blackguard
First Post
Having played both D&D and Harnmaster for most of my adult life, I will toss in my 2p.
1. flexibility - advantage Harnmaster by a long way
Where D&D offers fixed classes, skills and feats, Harnmaster offers a ton of skills that literally any PC can learn as long as they can cajole/pay someone to teach them. Want to change professions? Do it whenever your PC wants and keep your old skills, just like IRL. In D&D, there is a set level past which you can dual-class (min. 4th level), and you cannot use the old skills until you have passed your first profession's level.
Spells are not rote and development of new spells is encouraged - to the point of being mandatory for a Shek-Pvar (Pvarism is the predominant magic philosophy) to advance within his chantry. Therefore, the magic system can be tailored to the players and the campaign.
2. Realism - advantage Harnmaster by a long way
Medieval combat is rarely so well done as this. More work is required on some skills (Tarotry, Runecraft, Alchemy and Weaponcrafting all require more detail, IMO), but overall this is a big improvement over what I found with D&D.
3. Speed - tie
Like Shadow stated above, once you know the system - any system - speed comes from the familiarity. Both 3E and Harnmaster are relatively complicated, just in different ways. Combat is more detailed in HM, of course, but then again it isn't really the focus of play. Once a few game sessions have gone by, the players realize how deadly HM combat really is and use it as a last resort. Very similar, IMO, to real life. This has the added benefit of speeding the game along.
4. Flaws - tie
These are what I consider logical flaws in the concept of the game system, or flaws I have discovered during actual play.
HM fails to take into account strength in damage except in a very rudimentary fashion. Dragons don't do appreciably more damage than the average knight - which is ridiculous. Larger creatures have their only advantage in Endurance, which translates into taking a lot more whacks with the sword before they fall down.
Secondly, when testing against abilities, HM has a flawed system. It uses a scale of difficulty as a multiplier to the actual ability (Ability x 1 is difficult, Ability x 7 is easy). One can immediately see that characters with high scores will see their skill drop off very quickly as difficult increases (an 18 score will see their % chance of succeeding drop by 18 at every increased level of difficulty), while characters with low scores will drop off much less rapidly. In other words, the difference between skilled and unskilled PCs gets smaller as the task gets more difficult. I can't fathom that, myself.
All in all, HM has few flaws, but the flaws it does have are pretty glaring. D&D has the usual crop of logical flaws (classes, HP, AC, etc.) but because it is designed to be a high fantasy game system (and not a sim like HM tends to be) the abstractions can be accepted more readily by the people likely to play the game.
5. Fun Factor - tie
I call this one a tie because the goal of the two systems is so different. It is like comparing Wing Commander to a Flight Simulator; different people are going to have fun with each type of game and some will like both for different reasons. I found that as a teenager, I liked High Fantasy a lot and D&D was and is *the* system for playing that style of game. As I matured, went to University, picked up Medieval history as a hobby, etc., I found that I turned to Harnmaster because I prefered its greater realism and logical consistency. My choice in literature changed, and so did my taste in RPG, I guess.
My main niggling point with Harnmaster is that it simply isn't finished. There are rules missing for mounted combat, for example, that have been promised for half a decade. The Bestiary ( the equivalent to the Monster Manual) is like Pellinore's dragon: everyone has heard of it, but no one has ever seen it. CGI does not have the cash of a WotC, and this sometimes means that fans have to wait...
Of course, you can always enjoy the extremely well done campaign setting (Harnworld and the various kingdom modules) with nearly any system. I have a friend who is currently running a Harn campaign using the rules from Talislanta! D20 takes some work in order to fit it to the overall low-magic, high-realism flavour of Harn, but the online guide is available to make things much easier.
1. flexibility - advantage Harnmaster by a long way
Where D&D offers fixed classes, skills and feats, Harnmaster offers a ton of skills that literally any PC can learn as long as they can cajole/pay someone to teach them. Want to change professions? Do it whenever your PC wants and keep your old skills, just like IRL. In D&D, there is a set level past which you can dual-class (min. 4th level), and you cannot use the old skills until you have passed your first profession's level.
Spells are not rote and development of new spells is encouraged - to the point of being mandatory for a Shek-Pvar (Pvarism is the predominant magic philosophy) to advance within his chantry. Therefore, the magic system can be tailored to the players and the campaign.
2. Realism - advantage Harnmaster by a long way
Medieval combat is rarely so well done as this. More work is required on some skills (Tarotry, Runecraft, Alchemy and Weaponcrafting all require more detail, IMO), but overall this is a big improvement over what I found with D&D.
3. Speed - tie
Like Shadow stated above, once you know the system - any system - speed comes from the familiarity. Both 3E and Harnmaster are relatively complicated, just in different ways. Combat is more detailed in HM, of course, but then again it isn't really the focus of play. Once a few game sessions have gone by, the players realize how deadly HM combat really is and use it as a last resort. Very similar, IMO, to real life. This has the added benefit of speeding the game along.
4. Flaws - tie
These are what I consider logical flaws in the concept of the game system, or flaws I have discovered during actual play.
HM fails to take into account strength in damage except in a very rudimentary fashion. Dragons don't do appreciably more damage than the average knight - which is ridiculous. Larger creatures have their only advantage in Endurance, which translates into taking a lot more whacks with the sword before they fall down.
Secondly, when testing against abilities, HM has a flawed system. It uses a scale of difficulty as a multiplier to the actual ability (Ability x 1 is difficult, Ability x 7 is easy). One can immediately see that characters with high scores will see their skill drop off very quickly as difficult increases (an 18 score will see their % chance of succeeding drop by 18 at every increased level of difficulty), while characters with low scores will drop off much less rapidly. In other words, the difference between skilled and unskilled PCs gets smaller as the task gets more difficult. I can't fathom that, myself.
All in all, HM has few flaws, but the flaws it does have are pretty glaring. D&D has the usual crop of logical flaws (classes, HP, AC, etc.) but because it is designed to be a high fantasy game system (and not a sim like HM tends to be) the abstractions can be accepted more readily by the people likely to play the game.
5. Fun Factor - tie
I call this one a tie because the goal of the two systems is so different. It is like comparing Wing Commander to a Flight Simulator; different people are going to have fun with each type of game and some will like both for different reasons. I found that as a teenager, I liked High Fantasy a lot and D&D was and is *the* system for playing that style of game. As I matured, went to University, picked up Medieval history as a hobby, etc., I found that I turned to Harnmaster because I prefered its greater realism and logical consistency. My choice in literature changed, and so did my taste in RPG, I guess.
My main niggling point with Harnmaster is that it simply isn't finished. There are rules missing for mounted combat, for example, that have been promised for half a decade. The Bestiary ( the equivalent to the Monster Manual) is like Pellinore's dragon: everyone has heard of it, but no one has ever seen it. CGI does not have the cash of a WotC, and this sometimes means that fans have to wait...
Of course, you can always enjoy the extremely well done campaign setting (Harnworld and the various kingdom modules) with nearly any system. I have a friend who is currently running a Harn campaign using the rules from Talislanta! D20 takes some work in order to fit it to the overall low-magic, high-realism flavour of Harn, but the online guide is available to make things much easier.
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