One of the Many Things I like about the Conan RPG...

[Water Bob]

...is that it is easily played with one, two, or just a few players. Traditional D&D (of which I'm a big fan, btw), is designed for party play. The cleric, mage, thief, fighter, et. al., all have their parts to play when tackling the typical obstacles presented in a D&D game.

With Conan, it's easy to design adventures that focus on just one or a few PCs. Crafty GMs can even focus their games on one Conan-esque hero with a second or third player playing different characters as different sidekicks come and go.

Now, I'm not saying that you can't structure a D&D game like this. You can. But, that's not a traditional D&D game. D&D emphasizes team work and senario obstacles that requires skills from different D&D classes. Conan makes it easier to design and play games with fewer players.

 

[Water Bob]

Thanks, Rumbletiger. Yeah, the same is one of the things I loved about the old James Bond RPG from Victory Games. You and one other player could sit down, with your player playing a 00 agent, and have a blast. If you had two or three players, one could play the 00 while the rest ran the sidekick NPCs (which, in this case, would make them PCs). Or, you could have all the players play junior agents.

With the Bond game, five players was a crowd, and the GM would run into situations where the different characters would try to be efficient with all of them running off in different directions to tackle the spy problem at hand, almost Mission Impossible style.

Conan is more flexible, but it is, and can accomodate stories of a large party of people (escape gladiators, for example--or members of a Zuagir-esqe band of thieves) and a PC party of one (just the GM and one player playing).

In my current campaign, I've got two players, and both are of the same class: Currently 3rd level Cimmerian Barbarians.

The action is thriving, in a good Swords & Sorcery, Conan-esque kind of way.

I'm not saying that this is better than the standard D&D approach. It's not. It's just a different way to play--and something GMs may consider if they find their gaming group shrinking (as mine has, over the years, with people I've gamed wih for decades moving off to other cities and states).

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

Does this work largely because Conan is a very low magic game?

 

[Water Bob]

Does this work largely because Conan is a very low magic game?

That certainly has something to do with it, but I also think the class design helps a great deal. In order to multiclass, the only limitation is the GM (for example, I can't see a Barbarian multiclassing as a Pirate if the Barbarian has never been on the sea). Other than that, though, it's easy to multiclass.

Multiclassing provides skills needed to overcome problems. It's easy to multiclass, and characters with INT bonus can put some of their skill points into Cross Class skills without having to pay double.

The game is well designed to fit Howard's Hyborian Age.

For example, Conan became a thief in his early years, when he first set sandled foot into civilization. This made the character a Barbarian/Thief multiclass.

Conan, in the stories, was really more of a second-story man. You never see him picking locks or fiddling with traps. He uses his Climb (class skill for Barbarian) a lot to get him into less guarded areas.

In the Conan game, although there is a thief class, it's not necessary to be a thief class in order to be a thief. Conan could Climb, and he stole. That made him a thief--not his character class.

The same goes for priests and mages. In the Conan game, neither of those have a class. For example, the Pirate captain who is worshipped by native islanders, the Mercenary commander who leads fiercly loyal troops, or the Scholar-classed character who has studied the ancient texts and foretold the coming of an ancient god, all can be considered priests.




Yes, there is magic in a Conan game. Read any Conan story, and it is almost guarranteed that some sorcery will be in the tale, if not the focus of the plot. But, magic is used much differently than it is in a normal D&D game.

A good example is the location of my current game: An under-hill cave complex that serves as the fort/HQ for the bad guys.

In a D&D game, this place (since my game is low level) might be full goblins and kobolds, mayber a goblin shaman, a bugbear, a few hoboblins, and then a lot of extra stuff, here and there: gelatinous cube, giant weasle, giant spider, one skeleton and one zombie, etc.

But, in my Conan game, I packed the place with enemy clan members (human, barbarian classed), a few envoys from a far-off realm, and the giant spider which the baddies use for sport and prisoner interrogation. The one sorcerer in the place knows only one spell--a powerful spell that calls on the power of a demon to bring in gaseous beasties.

The D&D adventure might include several types of baddies for the PCs to face. In the Conan adventure, it is much more likely that the single sorcerer will call forth only one type of unnatural being for the players to fight.