Dangerous Jouneys

[Scribble]

So have any of you fellow gamers out there in enworldland ever actually played this game?

I own a copy, and I think the setting book, and maybe the magic book? But I've never actually played it, nor have I really looked through the rules since like... uhhh 90 something...

I just remember as a kid thinking... "The character sheet has HOW MANY PAGES?!?!"

I wonder what I'd think now... Maybe I'll pull it out and look it over... But until then... Have any of you played it?

 

[Nightchilde-2]

So have any of you fellow gamers out there in enworldland ever actually played this game?

Yes. I played a few sessions of it when it first came out with two different groups.

My main group was like "eewwww" and didn't like the rules AT ALL.

My secondary group was only 2 people so it was a little easier to run, but one of the players ended up rolling up a left-handed prince that was the seventh son of a seventh son full grey/black dweomercraefter and thus ABSOLUTELY DOMINATED the entire game. Worst part was, not only did I sit there and watch him roll this up, but he did it with *my* dice.

(For the uninitiated, that's about the equivalent of rolling all 18s on your stats and maxing out hit points every level for like 20 levels..it was literally a one-in-a-million..maybe even less than that....character)

I'd rather run another game of World of Synnibar than another session of Dangerous Journeys/Mythus.

 

[jdrakeh]

Years ago, I knew a guy who was a devout fan of the game and pushed it every opportunity he got -- so, when I found it at a used bookstore, I picked it up and gave it a whirl. I personally found it to be an over-complicated D&D clone that, mechanically, offered me nothing of interest.

The most infuriating thing was the excessive re-naming of standard RPG conventions (e.g., player character become "Heroic Personae," classes become "Vocations," skills become "Knowledge/Skill Areas," etc. Normally, flowery description doesn't bother me in RPG books, but when you're re-inventing the wheel merely to sound clever, it drives me nuts.

Note: Yes, I know I've been guilty of the same thing in Simple 20. I hereby admit that I was wrong and humbly apologize for wasting your time with fancy words like "aptitudes" when I could have (and should have) just said "skills."

The setting, OTOH, I felt was pretty neat.

I specifically liked Necropolis (later revisioned by Necromancer Games as "Gary Gygax's Necropolis" for use with D&D 3x), while Aerth (as seen in The Epic of Aerth) seemed like a much more detailed and serious version of Greyhawk. In fact, I greatly regret selling my Mythus/Dangerous Journeys setting books several years ago.

 

[Obryn]

How funny - I was just thinking about Mythus the other night.

I ran a Mythus campaign for about 6 months back in high school. Back then, all of us had the free time to deal with the incredibly intricate & overly complex system. I think it can be fun, but it's pretty deeply flawed.

I pulled the books out right before I moved a few years back and looked through them. The setting book is twelve kinds of awesome, but the rules... Wow, I don't honestly know how we ever played the game. Just thinking about an entire, several-hundred-page book that's nothing but spells... well, nowadays it makes my blood run cold.

Probably the deepest flaws were in character creation. There were a few things where, if you rolled just right, you got an incredibly broken character. These weren't stats; they were random rolls for your character's potential that existed outside the rolls. For example, let's say you're a Mage. Most of the time you'll be a half(?) or partial practitioner. You have a small chance, though, to be a full practitioner. IIRC, full practitioners are around 10x more powerful than the lower echelons, and likewise way above any other PCs. It makes balancing almost impossible for the DM. Ditto with Seventh Sons.

Whenever I hear someone talk about how much Gygax loved simple, rules-light games, I always think, "Well then what the hell was he thinking when he wrote Mythus?!"

-O

 

[Obryn]

The most infuriating thing was the excessive re-naming of standard RPG conventions (e.g., player character become "Heroic Personae," classes become "Vocations," skills become "Knowledge/Skill Areas," etc. Normally, flowery description doesn't bother me in RPG books, but when you're re-inventing the wheel merely to sound clever, it drives me nuts.

And some of the names were just plain dumb. I know he was going for an Egyptian (sorry, AEgyptian) flavor, but seriously. It wasn't luck points - it was Joss Factors (no relation to Whedon). Not magic points - Heka points. No gold pieces or whatever - we had Basic Unit Coins, aka BUCs.

I specifically liked Necropolis (later revisioned by Necromancer Games as "Gary Gygax's Necropolis" for use with D&D 3x), while Aerth (as seen in The Epic of Aerth) seemed like a much more detailed and serious version of Greyhawk. In fact, I greatly regret selling my Mythus/Dangerous Journeys setting books several years ago.

Necropolis was pretty awesome. It was very, very Gygaxian though. There's a few points where I scratched my head.

-O

 

[jdrakeh]

And some of the names were just plain dumb. I know he was going for an Egyptian (sorry, AEgyptian) flavor, but seriously. It wasn't luck points - it was Joss Factors (no relation to Whedon). Not magic points - Heka points. No gold pieces or whatever - we had Basic Unit Coins, aka BUCs.

Some of that is ostensibly due to the fact that Mythus was originally planned as a multi-genre game system, with Dangerous Journeys composing only the fantasy element thereof. GDW wanted terms that could be applied across several settings, in multiple genres, without raising too many eyebrows (e.g. BUCs). Of course, nothing other than fantasy books were ever published for the system. And, honestly, I'm not sure that cutesy terms like "BUCs" would have been any less stupid, even if they had been used in other genre supplements.

 

[Scribble]

Whenever I hear someone talk about how much Gygax loved simple, rules-light games, I always think, "Well then what the hell was he thinking when he wrote Mythus?!" -O

Yeah... I think pretty much the same thing... "Simple? Dude DJ had like 5 solid pages to it's character sheet!"

 

[Obryn]

Yeah... I think pretty much the same thing... "Simple? Dude DJ had like 5 solid pages to it's character sheet!"

I've pretty much repressed the character sheet.

I do remember that every stat had Capacity, Power, and Speed. And some of them were real head-scratchers.

Additionally, IIRC, Capacity was used for pretty much everything, whereas neither Power nor Speed got much love. It was like you had 20+ useless stats.

-O

 

[TerraDave]

I had the books, and the setting inspired, a little, my own alt earth setting.

AND, I also played at one of the two cons I have been two. It was an intro scenerio when DJ first came out. I think we did some kind of simplified charecter creation, and then, all met at an inn. And that was it. Some stuff happened at the inn. But not a lot. I think it was designed to avoid the games mechanics.

Sort of the complete opposite of Kobold Hall, which I played at the other con I have been to.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I played it. But character creation was so tedious that I would not care to repeat the experience.

This is one of those games that could have strongly benefited by a really good editor.