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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8282578" data-attributes="member: 70468">I’ve mostly completed my read-through of the Deluxe edition. The only parts I haven’t finished reading (“Heroic Classes and Characters”, “Legates”) are ones I won’t be using (because I want OSR-style grittiness).I think the book is fairly well organized. Most rules are organized together in a logical way. It’s a breath of fresh air coming from Pathfinder 2e, but it lacks the succinctness of Old-School Essentials. Sometimes it uses bolded text to call out important things, but there is room for improvement. The “Magic” chapter in particular buries important information in paragraphs of text. You have to dig to find out how many spells you learn or gain at advancement.There are some parts that weren’t great (though they don’t detract from my overall like of the system). WWN is based on B/X, but it omits several key procedures. There is a section on wilderness exploration, but there is no procedure for running it. There are also no procedures for handling encounters. B/X has a strong procedure, and it tells you when and how to transition. This is particularly problematic in WWN because this is one of the few places where the rules are not all in the same place. Reaction rolls, morale, and instinct (a new mechanic) are all off in a separate chapter (“Creatures of a Far Age”).WWN describes several different types of challenges you can run, and they’re mostly pretty good. However, the investigation challenge is not. When I was first skimming the book, I initially thought it was discussing <a href="https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule" target="_blank">three clue rule</a>. That had me excited initially, but I was wrong. It actually abandons the sandbox approach for a railroad: run three scenes to discover the clues, and the PCs have to succeed at them all or fail (or get a deus ex machina). There are <a href="https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/8171/roleplaying-games/advanced-node-based-design-part-1-moving-between-nodes" target="_blank">techniques</a> you can overlay a sandbox to support a mystery scenario, so I was very disappointed by that.I also don’t care for the bestiary. The writing is really good and evocative. The new creatures are really creepy. However, everything is (again) buried in walls of text. Abilities are noted in bold, but if you want to run a creature, you have to dig out the supporting text from the fluff. If I weren’t doing my own setting, I’d have to prepare my own stat blocks for a lot of things.I think the only issue I have is I wish projects had more mechanical weight (something like a progress clock). They give you some structure for figuring out who might get involved or be affected by it, but the resolution appears to come down mostly to fiat. Given the mechanics behind factions, which seems like a cool way to create a dynamic world without a lot of work on the GM’s part, that was also a bit disappointing.It’s also worth calling out that there is an undocumented group check mechanic. “The Rules of the Game” describes how to run skill checks. It discussed scenarios where the group needs to work together to help one person succeed (“Aiding a Skill Check”), but WWN also has rules for when the group needs to succeed collectively. Both escape and foraging have you use the best modifier of the group to make a single check. I only stumbled across this because the surprise rules make no sense without group checks (what happens if everyone rolls but some fail? It’s not said).Otherwise, I think the GMing stuff is pretty cool. There are tons of tables, and I’m really looking forward to getting into setting creation (more on that below). The system as a whole has a very strong 3e vibe. I’d describe it as B/X with the best of 3e added.We ran a one-shot last week, and we’re switching to it as the system of choice for my campaign. We were already doing a sandbox, so all the tools are very handy. I already have my own setting, which already fit somewhat (due to Dying Earth influences), but I’m starting the process of setting creation to see if it could improve things and to bring it in line with WWN’s default assumptions.The session itself went pretty well. I posted a <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/a-pathfinder-group-tries-old-school-essentials.677957/post-8274911" target="_blank">bit about it</a> in my “A Pathfinder Group Tries Old-School Essentials” thread. We struggled with OSE because the characters just didn’t have enough meat to them for my players, and combat was just too hard. They felt completely incompetent. In WWN, the classes have more mechanical weight, and things like Shock damage make warriors extremely awesome at killing things. As one of my players put it, the game felt dangerous, but they weren’t pathetically weak.I’ve just started working through the setting creation chapter. The thing that really sticks out is how frequently Kevin reminds you to keep your focus on producing playable material, which is a good thing. While adapting my setting during world creation, I found I actually had a lot of gaps. I’d just defined some species because I wanted the PCs to have options in prior iterations (5e, PF2, OSE), but none of that was really tied together in a believable way. I’d defined various homelands for the species, but the core conceit prevented them from working. I’d also been struggling through the <a href="https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17308/roleplaying-games/hexcrawl" target="_blank">Alexandrian’s approach to hexcrawls</a>, which proved just to onerous, so the region where play was actually happened turned out to be very poorly defined.Here’s an example of what I mean with regards to the species and their homelands. When I worked through world creation, it asks if there are any special physics in your setting. I’d originally conceived of the setting as a hard sci-fi setting but got away from that in a later revision. I wanted to pivot back to that but keep the general nature of the changes I’d made in the revision (where the world was flat), so the world became an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alderson_disk" target="_blank">Alderson disk</a>. Also inspired by Frederick Pohl’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_at_the_End_of_Time" target="_blank">The World at the End of Time</a>, I wanted the world to be traveling at relativistic speeds after the death of the universe (it just hadn’t caught up with the setting yet).That’s all neat, but WWN keeps reminding the GM: you can have fun with setting creation if you like, but you need to be focusing on creating usable, playable content. That lead me to start thinking about the implications of those core setting conceits. How do I have seasons (the sun’s precession causes them due to the wobble induced by the mechanism that keeps it from crashing into the disk)? How can you navigate between continents if the stars are gone (due to the death of the universe)? Well, you can’t, and that’s what told me I need to reconsider the original premise of the campaign (an expedition sent to another continent) and how the PCs would even be part of such thing.Fortuitously, I had events in my setting’s history that could map nicely into some of the system’s assumptions. The War of the Giants had taken place in the past, and it resulted in the departure of dragons in the setting. I took that and reframed that a bit. The departure of the dragons happened with a precursor civilization (at an unspecified point in the past) when the dragons came and destroyed them. This time, the War of the Giants became a war between the current empire and the fiends and celestials who descended from the heavens (around the time the stars started going out, which some people mistook as the gods in heaven coming down to punish them). Eventually, the fiends and celestials also disappeared for some reason, and about a thousand years later, we have the current date.What I’m left with is a world that’s dying, in decline, and making progress is difficult. The Legacy of prior civilizations doesn’t want to be understood, so people struggle to advance beyond what they have discovered. Because of the lack of stars, there are few living outside of settled areas, so much of the wilderness is untamed and dangerous. Once I start adding the other layers (regional and kingdom backdrops, geography, nations, factions, etc), I should have a sandbox setting with a lot of potential and mechanics and tools to make that work. Because of how burdensome it is to prep all the things, the settlement where the campaign is based is barely detailed, and that sucks (because it means it barely makes sense and isn’t a good source of events or drama even though it should be).I didn’t like the official one (or any of the unofficial ones), so I put together a <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/hhtmdraopkxuks3/WWN%20Character%20Sheet.pdf" target="_blank">character sheet</a>. There are a handful of things that don’t have dedicated boxes: initiative, speed, languages. To be honest, I forgot to include them, but they have reasonable defaults, and they can be put in the notes section on the back.</blockquote>

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