Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Water Bob" data-source="post: 5887545" data-attributes="member: 92305">This could easily turn into a nasty opinon war, and I'm not looking for that.  This is a serious question.  I'm interested at the opinions of the gaming community as a whole. My observation is that, in this age of anybody-can-produce-products-for-your-favorite-RPG, many gaming products are not well thought out and hardly playtested. Back in the day, if a product game from the original publisher, you could probably bank on the quality being there.  If the product came from a third party, then it was hit and miss whether the product was any good. Of course, this is all very subjective. Take the 3.x D&D game.  That's a pretty well thought out and game tested game.  Sure, you might have some problems with certain aspects of the game--maybe even a rule or two.  But, on the whold the game feels "solid" and well designed. I can't say that for a lot of third party material I've seen.  Heck, even from a semi-big publisher like Mongoose.  Many of you know I play the Conan RPG, and I think the Core Rules are fantastic--a great variation on standard 3.5 D&D. But, if you look at some of the secondary books, it would blow your mind.  For example, The Conan RPG Warrior's Companion, by Bryan Steele, has a pretty neat looking optional rule for using permanent damage in the game.  I say it's "pretty neat", until you dig into it and see that one of the ways to use the Permanent Damage Chart is when a weapon scores maximum damage on damage dice.  For example, a broadsword (in Conan) does 1d10 damage.  A dagger does 1d4 damage.  If, when using the broadsword, a 10 shows up on the damage die, then the Permanent Damage chart is consulted.  Same thing if the dagger shows a 4 on its d4 damage throw. I bet you've already caught what's wrong with that.  A bigger, larger, more powerful weapon, the broadsword, has a chance at permanent damage 10% of the time a successful strike is made while the dagger will go to the chart over twice as often, 25% of the time the dagger hits. Really?  They didn't think about these rules when they were writing them?  They didn't playtest them?     In my Cimmeria sourcebook, there are some sample Cimmerian NPCs.  But, good luck using the rules trying to duplicate those exact same examples.  You can't. C'mon!  This is basic!   Even today, I e-mailed one of the prolific writers of the Conan RPG to ask him a question about the Conan Rules on trapmaking out in the wilderness.  There's a couple of pages devoted to it in one of the supplemental books, but it's not complete.  I'm wondering if a paragraph or two got mistakenly chopped by the editor for length. Well, when I e-mailed the guy (and I love a lot of his work), he told me that he couldn't remember what he did when he wrote that section of the book.  It could have been anything--something tweaked from another d20 game. Hmm...    And, I think that is the root of this perceived problem.  Many game companies hire fans to write books for them.  I've seen it happen with most of the Mongoose lines.  I know it used to happen with some GURPS books.  With Traveller 2300, the same thing. Heck, I'm just as qualified to write many of these books as the original authors.  It's like some of the publishing companies are just handing the writing duties over to GMs who've played RPGs for a long time, then edit and publish what's turned in. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't any good 3rd party supplements out there.  Because, I know there is some good 3rd party stuff.  I own some of it. But, I hate it when I get a book and it just feels like another GM's rantings rather than a well-written sourcebook written by a professional game designer. Does anybody understand what I'm saying? Or, am I just ranting here?</blockquote>

Verification