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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KenHood" data-source="post: 1470649" data-attributes="member: 4413">Yep!One of my goals: Increase the speed of combat. In Real Life (tm), fights tend to be nasty and short. No more than a handful of seconds. If the rules end up giving you those results, then they're working according to design.Heh! Pull the other leg!DM's are manipulative SOB's with God-complexes. Hmm. Maybe that's why I liked being a DM more than a player...The pip system was "borrowed" (i.e., stolen) from Fudge, one of my favorite RPG systems. (The Fudge dice bell-curve on success is the best I've ever seen.)When I first made the switch to Fudge, my players thought the pips would suck. After one session of combat, they were hooked. I'm fond of it because it's visual. One look, you know where your character stands and what penalties to apply. Even though it's as abstract as hit points, it doesn't feel like a number. It feels more like the gas gauge on a car. When you're on the last couple of pips in the Severely Wounded column, you get the same sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach as when your gas needle hovers on the red line, below "E."---One act of evangelism for the system...Now that you've seen how intuitive and quickly it works, your players may buy into the same features. Why not take their characters, convert them into this system, and run a couple of major, old battles in the new rules? Pick a couple of fights about which they reminisce. That way, they remember how the fights worked under the old rules. It will give them a more immediate, visceral response when they're run under the revised rules. There's no risk involved for their characters, since it's just a couple of test runs. Very little effort is necessary to convert a character to the new system. Just figure attack, defense, soak, and weapon damage/crit DC. (Not like the old rules which required a lot of multiplication and consultation of charts.) You can track it all on a single 3x5 card for each character.Once you're done, if there's no "buy in" by the players, just chunk the cards. Despite the fact that many RPG'ers have more progressive ideas about politics and morality than most folks, they are rabidly conservative when it comes to their rules. They hate change. They hate trying new stuff. They immediately respond with suspicion and derision to variation or innovation. Why, if I recall correctly, a few years back, there was this big RPG company that wanted to revise their core rulebooks and create a third version. Hordes of naysayers came out, crying the apocalypse of gaming had arrived. There was speculation. There was derision. There was suspicion.But in a short while, after trying the rules, people bought into it. The game almost completely blew away all competition and became the dominant system in RPG's.Then, that company went for another revision. Yet again, people freaked out. Strange thing: Once folks tried the new revision, they found out that they liked it. Sure, everyone has their golden calf about which they feel some resentment when it got changed, but overall folks liked the fixes.I'm talking about D&D 3E and 3.5E.I expect -- once folks overcome their resistance to change and try the revised GnG rules -- they'll come to much the same conclusion as folks who switched from 2E AD&D to 3E D&D. I think they'll end up hooked.</blockquote>

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