Search results

This is just a personal, subjective rambling, and so probably deserves several grains of salt, but one thing I find interesting is that in general western RPG culture tries to establish distance from video games. I imagine TRPG designers look to CRPGs from a wider, games theory perspective, but...

The question of influence is a tough one. FF4 started development in 1990, at most a year after Sword World original edition came out. But I don't know if the original Sword World had Monster Knowledge Checks. Was it SW -> FF4 influence? FF -> later SW influence? Was it a common house rule in...

Just memories of people and events. Skill Packages and experience points are specifically noted as not being lost. Skipping ahead to the Game Master advice section, it says that success and failure is largely up to the GM, but in general if the PCs have a particular mission at the start of the...

As we come to the end of the Rules chapter, there's a small section on character recovery, death, and resurrection. I've covered 0 and negative HP and Life-and-Death checks before, so the new information here is the effects of not getting enough food and sleep, and natural recovery of HP and MP...

So, Special Combat Abilities. The next section of the rulebook merely goes over how they work, but in order to make it clear (and I little less dry), I'll be jumping ahead to the list of SCAs (contained in the Data section of the book), so people can see clear examples, and get an idea of what...

I think there's something of a moving goalposts effect here as far as the intelligence or charisma based fighter. I mean, the question isn't about size per se. Yes, there are a lot of highly-skilled, yet physically small fighters. Those fighters all uniformly extremely physical fit, and stronger...

I'll also point out that when TSR was at its most profligate with settings was also the time the World of Darkness books, particularly Vampire: The Masquerade, were vying with it for shelf space. Also, I'm not entirely sure the majority of current 5e players even remember 90s TSR, if they were...

So how does Sword World 2.5 handle Magic? So, there are four Magic-user Skill Packages: Sorcerer, Conjurer, Priest, and Magitec. All four make use of Mana Points (MP). Each needs a focus of some kind: wands and the like for the Sorcerer/Conjurer, holy symbol for the Priest, and Magisphere for...

While not necessarily disputing anything you wrote, I would say that dungeons play a very significant role in the design, even though they seem to be given short shrift in these discussions. 3-4 encounters per day sounds good if you're talking about a plot-driven adventure, or a city-based...

No, Pathfinder 2E does not show up on the lists, so either it hadn't been played there, or they just lumped it in with 1E. 1E didn't get an official Japanese release until 2018, which seemed to invigorate Pathfinder's session numbers: 54 in 2018 to 115 in 2019. Prior to the official release...

There are two things to consider: Granted, the way it is worded in the DMG ("...how much XP that character is expected to earn in a day") is misleading. But because the table is explicitly an adjusted XP table, it can't be about how much XP is actually earned. Adjusted XP is only ever used as...

Wait, that doesn't add up. 24,000 at Level 6 assumes a party of six. The encounter difficulty tables are for a party of 3 to 5. A 6th level party of 5 can be expected to get 20,000 XP (4,000 XP per character) over the adventuring day before needing a rest. Their thresholds are Easy: 1,500...

Exactly. Where I disagree with how people interpret that is 6-8 medium to hard encounters is not a necessary condition to maintain class balance, nor is it advice for designing an adventure. It's a guideline for how many encounters a party has the resources to handle in the course of a day, and...

It's not that. It's that Arneson was essentially suggesting leveraging the IP of TSR's worlds, and Riggs, rather uncharitably IMO, interprets that as meaning to flood the market with world-specific product like TSR did. In fact, it seems to me that most of Arneson's letter are contemporary...

Alas, it died on the vine. Too soon, maybe?

Didn't we just have a thread on this?

The replay translation is turning out to be more work than I anticipated, so I think I'll just go ahead and do a little clean up on Combat, and the chapter on Items and Equipment. So one thing I forgot to mention is Life-or-Death Checks. If you are reduced to 0 or negative HP, you fall...

I'd go with Icespire Peak. The hardest thing with new players is to impress upon them how much freedom they have. Without direction, they get analysis paralysis. With direction, they start thinking they have to find the "correct" way to proceed. I think the job board really gives newbie players...

The important thing to note was that, like in many wargames of the period, the most salient information was in the table referenced. With the table doing all the math, how the armor is classified is somewhat superfluous; they could have just called Armor Class A, B, C, etc. The central design...

Sword World Combat. A method to the madness? So, the first thing to consider is that while yes, martials (and damage-using spells, for that matter) have two chances to auto-fail (to-hit roll and damage roll), the fact that Sword World is a 2d6 system does mitigate that. The chance of rolling an...