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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4554308" data-attributes="member: 42582">Moldvay Basic: Few weaknesses, really, unless you're looking for long-term campaign play in which case you're stuck at level 3. Quick start, quick play, so the rate of character death is tolerable.Cook Expert: Starts to suffer from problems with unbalanced classes, unbalanced spells, magic items that are poorly balanced (or at least give the GM little guidance on how to use them).AD&D 1st ed: The same problems as Cook Expert, to a greater degree. I don't mind the baroque rules systems so much (they're good training for Rolemaster), although after a while (eg with Survival Guides added in) they start to become internally contradictory (eg why is climbing percentage-based but riding is d20 vs stat-based)?AD&D 2nd ed: The tone encourages GM railroading, the internal contradictions in mechanics are entrenched, many camaign supplements (eg Planescape, Dark Sun) read to me more like fiction than gaming - they don't really tell me what sort of game action is meant to take place in them.3E: Besides the maths which breaks down at high levels (games like RM and RQ, and to a lesser extent AD&D, try to avoid this via diminishing returns), and balance problems that are frequently mentioned (along the lines of <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/4552555-post47.html" target="_blank">Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit</a>) I think that there is a tension between the combat rules, which are far from grim and gritty, and the skill rules (both build and resolution) which are much closer to RM or RQ - except that there are not enough points to use skills to give a true picture of the character! The game doesn't know what it wants to be.4e: A bit early to get a good feel for it, but one glaring weakness is that the rulebooks don't give very good advice to players and GMs on how to relate the mechanics to the gameworld - I think that some other games using similar sorts of mechanics are much stronger in this respect.</blockquote>

Verification