Everquest OGL

[Lizard]

Since it isn't a "D20", game, technically...

I picked up the PHB at GenCon. My thoughts on it are precisely opposite of my thoughts on SAS D20. Where I criticized SAS D20 for going too far from the D20 'core', I think EQ did not go FAR ENOUGH. The issue is target audience.

Target audience of SAS D20 -- presumably, D&D players who might want to try superhero games. Thus, the closer to D&D (while still being different enough that it isn't Super-Paladin and Rogue Man versus the evil Dr. Red Dragon and his army of hench-orcs) (Though, actually, that does sound sorta cool...), the better.

Target audience of EQ OGL -- presumably, people whose idea of 'role playing' has always involved a computer, and who want to be able to get phat l3wt without 'camping the spawn'.

The EQ OGL game is friggin' lovely -- equal to the PHB in quality, and easier to read, to boot. And it's a good variant on D20 -- but it seems to not be EQ-ish enough. A lot of EQ tropes seem to have been dropped. (Armor by location, individual weapon skills, etc. Ironically enough, the combat system used in SAS d20 would have worked better here....)

Furthermore, if you are a 13-18 year old EQ fanboy, and you pick this game up with no other RPG experience, damn, are you going to be confused and possibly feel ripped off. You can't play it out of the box...er...book...the MM and GMG are still months off. Further, there's no real clue HOW to play it...not even the usual:

GM:You see a dark corridor.
Player 1: I light my torch.
Player 2:I wanna cast....magic missile!
GM: At what?
Player 2: At the darkness! Huh huh!

Etc...(Yes, I know I'm misquoting.)

I dunno. I have to trust S&S did their market research and I'm misreading something. I'd hate to see a game of this quality, which has the potential to revitalize the younger side of the hobby by bringing in the MMORPG fanboys, fail...I know it sold like mad at GenCon, but the real test will be cracking the EQ playerbase.

Goddamn, it's a pretty book. And a cool alternate magic system. And a LOT of Open Gaming Content. A whole lot. Including, if I read the copyright page correctly, massive amounts of *explanatory and example text* for things like D20/SRD combat -- something notably lacking, by design, from the WOTC SRD. Someone with an OCR scanner, a lot of patience, and a good lawyer can suck a virtually complete RPG out of this baby. Major kudos to S&S/WW for this.

 

[Chain Lightning]

Man, I've been looking everywhere for the EverQuest Player's Handbook and have not yet found any store yet that has it.

Yet, I've been hearing accounts of people who've bought it. Is it out only by mail order or special sales at Cons only? Or is it truly released to the general public and its just the stores by me have not been able to get copies? Or didn't order them period.

I really want to flip through it first before I decide on whether or not I want to actually buy it.

Thanks Lizard for giving, what so far has been the best review of the book that I've found on the web. Any searches for an actually review have turned up with sites that have yet to review it, or something from someone that seems to have appeared everywhere including amazon.com that says to be wary because his copy had like 30 duplicate pages or something like that.

Even though I don't own the book, all I can say is 'wow', it has actually happened. The game got big enough to expand to other entertainment mediums. To me, I thought bringing EverQuest to the rpg world was kinda odd. I mean, the purpose of the EverQuest MMPORPG is to take the escapism of rpgs to another level. Maybe the visual emmersion part if not the actual 'roleplaying' part. And it seemed for those who want to actually roleplay, they can stick to their pen and paper games.

To me, my first thought was, why play pen and paper EverQuest? To roleplay in the world of Norrath? Why? There are far more interesting and better written settings than Norrath abundant in the d20 market. Norrath's history (if any of you have bothered to have read it and have kept up with it) is kinda unimaginative and very convoluted in a way that reminds me of the writing my friends and I did for our character histories back in high school.

So why play EverQuest? Why am I interested in flipping through the book with the possible intent of buying?

I think I know. Here's where I found some humor.

It has to be a combination of what's left over from my once EQ addiction and some sentimentality. Yes, about a little over a year ago I was playing EQ and seemed pretty happy with it. Then, like most, it soon became the type of game I didn't want to play anymore. But your investment in your character, your attachment to the novelty of that persistant on-line universe, your relationships to other friends that are still playing, act as this obstacle you must get over in order to break your EQ addiction and cancel your account. Because really, why play the game if the gameplay is not fun for you? And for me it was really really not fun anymore. Part of me got mad at that because I thought that it still had the potential to be a great game if they would just fix some things here and there. So I left like a typical bitter complaining EQ player.

So now along comes the EQ d20 rpg. And now I'm thinking about EQ again after a year of not thinking about it. Maybe I want to get together with my other friends who've quit also and show 'em the EverQuest rpg and say, "Hey look....we can play EQ minus the camping, the kewl d00dz, the broken quests, and all that other crap!"

Maybe there's another reason. I also recognize there is a benefit of starting an EverQuest game instead of, let's say....a Forgotten Realms game. With my particular group of friends, more of them have played EQ than have played pen & paper rpgs. So they know nothing of Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Scarred Lands, Sovereign Stone, etc. I am the only one that has read the other d20 settings. So, the benefit would be that we could play in a world that we're all familiar with. If I say, "You are in the hills outside Qeynos," they can imagine it quite quickly.

Maybe another reason is, a part of me would just love to go in and 'FIX' all the stuff I disliked about EQ. Especially the silly armor designs. Myself being an artist, would go in and re-draw so much that was on the EverQuest fashion shelf!

Ha ha ha. Now here comes the funny part. Maybe there's some hidden psychological power trip/revenge thing I'm trying to fulfill by playing the EQ game 'my way'. Not the Verant way that has scarred me . So the only way to meet that need....is to buy the game and play it my way! Bwah ha ha ha ha!

Is that it I wonder? Is my interest in buying this EQ rpg attatched to some weird hidden motive to exorcise my EQ demons? Okay, anyone think like this or am I just nuts?

 

[jujutsunerd]

Or is it truly released to the general public and its just the stores by me have not been able to get copies? Or didn't order them period.

Given that I live in a small town in Sweden and bought it two days ago at my LFGS I'd say your local stores are to blame.

/Jonas

 

[JoeGKushner]

It's times like this that I'm glad to have a good hobby store like Mt. Prospect's Games Plus, even if it is a 40 minutes drivethere and another 40 back.

 

[Erifnogard]

The game was 'released' to distribution on Monday (the 19th). What this means is that distributors were allowed to ship it to stores on Monday. It will of course arrive at stores at different times due to the vagaries of the shipping system, but at the latest any store that had it preordered should get the game early next week. And yes, I do work at a game store and know what I'm talking about.
I expect our copies to arrive today.

 

[Mortaneus]

I've got my copy of the book sitting right in front of me. A bit of advice for those who intend to use this thing (which should qualify as a melee weapon because of the size):

Break out the tylenol.

One of the tricks that is often used by layout artists to allow for great density of type, while making it more readable is to actually DECREASE the size of the font, but leave the space between the lines the same. For a good example of this, open the FRCS. The text is tiny, but easily readable because of the exaggerated space between the lines.

In the EQrpg, they didn't do this. I get a headache just trying to read one page.

In addition, what they did to the D20 rules has shades of AD&D. The rules complexity has is quite a bit higher than standard D&D, and it is written in a very technical prose. This is NOT a book you can just sit down and suck up with no effort.

Also, if you're a spellcaster, be prepared to do a LOT of cross referencing. EQ has quite a few spell chains. If you've ever found it annoying to look up Globe of Invulnerability in the PHB, and have it send you hunting for minor globe of invulnerability, then you're in for a REAL treat in this book. p. 244, for instance, lists 11 different spells, ALL of which reference others for their effects. There are WAY too many spells that go 'as (blah), but with.....'

In addition, don't pick this book up and expect to immediatly be able to drop it wholesale into an ongoing D&D game. They've changed quite a few of the mechanics, including iterative attacks, the whole spell system, levels go from 1-30 with no ELH compatibility, the base classes are completely different from what's in the PHB. Heck, they don't even use the ECL system for the more powerful races. Rather, they give a % xp penalty, ala 2nd ed.

This is not to say the book is bad. There is quite a bit in here that is quite interesting. The idea of using the iterative attack progression to account for weapon speed I find intriguing.

I warn those of you who want to drop this into an ongoing D&D game, though. You've got a lot of work to do.

 

[Erifnogard]

Hence the whole point of making the game OGL instead of d20. d20 implies much more cross compatibility 'out of the box'. From what I've read so far, it does a pretty good job of modeling Everquest as a pen and paper game. And it wouldn't be that hard to mine it for D&D if you were so inclined. Heck I own d20 titles that require more effort to use with D&D.

 

[Samurai]

IMHO, it seems to me that S&S Studios was looking for a chance to bring back a lot of stuff from AD&D, and simply were looking for a license to do it with. As was said above, there is a VERY 1st ed/2nd ed feel to many parts of the game. Weapon speeds, seperate classes for wizard types, XP penalties, etc all harken back to that era. Although I've never played EQ online, the whole thing does feel very video-gamish, with spells being extremely limited to what is possible in a video game instead of a pen and paper RPG. (Teleports specific to a single map location, 75% of the spells are combat related, Illusions are limited to changing the caster into a single, specific race, etc) Although it is a nice book appearance-wise, and some of the ideas are worth stealing, it really is basically used for roleplaying CHARACTERS IN A COMPUTER GAME, not characters in an RPG...

 

[Tsyr]

it really is basically used for roleplaying CHARACTERS IN A COMPUTER GAME, not characters in an RPG...

I'm gonna have to disagree with that. The mechanics are perfectly suited for roleplaying in the world of Norrath. Norrath is what it is... there are reasons behind almost everything in Norrath, if you dig into the history deep enough.

As to why anyone would want to use the world of Norrath to play in? I happen to really _LIKE_ Norrath. IMO, it's actualy a very cool world.

 

[EarthsShadow]

I am a person who never got taken on the EQ ride for the computers, I stay away from it like the plague because personally I thought it was rediculous to spend hours each day playing on the computer like that. But, I liked the concept of EQ, and I was first in line to get the rpg book. Why?

Because to me its better than d&d and the general d20 stuff out there. Sure its not as simple as the normal d20 game, but who says it has to be. That is what makes this game just a little more unique as a fantasy game, because of the differences involved. It uses mana instead of spell slots, it has more races, more classes, sure the book is as heavy as a greatsword, but that doesn't bother me any.

I am also a gamer who never played AD&D or the 1st ed D&D because as soon as I read about THAC0 on those old games I never touched them and refused to play a game that was so stupid to include something like that (but that's the topic of a different conversation).

Sure there is a lot of cross referencing with the spells, but if they didn't do what they did in how they printed it, then the book would have been at least another 50 pages of spell description that wouldn't have to be there. All in all, its an excellent game and if you feel that its a bunch of video game characters instead of role-playing characters then that is what the person'a ability to role-play is all about. It's just a setting and a bunch of rules, nothing more. It's what we do with it that counts. Treat it like a video game, it will feel like a video game. Treat it like a world, then it will feel like a world.

Buy it for what it is and don't try to convert it to anything else, or convert everything else into EQrpg because its just that superior.