Slashdot Mirror
Legend: Tabletop Gaming For a Good Cause
danaris writes "On Friday, Rule of Cool gaming released Legend, a d20-derived tabletop roleplaying game system designed to be easy to learn, easy to play, and just really fun. As the names suggest, they recognize that people in an RPG frequently want to be playing epic characters with cool abilities, so they provide that — while making sure all such characters are reasonably well balanced against characters and monsters of the same level. For a nice overview of the system, there's a review up on RPG.net by one of the playtesters, and another review by a moderator from Reddit's RPG section. The game is initially being distributed as a pay-what-you-want benefit to the Child's Play charity, with all proceeds (not just all profits) going to the charity."
I disagree vehemently that tabletop RPGs are dead.
I currently play in 5 tabletops (3 of which are supposedly LARPs, but play more like traditional ttRPGs with a large number of players and pvp action), GMing another, and I am in the process of writing a system and content for a high fantasy tabletop game. I realize it isn't a tremendously popular activity (though I regularly game with about 30 individuals and know of many gamers in my locale with whom I do not play), but it never really was all that popular.
I've even seen something of a resurgence in the activity, as MMO gamers branch out from behind their keyboards to engage in a more social and flexible experience with drastically fewer limitations on what they can do.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
I started playing D&D not too long ago after hearing about it for ages, and it is a lot of fun, but the complexity of the system can be daunting to say the least. The games I've played also burn an inordinate amount of time on checking rules and spell behavior and keeping track of all sorts of mindless minutia. This system looks to retain much of the good but do it in a simpler and more streamlined way, which should make for fun gameplay.
If I can convince some of my D&D buddies to chip in as well, might have to pick it up. The biggest problem with tabletop games (especially obscure or new ones) is that it can be hard to track down people to actually play with.
>>Speaking of this, how does one exactly break into this hobby?
If you're in a major city, look up your local RPGA club or gaming convention. If you're into 4th Edition, D&D, that is, which grognards like me sort of poo-poo, but it's easy to get into. The D&D website has a tool to look up local game stores that are running D&D Encounters, which are short, 1-hour adventures that run once per week at local game stores.
If you want to play 3rd Edition D&D, which this product is a variation on, Paizo has been carrying the torch on this with it's Pathfinder system. The Pathfinder Society (http://paizo.com/pathfinderSociety) is their organized play branch, which means that you don't need to have an established game group to play... just show up at a Pathfinder Society game day, say you're new, and they'll help you out.
FWIW, Pathfinder (and quite possibly Legend, too, though I've only started digging into the meat of it) and 3.5 in general are better systems than 4th Edition D&D, but it's probably easier to find a friendly local game store running D&D Encounters every Wednesday night.
FWIW, Pathfinder (and quite possibly Legend, too, though I've only started digging into the meat of it) and 3.5 in general are better systems than 4th Edition D&D
I would disagree with you there, fairly vehemently. 4E certainly has it's flaws, but I think those in d20 are far more severe.
Problems with 4E largely stem from two areas: 1) overemphasis on combat, and 2) vastly increased demands on players to master the system. Both of these two situations can be boiled down into one basic fact: there are too many powers to choose from and characters have too many powers overall. A lot of players liked the simplicity of earlier editions for, well, any non-spellcasting class. 4E forces that to change, but it gives too many options. There are too many races, too many classes, and too many powers. They should have started simpler, and tried to keep the number of classes as low as possible rather than maximizing choice and trying to instantly make 4E comparable to 3E. The Paradox of Choice means that every time you level up, every time it's your turn in combat you must re-examine all your choices and make a new decision. I think the martial classes in particular could benefit from having far fewer powers at each level. One at-will, one encounter, one daily, class powers, and that's it. Combat simply takes too long in 4E to be enjoyable, and while you can do some things to speed it up, if you focus on speeding up the game too much you sap all the enjoyment out of it. It feels like work.
There are some minor issues as well. Skill Challenges is the obvious one, which are cool in concept but simply doesn't work well in execution outside of very few situations (tracking over long distances, opening a complex lock) and completely fail for skills which involve interaction. It also has the side effect of making your players want roleplaying encounters to just be more dice rolling, and that's not very fun. Lack of compelling magic outside of combat; making all rituals cost money made them feel useless. Solo encounter monsters are designed badly. The monsters are supposed to represent 5 individual monsters, but can easily be crowd controlled. They should be immune to stuns and most cc, and able to deal out damage in ways which really threaten the party. As it is now, solo encounters are about 5 rounds of terror and 10-20 rounds of cutting through all that HP while not really threatened because the buffs and debuffs are in place. 4E also seems significantly more delicately balanced. A simple +1 to some die rolls can be game breaking simply because those die rolls happen so often. I don't think that would ever happen in previous editions.
Things 4E does right or improves on: basic class progression, skills, character creation, feats (barring bad ones like Expertise), hit points. Minions. Emphasis on making the DM's life easier. Emphasis on position and movement in combat, and the ability to actually tank enemies. Working to make sure PCs get treasure they want rather than using random tables. Better healing system. Better balance between classes. The character generator was absolutely amazing. Overall I consider 4E to be a very good first edition of a new RPG system. I haven't kept up with the more recent books which introduce different class styles as my play group had abandoned 4E by the time it came out. We played it for a year and were tired of two encounter nights.
Problems with 3.5, on the other hand, are IMO far more severe and fair more inherent to the system. Class balance is and always will be a huge problem as long as Vancian casters are present. Prestige classes and the lack of multiclassing restrictions completely defeat the purpose of having classes. Lack of good heavier armors. Difficulty in healing. Difficulty in identifying magic treasure. The arbitrary alignment system. The skill system is completely ridiculous (Search, Spot and Listen... but most classes only get about 4 skills per level after modifiers). I think there a
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Funny, I met my wife at a tabletop RPG, but no one has ever gotten laid by trolling on Slashdot.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Another combat-feat paper implementation of WOW.
Nothing personal towards you but I find it ironic to see a PnP game being seen as a dup of computer game that is a dup of PnP games.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I got "into" this about half a year ago. With friends, we all hadn't played before, only 1 person had played DnD 2nd edition once. And we wanted to play DnD 3.5E.
The biggest challenge is a DM. The Dungeon Master defines the game. The Dungeon Master needs to know the rules. We didn't go look for a DM, I just became DM. Starting by reading the player handbook, understand the key parts of combat and stats. And then just go play. Figure out the rest as you go. With a new group nobody will complain if you make a mistake.
The first game we did was with 3 people, me as DM and 2 players. Just to get a feeling for the rules. We didn't have any dice or miniatures. Filling in the character sheets took about a hour. We only used melee/ranged character, no spellcasting. We used paper to draw out the maps and crosses and lines as characters and enemies. And an Android app to roll dice. It was a blast, and I killed one of my players near the end (just to show that I could).
As we progressed with more games, we added more players, dice, miniatures (combination of old board games, and new warhammer miniatures) until we had a full DnD game. We also noticed we had used a few rules wrong. Which is no problem really, it's all about the fun, and we fixed those.
Finding a paper copy of the 3.5 DnD edition is pretty hard because they are no longer sold, but your favorite torrent site should have them in PDF form. However, on http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:System_Reference_Document you have the "DnD 3.5 SRD" which is almost all the rules (except for EXP/level up rules) in a free form. With monsters and everything. Once you get the basic rules the SRD is all you really need, if you want to play D&D 3.5. (We just skip anything "epic" and "psionic", to keep it a bit simpler)
I took a look at Legend, and it looks quite a bit like 3.5 in my eyes. But I miss monsters. With the 3.5 SRD I have a whole huge list of monsters to use, for free.
If you have a group of friends willing to play, then it's just as simple as "go for it" really.
IMHO, combat only drags on too long because people are being munchkins instead of role playing. You shouldn't be asking yourself "which one of these 40 combat skills would kill the most goblins". Instead, you should be asking yourself "what would my berserk warrior with an INT of 8 do?"
Yes, this is a generalization, and isn't true in all cases. But it's true more times than not in my experience.
If you met *his* wife than you would be trolling.