GAHH!! Time to take a break from 3.5

[Evilusion]

While I can not completely agree with Steel Wind on all his thoughts. I will say this. The more I read about 4th edition (trying to keep a open mind here) the more it sounds like rolemaster to me. So Steel I would say this, switch now and start have some fun again.

 

[Gargoyle]

I get bored of any RPG if I play it too much, no matter how good the rules are. Sometimes you just need a different flavor. Game on.

 

[Steel_Wind]

While I can not completely agree with Steel Wind on all his thoughts. I will say this. The more I read about 4th edition (trying to keep a open mind here) the more it sounds like rolemaster to me. So Steel I would say this, switch now and start have some fun again.

I don't know why you would say that - other than a move away from Vancian magic and to the "per encounter" mechanic employed in SW: Saga edition. But that's not a simulationist game design as RM tried to be - that's a pure gameist design philosophy at work. It just happens to be a different gameist design mechanic than has been employed in D&D since the system was first published. But that does not change what its design philosophy is all about.

The only place where we see anything like that gameist influence in Rolemaster is with the bonus times per day free spells in the "adder" system employed in some of RM's minor magic items.

3E was in some way a step towards many of Rolemaster's mechanics in how it attempted to preserve a level based game while adding in a robust skill points system and the concept of "ranks" to a level based game. That's largely Monte Cook's hand in things, imo. Monte began in the industry as a designer for ICE and worked on RM2.

If 4E adds in plusses per level to skill ranks - then I suppose that would be even more like the RM approach to skills. But that's about it.

As for Rolemaster style combat, criticals, bleeding and complex stun for x rnds?? Nah. I don't see it. It's VERY heavy to run without player assistance (or computer automation, which would make ita no brainer but which ICE has always rejected as they can't figure out a way to make money on it).

Moreover, RM as written certainly can kill things with an unapologetic random dice mechanic. That does model lethality of combat quite well - but D&D has never been about that. Kids don't like dying in their first RPG adventure

I think most modern designers would view that as a decidely unFUN from a "gameist" point of view.

I think 4E will be a move towards many things - but the very dense details in RM (any version of it) is something that the market has decidedly moved away from. It might swing back towards simulationist design at some point - but I don't see that happening for another decade at least - and probably more.

I still have an abiding affection for RM2. But I'm a dinosaur when it comes to that and I started in the hobby as a wargamer. Like many in the 70s, simulationism was my premise from the get go.

Simulationist wargames aren't exactly ripping up the sales charts either, last I checked. Hobby games have changed greatly in the past 35 years. Boardgame designs are dominated by fast play Euros with elegant and simple mechanics. Modern AT boardgame design, at best, goes for plenty of chrome and deeper theme. But the rules are not simulationist and don't try to be.

So even the boardgamers have rejected simulationism as a design premise. Waragames are sold now by the hundreds and low thousands. Grognards are a dying breed.

Computer games? Same thing. Wargames and even modern aircraft flight sim combat games have essentially vanished too.

I would be quite surprised - nay - flabbergast if WotC takes another page out of Rolemaster for 4E. I just don't see it.

6th edition? Maybe the tide will have turned by then.

 

[Geoffrey]

Great rant, Steel Wind!

I do not like the magic system in ANY version of D&D, as it causes the problems you so well elaborated in your post. Even an apparently innocent spell like know alignment can really take the wind out of the DM's sails. I prefer Gamma World:

http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=12358

Right up front let me state that I HATE what seems to be the way the majority of people play Gamma World: wild and wacky. (Unfortunately, this style of play was supported to at least an extent in the published modules.) I don't like that, and I never have liked it. A post-apocalyptic campaign should be nothing if not serious.

That said, I don't think that the 1st edition Gamma World rulebook reads that way. The cardinal problem is that some of the rulebook's illustrations (though not all--such as the cool cover) are wacky (such as those damn rabbits with the rifles). Ignore those illustrations, forget about other peoples' wacky GW campaigns, and read the rulebook with fresh eyes. Its setting is dark and inhuman (with just a few discordant notes, such as the aforementioned rabbits), moreso than any other RPG I've ever seen.

Some considerations:

GW is bleaker IMO even than Call of Cthulhu. In both those games, mankind is eventually going to go extinct, but in GW the extinction has already started and is nearly complete. Instead of living on a planet with billions of humans on it (as in CoC), the humans of GW number probably only in the hundreds of thousands. You run the numbers, consider that high-tech artifacts are becoming scarcer by the day, and look at how the various mutants with human-level intelligence are all more powerful than the pure strain humans...

...and you're looking at human extinction. The Big Show is over. The Apocalypse has already struck, and it wasn't a mere WWIII. The very continents buckled. The very oceans boiled. All the nukes on earth couldn't do that. Mysterious forces and energies changed the very fabric of life on earth. Probably vertebrates as a whole (not just humans) didn't do too well. Now comes the age of the insect, the worm, the plant, the fungus, and all the hideousness of the microscopic world. The entire Gamma World is dominated by gloppy, tentacled, multi-legged, insectile, oozy, writhing, hideous abortions of life. At the most humans will be around for another 1,000 years (if they're lucky), and in that time their numbers will continually dwindle until the number reaches 0. And they are already well over 99% of the way there. GW simply allows you to adventure in the last choking gasp of humanity before the ultimate end.

In my experience, CoC characters last longer than do GW characters. Plus CoC characters live in a safe world. If they so chose, they could simply stay at home and listen to the radio. To get in real danger, CoC PCs typically have to go looking for it in obscure corners of the world. Contrast that with GW, in which there is no safety or comfort anywhere. The best you can hope for is to find yourself in a place relatively less dangerous than others. The whole freakin' planet is a danger zone.

In CoC there are happy families all over the world with little children playing safely in the yard. People go to movies, eat out, take vacations, and enjoy life. There's none of that in GW. That sort of thing is over. Civilization is gone. All that is left is a planet-wide mutated and insane wilderness, with a few small bands of endangered humans here and there.

I think that the tribe of natives in Jackson's King Kong perfectly illustrates what the typical human enclave would be in Gamma World. These guys are seriously messed-up from living in the shadow of vastly more powerful monsters.

Also, get some good recent science books (with lots and lots of color photos) about insects and microscopic life. That stuff is more horrific and even Lovecraftian that Lovecraft's best work. Now imagine the real-world insects and microscopic organisms horribly mutated and much LARGER, and some with a high (though inhuman) intelligence. As much as I love Lovecraft's extraterrestrials in At the Mountains of Madness and "The Shadow out of Time" (which I regard as clearly Lovecraft's two finest works), they aren't as scary as the GW versions of real-life creepy-crawly stuff.

Also, I do not think it would be possible for humans to rebuild their civilization in GW. They've been shunted back into the Stone Age. They'd have to start all over again by learning to farm...er, maybe not, since the flora bites back. And they'd have to learn to domesticate animals...um, ah, the animals are now trying to domesticate humans. It's a non-starter. With no farming, none of the rest of technical civilization follows. Small groups for short amounts of time could carve out little enclaves of high-technology. But who do they call when their computer crashes? Now their robot-control network doesn't work (resulting in wild and/or uncontrolled and/or defunct robots), and all they have are a few hand-held weapons with, oh, 47 charges total. What happens after firing that 47th charge? Meanwhile, the mutants can fire those eyebeams from now until the cows come home. Plus those mutants are making little mutants. Nobody's making new high-tech items. Inhuman mutated insects and mutated microbes inherit the earth.

In short, I think that a 1st edition GW campaign can be darker and more serious than any other type of campaign.

 

[billd91]

Thieves World... Yes. Definitely meets the grim n gritty test, but the nature of it is very urban. Truth is, I've never been overly enamoured with an urban focused campaign. Some city adventures? Sure. ALL City adventures? Uhmmm... no thanks.

Thieves' World may be at its best in Sanctuary, not all adventures need to be there. Even Walegin went adventuring looking for Enlibar steel and Masha the midwife did some dungeon crawling.

Having played Warhammer Fantasy back in the early 1990s, I can say it certainly has consequences. Very dire ones. Death happened to us a lot if you got into a fight (particularly if you were a halfling with a toughness of 1). Insanity seemed to happen nearly as often.
Games like this, where you may find death a little too frequent, can be just as tedious as super-heroic fantasy.

 

[Agamon]

But the idea of fight - rest heal - fight - rest heal - fight. DIE. Reload. is not an element of computer gaming that I think leads to overall superior game play in a PnP game. At least - it does not for me.

I know it's just fine for a lot of people. I'm just not one of them.

From 1983 to December of 2005, I never allowed a person to be raised from the dead in any campaign I ever ran. There were hiatuses from gaming in that 23 year period - probably enough for ... 9 or 10 years of hiatuses I guess, overall.

Still - 13 or 14 years of gaming and not one raise dead or resurrection ever did not seem to cause any players to leave from my table. It's MORE than doable. You pull punches here and there to be sure - but players adjust quite quickly to permanent death. They play in a way which does not court it quite so much - and which prepares to stave it off with much more vigor, discipline and creativity.

In the end, the players think more and prepare more. They rely upon game mechanics less to preserve their lives. It makes for a superior game overall if everyone is accepting of it. But a lot of people are not accepting of it - and for them - it just won't work.

Okay, I can agree with this. Yeah, I try to concentrate more on both the overall picture as well as the details and leave the fundamental hack/heal/hack/heal in the background. Roleplaying between encounters, creating different tactics with each encounter, clashing of personalities in and out of combat, reacting to the interaction of feats, spells, abilities in a fight. These things keep the game fun for me.

I agree on you with the dying part though. This was the subject of a different thread recently, as I recall, but, while I like the threat of death, I don't like it to be common, especially when that's supposed to be balanced out by the availability of resurrection magic. I think I get more pissed when a PC dies in one of my games than the player does. It messes with the groove of the game, and more often than not, the verisimilitude of the campaign. It's telling when losing one's items is a much more horrible situation for a PC than dying. This part of D&D, I could sure do without.

Maybe that's why when AoW is done, I'm going M&M for a campaign. The PCs are supposed to be superheroes, and dying doesn't happen much, but there are still big consequences for failure.

 

[Steel_Wind]

I agree on you with the dying part though. This was the subject of a different thread recently, as I recall, but, while I like the threat of death, I don't like it to be common, especially when that's supposed to be balanced out by the availability of resurrection magic. I think I get more pissed when a PC dies in one of my games than the player does. It messes with the groove of the game, and more often than not, the verisimilitude of the campaign. It's telling when losing one's items is a much more horrible situation for a PC than dying. This part of D&D, I could sure do without.

As for equipment loss, I think that move in the 3rd edition to protecting equipment from destruction far more vigorously than it had in first and second edition is probably the biggest "make it fun" rule change in the system. I think it's cheesey as hell, actually.

I'm not a fan of characters dying either. It's not that I'm out to kill them. It's that I'm out to make the possibility of that seem real, and the consequences permanent. Without it, death is a game state of no consequence in the AoW campaign I ran.

With Rolemaster and its extremeley detailed crtical system, the threat level goes up - and it goes up a lot if you've never played it, believe me.

But that does not meant I'm out to kill the characters. In fact, I've gone too far in the past to ensure they are not dying, fudging madly behind a screen when the dice dictate death. And sometimes fudging to assist them when they are fighting, too.

You see, in the past, I rolled all the criticals in the game behind a screen. For players and monsters alike. This gave me a huge element of control to the story. But in hindsight, I think I took it too far.

I tried not to be too obvious about it - but we played one RM campaign I ran for long enough that every player at the table knew I was doing it after a while. And that knowlege takes the edge off the threat in the game. Worse, after a while it takes on a GM vs the Players feel when I DON'T fudge in their favor.

So I think I'll do it differently this time. I'm going to let all players roll their own criticals. And I'm going to roll criticals for the bad guys in the open.

To counteract the very significant new threat this mode of play presents to the players in a system like Rolemaster, I'm going to modify a Rolemaster house rule of ours a little bit.

The main house rule we used for Rolemaster in the past was a house rule called the "tactical cheat". It works like this:

Tactical Cheat

Two times per gaming session, non-cumulative and non-transferrable, a player can roll the dice, look at the result, declare "cheat" and re-roll. He or she can only do this twice per session. If not used during the session, that Tac cheat is gone.

In the past, I have not allowed the player to declare a cheat on my rolls. Only their own personal roll.

The reality was that I was cheating myself on my own rolls in the players' favor from time to time. So I'll increase the cheats to the players to three per session - and allow them to also be able to declare a cheat on my rolls if the roll effects them - and only them - directly.

That should provide a little bit of a comfort zone to the players in a no-raise dead campaign while still leaving things exciting, gritty and dangerous in battle. After all, it's only a re-roll - it's not like the same result (or worse) can't be rolled again.

It also means as the session wears on, that the threat level increases significantly in the game. You might be able to heal up - and rest to recover power points, but you don't ever recover your tac cheats until the next session begins.

 

[Renshai]

The same exact thing happened to me after years of D&D. Thus far, Warhammer has been the answer. We've really, really enjoyed it.

 

[Agamon]

The 'tactical cheat' idea is sound (a lot like Action points, really, or in my AD&D games I allowed every player one saving throw reroll per session), but I'm not big on the player announcing "cheat" when he does it. Something about that doesn't sit right with me...

 

[Evilusion]

I don't know why you would say that

Let me try explain myself better. When I first starting reading about 4e it sound like that was the direction 4e was headed. Now only time will tell, but I'm still betting that we will see more rolemaster influence on DnD. I just think it will end up being in the area of skills and magic system.

As for Rolemaster style combat, criticals, bleeding and complex stun for x rnds?? Nah. I don't see it. It's VERY heavy to run without player assistance (or computer automation, which would make ita no brainer but which ICE has always rejected as they can't figure out a way to make money on it).

I will have to agree here that we will never see this in DnD. Yes this is hard to do without the players helping.