kill you (unless it's a save-or-die, I suppose, another bad habit of 3e) or make your character unplayable - but having those will also not break the game.

Quertus
2020-12-11, 05:40 AM
Scion

Epic Dexterity

soak and weapon stats

epic legendary heroes fighting epic ancient monsters

literally break the game… simply impossible to use them as designed and still have a meaningful game

I can and have used the 4e skill challenge rules many times without handwaving or houserules or anything without the game immediately breaking apart at the seams.

considerably more broken in any reasonable definition of the word

Well, I'm not sure whether "not only falls to meet the stated design goals, but actively works against them" is a reasonable definition of "broken" or not, but it is the one that matters in this particular context.

Having played (and, more importantly, *read*) Scion, I find that epic stat ridiculous scaling is *horrible* for balance (it's white wolf - what's new), but great for the feel of "epic legendary heroes fighting epic ancient monsters".

You very much *can* "use them as designed and still have a meaningful game" - it just isn't a 4e tactical skirmish game, it's an actual heroes of myth, sometimes you're in over your head against a Cyclops and need to rely on your wits and claim to be nobody, totally awesome kind of game instead.

So, no, disagree that Scion epic stats go against the design goals, let alone moreso than 4e skill challenges.


New subsystems were the norm.

dispense with long-term resource management outside of HP and make the game revolve around action economy management - it feels basically breaking one of the game's load-bearing walls and finding out that it doesn't matter.

the game feels deep enough that you can find multiple optimization levels on which it works just fine, and not having that +1 to your to-hit, or even those +4, won't actually kill you (unless it's a save-or-die, I suppose, another bad habit of 3e) or make your character unplayable - but having those will also not break the game.

Thanks for explaining all that. I think I've pulled out the key bits - let me know if I missed anything major. I'm curious now as to whether people would appreciate (or even notice) similar features if they appeared in a system without a history of their absence.

Jason
2020-12-11, 09:37 AM
Traveler (2-3 editions, but I don’t remember which. One was the one where your character may not survive creation – probably 1st ed?)Only first edition (aka Traveller Classic) killed you for failing a survival roll during character generation, though it's an optional rule for most of the other versions.


ParanoiaThere are three editions by WEG, one of which was terrible, and three by Mongoose, the first of which (XP) is my favorite comedy RPG (A narrow field, admittedly, but it's a great game for one-shots).


Dr Who RPGI'm curious as to which one, because I know of at least three of these too. The old FASA version, which I rather like, Timelord, and Cubicle 7's New-Who version.

AshfireMage
2020-12-12, 07:30 PM
It might not be objectively the best (ah, who am I kidding, it definitely isn't), but nothing has quite managed to hold my attention the same way Vampire: The Masquerade has.

Friv
2020-12-13, 01:22 AM
So, no, disagree that Scion epic stats go against the design goals, let alone moreso than 4e skill.
If you'd like some in-depth discussion of the ways I which Scion 1e had rules that went against the design goals (such as they were) I would be happy to chat with you either in the Worst RPGs thread or in a Scion-focused one. Let me know!

In the mean time, I'm throwing in a vote for Blades In The Dark. It's a tight focused heist game that still manages to be so consistent that it has been turned into properties as far flung as Fantasy Vietnam, Sailor Moon, Shadowrun and Star Trek. It's clean and tight while still having a solid mechanical base, and the core setting is a ton of fun.

Delta
2020-12-13, 09:25 AM
Well, I'm not sure whether "not only falls to meet the stated design goals, but actively works against them" is a reasonable definition of "broken" or not, but it is the one that matters in this particular context.

And by that definition, everything I mentioned is so, so much worse than 4e skill challenges by multiple orders of magnitude that I'm not sure what you're still arguing about. Skill challenges might fail to meet some design goals, Scion 1e rules works against the design goal of "create a ruleset that can be used to play a meaningful game", which is a much, much more basic design goal every game has to achieve in my book. Skill challenges easily meet that goal, a lot of Scion 1e rules work against that.

Morgaln
2020-12-14, 06:42 AM
It might not be objectively the best (ah, who am I kidding, it definitely isn't), but nothing has quite managed to hold my attention the same way Vampire: The Masquerade has.

I feel the same about Werewolf: The Apocalypse, simply because the setting resonates with me.

Morty
2020-12-14, 09:00 AM
In the mean time, I'm throwing in a vote for Blades In The Dark. It's a tight focused heist game that still manages to be so consistent that it has been turned into properties as far flung as Fantasy Vietnam, Sailor Moon, Shadowrun and Star Trek. It's clean and tight while still having a solid mechanical base, and the core setting is a ton of fun.

I would really love to play BitD someday. It's not something I'd apply to every genre and type of game - the indie RPG community is kind of prone to declaring something as the next best thing and hacking it every which way. But it does seem to have excellent fiction-first ideas.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-14, 09:14 AM
I would really love to play BitD someday. It's not something I'd apply to every genre and type of game - the indie RPG community is kind of prone to declaring something as the next best thing and hacking it every which way. But it does seem to have excellent fiction-first ideas.

I don't own BitD, but I do own the science fiction version Scum & Villainy. It's actually a really good adaptation, partially because despite the title referencing Star Wars the designers actually picked three TV series that fit the assumptions as the key inspirations and built the game around those. Those series to my knowledge being Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, andBlake's Seven.

I am less convinced by the military fantasy version.

Friv
2020-12-14, 04:40 PM
I am less convinced by the military fantasy version.

In all honesty, I have immensely mixed feelings about Band of Blades; I think it is a very well-constructed and carefully thought-out game that makes every possible choice in the exact opposite way that I would want to play a game.

Morty
2020-12-14, 05:14 PM
My favorite part about Blades in the Dark is probably that it'd let me actually play a heist game and enjoy it. Since I'm otherwise absolutely useless at actually planning or executing a heist, as I found out during a game of Dark Heresy that involved one.

Cluedrew
2020-12-14, 08:06 PM
It might not be objectively the best (ah, who am I kidding, it definitely isn't), but nothing has quite managed to hold my attention the same way Vampire: The Masquerade has.And when the dice are down and character sheets out, isn't that what really matters?


I would really love to play BitD someday. It's not something I'd apply to every genre and type of game - the indie RPG community is kind of prone to declaring something as the next best thing and hacking it every which way. But it does seem to have excellent fiction-first ideas.When I saw Apocalypse World Hacks that made sense to me as did the label "Powered by the Apocalypse" because that is a pretty flexible base. Blades in the Dark probably took direct inspiration - I forget if it is been said but the "playbooks" and clocks feel like a give away - and certainly has a similar design philosophy. But it feels so much less flexible than it. Now on one level you can scratch out Ironhook and put jail so you change the setting out pretty easily. But there is the score-payout-downtime cycle, some of your stats come from your gang sheet, heat is an important resource and you can't just add or remove stats because of the symmetry that is required to resistance rolls. Sure the resolution mechanics is pretty cool but there are a lot of things tied up around it and they feel pretty important.

In short: Hey does anyone know where I can find a free version of Band of Blades or some other more extreme hack to see if it can be done?

Also there is a lot of people who want to play Blades in the Dark in this thread.

kingcheesepants
2020-12-15, 01:07 AM
I don't own BitD, but I do own the science fiction version Scum & Villainy. It's actually a really good adaptation, partially because despite the title referencing Star Wars the designers actually picked three TV series that fit the assumptions as the key inspirations and built the game around those. Those series to my knowledge being Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, andBlake's Seven.

I am less convinced by the military fantasy version.

I didn't realize there's a sci-fi version of Blades, I'm getting that ASAP.

In related news Blades in the Dark is a great heist game. Honestly just about everything about it is fun and intuitive and it really works for what it's trying to do. The multiple levels of success and failure, the resolutions and complications, the various downtime activities and upgrades. It really works well.

Another game I enjoyed but don't see talked about much is Big Eyes Small Mouth. It's horribly unbalanced but it's so flexible. I just love being able to make such a huge variety of characters and powers. It's definitely got problems but it's a lot of fun.

Willie the Duck
2020-12-15, 09:32 AM
It might not be objectively the best (ah, who am I kidding, it definitely isn't), but nothing has quite managed to hold my attention the same way Vampire: The Masquerade has.

There will always be games where the premise is so fascinating, or the worldbuilding so amazing, or some other factor that one can find it immensely favorable (if only for the potential), even if there are massive problems in one aspect or another. For me it is Symbaroum -- the game just exudes a dark and foreboding (with out being grimdark or similar) atmosphere that I adore. That the actual game rules have problems doesn't matter, since I'll just be changing them anyways.

Necrosnoop110
2020-12-22, 10:51 PM
In a wierd way 5th edition gets both better and worse the more you play it.
Can you expand on that I don't quite follow?

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-23, 04:47 AM
Can you expand on that I don't quite follow?

I can't give MrStabby's view, but to me it comes down to D&D 5e being very mediocre. It does what it wants to do, and it does a little bit more, but it didn't do it in a majorly satisfying way. The bits I was looking forward to seeing are incredibly vestigial, and while it might be modular it feels unsatisfying to have a lot of systems that don't interact with each other.

To me the big example if this is Insisting. At its core it's a fine idea, if you roleplay really well you get what's essentially a reroll token, but nothing interacts with it. I'm the cast at least there's no sculptures that require you to have it or spend it, there's nothing that gives it to you or takes it away. It's just a vestigial mechanic that comes up by GM fiat (, so IME not at all).

The core of 5e is good, but everything's separate to the point of not interacting with other subsystems.

Imbalance
2020-12-23, 09:00 AM
I can't give MrStabby's view, but to me it comes down to D&D 5e being very mediocre. It does what it wants to do, and it does a little bit more, but it didn't do it in a majorly satisfying way. The bits I was looking forward to seeing are incredibly vestigial, and while it might be modular it feels unsatisfying to have a lot of systems that don't interact with each other.

To me the big example if this is Insisting. At its core it's a fine idea, if you roleplay really well you get what's essentially a reroll token, but nothing interacts with it. I'm the cast at least there's no sculptures that require you to have it or spend it, there's nothing that gives it to you or takes it away. It's just a vestigial mechanic that comes up by GM fiat (, so IME not at all).

The core of 5e is good, but everything's separate to the point of not interacting with other subsystems.

I'm not gonna lie - you had me in the first half, but I have no earthly clue what your second paragraph is saying. What is 'Insisting,' what do you mean by 'cast' and 'sculptures,' and please explain why any of it is a fine idea at core?

Luccan
2020-12-23, 09:45 AM
I'm not gonna lie - you had me in the first half, but I have no earthly clue what your second paragraph is saying. What is 'Insisting,' what do you mean by 'cast' and 'sculptures,' and please explain why any of it is a fine idea at core?

I think they meant Inspiration. Probably an auto-correct issue. It seems to me that either a lack of roleplay demands or roleplay rewards is the issue. And while I don't think that really makes 5e bad (and I've never seen an example of roleplay "rules" that seemed anymore fun than just roleplaying because you want to), it's absolutely something the system is lacking. D&D has often been vague on how to reward roleplay* and even now that 5e has at least one definitive mechanic for it, I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen it come up in a game. It's really not central to the system and I can understand why that might bother some people.

*Roleplay XP is always a nebulous "you can if you want, we have no guide for you"

Meatball
2020-12-23, 10:13 AM
Best TT RPG I've ever had the chance to play was HarnMaster/HarnWorld. Great game, super detailed world, but it is really heavy on rules & mechanics. To the point of rolling an attack, rolling a location on the body you hit, checking how much protection is on that point of the hit, then figuring out how much 'impact' got through, and then figuring out how much damage. But once you get going, it was crazy fun.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-23, 10:18 AM
I'm not gonna lie - you had me in the first half, but I have no earthly clue what your second paragraph is saying. What is 'Insisting,' what do you mean by 'cast' and 'sculptures,' and please explain why any of it is a fine idea at core?

Inspiration, core, and abilities.

And because nothing in the system, except maybe skill DCs, is broken, but none of the subsystems interact with each other. Inspiration and the associated roleplaying mechanics needed more teeth, if only because I always see them completely ignored. IME the whole section might as well be replaced with an essay on developing believable and consistent personality traits for your character.

Willie the Duck
2020-12-23, 10:21 AM
I think they meant Inspiration. Probably an auto-correct issue. It seems to me that either a lack of roleplay demands or roleplay rewards is the issue. And while I don't think that really makes 5e bad (and I've never seen an example of roleplay "rules" that seemed anymore fun than just roleplaying because you want to), it's absolutely something the system is lacking. D&D has often been vague on how to reward roleplay* and even now that 5e has at least one definitive mechanic for it, I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen it come up in a game. It's really not central to the system and I can understand why that might bother some people.

*Roleplay XP is always a nebulous "you can if you want, we have no guide for you"

I'm going to be honest, I have never found a single xp* reward mechanic which satisfies a group universally. TSR-era GP=XP is a really elegant system... for a very specific setup ('get rich or die trying' being an accepted character goal). Same with WotC-era opponent/obstacle-overcome=XP system (if people agree to that goal, it works, otherwise...).
*or whatever advancement mechanic exists in a given game

None of the roleplay-rewarding, or quest accomplishing, or even character development systems really seem to work excepting when you have a good GM in tune with the playgroup (otherwise it can just become the GM rewarding what they think is important, which can be a mismatch to what the group thinks). Monte Cook's Invisible Suns is a good example: it has a truly interesting reward system where you are rewarded for completing pre-selected plot arcs for the characters. It's nice in that, if you decide it makes sense that your character should enter a downward spiral and just completely bottom out, the system can reward you for doing that (which would be considered failure in most other systems). The problem then is that you have to preselect the character arcs, meaning it will not reward someone who wants to discover the emergent important points of their character. While each other system I've seen has a different constraint or limitation, they all seem to have one.

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-23, 10:37 AM
I've found no system to work better than 'you get X XP per session' or 'you get one XP per X sessions'. Because at the end of the day that's what every system boils down to, an attempt to roughly correlate rewards with playtime.

EggKookoo
2020-12-23, 11:56 AM
I've found no system to work better than 'you get X XP per session' or 'you get one XP per X sessions'. Because at the end of the day that's what every system boils down to, an attempt to roughly correlate rewards with playtime.

In my D&D campaigns I experimented with milestone leveling and such, and eventually came back to XP for overcoming encounters. Encounters are mostly combat, but could also be puzzles or complex traps, and in some cases social stuff. Basically my rule is, if it costs resources or has the potential to, and overcoming it reveals new information that you can act on, or opens a path to further adventuring, it'll reward XP.

Telwar
2020-12-23, 01:44 PM
I've found no system to work better than 'you get X XP per session' or 'you get one XP per X sessions'. Because at the end of the day that's what every system boils down to, an attempt to roughly correlate rewards with playtime.

TBH, that's one of the reasons I really liked FFG Star Wars, the XP/session was enough that you could have measurable and tangible advancement, such you could get a tangible mechanical improvement at worst every other session. This did not appear in, say, WOD/Exalted/older editions of Shadowrun. The last game I played of SR4, I never got enough xp to increase a stat or skill that I wanted to.

Shadowrun 6e, for all it's faults (and they are numerous), does something similar *and* has character building points at the same value as XP, which SR5 did not.

Quertus
2020-12-23, 03:43 PM
GM in tune with the playgroup (otherwise it can just become the GM rewarding what they think is important, which can be a mismatch to what the group thinks). Monte Cook's Invisible Suns is a good example: it has a truly interesting reward system where you are rewarded for completing pre-selected plot arcs for the characters. It's nice in that, if you decide it makes sense that your character should enter a downward spiral and just completely bottom out, the system can reward you for doing that (which would be considered failure in most other systems). The problem then is that you have to preselect the character arcs, meaning it will not reward someone who wants to discover the emergent important points of their character. While each other system I've seen has a different constraint or limitation, they all seem to have one.

What if you just ignored the "preselect" in Monte Cook's Invisible Suns?

How about my technique of opening the table to nominations for things that *the group* thinks are worth XP, fit not requiring the GM to actually be "in sync" with the group in that regard?


I've found no system to work better than 'you get X XP per session' or 'you get one XP per X sessions'. Because at the end of the day that's what every system boils down to, an attempt to roughly correlate rewards with playtime.

This encourages the group to move at the most glacial pace, leveling as much as possible between challenges. And, as it turns out, this encourages both *planning* and *role-playing*.

I approve. :smallwink:

Anonymouswizard
2020-12-23, 04:27 PM
This encourages the group to move at the most glacial pace, leveling as much as possible between challenges. And, as it turns out, this encourages both *planning* and *role-playing*.

I approve. :smallwink:

I mean, the times I used it we did get extra XP for hitting key plot milestones (witnessing or hearing certain events), so we still moved at a decent clip, but like 90% of our XP was just the set session amount. It very much encouraged planning, but running the game at roughly one session equalling one week meant that the PCs couldn't just hang around gaining power, because otherwise our opponents would get too far ahead in the 'achieving their goals' metric.

Willie the Duck
2020-12-23, 09:46 PM
What if you just ignored the "preselect" in Monte Cook's Invisible Suns?
So you gain XP for advancing down every conceivable plot arc anyone could envision for your character? Then everyone just gains infinite XP every session and the XP system ceases to be meaningful.


How about my technique of opening the table to nominations for things that *the group* thinks are worth XP, fit not requiring the GM to actually be "in sync" with the group in that regard?
It's more egalitarian, but it pretty much just makes *the group* into the GM for this purpose only -- it still works really really well when the decider is really really skilled and really really poorly when the decider is not. To my mind, the people for whom a given games in-the-rulebook XP system needs to be designed is a group of 10-12 year-olds playing without adult supervision (or perhaps strangers playing together semi-competitively who simply need a fair and formulaic allocation method so that they can benchmark success against each other). Skilled and mature adults who trust each other barely need game rules at all, much less care overly what the book says about XP. I think *the group* might fail to be fair amongst these hypothetical 10-12 year-olds just as frequently as a single GM.

Quertus
2020-12-23, 11:11 PM
So you gain XP for advancing down every conceivable plot arc anyone could envision for your character? Then everyone just gains infinite XP every session and the XP system ceases to be meaningful.


It's more egalitarian, but it pretty much just makes *the group* into the GM for this purpose only -- it still works really really well when the decider is really really skilled and really really poorly when the decider is not. To my mind, the people for whom a given games in-the-rulebook XP system needs to be designed is a group of 10-12 year-olds playing without adult supervision (or perhaps strangers playing together semi-competitively who simply need a fair and formulaic allocation method so that they can benchmark success against each other). Skilled and mature adults who trust each other barely need game rules at all, much less care overly what the book says about XP. I think *the group* might fail to be fair amongst these hypothetical 10-12 year-olds just as frequently as a single GM.

Ah, I was unfamiliar with the Monte Cook system - That answers my question. Sadness.

For the group bit… note that *everyone* gets the same XP, so *everyone* gets XP for enjoying the role-playing / drawing / singing / joking that you did.

Ignimortis
2020-12-23, 11:56 PM
TBH, that's one of the reasons I really liked FFG Star Wars, the XP/session was enough that you could have measurable and tangible advancement, such you could get a tangible mechanical improvement at worst every other session. This did not appear in, say, WOD/Exalted/older editions of Shadowrun. The last game I played of SR4, I never got enough xp to increase a stat or skill that I wanted to.

Shadowrun 6e, for all it's faults (and they are numerous), does something similar *and* has character building points at the same value as XP, which SR5 did not.

Uh, what? 6e still uses the priority system as the chargen method (horribly outdated, maps onto karma poorly, and rewards actual minmaxing with "build tall, not wide" to the utmost degree), and we haven't seen anything about karmagen in 6e yet. 5e has karmagen as one of the alternative methods. Furthermore, the suggested rewards in 5e, while completely inadequate, are still higher relative to 6e, since improving a skill or an attribute costs 5 karma x new rating, but the game suggests awarding 5 karma points (which isn't enough for anything you care about) for completing a mission. Also, improvement times (if the group actually uses them, because they're cumbersome enough not to) just don't function in a good way - the game starts in 2080, and by the time you get to advance a few primary stats and skills somewhat, you're in the 22nd century. That's in a game where you still have human-or-less-than-human lifespans for most characters.

I would agree that most listed games are, for some reason, very much afraid to let players earn EXP. Playing VtM for three years straight and getting maybe 200 XP (and that with a GM who was more generous than the book suggested) was a pretty major letdown, since I basically started playing what I actually wanted to play mechanically in the last year or so. Same with Shadowrun 5e - in a year and a half of consistent play and probably double awards compared to the rulebook, I have progressed mostly horizontally, because going up just costs so much, it seems outright inefficient. The only vertical improvements were in armor and initiative, primary skills and attributes didn't change a bit.

Telwar
2020-12-24, 12:12 AM
Uh, what? 6e still uses the priority system as the chargen method (horribly outdated, maps onto karma poorly, and rewards actual minmaxing with "build tall, not wide" to the utmost degree), and we haven't seen anything about karmagen in 6e yet.

My bad, I was referring to the 50 karma you get for customization.

Ignimortis
2020-12-24, 12:50 AM
My bad, I was referring to the 50 karma you get for customization.

Ah, that makes sense. You get 25 in 5e, and up to 25 more if you pick negative qualities. Still, it's pretty much a bandaid put on a bullet hole with the bullet still inside.

Shadowrun should've switched to karma-driven chargen a long time ago, right after 4e made a step in that direction with BP. At the degree of complexity Shadowrun is at (any edition at all), you still have to track so much that it's almost required to use a program (Chummer) to get chargen done quickly (as in, in an hour or two or three, instead of ten), and at that point, karmagen isn't anything harder than priority.

Willie the Duck
2020-12-24, 08:50 AM
For the group bit… note that *everyone* gets the same XP, so *everyone* gets XP for enjoying the role-playing / drawing / singing / joking that you did.

I did miss that, thanks. That helps on the fairness bit, but again to me it sounds like a system that would work very well for people who really don't need a system.

Quertus
2020-12-24, 06:09 PM
Also, improvement times (if the group actually uses them, because they're cumbersome enough not to) just don't function in a good way - the game starts in 2080, and by the time you get to advance a few primary stats and skills somewhat, you're in the 22nd century. That's in a game where you still have human-or-less-than-human lifespans for most characters.

My question is, do the NPCs reflect this rule? Is anyone who has advanced more than "a few primary stats and skills somewhat" in their 60's?


I did miss that, thanks. That helps on the fairness bit, but again to me it sounds like a system that would work very well for people who really don't need a system.

So, while many hate it, I never had problems with White Wolf end-of-session XP of

1 point automatic
1 point learning curve
1 point acting
1 point role-playing
1 point heroism

Or adding the extended

1 point taking an unusual action that worked
1 point noticing an important fact or clue
1 point showing unusual wisdom, restraint, or vision
1 point major accomplishment
1 point comic relief

Nor did I really think about it during the game, or gear my actions towards it - I could just readily organize my memories of the session in that fashion after the fact, and describe my best candidate for each category. Granted, I'd sometimes shoot myself in the foot, not thinking ahead, and picking something for category A that was my best candidate for category B. Oops.

Point being, even if my group has no trouble making stuff up, having that structure to hang it on, that mantra to get the mental juices flowing, doesn't sound like an always inherently bad thing.

Meatball
2020-12-24, 09:16 PM
I've found no system to work better than 'you get X XP per session' or 'you get one XP per X sessions'. Because at the end of the day that's what every system boils down to, an attempt to roughly correlate rewards with playtime.

Not to come back around to HarnMaster, but they didn't even have an XP/Levelling system, it was all skill based. You'd roll a percent for every skill check, and if you got a 'critical' (5 or 0 on the end of the percent) you had a chance to roll and see if your skill went up. To me, that was the best system as the skills people used went up over time, and the ones they didn't use just stayed where they were. Was nice because just about every sessions you were sure to at least have a few chances of rolling to try to raise a skill, so your character just got stronger organically.

Ignimortis
2020-12-24, 10:35 PM
My question is, do the NPCs reflect this rule? Is anyone who has advanced more than "a few primary stats and skills somewhat" in their 60's?

Of course not, there are super special forces with lots of skills in the 8s and stats at metatype maximums. If we consider that they started off in their prime, say, 24 years old, by which point they had all their stats at -1 to current (so a Body 6 would be a Body 5), and all skills at 6 (chargen maximum) or -2 if they're not at 7 or above, which would still make them superior to the average chargen runner, then...

They'd be 42 years old.

And if you actually take those rules by default, starting off at an age of perhaps 10 (did somebody say child soldiers?), zero skills and a 2 in every stat (supposed human average as of 6e, instead of more reasonable 3), well...

They'd finish training by 51 years old. They'd have to have been training since before SR1's events.

Edit: Rereading the rules, they could cut that down to 31 years old and 23 years old respectively, if they devoted 12 hours to training every single day for all that time. Still, since you generally don't have enough karma to advance several skills/attributes at once, it'd generally take longer.

Quertus
2020-12-25, 12:52 PM
Sounds like, so long as someone else is footing the bill, the NPCs aren't unrealistic (unless they're portrayed as younger than their stats allow).


Not to come back around to HarnMaster, but they didn't even have an XP/Levelling system, it was all skill based. You'd roll a percent for every skill check, and if you got a 'critical' (5 or 0 on the end of the percent) you had a chance to roll and see if your skill went up. To me, that was the best system as the skills people used went up over time, and the ones they didn't use just stayed where they were. Was nice because just about every sessions you were sure to at least have a few chances of rolling to try to raise a skill, so your character just got stronger organically.

It is difficult for me to ask this question in a way that sounds neutral, but… this sounds like it *encourages* you to roll the dice, whereas many people seem to want to *avoid* rolling the dice. Is "rolling the dice" an enjoyable component in HarnMaster? How would a statistically-equivalent "every time you use a skill (regardless of the need to roll)" mechanic fare instead?

Drascin
2020-12-27, 07:19 AM
Honestly, in terms of "the system is actively being helpful to get the fiction and fun across", which in the end is probably what we want an RPG to do... I think the FFG Star Wars and L5R systems have probably been the best among the maybe fifteen or so systems I've tried.

The One Ring is also pretty good on this end, but it's extremely sensitive to the party. If you have a couple players who don't quite take point as much, it can fall apart real hard.

Scots Dragon
2020-12-27, 10:18 AM
The answer to 'best' is always going to be subjective, but for me it's Mutants & Masterminds. Consider that to mean 2e or 3e at your choice.

Telok
2020-12-27, 07:24 PM
It is difficult for me to ask this question in a way that sounds neutral, but… this sounds like it *encourages* you to roll the dice, whereas many people seem to want to *avoid* rolling the dice. Is "rolling the dice" an enjoyable component in HarnMaster? How would a statistically-equivalent "every time you use a skill (regardless of the need to roll)" mechanic fare instead?

Generally players want to roll dice when they feel that they get a better reward from the system for rolling than from not rolling. That includes the chance of success as well as the relative magnitudes of success and failure.

I've been starting to prefer dice pools and exploding dice systems with a measure of success/failure over the past few years, and mostly reserving the flat probability systems for stuff like Paranoia and Toon knockoffs (rolling = potential humor & all failure results are temporary or useful). The players know they have a target number, a bottom level that they can't roll below, the posibility to roll extra high, and extra benefits for high rolls. They want to roll a lot (assuming they aren't min/maxed into being irrelevant in 75% of the game), they want to play the game and use the system.

The last Call of Cthulhu version I own has something similar to the "trying skills = advancing skills" thing. Every session when you succeed on a skill roll you put a check by the skill. After the session you roll all the skills you have a check by. If you fail the after-session roll you add 1d6 points to the skill. Since properly run in CoC a success is a significant advance and most failures are delays instead of punishments people are pretty willing to roll even the 15%-25% chances (the biggest exceptions being sanity and dodge rolls and those should happen after things start going wrong).

The games I see people not wanting to roll dice in usually have failure being relatively punative and frequent, success being a minor advantage or "may continue to act", the players often don't have much say in affecting their rolls or perhaps not much say in what they're rolling, and the dice result being more important than the player or the character.

I don't get trying to play a game where the primary mechanic is rolling dice and setting up systems and situations in it where people feel that dice rolling is a bad thing. Even old AD&D saving throws were something you wanted to roll because they were supposed to be rolled when you'd already made mistakes and failed hard, now only fate & luck could save you (you didn't want to be in that position but rolling could only make things better).

Theodoxus
2021-01-02, 11:46 PM
I've found no system to work better than 'you get X XP per session' or 'you get one XP per X sessions'. Because at the end of the day that's what every system boils down to, an attempt to roughly correlate rewards with playtime.

Apophis Consortium's Obsidian: Age of Judgement has probably the best "XP per session" I've played. You and the GM create up to 4 goals for your character, active or passive, and you get XP when you meet the goal. An active goal might be "Heal 100 hit points of damage" or "Advance a skill", while a passive goal might be "A sense of duty (save children, help the poor)" or "Demands on self (Respect, financial security". Most passive goals will play throughout a character's lifetime, but if they can find a way to interact with it each game session, they're guaranteed to get some XP. Active goals provide more XP, but they're generally one time deals. When you complete a goal, you get to pick a new one.

Now, the actual mechanics of the game are pretty meh, and the rulebook could use both a decent editor and probably a massive re-write, taking out 99% of the backstory detail into it's own book, but it did provide one of the most iconic characters I've ever made. Probably more than anything, that's how I measure if a game is good or not - does it inspire a character or two that I'll tell tales about decades later. RIFTS and Obsidian are so far, the only games to do that for me. While I've played 100's of hours of 5E, I can't think of a single character who's had more than a couple interesting tales to tell. But Boris the Red (of RIFTS fame) and Fetid Vance (of Obsidian fame) I could expound on for hours.

137beth
2021-01-04, 01:57 PM
I've found no system to work better than 'you get X XP per session' or 'you get one XP per X sessions'. Because at the end of the day that's what every system boils down to, an attempt to roughly correlate rewards with playtime.

For a system where you are expected to advance one level at a time (like D&D), I prefer having the players vote at the end of every session whether they level up, with a tie meaning they don't level up. For a point-based system like GURPS the rule could be that the players vote every session on whether they either gain X points or keep their current point totals.

Mordar
2021-01-04, 05:36 PM
Personal favorites, thus "Tabletop RPGs best for Mordar" are:


Call of C'thulhu - wonderful match where the system fully encourages the intended playstyle
Rolemaster - Wonderful array of options to make extremely customizable characters, perceived barrier to entry/hyper complexity is an illusion
Deadlands - Fun, original feeling ruleset set in a fun, original setting
Marvel FASERIP - Because sometimes you just want to make original super heroes and sometimes you just want to throw 16 Marvel characters into a Contest of Champions


Played all four lots and lots. Would probably play them lots and lots more if the opportunity existed.

- M

Quertus
2021-01-04, 10:00 PM
Apophis Consortium's Obsidian: Age of Judgement has probably the best "XP per session" I've played. You and the GM create up to 4 goals for your character, active or passive, and you get XP when you meet the goal. An active goal might be "Heal 100 hit points of damage" or "Advance a skill", while a passive goal might be "A sense of duty (save children, help the poor)" or "Demands on self (Respect, financial security". Most passive goals will play throughout a character's lifetime, but if they can find a way to interact with it each game session, they're guaranteed to get some XP. Active goals provide more XP, but they're generally one time deals. When you complete a goal, you get to pick a new one.

Now, the actual mechanics of the game are pretty meh, and the rulebook could use both a decent editor and probably a massive re-write, taking out 99% of the backstory detail into it's own book, but it did provide one of the most iconic characters I've ever made. Probably more than anything, that's how I measure if a game is good or not - does it inspire a character or two that I'll tell tales about decades later. RIFTS and Obsidian are so far, the only games to do that for me. While I've played 100's of hours of 5E, I can't think of a single character who's had more than a couple interesting tales to tell. But Boris the Red (of RIFTS fame) and Fetid Vance (of Obsidian fame) I could expound on for hours.

OK, most important bits first: I agree that "the stories we tell afterwards" is one of the biggest things (the fun we have at the time" seems pretty important, too, IMO).

Any idea what made Rifts and Obsidian produce the best stories for you?

That out of the way…

Part of what makes a character feel "good" to me, part of my measure of a character is how many goals they have.

So I'm pretty sure that I would hate the Obsidian XP method - for one because it would compound "not accomplishing goals" with "not getting XP".

But I would also dislike it because I want to come by my victories (and defeats) honest - I don't want the GM knowing what I'm after.

So, I have a counter-proposal.

What if, instead of being limited to 4 "active" goals, there was no such arbitrary limit. Any goals your character has, you record in secret (perhaps even electronically, with a timestamp of when the goal was added).

Each session, you can submit one or more goals that your character has *accomplished*. Then, at that point, there should be rules for how many XP such goals are worth.

Armus might submit goals accomplished like, "commissioned creation of not-so-cubic Cubic Gate to return (self and) fellow abductees to their respective homes", "created and saw adopted new religious custom to protect against antimagic plague", "protected party from truths that would destroy them", "gave queen curse of sterility". Or goals he never know he had until they came up, like "gifted magical sword by celestial being", "turned that snake what disturbed my sleep into a nice snakeskin belt / pair of boots", "looted his own dead body".

How would my proposed system compare, in your opinion?