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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cyric" data-source="post: 2011315" data-attributes="member: 8879">Ive been a D20 player from the start and switched to 3.5 as soon as the playershandbook hit the street. But after 4 to 5 years of playing the system I'm still missing some things, mostly concerning charakter creation. So I looked through a wide range of system and finaly tried Hackmaster... and I must admit: I'm totally hooked.If you played AD&D (1st or 2nd) you will notice a lot stuff that just feels like coming home. If you didn't don't be afraid: the rules are clear, easy to understand and what's most important: easy to learn!The Player's Handbook comes with more than 400 pages of rules,  a big part of which is dedicated to charakter creation (Attributes, skills, talents, etc.) and giving the char a story (heritage, siblings, social status, etc.).But let me begin from the start...The first chapter handles the attributes which are the "normal" D&D attributes plus comeliness and honor.  While I don't see any real need for an atttribute wholly concerned with attractiveness, honor plays a major part during an Hackmaster seesion and provides help to  the player (with extra dice) AND the gamesmaster (more on this in chapter 5).The second chapter is about races and provides stats for the typical D&D races as well as half-ogers, pixi fearies, gnome titans and gnomelings.The third chapter is about the classes and there are a lot in the core rules allready. The classes are divided in 4 categories (fighter, magic users, clerics and thiefs) for which class books are allreay availiable. In these categories you find great additions like knight errants (knights without the goody good d&d feel for knightly charakters), assassins and battle mages.The fourth chapter is about the story behind the Charakter. Here you learn how to roll for social status of your familiy (and the affect this may have to your honor), the size of your family (and who allready died), your starting money (which depends on your race as well as your social class, your charakter class and some other bonus) and other cool stuff. This is one of my favorite chapters as it provides far more backgorund information to charakters as the normal player typically write down. And, as a gamemaster, it provides alot adventure seeds for your campaign.The fiths chapter is about honor, alignement and fame. One of the great additions to Hackmaster is the concept of group honor as well as group alignement, which has influence to the individual charakter alignement as well as the individual charater honor. This means that a charater who plays dishonorably will have a negative impact on his fellow players as well. With this concept you as a gamemaster get a handy tool with which you let the group find solutions for inner group problems. It means a lot work for the GM to track the temporary as well as real honor of each charakter but it's more than worth it,Chapter six and seven are about charakter quirks and flaws as well as skills and talents. The former giving some extra building points for the rest of the charakter creation. Talking about Building Points: in contrast to D20 (or AD&D) you create your charater with the class and race concepts you know from these systems as well as wirth building points, with which you buy skills and talents or raise your attributes.Quirks and flaws add a lot of fun to charakter creation as well as making each charakter special. The skill system stays in total opposition to the D20 skill system. While the 3rd Edition tried to give each skill a broader range of usefullness, in Hackmaster each and every skill is different. Therefor, you have a lot of skills (but you have alot buiilding points, too). I like this system more because with this much broader range not every fighter looks the same.Talents are what feats are for D20, just some special knowledge or talent which could bot be learned as a skill.Chapter eight and nine are about money and equipment and both are very well written. Weapons receive sepperate values for damage against small, medium or large opponements, armor and shields get hitpoints (see combat) , but most of the rules are just the typical stuff.Chapter ten is a short introduction to magic. It explains the eight different schools of magic and give details about casting spells and spell components... nothing special here.Chapter eleven handles experience and training for next charakter level. The whole concept depends on mentors and real training so in Hackmaster there no "I got the experience, now I have the new skills and feats" feeling from D20. Advancement takes time... and cost a lot of money!Chapter twelve is combat and this is another one of my favorites because it's EASY! Everything the player needs to know is here and it's written with the pen & paper roleplayer in mind... not with miniature players! That's a great experience afer reading through the 3.5 D20 rules. Combat rounds are six seconds long each having 10 segments (rolling for initiative gives you the exect segment in which you can attack ir cat your spell).  Crits are not just double damage.... but a roll on extensive crit tables (which are NOT part of the palyers handbook but the gamemasters guide, btw).The chapter 13 to 17 are about the life of adventures, talking about encounter, nsc's, movement, light and such.Than starts the huge amount of appendixes where you find descriptions of the skills, talents, spells, character creation as well as advancement step by step explanations and a lot of other usefull stuff.I could write a lot more but beeing a german it was allready quite alot of work to write this review. I felt that I had to write it... because I know that there're a lot of predjudices about Hackmaster but I really think you should give it a try. As a player the creation process is much more fun than many other systems out there, as a gamemaster rule concepts like honor and fame provide you with a great tool to keep your group under control without using the alignement rule club!It's a 5 + ... thanks Kenzer & Co for this system!</blockquote>

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