The Wheel of Time RPG

[CapnZapp]

The biggest flaw was using d20. Can't be bothered with such mind-numbing complexity any longer. Doesn't surprise me when you say it wasn't very balanced.

The other big flaw was a lack of support.

For humanocentric fantasy I'd recommend the upcoming Song of Ice and Fire game by Green Ronin. Assuming it's followed by a decent bunch of adventures (say a dozen modules or so; not just the one campaign), that is.

 

[drothgery]

As someone above mentioned the Aiel felt underpowered... they're supposed to be all badass but their PrC (or is that a base class?) seemed rather gimp.

The Aiel base class is woodsman (native terrain: desert). That algai class was just for show .

I'd kind of like to see a respin of the game after Brandon Sanderson finishes A Memory of Light; I think using 4e or Star Wars Saga or something in between as a base would work out a lot better than using 3e did.

 

[Stogoe]

The WoT RPG was the first system I ever ran as a DM. I don't remember much of the plot, but I do remember having to rein in a falling damage loophole because uppercutting the enemies with the One Power seemed cheesy. That problem was inherent in the 3e base, though. I used to be pretty involved in the WoT RPG homebrew community until WotC closed their message board. They even had a homebrew blademaster with forms that in retrospect was quite close to the Book of Nine Swords. I thought the magic item rules and the casting system were both a good attempt at emulating the magic of the books and something fun and different than the 3e magic system.

I do remember I set the game after Winter's Heart, far away from the protagonists, and that seemed to smooth out some of the bystander-ism.

 

[Plane Sailing]

They had some neat ideas in there - I liked

* Healing spells which converted damage to subdual - so you still had to rest and recover, but recovery came quicker

* Latent feats - a way of making very powerful feats becoming available through the investment of two feat slots; one for the latent feat and then three levels later one for the actual feat.

I thought Aiel were poorly done as a class, and should have been a prestige class - when I was working with the game I turned them into a prestige class (typically based upon the Woodsman for pre-prestige Aiel)

There was one other issue I felt was poorly done, but I'm tired and I can't remember at the moment

 

[Jhaelen]

Yup. We had a similar experience.

And so did we! Our problem can be easily summarized in one word: Trollocs.

It was the shortest rpg campaign I ever participated in (well, okay, it was exactly as short as our attempt at playing Rolemaster...).

 

[dm4hire]

Ubiquity would actually be the best system I think to capture the feel of WoT. Desolation RPG introduced a freeform magic system to Ubiquity that would work perfectly. The way it works is you calculate what your spell does then roll to see if you succeed. Each success goes towards the spell with extras amplifying it, however each failure not only hinders but causes "burn" which the character takes as damage. A little tweaking and you'd have channelers down perfectly.

 

[kitsune9]

I picked this up along with the adventure "Prophecies of the Dragon" at a Used book store earlier today. I am on book seven of the Wheel of Time series and I am enjoying it thus far.

I have not gone over it too heavily, so I am just giving my first impression here. Looking through the book I find that it is well laid out, having the classes in the third chapter seemed odd to me, but no big deal.

One thing the Wheel of Time series has really done for me is open me up to the world of Humanocentic fantasy. I admit, before picking up these books, I did not really consider them the type of fantasy I would like to read because of the lack of other races in them like Elves and Dwarves, Gnomes etc. Of course there are the Ogier, but the world is mostly human.

I have heard that the Channelers are way overpowered compared to the rest of the classes, which fits with the flavor of the books, but I am not sure how that would work out in actual play.

The adventure "Prophecies of the Dragon" looks well laid out, I have not looked at it much, but I think it will be a pleasan read.

Overall, I think this is an interesting RPG that captures the flavor of the world.

I really digged the books and I have the RPG, but my players aren't the types who like to read fantasy so the mention of Wheel of Time just draws 0% interest and blank stares.

Can't say if it's broken for us, because we never got a chance to play it as of yet.

 

[Shalimar]

The Aiel base class is woodsman (native terrain: desert). That algai class was just for show .

I'd kind of like to see a respin of the game after Brandon Sanderson finishes A Memory of Light; I think using 4e or Star Wars Saga or something in between as a base would work out a lot better than using 3e did.

I'd be interested in that too, then again I see Star Wars Saga as the best possible Class/Level system so I'd like to see any game done with that system.

 

[Hazard_53188]

I had a friend who is really into WoT and when it was his turn to DM he ran us through Prophecies of the Dragon. I think we all had fun but it definitely seemed more fun for those that had read at least some of the books.

The DM beefed our characters up quite a bit so we didn't experience the high mortality rate that others experienced but I do recall a couple encounters that seemed like they would have been too difficult for standard powered characters.