Yora
2021-06-14, 07:13 PM
I finally sat down to take an actual look at the game system in the big Worlds Without Number tome, and found it to be actually quite interesting.
At it's core, it appears to be based on the 1981 Basic Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, but with a considerable number of changes.
Attribute modifiers are even lower, as they were originally in the first version of D&D, with 7 to 12 giving no modifier, and only a 3 and 18 giving a -2 or +2 respectively. This is how the "roll 3d6 six times in order" system was supposed to be used. Your modifiers might make some classes benefit more than others, but in the end all classes would work with almost any stats you randomly rolled. (OD&D and Basic also gave an XP bonus for having a high score in the main attribute for the character's class, but these were so small they made almost no difference. WWN has nothing of that kind.)
Something very familiar to players of 3rd and 5th edition are the action types of Main, Movement, On Turn, and Istand Actions, which are just Standard, Movement, and Bonus Actions, and Reactions. It still keeps the group initiative system from Basic though, which I really like. (All PCs go together, saving the trouble of working out the initiative order for every fight, and speeding things up by having all players think about their move simultaneously instead of only starting when it's their individual turn.)
The biggest change is classes. There's only three classes in WWN. Or 6. Or 7. Or 27, depending on how you want to count. The three primary classes are Expert, Mage, and Warrior, with mages having to pick one of five traditions. You can also choose to dual class, and you can even dual-class a mage/mage with two different traditions. Of note here is the Healer tradition, which can only be selected by dual-class characters and can't be the only class of a plain mage (because it doesn't have enough abilities).
Characters have four saving throws. Evasion, Physical, Mental, and Luck. The base value for all four is the same, and the same for all characters, but the first three are modified by one of two attributes each, whichever of them is better. Luck always remains unmodified.
Like Spears of the Dawn and Stars Without Number, this game has a skill system. Skills can have a rank from 0 to 4, which is added whenever you make a 2d6 roll to get something done that doesn't have other specific rules. Characters also add whatever attribute modifier is appropriate in the particular situation.
if you don't have a skill trained, you get a -1 penalty to the roll instead of your skill rank.
Very simple and easy and stays out of your hair. I like that.
Very interesting are the Punch, Stab, and Shoot skills, which give you a bonus to attack rolls. Nice way to let players chose between investing in fighting or other abilities, which I think makes the game feel more like a universal system than just a dungeon crawler.
There are also Foci, which I think are simply feats. But all of them have two levels, with the second level requiring that you got the first level earlier.
Magic is also quite interesting: Spellcasters have a number of spells that they can prepare, and a number of spells they can cast per day. A bit like 5th edition, but they don't even care which level the slots are. (More like warlock spells in that regard.) Even a 10th level single class mage can only cast 12 spells per day, which can all be 5th level spells if you want to. (Lever really only limits when you can first learn a spell, I believe.)
That's not a lot spells, which is where Arts come in. Arts are minor magical effects that don't use the daily limits for spells. Instead they are limited by effort. Spellcasters have one daily effort that returns with ever new day, and a scene effort, which returns every new scene. Such arts are a bit like daily or encounter powers, but you can only use one of your daily powers per day, even if you have multiple. Same with scenes. There's also indefinite effort which works basically like concentration.
A very neat new concept is system strain. Several things can cause system strain, but most importantly magical healing. A character with the healing tradition can heal an unlimited number of times per day, but characters can not benefit from an indefinite amouny of healing. Every healing gives you one system strain, and once your strain is equal to your Constitution score, you no longer heal anymore. You do reduce your strain by 1 every day.
At the start of an adventure, after having had a week or two of safe rest, character can laugh of much damage that isn't immediately fatal and just have it healed for free. But if you gor 12 healings in 2 days, you find yourself with a strain of 10 and might only be able to benefit from one or two more healings. Your hp migt be full, but if you take serious damage now, it might take quite a while to recover from that. I think this should quite change how hit point management comes into adventuring. It's not so much about how much damage enemies can deal, but how many days without injury you can get in. I'm really curious how that plays out in action and how it affects GM planning. A party that has one day of massive fighting once per month might have a very easy time, while a party that gets a little scraped every day could be in serious trouble.
I think I saw a somewhat similar system a while back, but can't remember where.
Another new innovation is shock damage, and I can't really get my head around what it's purpose would be. Most melee weapons have a shock value that makes them deal a small amount of damage even on a miss unless the target has a sufficiently high AC. This just seems really weird to me.
There's a neat little Encumbrance system that I really like, because it's almost completely the same as the one I made for B/X. But I think Kevin Crawford just read the same peoples' ideas as I did. The difference is that in WWN, the maximum load is much smaller than what I planned.
Though the game is a pretty hefty book, the rules themselves are only 90 pages. (The rest is campaign preparation tools.) Unfortunately, it could easily have been compressed down the 30. The writing here is extremely Gygaxian in a way that I did not notice in Red Tide and Spears of the Dawn. The signal to noise ratio is pretty horrible and our boy really should get off that thesaurus. The entire first page of the magic system does not actually seem to include a single rule. It's all noise sans signal. Pure fluff where we need a clear explanation of rules. And you can't tell if a paragraph includes anything relevant or is just flavor text until you read it.
If you already know B/X well, I think it's not actually a big problem. But it would be nice to have a brutally plain 30 page document with just the rules for making characters and running the game. I know I'll be making one, as I am very much considering usng NNW in place of B/X in the campaign I am workng on.
At it's core, it appears to be based on the 1981 Basic Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, but with a considerable number of changes.
Attribute modifiers are even lower, as they were originally in the first version of D&D, with 7 to 12 giving no modifier, and only a 3 and 18 giving a -2 or +2 respectively. This is how the "roll 3d6 six times in order" system was supposed to be used. Your modifiers might make some classes benefit more than others, but in the end all classes would work with almost any stats you randomly rolled. (OD&D and Basic also gave an XP bonus for having a high score in the main attribute for the character's class, but these were so small they made almost no difference. WWN has nothing of that kind.)
Something very familiar to players of 3rd and 5th edition are the action types of Main, Movement, On Turn, and Istand Actions, which are just Standard, Movement, and Bonus Actions, and Reactions. It still keeps the group initiative system from Basic though, which I really like. (All PCs go together, saving the trouble of working out the initiative order for every fight, and speeding things up by having all players think about their move simultaneously instead of only starting when it's their individual turn.)
The biggest change is classes. There's only three classes in WWN. Or 6. Or 7. Or 27, depending on how you want to count. The three primary classes are Expert, Mage, and Warrior, with mages having to pick one of five traditions. You can also choose to dual class, and you can even dual-class a mage/mage with two different traditions. Of note here is the Healer tradition, which can only be selected by dual-class characters and can't be the only class of a plain mage (because it doesn't have enough abilities).
Characters have four saving throws. Evasion, Physical, Mental, and Luck. The base value for all four is the same, and the same for all characters, but the first three are modified by one of two attributes each, whichever of them is better. Luck always remains unmodified.
Like Spears of the Dawn and Stars Without Number, this game has a skill system. Skills can have a rank from 0 to 4, which is added whenever you make a 2d6 roll to get something done that doesn't have other specific rules. Characters also add whatever attribute modifier is appropriate in the particular situation.
if you don't have a skill trained, you get a -1 penalty to the roll instead of your skill rank.
Very simple and easy and stays out of your hair. I like that.
Very interesting are the Punch, Stab, and Shoot skills, which give you a bonus to attack rolls. Nice way to let players chose between investing in fighting or other abilities, which I think makes the game feel more like a universal system than just a dungeon crawler.
There are also Foci, which I think are simply feats. But all of them have two levels, with the second level requiring that you got the first level earlier.
Magic is also quite interesting: Spellcasters have a number of spells that they can prepare, and a number of spells they can cast per day. A bit like 5th edition, but they don't even care which level the slots are. (More like warlock spells in that regard.) Even a 10th level single class mage can only cast 12 spells per day, which can all be 5th level spells if you want to. (Lever really only limits when you can first learn a spell, I believe.)
That's not a lot spells, which is where Arts come in. Arts are minor magical effects that don't use the daily limits for spells. Instead they are limited by effort. Spellcasters have one daily effort that returns with ever new day, and a scene effort, which returns every new scene. Such arts are a bit like daily or encounter powers, but you can only use one of your daily powers per day, even if you have multiple. Same with scenes. There's also indefinite effort which works basically like concentration.
A very neat new concept is system strain. Several things can cause system strain, but most importantly magical healing. A character with the healing tradition can heal an unlimited number of times per day, but characters can not benefit from an indefinite amouny of healing. Every healing gives you one system strain, and once your strain is equal to your Constitution score, you no longer heal anymore. You do reduce your strain by 1 every day.
At the start of an adventure, after having had a week or two of safe rest, character can laugh of much damage that isn't immediately fatal and just have it healed for free. But if you gor 12 healings in 2 days, you find yourself with a strain of 10 and might only be able to benefit from one or two more healings. Your hp migt be full, but if you take serious damage now, it might take quite a while to recover from that. I think this should quite change how hit point management comes into adventuring. It's not so much about how much damage enemies can deal, but how many days without injury you can get in. I'm really curious how that plays out in action and how it affects GM planning. A party that has one day of massive fighting once per month might have a very easy time, while a party that gets a little scraped every day could be in serious trouble.
I think I saw a somewhat similar system a while back, but can't remember where.
Another new innovation is shock damage, and I can't really get my head around what it's purpose would be. Most melee weapons have a shock value that makes them deal a small amount of damage even on a miss unless the target has a sufficiently high AC. This just seems really weird to me.
There's a neat little Encumbrance system that I really like, because it's almost completely the same as the one I made for B/X. But I think Kevin Crawford just read the same peoples' ideas as I did. The difference is that in WWN, the maximum load is much smaller than what I planned.
Though the game is a pretty hefty book, the rules themselves are only 90 pages. (The rest is campaign preparation tools.) Unfortunately, it could easily have been compressed down the 30. The writing here is extremely Gygaxian in a way that I did not notice in Red Tide and Spears of the Dawn. The signal to noise ratio is pretty horrible and our boy really should get off that thesaurus. The entire first page of the magic system does not actually seem to include a single rule. It's all noise sans signal. Pure fluff where we need a clear explanation of rules. And you can't tell if a paragraph includes anything relevant or is just flavor text until you read it.
If you already know B/X well, I think it's not actually a big problem. But it would be nice to have a brutally plain 30 page document with just the rules for making characters and running the game. I know I'll be making one, as I am very much considering usng NNW in place of B/X in the campaign I am workng on.