~Beyond the Border~ > Rumia's Party Games

On storytelling, gamemastering, and the approaches thereto

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Hello Purvis:
This is missing Unknown Armies, ORE, and Window. This is shameful

Also: 4e is not remotely the best approach to Swords and Sorcery. That honor goes to REIGN. 4e is for your hack and slash almost but not quite WH Fantasy games.


Unknown Armies: A modern era supernatural RPG. The rules are mostly quick and easy, and the game is definitely flavor heavy over rules heavy. Magic is possible, very stylish, and flexible. The setting itself is very well done and handled; the combat chapter starts with 6 ways to avoid a fight; and emphasizes why it's not a good idea to go hacking and slashing through everything. Magic styles are varied, modern in flavor, and based off of either obsessive insanity or consensual reality. It is designed to be played at street level, which is more or less everyday shmucks learning a bit of the truth; global level, in which powerful peoples vie for temporal power, and cosmic level, where the real players try to win the universe.

Pros: Everything ever.
Cons: Hard to adapt to other settings.

Window: Window is based around a very simple concept: Roll under 6.  Every stat, every action, every skill and so on is assigned a die; success happens when you roll under 6. Anything you're average at, you have a d12 for it and will succeed half the time.  If you're good, a d10, a d8, or even a d6 (a 3 or lower is a crit). If you're bad at it, it's a d20. And that's it. All the rest is up to you.

Pros: Very fast, very flexible, easy to make house rulings on.
Cons: Doesn't lend itself very well to gaining power over time. Requires a lot of maturity. Some GMs may want to make a lot of extra rules.


ORE: this system is based around condensing everything into a no more than one roll; thus the name One Roll Engine. It works off of dice pools, and is designed to incorporate a large variety of playstyles. It's particular charm is that character creation is very open ended. You can theoretically make damn near anything if you can keep it under point cost. The GM is encouraged to allow this, and find ways to deal with especially broken stuff through cleverness, as the rules and skills are much more fluid than that of DnD. Fun aspects include loyalty, willpower, and character motivations being sources of power; and attackable. ORE has a variety of flavors including Wild Talents for your Superhero Time (which adapts easily to everything), REIGN for specific Swords and Sorcery Times, Progenitor for kickin' rad alternate history superhero stuff, and so on.

The best description for Wild Talents, in particular, comes from the books. One in which you make yourself invulnerable to ever taking HP damage and ways that GMs can screw with you anyways, and how to make a character that can literally extinguish the sun and what it means to have such a character. That is, they literally make the power Suppress Nuclear Fusion for you. It is a system designed to be kicked around in clever ways.

Pros: Very flexible, very easy to pick up the basics.
Cons: So many ways to do things, it's easy to get lost or be inefficient. Very breakable at higher levels.

Sect:
Fightest: I think you're under-representing D&D 3.5 here. The system isn't nearly as complicated as you make it out to be (it wouldn't be nearly as popular or as much of a gateway game as it is if it was): the core rules are simple enough once you try it out, though some spells, some of the alternate combat techniques (grapple), and options from some of the later splat books are indeed complicated. Also, you missed out on probably the biggest advantage that D&D 3.5 has: accessibility. The basic rules and some of the expanded rules are available for free online, unlike almost every other game system out there (unless you download torrents and that kind of stuff, but that has the disadvantage of being, well, against the wishes of the publisher).

That said, there's one other game system I want to add: Pathfinder. It's frequently called "D&D 3.75", and with good reason: it's essentially an overhaul of the 3.5 system. Classes have been rebalanced and upgraded to make them not only more fun to play, but worthwhile to take beyond five, ten, and up to twenty levels of, complicated combat systems have been made less of a pain in the ass to implement, and the skill system is actually usable.

And the best part? The core rules are free.

As for pros and cons, pretty much the same as D&D 3.5, but better.

Fightest:

--- Quote from: General Shinsecti on March 05, 2011, 12:04:52 PM ---Fightest: I think you're under-representing D&D 3.5 here. The system isn't nearly as complicated as you make it out to be (it wouldn't be nearly as popular or as much of a gateway game as it is if it was): the core rules are simple enough once you try it out, though some spells, some of the alternate combat techniques (grapple), and options from some of the later splat books are indeed complicated. Also, you missed out on probably the biggest advantage that D&D 3.5 has: accessibility. The basic rules and some of the expanded rules are available for free online, unlike almost every other game system out there (unless you download torrents and that kind of stuff, but that has the disadvantage of being, well, against the wishes of the publisher).

--- End quote ---

This seems like the thread to do so, so I will present arguments against 3.5. The basic resolution mechanic is, indeed, not complicated: take a d20, roll over target number. Everything else, however, is an unholy mess of numbers and tables that are needlessly complicated. On the other extreme, everything but combat has only the most cursory of rules, often unclear in form and intent, frequently relying on GM fiat to get anything done other than murdering a guy in the face.

Beyond that, however, even forgiving the above issues, there is the issue 3.5 is infamous for the most: balance. As in, what balance? The game is a powergamer's wet dream and a nightmare for anyone who does not like to juggle numbers during character creation. Having both at the table simultaneously puts immense pressure on the GM on trying to run a game that is challenging for one and not soul-crushing for the other. Sure, additional source material can bridge the balance gap, but that reintroduces the aforementioned needless complexity into the game.

The reason 3.5 is such a popular gateway game is because of its strong market hold. It has been around for a long time, and is practically a household name - it's something everyone knows simply through word of mouth. Hence it's not popular through any particular strengths of its own. It's popular because it has the most hype. (Also being free helps a lot.)

For all intents and purposes, D&D 3.5 is a ball-and-chain for new GMs - it will inhibit their creativity and imagination for a long time, and it will be felt even after they might choose, for whatever reason, to switch systems.

I will take your word for Pathfinder, however. It seems solid, but I have not had the opportunity to play or run a Pathfinder game.

Hello Purvis:
Reminder that 3e and 3.5e were built up on the much simpler and more story-driven 2e and iconic 1e that more or less was the first real system. So 3e and beyond gets a lot of free fame for things its not; and in fact actively ruined.

Also the magic system is just...I laugh whenever anyone calls a spell in DnD unbalanced. Of course it's unbalanced! Good lord, Fireball (Aka: Kill Entire Military Regiment) is not that far off from being a starter spell.

Stuffman:
Really, D&D isn't that unbalanced compared to most games. I'm not aware of any tabletop RPG that doesn't have balance issues. The problem is that it puts so much work and so many rules into trying to make it balanced, and fails completely.

Pathfinder isn't any better. The power gap between classes may be smaller, but casters still have spells to sidestep any conceivable obstacle you could encounter, the spells they have are still better solutions than the things other classes can offer, and they still win battles in one round right from the get-go with things like color spray.

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