Do you know any good "Nova D&D" system?

[MoiMagnus]

Reading through yet another thread about spellcasters in D&D 5e, I've seen this post, which characterise our group of player/GMs quite well:

From previous posts, I know you tend to run
a) a (relatively-speaking) few combats per day
b) against mostly solos or small groups
c) of very high (relative to level) CR.

(...) But you're operating miles from the guidance provided by the books. (...)

To this list I'd add (d) more oriented toward power fantasy, hence the "Nova" in the title, than gritty realism.

We know for quite some time that "D&D as intended" doesn't match our tastes, and while we have our fair share of barely working homebrew RPGs designed along the years to answer our needs (from minimalist rule-light ones to fully reworking a D&D edition), I'd be interested in reading published RPG that goes into this direction.

I'm pretty sure a few superhero systems probably work (and don't hesitate to suggest some), but I'm more interested in more D&D-like games (so "pre-industrial fantastic" & class system).

[Tanarii]

If you want to add "easy to play" and "old school goals", then Forbidden Lands. It's dangerous in general. You absolutely do not want more than a few combats a day, and Monsters are quite dangerous.

If you don't want to spend most of your time doing hexcrawl and adventuring site delving for treasure, you'd need to rip out the XP system and replace it with your own goals instead though.

The main downside is if you don't like rolling fistfuls of d6s to resolve stuff. A typical attack when starting is usually something like 6d6 vs 4d6 defense, with each 6 counting as a pt of damage or negating one. The handfuls go up from there.

[Satinavian]

I would suggest Exalted.

It is perfect for power fantasy play.

[icefractal]

It depends on what you're looking for.

Balance? In most cases, 3.x is as balanced in a nova-friendly campaign as it would be otherwise - not much balance by default, can have good intra-party balance if people build with that in mind, stands no chance against people trying to break it.

The only case where 4-6 encounters a day is balanced but one a day wouldn't be is if:
1) The players have very little system mastery.
2) The GM also has little system mastery, or takes a hands-off stance on PC build choices.
3) Their style happens to be close to the WotC-imagined one.

If you want more balance than that, like "it's out of the box balanced for players of different skill levels", then you'd probably want to look for a tighter/more constrained system, like 4E. Which incidentally would work fine for nova-friendly adventures - while it makes dailies better relative to encounter powers, all the standard classes have an equal amount of both. Don't use the Essentials classes I guess.

If you want a crunchy system that has a variety of resource management options other than encounters per day, then a universal system like Champions or M&M may be a good fit. Like 3.x, they're not automatically balanced, but can be balanced if the group coordinates on char-gen.

[Anonymouswizard]

Honestly, D&D mostly sucks here because of it's rest focus and large numbers of resources.

I'd honestly suggest going completely the other way though. You could probably do it with Champions, Aberrant, Exalted, or whatever high powered system you want, but I think the ideal might be Mutants & Masterminds. Unless you build towards it you don't have resources and so can go all out on every fight, damage IIRC heals very quickly, and pretty much every fight is supposed to let the PCs go all out and feel awesome. As for the power fantasy aspect?

Beginning PCs can achieve FTL speeds and still have over ⅔ of their points leftover. Seems like a power fantasy to me.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I would suggest Exalted.

It is perfect for power fantasy play.

Agreed. "Ridiculously overpowered player characters" is the entire selling point of the game. To quote 1d4chan's description...

Exalted is a game where one of your main antagonists is Death, Creator of the Underworld. Except there's several of him, probably six or seven. Oh, and he's got 13 dread henchmen, one of whom was probably you at some point in time. Also, Hell has a personal grudge against you this time.

Magical Rome/Persia/China regularly trains and sends ninja-monks out for you personally. Ninjas specially trained in asskicking. And if that doesn't work, they keep giant color-coded gundams and suits of power armor as backups.

The Transformers have united under Primus (who has robo-cancer), and are invading because they have a shortage of souls.

The Jedi Council has corrupted Heaven and usurped your rightful place as the Masters of Everything - but nobody can remember them. The only reason they haven't hunted you down is that they're too busy trying to keep reality from imploding.

Your ex-wife dropped by; she's a two thousand year old shapechanging man-eating monster, interested in maybe going on a date next Thursday for dinner, followed by breeding a new race capable of rewriting the biosphere.

Your best friend from growing up -and your last life- now seeks to cover all the lands of Middle Earth in darkness, if he can just find this damn ring.

Your god has the world's biggest crack habit, and needs some serious rehab.

You may bump into some fairies, but instead of granting wishes, they eat people's souls.

And yet, in theory, you think you can fix everything!

Welcome to Creation, kid! Hope you've got enough Essence!

Have Fun.

("Balance" isn't something you're going to find anywhere in the system, mind you. But everyone in the party will be broken in their own unique ways, so who cares?)

[Psyren]

I'd say there's no need to learn a whole new game if you want to stick with D&D for this; it does have guidelines for a high-powered superhero/demigod style game. This is the Epic Heroism variant (DMG 267) which lets you short-rest in 5 minutes and long rest in 1 hour. You can then crank things up further by using tools like Boons, Inspiration, Plot Points, and of course magic items.

[MoiMagnus]

Thanks for all the suggestions!

As for our experiences with D&D:
+ With 3.5/Pathfinder Probably the best "out of the box", but some bad experiences pushed us away from this system.
+ With 4e. We indeed worked a lot on trying to homebrew it to solve the issue we had (including combats that were too long and boring). While the resulting homebrew is clearly not in a working state, we had a lot of fun with it along the way.
+ With 5e. Playing with rest length did help a lot. And while we had some class balance issue, the main issue was probably that the GM didn't have enough fun during the combat encounters.

I've already checked on Mutant and Mastermind and planning to eventually test it. I'm a little worried about the absence of "class", in the sense that there might be too much flexibility (hence analysis paralysis, or possibility to make a bad build) and not a lot of "level up" (the game seems to be intended for a slow growth of power).

I'll definitely take a look at Exalted. Is the last edition the best one to look at?

[Batcathat]

I've already checked on Mutant and Mastermind and planning to eventually test it. I'm a little worried about the absence of "class", in the sense that there might be too much flexibility (hence analysis paralysis, or possibility to make a bad build) and not a lot of "level up" (the game seems to be intended for a slow growth of power).?

Yeah, I would say that both of those impressions are pretty accurate, even if neither is necessarily a bad thing (particularly the first one, I love how ridiculously flexible the M&M power system is). It should be said that M&M might have even more potentially broken options than D&D, but I think it's a better kind of imbalance, in that you could probably make pretty much any concept very powerful (unlike the D&D caster supremacy).

[Grod_The_Giant]

I've already checked on Mutant and Mastermind and planning to eventually test it. I'm a little worried about the absence of "class", in the sense that there might be too much flexibility (hence analysis paralysis, or possibility to make a bad build) and not a lot of "level up" (the game seems to be intended for a slow growth of power).

Making a "bad" build isn't hard to avoid as long as you don't do things like "not max out your defenses" and "forget to buy an attack power"), but it's true that it's not the most intuitive character creation system--at first. Once effects and modifiers and costs/rank and all start making sense in your brain, it becomes very easy and flexible, but it can be hard to pick up. And... yeah, it's intended much more for horizontal growth (ie, an ever-increasing variety of powers) than vertical, and there's not a lot you can do about that. You can use power level changes to increase the numbers, but the potential superpowers at PL 1 and PL 20 are exactly the same*-- it's entirely up to the player if they want to look like a gritty street-level hero or a cosmic champion.

I'll definitely take a look at Exalted. Is the last edition the best one to look at?

By leaps and bounds, yes. 1e has (as I understand) extremely wonky mechanics, and 2e is one of the few systems that's probably worse than 3.5e D&D in terms of imbalance, content bloat, and all-around over-complicated nonsense (not to mention what most view as a lot of highly questionable lore/setting elements).

3e is by no means a perfect game. It's still very demanding in terms of rules mastery, and the combat rules are... eh... I wouldn't say bad, but they seem to have been designed with one-on-one duels in mind. They get significantly slower as you add actions, and having an action economy advantage through numbers is exponentially more significant than in most games. It'll be very different than what you're used to, but if your group enjoys complicated characters and fiddling with the rules (and it sounds like you do) you can have a grand old time.

(I'd be happy to talk about some of the key things I learned/changed over the course of my two-year-long Ex3 campaign, but this probably isn't the right time)

[Telok]

For mashup lunacy there is Dungeons the Dragoning. Taking D&D, Exalted, WH40k, Werewolf, Vampire, and... well, lots of other bits & bobs, putting them through a meat grinder and getting fairly reasonable sausage coming out.

Its combat is probably as fast or faster than D&D 3e (in our group 3e & 5e play about the same speed & 4e was annoyingly slow, ymmv), everyone is pretty strong out of the box. As always its possible to screw up a character, but like with supers systems its usually the result of bad min/max attempts. Has an online wiki with automated tools.

[Anonymouswizard]

There's also 13th Age, which is 3e and 4e mixed together and moved towards theatre of the mind. It's pretty neat, although it relies on the GM only giving a Full Recovery every 3-5 encounters like 4e (although explicitly notes that the GM gets to hand them out without the PCs resting or the like). It's also compressed into ten levels, but I don't see that as a bad thing.

Characters begin as badasses and end as EPIC BADASSES, although the system assumes that the thirteen Icons are still above them. Plus Flexible Attacks are just better than any way D&D has tried to make Fighters interesting.

[Chronic]

Reading through yet another thread about spellcasters in D&D 5e, I've seen this post, which characterise our group of player/GMs quite well:



To this list I'd add (d) more oriented toward power fantasy, hence the "Nova" in the title, than gritty realism.

We know for quite some time that "D&D as intended" doesn't match our tastes, and while we have our fair share of barely working homebrew RPGs designed along the years to answer our needs (from minimalist rule-light ones to fully reworking a D&D edition), I'd be interested in reading published RPG that goes into this direction.

I'm pretty sure a few superhero systems probably work (and don't hesitate to suggest some), but I'm more interested in more D&D-like games (so "pre-industrial fantastic" & class system).

Honestly d&d can do the job very well, but you need to work on encounter design. Limit hard cc, use legendary actions and you can lake verybinteresting encounters against a single powerful ennemy. You might want to adjuzt the nupber of spell per day and limit a few features such as smite at once per turn, but even without that it works pretty well.

[Draz74]

I've already checked on Mutant and Mastermind and planning to eventually test it. I'm a little worried about the absence of "class", in the sense that there might be too much flexibility (hence analysis paralysis, or possibility to make a bad build) and not a lot of "level up" (the game seems to be intended for a slow growth of power).

"Absence of class": eh, the suggested Archetypes in the book can fill the need for classes just fine. The given builds suck (where they don't outright have mistakes in their builds), so I don't recommend using them wholesale, but there are plenty of forum threads in the M&M community where people have "fixed" the Archetypes if you don't just want to build them yourself using the given character concepts.

"Analysis Paralysis or Possibility to Make a Bad Build": true, avoiding these things requires a fair amount of system mastery. I personally like that in a system, and have spent enough time in M&M character creation to overcome this, but it's a legitimate reason to pick another system. Of course you can always ask for online help.

"Not a Lot of Level-Up": there's no XP system; the rate of character advancement is purely up to the GM. So I don't understand where this complaint is coming from. You can give out 3 new Power Points per gaming session if you want to! Just force the players to budget some of their PP for growing in overall power instead of growing laterally in versatility. (It takes 15 PP to grow one Power Level, and maybe 9 or 10 of those Power Points should be saved for boosting your "main stats" instead of for gaining new Powers for flexibility.)

[Anonymouswizard]

I honestly always just used my first PP after increasing in Power Level to buff first my main attack powers, then Dodge/Parry/Toughness, then major skills, then maybe Will/Fortitude (although I've only seen a handful of enemies attack the former and none attack the latter that's more of a GM thing).

As a side note Power Level and Power Points have no actual relationship. The game recommends keeping PCs at around (Power Level*15)PP but you can get rid of upwards advancement or increase the Power Level more slowly if you want to. You could also just hand out a Power Level and a lump of PP every month or two.

[Grod_The_Giant]

As a side note Power Level and Power Points have no actual relationship. The game recommends keeping PCs at around (Power Level*15)PP but you can get rid of upwards advancement or increase the Power Level more slowly if you want to. You could also just hand out a Power Level and a lump of PP every month or two.

I kind of like a combination of both-- give a stead trickle of 1-2 power points per session, and after a big milestone hand out 10pp and a power level increase. (10pp is what I'd consider the minimum cost of advancing a PL-- to get up to the new limits you've got to spend 5pp on your five defenses, 1/2 pp on your attack skill, and 2-4 pp on your attack power/array)

[Black Jester]

Mythras, probably with the Classic Fantasy sourcebook would both do the trick pretty well:
The idea of facing fewer, but more challenging opponents work very well in concert with the more tactical and dangerous combat system where you don't fight as often but each fight matters a lot more. Also, the fights themselves tend to be more energetic/variable than in D&D. For me, that makes it very rewarding; I like it to be able to outmaneuver my opponent during their turn.
You can get Mythras Imperative, the streamlined, simplified version of the full rules, for free. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

Mythras is a skill-based system, mostly using a D100 and belongs to the same 'family' of games as Runequest and Call of Cthulhu. The percentage-based system is super intuitive, very clear and offers a lot of options. Especially in combat situations, the depth of the system is so gratifying to play. Not getting hit in D&D is an entirely passive event, for instance. You, as a player are no longer involved in most cases and have only very limited or rare options to react to an imminent ernemy attack. In a game system with actual depth, you are still involved while defending and can make meaningful gemapley decisions (it is also a lot less boring waiting until your next turn).

Also, you get to do some form of special maneuver whenever you successfully attack or defend, without needing to sacrifice dealing damage for a tactical decision. It is a very satisfying way to involve the players in their opponent's misfortunes ("Do I want to hit him straight on the head or do I want to bleed him dry?”), it also affects defense, you can punish attackers so hard for daring to attack you and failing to connect.

Here is a detailed write-up of a samurai sword fight using Mythras rules, as presented in the acompanying short film.

As a power fantasy, there are several ways to adjust the game's power level to your liking; it runs smoothly either as a grim and gritty historical game or in an absurdly high magic, high power campaign setting like Glorantha.
There are five widely different styles of magic, varying in complexity, focus and source. This makes it quite easy to find some form of magic for every character. Especially common magic, the most basic form of spells, is dead simple and written with the assumption, that in a magical world, a lot of people, if not everyone, would benefit from some form of magical skills and therefore strive for magical knowledge.
Also, you can decapitate your foes in battle. Doesn't happen that often, but it is so deeply satisfying when it does.

Classic Fantasy is a Mythras sourcebook concerned with emulating D&D, or more specifically AD&D's atmosphere. It offers more details about classic demi-human characters (these are also in the core book) and adds classes to the mix (which offer a power boost, but also make the characters a bit more same-y than usual) and a soft lvelling system, applying the usual system of ranks in various cults and secret societies to the different levels of a class, granting access to more powerful abilities. It also offers a more straightforward magic system with fewer options. All in all, it is a different take on a D&D style form of gaming (again, it feels mostly nostalgic for 80s to 90s AD&D campaigns, not bad and less focused on lowest-common-denominator-design, but while I can see howe it might be a step up from D&D (especially the toxic entitlement appeasement of later editions). I have only picked some minor elements from it, preferring standard Mythras, but other people prefer different approaches, I suppose.

If you are not easily intimidated by background, you could also (or instead, the rules are very similar, but sadly not interchangeable) the current edition of Runequest, respectively Glorantha. Glorantha has a bit of a threshold to get into the setting, due to its complexity and sheer size, but it is arguably one of the best, if not the best fantasy setting, period, ever written. It is an absurdly high magic world, deeply involved in its own mysteries and mythological in scope. Glorantha offers a world of heroic epos similar to Gilgamesh, the Iliad or the adventures of Asterix and Obelix- it is not particularly accessible to newcomers, but once you get into it and start to grasp the sheer scope and depth, it is breath-taking. I personally don’t’ like it all that much (just because it is objectively great doesn’t mean that one cannot prefer lighter cost), but it is undeniably one of the crowning achievements of what a role-playing game can actually become.