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NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.
Need Help To Make/Find My Perfect D&D
- Thread starter AslanC
- Start date
Quickleaf
Legend
Looks cool, but alas we start the new campaign this Monday
Well with that kind of prep time you're going to be limited to something you could pick up at your FLGS, something you already own, or something you can download.
Browsing used bookstores or ordering books online is out.
Radiance, which meets many of your criteria, is a free download: http://www.radiancerpg.com/
On the OSR front I believe Castles & Crusades as well as ACKS have PDFs for sale.
Or, since you like AD&D so much, you could run a houseruled version of AD&D and limit spells.
GX.Sigma
Adventurer
I'm not sure what you mean. There's just movement and actions, and some actions let you do multiple things at once. It all relies pretty heavily on rule 0 as to what counts as an action or not. Actually, the entire system seems to assume the DM is going to gloss over the rules for the sake of keeping the game moving.
Neonchameleon
Legend
Just out of curiosity (feel free to say no and rule it out), have you looked at 4e? Every single point you make on the negative side is something it quite deliberately worked to eliminate. And everything you like is something it kept. (Of course it changed quite a lot of other things so you may not like it when push comes to shove) - if you want to give it a look I'd start with the Essentials line.
In specific before Essentials there were 25 classes, with an average of four subclasses for each and a lot of variation. Each race comes with a distinctive ability, and E6 is almost a design goal.
And on the critiques side, the 33 skills + 3 families, each with a separate rank have been cut to 17 skills with training being a flat +5. You gain abilities most levels. The feats, with the exception of weapon focus, aren't so overwhelming and are divided much better (but thisis a bloat problem). Spells were cut down to size (and most of them turned to rituals). Full round actions died, opportunity attacks are only triggered by movement or using long range powers, and most of the rest was streamlined. And the monster design guidelines are simple enough to fit on a business card and the encounter building gives you a flat number of points and you just go shopping (I've literally done it at the table while hunting through the minis box when the PCs decided to ignore any hooks I prepared and the combat still turned out life-threateningly tense) - 4e's a joy to DM. Just remember to pull out all the filler fights; the 4e combat engine is great for setpieces and annoying for sets of orcs.
The other thing I'd take a long look at that no one's mentioned so far is Dungeon World. For largely improv roleplaying, very little beats the Apocalypse World engine, and it's a fun and fast system with a very heavy emphasis on narrative.
AslanC
Explorer
I was looking at it, can you tell me more about it please?
No I dislike the spells of 3e.
C&C I own and the Seige Engine is meh, though it is the closest to what I want really.
Why Radiance? Tell me more about it please.
From the latest playtest package they talk about speed changes from prone and disengage actions, etc... can't stand that level of minutiae.
Sadly, no. I am one of those who got really excited about 4e and then played it and really lost all interest fast. I don't see my D&D that way, since my players don't raid dungeons, but go on epic quests and such. There is always a story. Explaining how the Paladin just teleported across the room, swapped places with another player and took the hit, well that stretches the amount of magic I really want in my campaigns.
I agree with the chap who suggested taking 3e and yanking out the bits I like, but I can do that with C&C I suppose... though there are bits in C&C I really despites... Siege engine being the primary one.
Iosue
Legend
Actually, I don't own it, nor have I played it, so I can't tell you much. But I know it's based around the B/X rules, has some new rules for mass combat and domain-ruling, and from people who like B/X type games, I've only heard good things.
There's really not much in the way of minutiae, unless you want it. The disengage action is pretty much the same as the fighting withdrawal of B/X: move up to half speed away to get out of melee. And speed changes are pretty much moving at half-speed also (5 feet lost from move for every 5 feet moved). It's just written the way it is to make it easily transferable to a battle mat, if that's what one wants.
Next is pretty much designed to be playable in a B/X style. Don't want to have to worry about feats and skills? Just pick the standard background and specialty for that class. Don't want to deal with sub-classes/traditions/deities? Just use the archetypal subclasses: scholarly wizardry, lifebringer cleric, etc. Or just think of the sub-classes as separate classes, if you want the variety. Ignore conditions you don't want to track and make liberal use of Advantage/Disadvantage. The playtest just seems a little full now because they've thrown in a bunch toys for the folks who love crunch.
Neonchameleon
Legend
If I could go back in time and erase Keep on the Shadowfell (and probably Pyramid from Shadows and most of Scales of War with it) from history I probably would. (Well, I'd join the pile-up round whether to kill Hitler first - but that's a whole different story). 4e is to be quite honest third rate at dungeon crawls and works really well for epic quests (especially if you extend the recharge to take more than one day) - and as a veteran of 4e, the only way I can think of for the Paladin to teleport across the room, swap places, and take the hit involves multiclassing into sword mage and taking some explicitely arcanely magical powers. Or possibly multiclassing Warlock ... and taking some explicitely arcanely magical powers (although Warlocks are a whole lot less keen on the whole "Taking the hit" thing). Now lunging five feet and taking the hit would be entirely expected.
4e when it came out was about a year undercooked (mostly because they abandoned the first draft a year in and went back to the drawing board), and the early adventures for it were terrible. I've fairly recently played heroic tier in Middle Earth using only martial classes, and there was absolutely nothing the PCs did that would have been out of place for the LotR or Hobbit protagonists (and I don't mean Gandalf). But it took about a year for 4e to find its feet as a game - and they redid the most useful two thirds of the Monster Manual 1 as Monster Vault. As it ended up is sounding more and more like what you want.
Iosue
Legend
I agree that 4e is awesome at epic quests and stories. What's more, I think it's even good at dungeon crawls, if you throw out sunrods, and approach adventure design in a B/X way, and if you enjoy granular combat.
But 4e does work best when you approach it with "here's the effect I'm going to have, and this is how I explain it". It sounds like the OP prefers a "this is what I'm going to do, and now we find out what effect it has."
AslanC
Explorer
My players and I are very narrative and story driven. We don't tend to use maps or figures. We tend to want simpler systems that do not have bog down rules, as the minutae about "half move actions" etc... We are a bunch of old men with not much time to learn rules anymore.
I think gutting C&C is the way for us to go.
I think gutting C&C is the way for us to go.
Quickleaf
Legend
My players and I are very narrative and story driven. We don't tend to use maps or figures. We tend to want simpler systems that do not have bog down rules, as the minutae about "half move actions" etc... We are a bunch of old men with not much time to learn rules anymore.
I think gutting C&C is the way for us to go.
Yep, I agree. C&C is good for grognards in theater-of-the-mind style play. It's familiar, it's simple, there's plenty of resources to make prep easy. Bam. Problem solved.
