Yeah, I saw that when I read through the OG Chainmail rules and Gygax just put it out there directly. I didnât know it went back even farther, but it makes a lot of sense considering that miniatures wargaming was around for quite a while and required players to basically make up and consent to rules.
In case you werenât already aware, Zine Quest 3 is on!
I recommend Hibernation Games: 5 Journaling RPGs for Solo Play. It has several fun creator but I rather liked Lucian Kahnâs prior work, Visigoths vs Mall Goths.
Lucian Kahn confirmed S-tier.
Can we all agree that this is about damn time?
"Both eras will be depicted in these books, giving players the tools to create their own protagonists. Someone might create a group of Earth Kingdom heroes during the war with the Fire Nation, or a waterbender finding their fortune in Republic City.
The roleplaying gameâs core book is planned for a February 2022 release. Two supplements will follow. The first one, to be released in August 2022, is named Republic City. Republic City was first established in The Legend of Korra as a newly industrial and modern city with a population of millions of people from all over the world. Republic City has a lot of political conflict, industrial sectors, and triad gangs that menace the public.
The second supplement, The Spirit World, will be released in February 2023. The Spirit World was a major element of both The Last Airbender and Korra, a parallel plane of reality full of spirits that embody aspects of nature, or creatures like Koh, the Face Stealer."
Hopefully they are mechanically elegant.
Because I have memories.
Apparently, the company thatâs adapting Root into an RPG is also adapting Avatar/Korra.
I assume since the Root one is PbtA that these others will be as well?
I like PbtA a lot, but it actually makes me less interested to play the Root RPG because of it. I feel like that setting could really have been amazing if they did a completely custom game from the ground up.
After months of struggling, I am now a mediocre Dungeon Master.
The Group has changed, as people here suggested, some players werenât really into it and left. I picked up two more and it is going well.
Unfortunately, I say âDungeon Masterâ because despite my personal frustration with Dungeons and Dragons, itâs the system everyone could get into.
But Iâm regularly interacting with people, and Eberron is my favorite setting, so Iâve got that going for me, which is nice.
Thatâs been the supposition since all the other games that Magpie has done are
- PbtA
- Good
Iâve been looking for an excuse to try out the Cortex Prime system and AtLA actually seems perfectly suited to it. I might build that just for kicks.
Apparently, Cortex Prime is also doing a Dragon Prince RPG.
Wrt. Verisimilitude, itâs worth mentioning that a lot of consternation comes from the fact that the gunslinger: a wild west cowboy archetype, exists in the sword and sorcery game. If you come at it with the above âd&d is everythingâ mindset, you think someone is telling you that âpeople who like wild west/guns arnât allowed to rollplay/anything thatâs not midevil is bad funâ. If a group of people sit down to play a sword and sourcery game, and someone really wanted to play a cyberpunk game and decided they wanted to play a cyborg, I think saying that âwizards existâ is missing the point"(and in bad faith in some situations). Youâve expiriences a major miss in terms of matching expectations.
This fits into a larger flaw/discussion of d&d wherein people (imo badly and clumsily) try and compensate for the fact that âmartially inclinedâ characters are pretty weak. They generally have less options and less powerful and more limited options. Like, if you look at skill rolls, things like jump have a lot of human bounding working in. What use is a 8 ft vertical jump when your wizard friend can fly. I get the feeling these days that a lot of these flaws might be less severe if you consider deeply that d&d is written a a combat rpg with interstitial sections rather then trying to run it without combat/with interstitial combat(it makes âskill charactersâ less bad because skills become a nieche thing rather then just a âbe good at the gameâ button). That said, I think itâs to some degree worth just recognizing instead of trying to hack around. Because often people divide classes into martial/magic, it also lends people to want to not ever use magic, and there isnât really a lot of support for that(even the original d&d compinsated by allowing fighters to use magic weapons).
That said, gunslinger has some other awkward things. Called shots is a thing that people often want, and it doesnât really play well with the assumptions that are made in base combat. Hitting touch ac is kinda weird and super powerful in some situations (before ac becomes meaningless). Things like damage confuse and frustrate players who donât understand the abstractions of damage, or donât care and just want âa thing that instantly kills thingsâ because guns are good/strong. This is balanced by the misfire mechanic, but people hate it because missfires are frustrating. It exposes how different people think about guns(ie, are you thinking about wild west cowboys, or are you thinking about pike/musket troops), which leads to confusion and frustration.
edit: itâs probubly worth mentioning that itâs a expectation miss from their side in not expecting gunslingers to exist. pathfinder is awkwardly a world where every genre exists at the same time. I donât think itâs what most people want, or a responsible or reasonable way to do things, but it is a thing, and itâs also silly to not recognize that.
I think itâs not just that âD&D is everythingâ, but that D&D is also its own thing. One built by a long series of systems building on each other, media influences going out into the world and filtering back into the system, changing cultural touchstones. Too many people think about using D&D for everything, but itâs not everything⌠Itâs just weird.
Guns/Science Fantasy is probably some of the oldest bits of the game (Hello Barrier Peaks), and Dying Earth, one of the places the magic system is drawn from, is a dying future fantasy. Thereâs a lot of ways people can build a setting where guns make sense, and some of it gets easier when you think about having societies built on magic instead of built around burning mages. Eberron is a strong example of this, you have ârobotâ people, trains, and high-rise cities.
On the Martial/Magic divide, I think that a decent amount of whatâs been done in recent versions of the game is to treat the characters like protagonists. They just become awesome. Fighters become capable of inhuman feats of skill or strength, making that incredible leap when your wizard friend has to burn a spell to do it. The rogue? He ran along the fucking wall! It feels like thatâs some of how the balance has been handled in more recent versions.
I donât like the system anymore, but I still love so many of the trappings that make D&D weird fantasy. I like the idea of a group of elves and weirdos stumbling on a river gambling boat. Playing with things outside of what the framework of the system works for, but the setting can handle. And maybe thatâs why thereâs a lot of people that still try and make D&D work, because thereâs something weird there that they want to bring out in their game, and itâs not matched by another system.
I remember watching a video going into the history of D&D through itâs changes, and there was a big rant about rogues existing. Like when rogue came out, someone sent gygax a homebrew class called the thief(iirc). The thing was that it took things that before then were considered âthings that everyone should be always trying to doâ, made them even stronger and then gave them exclusively(assumed) to the thief class. the âdownsideâ is you wernât able to like, base build and stuff, but you got to be better at âdungeoningâ (you knowâŚthe game). Gygax saw it and was like âI like dungeoning, I should include this class in the gameâ.
Thereâs a strong strain of that being the case/wanting to be the case in the community, but itâs not really supported by the text. In 5e, a bard can outjump a fighter every single time with (or sometimes without) the double athletics boost. Thereâs a lot of balance provided when people use the ârule of coolâ to balance things(which generally revolves around skill checks, things bards esp, but also rogues/wizards can do a lot better then barbs/fighters). Some of âfixing thisâ also involves having the gm account for martials not having much raw backing by arbitrarily changing what skill checks/etc mean for martial classes on the fly). Even then, a raw skill check RAW isnât very mechanically powerful(jump skills max out at honestly not terribly fantastical levels, esp considering that to be able to consistantly make some of the checks you already have to be fairly high level. Like, weâre comparing wish to 8 feet high jumps here.
there are a lot of fantasy rulesets(ie, things that share a lot of flavor), dungeon world, burning wheel, etc. A lot of people donât know about them, or feel afraid of learning something new(/canât convince anyone else to come to the table unless they preceed it with the words âd&dâ)
Edit: one sidenote: wrt âcan do it unlimited times per dayâ feels a lot like a hypothetical constraint in most cases. Most games to my knowledge never run into the point where resource constraints in that respect become meaningful. It requires a lot(especially at higher levels) to actually exhaust a party. Even then, you donât necessarily have to do so for differences to be relevant.
And that misses the exact point I was trying to make. I canât account for everyoneâs tastes (and donât get me started on BW), but itâs not the same flavor much of the time. Dungeon World is really loose, and might be able to get closer once you incorporate community playbooks. âFantasy flavorâ is like saying âA restaurant in NYC,â it doesnât say anything other than what neighborhood youâre starting from. Lord of the Rings is not Elric is not Perdido Street Station is not The Stormlight Archive. In some senses, D&D is a boxed pizza. You know what youâre getting, itâs not the best, but youâve got tricks you use to pretty it up to a slightly better meal.
And I did say I didnât really feel like defending 5e or PF as a ruleset. They donât have the gameplay or mechanical parts of the game I want to interact with the most. But the idea of a warlock, the implications of that kind of magic VS a sorcerer VS a wizard⌠thereâs story ideas there.
And yeah, too many people just donât want to step out of their comfort zone of D&D. Had a GM in our group that hesitated to play anything but D&D, and now doesnât want to go back. System mastery probably plays a part in peopleâs hesitation. I know my brotherâs group still plays mostly 3.5, which confuses the hell out of me every time I hear it.
ahh yes. I mentioned them because theyâre my full mental pool of âfantasy rpg gamesâ, and I think they should both be able to handle âgroup of elves and weirdos stumbling on a river gambling boatâ in some way or another. Definitely depends on what you want out of your rpg(which I think varies. Although I think some of the things people latch on to are harmful, or indicate a lack of careful consideration about what specifically people want in a rpg). Like, some people exist who just want there to be lots and lots of numbers and mechanical choices. I personally have my own opinions on this(it tends to make the game center more about âchallange of completionâ in the best cases, but often comes from a variety of unhealthy places. Like more things must = better game, or wanting enough room to optimize to break the very precepts of the game, or various kinds of anti-social behavior the ruleset allows them to do). Itâs very hard to communicate around these things though. You might have some specific feelings about some flavor choices(I know burning wheel in my example has a lot of very specific and nieche flavor elements that are easy to disagree with, like âwhat elves and dwarfs areâ). Some of the things that excite people are weird artifacts about how d&d is organized(people donât usually like thurges because theyâre super into the idea of âsmart clericâ(I mean this is already a thing that clerics can be), but because it lets them cheese out having all the spells).
Looking to get another Wednesday night Discord game rolling, and Iâm looking for people who would be interested.
When: Wednesday nights, EST. Start time between 6 and 7 pm. The average session would be about three hours.
What system: Lancer. I want to run a giant robot game, and this one is currently hitting the right spot for me. (https://massif-press.itch.io) Playerâs version of the book is free, and thereâs a powerful webtool for character generation at: COMP/CON.