I gotta disagree pretty strongly with SHEEP on the relative simplicity of D&D/Pathfinder vs, say, Mutants & Masterminds. Esp since the latter is based off a stripped down core of 3.5-era D&D anyway. Don’t get me wrong, I love M&M and am getting ready to GM a game in it, but character creation isn’t especially more sophisticated in it than, say, PF, and if anything, I find its noncombat stuff like social rules to be quite lacking.
M&M is an absurdly OPEN system in which you can make almost anything, including very easily useless starting characters. But I think it fits the “wide not deep” moniker just as much as most modern D&Ds.
I’ll also buck the trend and say that 4E was perhaps the best and most interesting combat simulation of the entire D&D family tree, with tons of options at every moment and the capacity to build characters who were hyper effective with any stat as their “high stat.” It was crunchy and hyper balanced to a boardgame like degree.
None of which makes it an especially good RPG, but I’d play the hell out of a minis system using 4E as its baseline.
All this comes from a storygame obsessed, never run premade settings weirdo GM whose favorite system is Fate Core by a country mile, so take it all as you will.
Yeah, a lot of people I don’t care about when deciding who to share my free time and hobbies with…
I have no interest in watering my hobbies down to the lowest possible level just to find the maximum amount of people to play with. You need 3-5 capable, reliable people for a good round, not thousands ;)
I get what WotC is doing, business wise, I just don’t care about it. I’ve moved on.
You are definitely right about some of the rules not being very deep, especially the social rules.
But I picked M&M mostly as an example because of the character system.
I really don’t know why anyone would say that a system that allows you to build almost anything from an array of building blocks that can be chained together following a not-that-simple ruleset is not a lot deeper than a system that merely allows you to pick “one of X”.
Those two things aren’t even close.
And no, M&M is not wide, not at all. It is probably one of the smallest rule books I know. And it really is just that one book you need to build more than other systems allow with a dozen supplements.
Openness is depth.
Width = the amount of rules/options. Depth = the amount of different results which can be achieved with the given rules/options.
It’s pretty clear to me that M&M doesn’t have that much of the former, while being close to endless in the latter.
The problem with being so “hyper balanced” is that all characters are the same. Just look at the combat abilities. Every character in 4E is a mage. Every ability is “X damage + effect Y”, the only difference is that one is described as “throwing a bomb”, the other as “casting a fireball”.
I don’t want my character to be like every other character, I want my character to be as unique as possible, not only in the background I give him but in the rules themselves as well. Which is just plain impossible in 4E.
That said, yes, it would have been great if we had received a game like Temple of Elemental Evil or Knights Of The Chalice for 4E. It’s a solid base for a tactical RPG.
It’s a sliding scale, though, right? Some players want more structure than Dungeon World and Fate provide, but not necessarily going all the way to the complexity of Pathfinder. I think 5e does a good job of splitting the difference.
I mean, I guess, on it’s face value it gave every class something to do every turn, but it also felt like each role in the party was somewhat homogeneous. I feel like comparing it to current World of Warcraft vs Classic. Now each class has interrupts, self-heals, crowd control abilities, and they all kinda feel the same.
Not that it is bad, but it definitely isn’t the PnP RPG I want to play.
Fully deterministic then?
Seems like that would take away the fun factor and risk management of not knowing if your actions will succeed or not. A lot less “huzzah!” moments due to that incredibly unlikely maneuver actually working out.
Those are always the moments sticking to memory the most, being talked about even years later.
On the other hand, without having any chance at all against a superior opponent in a given skill (I guess there are still skills?), I can imagine that would create a very tense atmosphere of trying to avoid conflict. After all, the enemy will never critically miss and you will never critically hit.
So Amber had a really cool system. At the start of the campaign all the players were in a secret bid/auction in 4 stats, with 100 points total. You also used points to buy powers (some related to the skills), items, etc. If remember right the skills were warfare, strength, endurance, and psyche. There were skill checks throughout the game where say, you’d have to have a certain strength score to pick up a boulder, or whatever. But you were also ranked by your final bid in that skill against the other players. If there was a conflict between players (the game is set up so there is a lot of conflict, it’s about a royal family vying for the throne), the winner was predetermined. So strength rank 2 (the person who came in second in the auction) would always lose against strength rank 1 (the person who won the auction).
The really cool part is it’s all secret and unrevealed. You’d have to actually get into conflict in that manner, and you were never sure where people were ranked. So there was a lot of cat and mouse and deception and manuvering in order to position a conflict to go your way.
It really worked well, having ranks and numbers, but not randomization.
Ah, okay, then it is a player vs player game mostly. Sure, that makes sense.
Most PnP is players acting as a group though (except the odd in-party conflict, but that barely happens) against NPCs. In that scenario, players of course know each other’s stats (to an extent) and the challenge isn’t outsmarting other players, but solving a given problem (combat or otherwise).
Anyway, I’ll admit that not fully knowing your own stats - or those of the enemy - makes the end result somewhat random as well, at least from the player’s perspective.
I’m looking to setup a DnD game with my nieces and nephews on New Years Eve and was wondering if there are any computer DnD app’s that would allow me to create my own campaign. This would include drawing the map, placing monsters, npc’s and all other things necessary for a complete campaign. I would also like to be able to DM the campaign using the app and I would like to be able to DM both online as well as offline. Also I want the app to be able to create character sheets. In other words an app that can create the campaign, create characters and DM a game. Being able to store offline is highly desirable. I found one app that would allow me to send the players an invitation link to their computers or mobile devices, that works as well. Anyway, any suggestions? Thanks.
The interesting thing is you can partially blame GURPS for GRRM taking so long on his books. Back in the day he had a regular group using GURPS to play a Roman Senate campaign.
My daughter recently started playing Dungeons & Dragons with some school friends over Zoom. She is new to D & D (I never played, do I have to turn in my Qt3 membership card?) and so I bought her a player handbook and her DM started her off as an 8th level character this past weekend. They play every other Saturday.
I’m thinking my daughter might want some means to learn the game by also trying a lower level character.
Do any of you have advice for entry level D&D solo adventures she could try on her iPad or a laptop between sessions to learn the ropes? Any help you could provide to point her in that direction would be appreciated.
Read the books. For fun. All the time. That’s mostly what I did back in jr high and high school. I read them so much more than I played the game it’s not funny.
I wouldn’t start out anyone new at level 8. That just seems like throwing too much info at a person at once. Level 2 to start was always my preference. You get past the ‘one bad roll and you’re dead’ issue but still only have a few things to worry about from a character standpoint.
Do they still have any sort of random dungeon generator? Either in the rules or elsewhere? You can learn quite a bit just futzing around with this or even just doing little combats or whatever on your own.
I moved from MA to CA back in the 70’s for a few years when a buddy of mine was getting his PhD at Cal Tech. One of his classmates was a computer science major and wrote a program that ran the dungeon while a few of us explored it. Spent many a fun night playing DnD in the basement of the Computer Science building at Cal Tech.
My favo random generator website for various d20-spawned RPGs (oldschool D&D, PF, 4E, 5E, etc.). it won’t, like, administrate the dungeon for you, but it’ll craft one based on parameters you tell it (size, maze complexity, overall thematic “type” and populate it with monsters, loot, and traps, based on actual game rules. Also has solid generators for things like names, tavern menus, etc.
