Settings and stories the rules can't handle (or don't handle well)

[gamerprinter]

Drain Magic
When a caster casts a spell the caster takes damage. You can cast spells till you die, thats the only limiting factor. (the potential problem I see with this in D&D is healing magic as they dont have a drain stat)

Improv Magic
You make up your spells on the fly. There is no spell list, sometimes it may have a component or gesture requirement depending on the fiction. Most games like this have a couple tables (area, power, etc) and a skill roll to see if you succeeded in casting whatever you wanted. For example in Mage I could be running away from some goons and decided I want to create a banana peel under them or that I want to teleport to Mt Everest.

Although I'm not as adept at Psionics rules, one of my players played a psionicist that had an ability to drain/take ability damage in exchange for enchancing other abilities or otherwise enhancing a powerful psi attack.

Perhaps take deliberate CON damage per spell cast, limiting your spell capability to your CON score, zero CON is death. Ensure to have some restoration spells handy to keep on casting a bit longer than your stat score. If you should be able to cast more spells, make it two spells for one CON, or whatever other measure works best.

My previous post pretty much handled my way for your improv caster. If I could recognize when a casters impromtu spell as equaling a 5th level Wizard's spell, then I assign the spell to the slot and expend it. Continue until all your slots are gone.

Know this, that I'm a startup 3pp, and I've been working on settings for Pathfinder, that have rules specific to the settings, but are designed to integrate well to PF Core. So this kind of exercise is what I've been doing for much of the last year or so in RL.

GP

 

[MortonStromgal]

Cool, one of the problems I foresee with the improv is what do you do when you run out of 5th level slots? In most of the improv magic fiction I'm aware of the limiting factors on spells is usually wanting to be subtle, you can cast all day long. In most of the games that use improv magic everyone plays a caster

[edit] personally I'm fine with the limited spell slot except I want spell pts not slots so if I used up my 5th level but I have a bunch of 1st level slots left I can trade them in for another 5th level.

 

[utopia27]

i've gotta take the cheap road out - look at a general/universal system, then back out to whatever your current system is.

Because I burned pathways into my brain for it, I strongly prefer to analyze mechanics with reference to Hero Games/Champions, then drag the results kicking and screaming into whatever system I started from. This, for instance, is how my brain processes improv magic: desired effect -> Hero writeup -> active and final costs -> compare to known spells expressed that way -> back to D&D with the appropriate level and/or changes.... OK, it got a little ugly when I was trying to drag Mage the Awakening improv into Seventh Seas mechanics, using Hero as my arbitrator... but it did/does work.

At the end of the day, I haven't found a lot of settings/mechanics that I can't implement in Hero fairly straightforwardly, as long as I'm willing to pick a convention, then run with it (debates about "right" get tedious). It gets a solid first-order approximation with decent balance to it.

Exotic-ish sorta things that are challenging are:
- Anime giant robots in space: lots of movement, lots of robots, lots of mixed-scale stuff (humans & animorphic robots & giant space cruisers).
- Systems that explicitly recognize PCs v. non-PCs (Ars Magica - style)
- improvisational magic (though largely from a time-at-game table)

</ramble>

 

[Dausuul]

Oh, well, if you're allowed to make up new rules to that extent--yeah, you can adapt D&D to a lot of settings then. But I don't think you can say "the D&D rules can handle that setting" if homebrewing new subsystems and classes is required to make it fit!

 

[Stormonu]

Eragon is something I don't see the D&D system handling very well. Same would go for Dragonriders of Pern. Heck, I'd love to do a How to Train Your Dragon campaign with my kids. Without heavily modifying the game, I don't see 1st level characters running around with the likes of full-blooded draconic companions.

Harry Potter is another series that I've seen people want emulated by the D&D rules, but which I haven't seen a good result from. (Though I believe 4E implements were created just to help replicate the wands of the novels).

 

[gamerprinter]

Oh, well, if you're allowed to make up new rules to that extent--yeah, you can adapt D&D to a lot of settings then. But I don't think you can say "the D&D rules can handle that setting" if homebrewing new subsystems and classes is required to make it fit!

All my examples stayed within the rules pretty much, I didn't invent any systems or mechanics that didn't already exist in D&D/Pathfinder. The really odd stuff like an improv caster, how else could it be done easily, so yeah, the wierd stuff takes some shoe-horning.

In my intended setting publications for Pathfinder, I've added plenty of additional rules and mechanics that specifically fit my settings and is certainly not RAW, but are designed to mesh directly to Pathfinder RAW without breaking the game. The point is it doesn't take much to tweak the rules to fit a different theme or premise. Its not like I have restart the whole system from scratch to add something new. Just a tweak here and there and D&D ruleset works fine for most things.

If this thread is about being purist RAW, then no, its more difficult - but then who really wants a purist RAW situation ever. The game is made to be creative and for modification, so that's what I do to make a better game, or better fit an intended theme, genre, wierd mechanic...

GP

 

[green slime]

Of course it can be done. It doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to put something together.

 

[Aus_Snow]

I would venture to say that, with the exception of novels explicitly based on D&D properties and settings specifically made for D&D, I have never encountered a novel or a setting where I felt D&D did have the rules for that.

Indeed. D&D is its own genre (subgenre; whatever.) Some D&D books - or the equivalent - will even tell you this, outright! IOW, that D&D is NOT for "generic" (or, um, most types of) fantasy. In general, it works very poorly for such, if at all.

Again and again, I see threads regarding rules and story. Honestly that's apples and oranges. It ain't the system that can't handle the story, its the DM. Sometimes it takes some adjunction to the ruleset, if you want to be more precise with some 'new' mechanic. But generally it should be able to be shoe-horned in within an existing mechanic - psionics, arcane, divine, ki, clockwork/alchemy, or an alternate rules using one of those subsets.

While you could come up with some bizarre, unrealistic setting requirements and task the system rules you use. It shouldn't be too difficult.

Story is completely in the hands of the DM, and really has nothing to do with the rules. If the DM can handle the new story element, the mechanics should work right off no problem.

Rubbish.

Fantasy stories tend to be full of "mechanics" assumptions/implications, particularly to do with magic, but sometimes other things as well. To get D&D to fit such kinds of stories is, well, basically a lost cause. Unless you feel like rewriting the system from the ground up. Oh, fun. Mind you, I have at times done that, more or less. But time is finite, as is patience. And hey, there might be a game out there that is actually better suited, straight out of the box, so to speak. Or with considerably less tinkering required. Or, it might simply be such a flexible system (e.g., M&M) that nearly any genre or subgenre is doable, with ease. . . provided you don't mind the level of "crunch" that game brings with it in the first place.

This issue is highly relevant to me right now, because a small group of potential players has asked me to run something similar to some of the modern(-ish) fantasy fiction they're familiar with - as opposed to D&D, which they tried and disiliked - so, I've been trying to figure out the right game for them. I even started a thread in another forum here, asking about just that. M&M would've been an option, but a) it's d20-based, and b) it's very complex, so maybe not so good for those just getting into RPGs.

Even if they hadn't been opposed to D&D to begin with, I wouldn't have chosen it (or Pathfinder, etc.), simply because the subgenre it supports, or indeed has created, doesn't suit their needs.

System matters. Unfortunately, that's also a Forge-like saying, or so I hear, but well, if I agree with the odd thing here and there, I'm sure I can avoid gonig to hell, if I'm good the rest of the time.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

You can make any system do anything if you squint hard enough and don't ask questions about why stuff doesn't line up right.

<edit>

But being able to bash and squint and shoehorn the rules into something vaguely, sort-of resembling the setting is different from having suitable rules for the setting. Honestly, I find it very hard to imagine a ruleset that could handle any fantasy setting well other than the one it was built for--or the ones that were built for it.

I agree with this 85%.

The other 15% of me says, "Look at toolbox systems like HERO, GURPS or M&M...they can handle any setting."*

To date, I haven't found a setting I couldn't model with HERO, with enough thought. At one point, I had rules for running 2Ed D&D- including all the class & PC race quirks- for HERO 4th Fantasy HERO. Why? Because the group I was in hadn't played D&D but had played HERO. It was easier for me to do a little prep work and run the campaign with the Fantasy HERO rules. (OK, more than a little prep work...alas, all lost due to software obsolescence.)



* Though odds are high that a RPG built from the ground up to model a given setting SHOULD do a better job than a toolbox system.

 

[jonesy]

You could play a high-concept epic fantasy game using the Monopoly rules.

At first I thought: that's funny, and probably true.

Then I thought: now hang on a minute, there are quite a lot of versions of the game already.

And then I went to google and found this:
[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-Monopoly-Lord-Rings-Trilogy/dp/B00009YEHI]Amazon.com: Monopoly - The Lord of the Rings Trilogy Edition: Toys & Games[/ame]

Yikes, wait till my grandpa sees this. That's all he'll want to play.