Birthright??

[cignus_pfaccari]

It's fun in a human-dominated setting, but not so much fun when the other players are playing an immortal elf, a long-lived dwarf, and a halfling, and you're the one stuck with the old age penalties while they go off to do something else.

We wound up having only about 15 or so years pass in ours, as we were spending so much time adventuring.

OTOH, the shorter-lived races did do some serious hunting for life-extension stuff, just in case. The winner was the half-orc, who drew from a variant Deck and got +1000 years added to each age category.

Brad

 

[gamerprinter]

The main reason I believe the setting failed is that it was too niche.



Kingmaker works better because it is a single campaign and can work as a change of pace. The niche it creates lasts for one arc. Birthright asks you to buy into the niche for an entire setting, which will appeal to less people. Even though you could play a single campaign using Birthright, it's a lot to ask someone to buy into compared to a single AP like Kingmaker.

Well, yeah, of course - I indicated they were not the same thing - apples and oranges..?

Similarities were only in eventually becoming sovereigns or sovereign agents, playing some large scale battles. Just these ideas that were first unique to Birthright.

As products Paizo's Kingmaker AP and Birthright are apples and oranges, but the ideas of kingdom building and management, and large scale war done uniquely existed in BR, though as a setting it was less than significant - I'm sure some small influence reached the Kingmaker concept.

I wasn't trying to compare the two in any other way.

GP

PS: I bought the basic Birth Right boxed set, not any other supplements, so I played it like an AP, not as a long standing campaign setting anyway.

 

[Falstaff]

I love Birthright and still have all the books. I'm currently running an AD&D 2nd edition campaign in Birthright. No PCs are regents. They're all "commoners" and are currently exploring the Elvenmere marshlands in the Barony of Roesone. The party is half-elf ranger, dwarven fighter (battlerager), halflling fighter, and half-elf thief/priest. As a houserule I allow a % chance of being Blooded equal to the average of your PC's stats. The dwarf battleranger is Blooded and possess the Alert power.

 

[Ampolitor]

new version

Wow, than ks for all of the replys, all I know is that I would buy it in a second if they ever put it back out in a box, or hardcover, I agree that the war cards were not so fun, my campaigns were usually where the PC's became nobles each controlling a small area by birth, and usually without fail after a while one of them would want to run his own kingdom, it was hard as a DM but it made for some GREAT games, PC's doing backhanded things, we did mostly adventuring like regular setting and did the domain turns outside of play, like at the end of a session, or by email. The games for me worked the best out of all the setting that I've played, and yes I've played them all since 82. I really hope that WOTC considers redoing the set as a hardcover or something. We had a party that tried to take down the Gorgon, and it didn't go so well, but made for a memorable game. We used the Battlesystem rules for mass combat, which were a lot longer but the players looked forward to a session of mass combat, I'd love to start one up again!

 

[S'mon]

I'm a sucker for dominion/rulership/king type stuff. Looking back, I think the reasons I didn't buy Birthright were:

1. The 2e TSR Ethics Code. With the Ethics Code in place, I didn't see how this setting could possibly be any good (ironically I think WoTC gets away with a de facto even more restrictive ethics code in their products, in some ways. Maybe it helps they don't have a rep for evilness in other areas like copyright enforcement).

2. I think the Celticy-ness or faux-Celticy-ness must have been a turn-off, although I don't remember thinking that consciously. I really don't like "American Celtic" tropes, and I don't like use of Gaelic type spellings, which make English-language pronunciations difficult - I don't even like it on English-language road maps of Ireland, never mind on English-language gaming products. I like stuff like "Slaine" where people have nice pronunciable names like Murdach, Ukko, Calgacus, and Slough Feg.

 

[ssampier]

I find it interesting that many thought Birthright was bland. On the surface Birthright is a standard D&D world, but really BR main problem that it was too different from core D&D. The person that said BR was medieval has things right.

By default wizard magic is fairly rare. Clerical magic, however, was fairly common, except for elves. Elves are supposed to be pretty crazy, though, hence their CN alignment.

The Gorgon is supposed to the biggest, baddest, and scariest mofo out there. You shouldn't be facing beholders, dragons, and liches on a regular basis. You should regularly be facing the machinations of the kings of another realm, or the consequences of running all the trolls off your land, for instance.

If I were to run it I would run it in E6 at a minimum, but really BR should be run in a low-magic rule system. I would run it in True 20 or Grim Tales, perhaps.