Need an alternative to D&D.

[Dannyalcatraz]

If you DO follow through on the D&D in HERO campaign, start a new thread in here with the HERO header. There's enough HEROphiles on ENWorld to help with the heavy lifting of campaign design.

 

[DeltaEcho]

Come on! _Nothing_ can be compared to Rolemaster, unless it requires looking up multiple tables for every action... (Well, I guess Harnmaster might qualify...)

I wouldn't necessarily consider Burning Wheel a rules-light game, though.

Try Living Steel...

 

[Tony Vargas]

I did allow myself to be put off somewhat by some posters here. Oddly it wasn't the people making criticisms of the 5e system that started me looking at other options, it was those who kept attacking such criticism with "you're playing it wrong" style responses.

There's no playing 5e 'wrong,' just not adjusting it enough to the way you want to play.

That said, whilst I'm out of time to replace it for this week's game and we'll be continuing with 5e a little longer, I am starting to find it not quite to my taste. I like much of it but it's also something of a two steps forward one step back affair for me.

What are the steps back? Very often, as DM, you can change/ignore/restore something that's bothering you. Might as well take the perks of DM Empowerment.


[sblock="4e"]

It seemed unplayable without a grid (ironically I'm now using a grid)

Actually, wrecan, over on the WotC boards came up with a system he called 'SARN-FU' to run even 4e what we'd now call 'TotM.' 13A used something similar. Better than what 5e has in support of the style that's meant to be it's default.

it seemed to focus everything on combat and had the barest bones for non-combat

Skill Challenges represented more support for non-combat than any edition of D&D before or sense. Of course, they didn't work as originally presented, but once they were fixed up. If you ever do decide to dust it off and try it, check out the Skill Challenge system in the Essentials Compendium.

mechanics seemed to divorce entirely from in-game meaning.

That was a myth "dissociated mechanics" perpetrated by the edition war, one of many. The reality was that the fluff of powers was subject to re-skinning just like the fluff of character appearance and gear had been in 3e.

The halfling is a fighter? Well they'll have 20 strength and arm-wrestle the minotaur cleric to the ground.

Characters went up to 30th levels and stats were all but open-ended. A human "Demigod" could be as strong as a giant. Size really doesn't matter when things get that super-human. It was an issue I remember being put off by the first time I saw it in a superhero game, having been accustomed at the time, to the detailed race/gender limits on Strength in 1e AD&D - but once you take a moment to think about it, it's fine.

That old grey-bearded wizard is 15th level? Well then they'll be bouncing up and down the mountain side like a frisky goat because that's how level bonus works whilst the strapping young peasant man will be out of breath and tumbling to his death.

Like everything else, it depends on how you visualize it. Why is a 15th level wizard +7 to basically everything? Probably because he's pulling minor magic to aid himself.

4e was always the edition that I wished I could run. It was so perfect in so many ways, but everything was sacrificed on the alter of sacred balance.

The only thing ever sacrificed on the altar of balance was imbalance.

Sword of Spirit mentioned the Flight spell which is interesting. It was so clearly written to prevent a player finding anything special or clever to do with it.

There's really nothing 'clever' about abusing a spell or ability, it's usually just pulling something counter-genre or anachronistic.

I actually thought 4e did a very good job of addressing this with its rituals system. As a GM I thought that looked pretty liberating - I could just make up a ritual, give it whatever timing or ingredients I felt like if I wanted to restrict use, and then apply whatever I wanted. An overland flight ritual? Sure, not a problem!

IIRC, Overland Flight was a ritual.[/sblock]

[sblock="Hero System"]

Hero is unique in my experience in that it's simple and heavy.

I've never heard it called 'simple' - consistent, perhaps or elegant, maybe, at the outside.

That's not a criticism, it's a complement. I should explain what I mean. The core approach is very simple and very consistent. Learning it wont take more than an hour or so. It's elegant and thus fairly easy to learn and balance. What it also has are copious listings of powers and circumstances based on upon that simple core and that's new.

OK, you meant consistent or elegant.

Of the recommendations, Hero seems to be the only one that will satisfy my obsessiveness. I'm still getting a feel for it and the work required to make a D&D clone out of it is not trivial.

You could do a lot worse than Hero, the question is usually if your players are up for the challenge of learning it and building characters using it. You can not only do anything, in concept, you might in other systems, D&D quite easily included, you can even model the system artifacts, if you like. I've seen Champions! or FH characters with "D&D Armor" in the form of focused DCV levels (so it literally just makes you harder to hit), for instance. Or half damage reduction on an activation roll so you can 'save for 1/2.'

However, it has a number of elements that I'm finding much to my tastes. Endurance as a core mechanic pleases me - I like the notion of different characters being able to battle on through slowly depleting reserves of stamina. Hit locations could be more elegantly implemented but I do like the idea of a bit more grittiness to combat.

Hit locations are a bit iffy, but work for some genres. You probably want to fiddle with KA's and stun multipliers a little, anyway...

For example, one of the first things I did to try and get my head around the system was to create a magic item. In this case, a flaming long-sword that exhausts the wielder over time (costs endurance each round it's used) but burns the wielder's foes and dazzles those who try to attack her in hand to hand. Making ports of D&D monsters seems relatively easy. I'm currently toying with creating different classes as templates, e.g. warlock, paladin, fighter, etc. If I can find a little time to do this, I will probably post it somewhere as a D&D conversion for Heroes.

In any case, unless the perfect system falls into my lap unexpectedly, I'm going to try and see what I can come up with in Hero 6e whilst the campaign carries on a little longer with D&D 5e. Really appreaciate so many helpful replies!

The last ed of Hero (6th) I'm not familiar with, but what I heard about while it was in development didn't fill me with confidence. Even what I'd consider the best versions of Hero suffer from an excess of skills, especially open-ended categories of skills (KS, Sciences, Professions, etc). By the end of the 5th edition, it could cost you 60-100 points of skills to be lawyer. When the 'professional' skills were first introduced in ChampionsII (c1982) being a lawyer cost 2 points.[/sblock]

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

On HERO skills costs: it really is campaign dependent. If you want a simple professional skill to encompass everything, you can do that. If, OTOH, you want to model job subtasks like persuasive oratorical skills at trial, research ability, etc., yeah, you're spending points.

You could even leave it out of your campaign rules and let the players design their PCs as they like. A player need only spend a couple points for his PC to have a law license and be an average attorney, but if he wants to play a PC who is the modern Daniel Webster, he'd need to invest the XP.

...IOW, just like being a Martial combatant.

Everybody can do the basic moves for free, but if you want your PC to have serious skill in physical combat a la Bruce Lee, he needs to buy maneuvers and maybe some Skill levels and DCs.

 

[TBeholder]

Small illustration of why linear perception penalties are bad:
Suppose that there is something very far away, but which has such a tremendous penalty to stealth that no one could possibly avoid missing seeing it. Consider for example your world's Sun. In our game, let's suppose that the Sun has a stealth penalty such that at even at the vast distance it is from your fantasy world, the difficulty of perceiving the sun is 0. Anyone that isn't completely blind notices the sun anytime it's present, even without really thinking about it. Now, let's apply a simple linear penalty to perception. For every 10' further away the object is, the difficulty of perceiving the option increases by 1. Move the sun 210' feet further out, and now suddenly only the keen eyed will notice the sun (and presumably, the Earth gets plunged into darkness.). If we on the other hand adopt a table, and an exponential scale, how much further out must the Sun be to become noticeable only to the keen eyed observer? Roughly 5000 times its original distance.

Or maybe you didn't set the penalty high enough.
Anyway, your argument boils down to that ~L/R^2 is approximated better by ~(L - ln R) than ~(L-R), and base your argument on an assumption that such an approximation must work equally well on great distances with minor relative changes and on very short distances changing by orders of magnitude. I can only quote Uncle Joe: "Both are worse".

This also raises a question: are Perception and signature values (to which the range penalties are applied) themselves already on a logarithmic scale or not?
And the same for the rest of them, of course. Which is tied to the question of random distributions, of course.

Take a look at this.

D6 is not bad, but...
This raises another very YMMV issue:
‣ Plain numeric adjustment: e.g. *D&D, RuneQuest?
‣ Dice stepping: e.g. Cortex system (used in Castlemourn), Savage Worlds?
‣ Dice pool: e.g. d6, Shadowrun/Earthdawn?
‣ Something weird?

Dice stepping is not streamlined nor very transparent. If you ever need to pick different dice for one check, why not to switch to dice pool, so that it's at least the same die? Or to Alternity, where one of two remains the same (also, it already has structured skills and there are multiple hitpoint tracks - YMMV, but it also allows extreme scaling in an easy and uniform way).
RuneQuest/OpenQuest uses d100 and is somewhere between *D&D, SPECIAL and Warhammer Fantasy/40k RP. Some parts are a little more convoluted than they could be, but nothing horrible. And import of most things from Warhammer RP is fairly straightforward, if you want it - IMO, a little d10 transfusion could do OpenQuest much good.

 

[aramis erak]

Come on! _Nothing_ can be compared to Rolemaster, unless it requires looking up multiple tables for every action... (Well, I guess Harnmaster might qualify...)

I wouldn't necessarily consider Burning Wheel a rules-light game, though.

Actually, both Rolemaster and BW are pretty easy to run and to play...
RM just needs putting the tables you use on the table. Photocopies are your friend.

Both of them are fairly straightforward mechanics in play, with convoluted character generation, and a zillion optional elements that you can opt never to use.

 

[dco]

Anyway, after all the replies, which have been interesting, I should say that I've been following a recommendation from early on and looking into the Hero system. It's, well... quite something. People weren't kidding when they said there was a lot of front-loaded work. But they also weren't wrong when they said it plays pretty quickly and elegantly once you start play. Usually a system leans towards being simple and light or more complex and heavy. Hero is unique in my experience in that it's simple and heavy. That's not a criticism, it's a complement. I should explain what I mean. The core approach is very simple and very consistent. Learning it wont take more than an hour or so. It's elegant and thus fairly easy to learn and balance. But then so are systems like Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space. What it also has are copious listings of powers and circumstances based on upon that simple core and that's new.

Anyone who has read this far through my post will have picked up that I am a fantastically picky and perfectionist person. Of the recommendations, Hero seems to be the only one that will satisfy my obsessiveness. I'm still getting a feel for it and the work required to make a D&D clone out of it is not trivial. However, it has a number of elements that I'm finding much to my tastes. Endurance as a core mechanic pleases me - I like the notion of different characters being able to battle on through slowly depleting reserves of stamina. Hit locations could be more elegantly implemented but I do like the idea of a bit more grittiness to combat. It's certainly capable of managing high level magic and whilst some of it is fiddly, it's pretty capable. For example, one of the first things I did to try and get my head around the system was to create a magic item. In this case, a flaming long-sword that exhausts the wielder over time (costs endurance each round it's used) but burns the wielder's foes and dazzles those who try to attack her in hand to hand. Making ports of D&D monsters seems relatively easy. I'm currently toying with creating different classes as templates, e.g. warlock, paladin, fighter, etc. If I can find a little time to do this, I will probably post it somewhere as a D&D conversion for Heroes.

In any case, unless the perfect system falls into my lap unexpectedly, I'm going to try and see what I can come up with in Hero 6e whilst the campaign carries on a little longer with D&D 5e. Really appreaciate so many helpful replies!

With hero system and any other game my advice is to not try to make a clone of D&D. If someone is an experienced mage, fighter, etc build one with the rules but without trying to give them all the specific powers of D&D, pick the "spirit" of the character or class.
Normally the first thing you need to do is to implement a magic system and think on some limits for abilities, skills, powers and consequently damage. Once you have that is very straightforward.

For example for a very high level warrior I would give him max or near max OCV, DCV, some maneuvers and some specialization with some weapons using combat skill levels. For a berserker I would give high OCV, low DCV and damage classes for melee, perhaps some combat skills levels and some extra stun and PRE for PRE attacks.

For monsters you can also take a look at the bestiaries of the different games, they will save you time and give you ideas.

 

[Caliban]

Cocaine. It's a hell of a drug.

 

[GreenKarl]

I have HERO Complete and the 6th ed. HERO Fantasy, both are pretty good and its not a bad system. I use to play the heck out of HERO and loved it back in the day. These days... hmmm I am not that big a fan of the Speed chart anymore. I ran it last year and everyone had the same Speed. Made the game go a lot faster.

IF Rolemaster is your thing but its too chart heavy you can try HARP, which still has charts (although there are some options to drop a lot of them) but not as many

I am a HUGE fan of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and my next fantasy game will probably use that. I also picked up Classic Fantasy for Runequest/Mystic and it is pretty cool. If you want to have a D&D like game in Runequest d100 that is the way I would go.

 

[GreenKarl]

If you DO follow through on the D&D in HERO campaign, start a new thread in here with the HERO header. There's enough HEROphiles on ENWorld to help with the heavy lifting of campaign design.

I played around with HERO 6th fantasy a while back... here where my notes just for food-for-thought

* Starting Campaign Points Heroic Fantasy: 150pts (Base 125 + up to 25 points of Complications). All characters start with a Speed of 4 for no points NOR can they invest points in Speed (this is a campaign limit/set)

* Heroic Fantasy assumptions: you purchase your gear with coin, END cost for STR is 1/5, round to the nearest, Pushing requires an EGO roll up to a max of +5 active points for 5 END.

* Characteristic Maximums are being used, but the character’s chosen Race will modify this up or down depending on their normal characteristic modifiers (for example Halflings suffer -4 to their STR scores but +2 to their DEX, so their characteristic maximums would be 16 STR and 22 DEX, etc.).

* Racial Templates allowed: for this standard fantasy campaign I would like to limit the races too Dwarf, Elf (any), Gnome, Half-Orc (use the standard Orc option), Halfling, and Humans. I may allow some of the Environmental/Ancestry Template on a case by case (except Vampires and maybe Lycanthropes) bases but these attribute adjustments cannot raise your normal characteristic maximums.

* Professions allowed: all are generally available including the Miscellaneous Templates.

* Starting Funds: 300 silver pieces. No prices are listed in Fantasy Hero Complete nor are all the weapons available so I copied them over Weapons & Armor from Fantasy Hero 6^th edition PDF
o Poor Characters (Social Complications – Infrequent, Minor) start with 150 sliver pieces and tend to “loss” money between adventures (on average ½ between each adventure). Destitute characters (Social Complication – Infrequent, Major) start with 25 silver pieces and lost ¾ any earned coin between adventures (This could include giving it away to poor children, gambling, drinking, etc.)
o Well Off – 1pt start with 350sp; 2pts start with 450sp; 3pts start with 600sp; 4pts start with 800sp and 5pts start with 1,000sp. Starting characters should not begin the game as Wealthy or above.

* I am using Encumbrance so watch what you are carrying as it can have an impact on your DCV, etc. Small sized characters (Halflings and Gnomes) armor and clothing weights ½ normal.

* Magical Assumptions: there are three main forms of magic in this setting – Divine or Miracles, Arcane or Sorcery magic and Alchemy. You just have to build them…
o Divine Magic – druids, priests, paladins and shaman use Divine Magic that must include the following Limitations: Requires a Skill (Faith) Roll (-1 per 20 active points, -¼) (Faith is based on the EGO attribute), Gesture (one hand must be free but can be holding a holy symbol, -¼), Incantations (speak firmly; -¼), OAF (holy symbol, etc. or an additional -3 to Faith roll without; -½). Note that Divine magic does not require an Endurance Reserve so does not get the ‘Spell’ limitations.
o Arcane Magic – bards, wizards, war-mages and witches use Arcane Magic or Sorcery to work magic and all require the following Limitations: Requires a Skill (Magic) Roll (-1 per 10 Active Points, -½; although Bards can take the -¼ limitation for -1 per 20 Active Points) (Magic is based on the Intelligence attribute), Gesture (both hands must be free but one can be holding the focus; -½), Incantations (speak firmly; -¼), OAF (staff, wand, instruments etc., or an additional -3 to Magic roll without; -½), Spells (-½). The Spell limitation means that all Magic casters require an Endurance Reserve to power their spells. All spells cast with normal Endurance have an automatic x2 cost (or 1/10 Active Points even for spells that normally cost 0 Endurance). The Endurance Reserve has to have the following limitation: Arcane Magic only (-¼) and the Recovery has the additional limitation: Recovers Only Once Per Hour (-1). Note that the OAF that is Expendable but easily acquired item is as the normal focus, but if requiring an Expendable and hard to acquire item increase the limitation by -¼, Difficult to acquire Expendable Focus are worth an additional -½ limitation. Other common limitations might include Extra Time (Full Phase; -½), Concentration (½ DCV; -¼) or (0 DCV; -½) and Side Effect (various).
o For both Divine and Arcane Powers, after the Base Cost has been determined, the Actual Cost that the caster must pay is ½ (round down) in Character Points. This does not apply to any Talent or general Powers that are always ‘On” though (Characteristics, etc.). Finally all spell-casters can spend extra Endurance to ignore some of these Limitation. Each -¼ ignored increase the Endurance by +1 step (i.e. 0 END would cost base END, base END cost would cost x2, etc.). Spellcasters can chose to ignore as much of their Powers limitation as they want to, if they are willing to spend the increased Endurance points.
o Alchemist are arcane (and occasionally divine) casters with a very different breakdown on cost. They create potions, elixirs, salves, unguents, and the like. All powers are built with the Delayed Effect advantage and can have no more the INT/2 (+¼) or INT (+½) of his own potions available for use at any time (“Available for use” includes giving them to another friendly person, but not selling them to strangers). Concentration (0 DCV throughout brewing; -1), Extra Time (6 Hours to brew; -3½), and Requires A Magic Roll (-1 per 10 Active Points, to brew; -½) (based on INT) are required Storing Limitations; they apply only to the creation of the potion, not its use. OAF Fragile (-1¼) and Charges (varies) are required Limitations for using them afterwards (in combat or not). Unlike other forms of spell casting an Alchemist cannot cast spells without first brewing them and do not require the Endurance Reserve. Also the final cost is not halved as other forms of magic. An alchemist requires a laboratory to create new potions.