Oath Hammer - new d6 dice pool fantasy rpg

[Broken Blade Publishing]

Does this mean that a successful attack can do no damage? It looks like the Damage Dice need to succeed, or they don't do damage. And they're reduced by Armor Dice (successes) as well?

That is correct! The goal was to create narratively intuitive combat rules. An attack roll determines if an attack physically lands on the target. More successful attack rolls deal more damage, reflecting the differences between grazing strikes and accurate blows. The armor roll determines if the attack slips into a gap, completely deflects, or maybe causes a minor wound. There is a tradeoff between defense and armor. Heavily armored characters are usually easier to hit, though trying to bypass their armor is more difficult.

This is different than say D&D where an attack is more abstract. A "miss" could mean the attack failed to land completely or it landed on an armored location. Because all forms of defense are combined into a single statistic (Armor Class), it is difficult to present interesting mechanical differences between lightly armored combatants that are difficult to hit and heavily armored combatants that can wade through melees. In Oath Hammer, fighting styles are meaningfully different and each excels in different scenarios. Because dodging/parrying is different than armor, we can also incorporate armor penetration mechanics.

What is it about hex-maps that is so mysterious and inviting? More seriously, how do the rules for diplomacy, warfare, and subterfuge compare, in bulk/complexity, to the individual combat rules?

I think hex-crawling makes travel feel more substantive. Players can think about the routes they want to take and acquire gossip about clearly defined regions.

The domain rules for things like diplomacy and warfare were designed to be simple and easy to use. We want the players to engage with these rules early on in a campaign and we offer the GM tables to randomly determine faction activity.

 

[jdrakeh]

Shoot me lol. That's got to be intentionally silly right?

Maelstrom Storytelling used/uses a die pool system where only odds count as successes vs. a target number. It's a legitimate system.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It's a legitimate system.

So is Dread using a Jenga towers. Doesn't mean I want anything to do with it, even if I respect the cleverness with Dread.

With Maelstrom, I think I'd need math-based explanation of why they had to make that decision, why only that method could work for them. Because otherwise it's just being difficult imho.

 

[jdrakeh]

With Maelstrom, I think I'd need math-based explanation of why they had to make that decision, why only that method could work for them.

That might be difficult. While Maelstrom is technically still in print, it's through a different publisher. I think the original designers are no longer involved with the TTRPG industry.

 

[Matrix Sorcica]

If you have any questions about the game please reach out!

EU friendly shipping?

 

[Broken Blade Publishing]

EU friendly shipping?

Orders are being fulfilled from the US. We are eating some of the cost for shipping to help offset any customs fees.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

OK quick glance through Quickstart:

• Basic mechanic is a dice-pool but the COLOUR of the dice, which is determined by the rules, affects the number needed to succeed.

As such it's kind of a hybrid of 2 and 5 on my list, but I guess because it's predictable and reliable - i.e. white dice = is always 4+ success, red = 3+, black = 2+ it's basically fixed number roll. Uses d6s as thread title notes. 6es explode indefinitely. So far all abilities that change die colour change the colour of ALL the dice in the roll, which is also good (I don't know if this is 100%, true, just all the ones I saw glancing through).

You have a Difficulty Value (DV) which is usually 1 to 5, and each dice that beats that makes the required number for its colour is a success. Your success value (SV) is successes minus difficulty, so 3 successes on difficulty 3 is SV0, which is a success but like, I noticed for example the Mage's Magic Bolt (their main magic attack) does SV dice of damage based on the attack roll, so if you only got SV0, 0 = 0 damage dice sooooo... (Weapons have extra dice so even SV0 gets to roll damage but not default Magic Bolt apparently).

Bonuses and penalties are always to number of dice, so +2 bonus = roll 2 more dice.

• The art style and very intentional font and colour palette choice are big "Early 2nd Edition" vibes stuff. Very specifically, like, 1989 through 1994, before they re-did the core books with as different style in 1995.
• General very heroic/good-guy-oriented tone
• Ancestries are a bit more detailed than I expected - none shown any kind of special vision modes - hooray!
• Classes seem pretty cool and have a lot of fairly powerful-sounding abilities - somehow reminiscent of PF2
• Rogue/Thief is "Delver" in keeping with the tone
• The titular Oaths are significant - each PC picks three from stuff like Humility, Courage, Peace - all classically virtuous, no bad-disguised-as-good at least in the quickstart, though a couple are classically virtuous but not necessarily actually virtuous (Justice and Purity), depending on perspective. If you fail to uphold them you get big penalties and RAW don't get XP at all that session (I suspect this is actually "don't gain bonus XP" but...).
• XP system is not level-based but like White Wolf games and so on, i.e. buying up traits etc.
• Don't understand how magic works, maybe later - spells look more like say, Dragon's Dogma than D&D though.
• Loads of skills didn't read them
• Side-based initiative
• Combat seems like moderately complex dice-pool stuff (really glanced through though) with 5E-esque Action rules (bit of a yawn)
• Literally in the rules that attackers usually ignore apparently downed characters (even if they're faking!) in keeping with the "heroic" 2E-ish tone rather a 1E-ish "grim n gritty" tone.
• Very hard to die if you reserve a luck point or two in case you get taken out, but you probably do get injured (again in keeping with tone)
• No levels and thus no linear HP gain - Your "Grit points" are likely to remain close to their initial value if I'm reading correctly.
• Some kind of slot-based equipment tracking system (rather than encumbrance or the like)

Overall? Looks like an interesting and potentially decent trad-style system for running heroic fantasy that's neither as over-the-top as D&D 5E rapidly gets nor as grim/gritty as a lot of OSRs want things to be, and that's not level-based (a major plus for me). It definitely DOES NOT want you have to have mean or evil or even uncaring PCs, I note, this is very much "We're the good guys" kind of game, though I do wonder a little how well that's going to fit the "kill all the ugly humanoids" deal it also seems to have going on - they've at least tried to minimize the racism/colonialism factor by having the orcs be like, Saxon/Viking-esque (right down to titles like "jarl"), making it so they're invaders (and thus presumably the orc women/children are back in orcland), and making it so the dwarves are "reclaiming" their lost holds from them (which were lost fairly recently, too, not lifetimes ago - in fact about half a dwarven lifetime), but for me it sits a little uncomfortably with the "heroism". It's not impossible or anything, just a little "Hmmmm".

That said in the full setting it's sort of implied orcs/goblins will be a sideshow rather than the "main" bad guys (who seem to be not present in the quickstart) who they are also fighting.

I mean any game like this where you are the good guys is going to use a morality that does not dictate that violence is Evil unless absolutely unquestionably necessary.

Not even all modern moral codes do so, and almost no ancient moral codes did, so it shouldn’t be that hard to square IMO. Killing violent invaders is good. Killing kids and innocent farmers is evil.

As long as you aren’t “taming” a land by killing and displacing the local “savages”, I don’t think fantasy colonialism really comes into the picture.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I mean any game like this where you are the good guys is going to use a morality that does not dictate that violence is Evil unless absolutely unquestionably necessary.

Not even all modern moral codes do so, and almost no ancient moral codes did, so it shouldn’t be that hard to square IMO. Killing violent invaders is good. Killing kids and innocent farmers is evil.

As long as you aren’t “taming” a land by killing and displacing the local “savages”, I don’t think fantasy colonialism really comes into the picture.

I don't fundamentally disagree, but I also don't think it's 100% effective here, at least from the quickstart. But I can't fully judge the situation without seeing the full game, and I suspect it'll look a little better in full context. And I do appreciate that they at least tried to make it significantly less "colonial violence"/"hooray for genocide!" than was somewhat common in 1980s and to some extent 1990s (and even a bit later), with the Orcs both being actual invaders (though the timeline is slightly confusing here) and resembling Norse/Saxon culture rather than a non-white culture (I once before suggested if I did Arthurian D&D I'd cast the Saxons as Orcs so makes sense to me!). I think to be fully effective you'd want to use an fantasy species that doesn't have a long history of being used as sort of "free genocide target", but that conflicts with the nostalgic appeal of "Dwarves vs Orcs", so I guess a decision had to be made (I'd have considered making elves the evil invaders - but again maybe there are evil elves - hopefully not dark-skinned - in the main product).

I do like that the oaths kind of force the PCs into being like, actually good - the meanest you could make a PC from the codes in the quickstart is Justice and Purity, but you'd still need a third. And as you're probably looking at 3+ PCs, probably with little/no overlap on their oaths, and with serious consequences if they break them (which seems like it includes allowing others to act adversely to them when they could do something about it), the party as a whole is probably operating under much stricter rules than even most LG/NG-filled early edition parties.