Legend: Tabletop Gaming For a Good Cause 83
danaris writes "On Friday, Rule of Cool gaming released Legend, a d20-derived tabletop roleplaying game system designed to be easy to learn, easy to play, and just really fun. As the names suggest, they recognize that people in an RPG frequently want to be playing epic characters with cool abilities, so they provide that — while making sure all such characters are reasonably well balanced against characters and monsters of the same level. For a nice overview of the system, there's a review up on RPG.net by one of the playtesters, and another review by a moderator from Reddit's RPG section. The game is initially being distributed as a pay-what-you-want benefit to the Child's Play charity, with all proceeds (not just all profits) going to the charity."
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Given how awesome it is, i'd say the undead species is Demilich
Re:The Truth (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree vehemently that tabletop RPGs are dead.
I currently play in 5 tabletops (3 of which are supposedly LARPs, but play more like traditional ttRPGs with a large number of players and pvp action), GMing another, and I am in the process of writing a system and content for a high fantasy tabletop game. I realize it isn't a tremendously popular activity (though I regularly game with about 30 individuals and know of many gamers in my locale with whom I do not play), but it never really was all that popular.
I've even seen something of a resurgence in the activity, as MMO gamers branch out from behind their keyboards to engage in a more social and flexible experience with drastically fewer limitations on what they can do.
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Speaking of this, how does one exactly break into this hobby?
Hobby shops (Score:3)
Re:The Truth (Score:5, Informative)
>>Speaking of this, how does one exactly break into this hobby?
If you're in a major city, look up your local RPGA club or gaming convention. If you're into 4th Edition, D&D, that is, which grognards like me sort of poo-poo, but it's easy to get into. The D&D website has a tool to look up local game stores that are running D&D Encounters, which are short, 1-hour adventures that run once per week at local game stores.
If you want to play 3rd Edition D&D, which this product is a variation on, Paizo has been carrying the torch on this with it's Pathfinder system. The Pathfinder Society (http://paizo.com/pathfinderSociety) is their organized play branch, which means that you don't need to have an established game group to play... just show up at a Pathfinder Society game day, say you're new, and they'll help you out.
FWIW, Pathfinder (and quite possibly Legend, too, though I've only started digging into the meat of it) and 3.5 in general are better systems than 4th Edition D&D, but it's probably easier to find a friendly local game store running D&D Encounters every Wednesday night.
Re:The Truth (Score:4, Informative)
FWIW, Pathfinder (and quite possibly Legend, too, though I've only started digging into the meat of it) and 3.5 in general are better systems than 4th Edition D&D
I would disagree with you there, fairly vehemently. 4E certainly has it's flaws, but I think those in d20 are far more severe.
Problems with 4E largely stem from two areas: 1) overemphasis on combat, and 2) vastly increased demands on players to master the system. Both of these two situations can be boiled down into one basic fact: there are too many powers to choose from and characters have too many powers overall. A lot of players liked the simplicity of earlier editions for, well, any non-spellcasting class. 4E forces that to change, but it gives too many options. There are too many races, too many classes, and too many powers. They should have started simpler, and tried to keep the number of classes as low as possible rather than maximizing choice and trying to instantly make 4E comparable to 3E. The Paradox of Choice means that every time you level up, every time it's your turn in combat you must re-examine all your choices and make a new decision. I think the martial classes in particular could benefit from having far fewer powers at each level. One at-will, one encounter, one daily, class powers, and that's it. Combat simply takes too long in 4E to be enjoyable, and while you can do some things to speed it up, if you focus on speeding up the game too much you sap all the enjoyment out of it. It feels like work.
There are some minor issues as well. Skill Challenges is the obvious one, which are cool in concept but simply doesn't work well in execution outside of very few situations (tracking over long distances, opening a complex lock) and completely fail for skills which involve interaction. It also has the side effect of making your players want roleplaying encounters to just be more dice rolling, and that's not very fun. Lack of compelling magic outside of combat; making all rituals cost money made them feel useless. Solo encounter monsters are designed badly. The monsters are supposed to represent 5 individual monsters, but can easily be crowd controlled. They should be immune to stuns and most cc, and able to deal out damage in ways which really threaten the party. As it is now, solo encounters are about 5 rounds of terror and 10-20 rounds of cutting through all that HP while not really threatened because the buffs and debuffs are in place. 4E also seems significantly more delicately balanced. A simple +1 to some die rolls can be game breaking simply because those die rolls happen so often. I don't think that would ever happen in previous editions.
Things 4E does right or improves on: basic class progression, skills, character creation, feats (barring bad ones like Expertise), hit points. Minions. Emphasis on making the DM's life easier. Emphasis on position and movement in combat, and the ability to actually tank enemies. Working to make sure PCs get treasure they want rather than using random tables. Better healing system. Better balance between classes. The character generator was absolutely amazing. Overall I consider 4E to be a very good first edition of a new RPG system. I haven't kept up with the more recent books which introduce different class styles as my play group had abandoned 4E by the time it came out. We played it for a year and were tired of two encounter nights.
Problems with 3.5, on the other hand, are IMO far more severe and fair more inherent to the system. Class balance is and always will be a huge problem as long as Vancian casters are present. Prestige classes and the lack of multiclassing restrictions completely defeat the purpose of having classes. Lack of good heavier armors. Difficulty in healing. Difficulty in identifying magic treasure. The arbitrary alignment system. The skill system is completely ridiculous (Search, Spot and Listen... but most classes only get about 4 skills per level after modifiers). I think there a
Re:The Truth (Score:4, Insightful)
IMHO, combat only drags on too long because people are being munchkins instead of role playing. You shouldn't be asking yourself "which one of these 40 combat skills would kill the most goblins". Instead, you should be asking yourself "what would my berserk warrior with an INT of 8 do?"
Yes, this is a generalization, and isn't true in all cases. But it's true more times than not in my experience.
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The answer to that is likely to be "my berserk warrior wants to kill as many goblins as he can". Then you need to translate it into game terms, which still means figuring out which of the 40 skills kills the most goblins.
It seems to me that while some skills are being selected by the character (such as spells), some are not. The player is more like a writer--some things the writer writes are 'what would the character do" but others are "what would I want to happen to the character". When the player choo
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The problem is that your Berserker doesn't have 5 minutes and a calculator.
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That's just it.
In 3.x, a 10th level Fighter realistically has the choice of the following:
1) Move & attack
2) Attack & move
3) Full attack
4) Double move
In 4E, a 10th level Fighter has the choice of:
1) 2 at-will powers
2) Racial power
3) 3 encounter powers
4) 3 daily powers
5) 3 utility powers
6) Class powers (depending on build)
7) Movement (where to move to best utilize your class power)
And the 4E character has to make the same decision each round. The simplest character in 4E (which, granted, the Fighter
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4th Edition has a lot of powers, as you say. It also has a lot of feats and magic items.
"Fortunately", most of them are utterly terrible. Of the 3000 feats in the game, there's maybe 300 that are good. So that's 90% dross that's utterly wasting the time of the players and space in the source books (which they hardly print any more anyway). A similar ratio exists for powers and magic items.
The reason for this was that, unlike with 3e, the 4e PHB1 set the power bar very very low, and they've been (admirably o
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Sorry, I didn't answer everything I realized.
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AD&D 1st Edition FTW!
Everything else is sloppy seconds.
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Speaking of this, how does one exactly break into this hobby?
The easiest way is to have friends who are into it, or friends that you can sucker into it...
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I want to see "Wesnoth: The Tabletop Game"
Re:The Truth (Score:4, Interesting)
I got "into" this about half a year ago. With friends, we all hadn't played before, only 1 person had played DnD 2nd edition once. And we wanted to play DnD 3.5E.
The biggest challenge is a DM. The Dungeon Master defines the game. The Dungeon Master needs to know the rules. We didn't go look for a DM, I just became DM. Starting by reading the player handbook, understand the key parts of combat and stats. And then just go play. Figure out the rest as you go. With a new group nobody will complain if you make a mistake.
The first game we did was with 3 people, me as DM and 2 players. Just to get a feeling for the rules. We didn't have any dice or miniatures. Filling in the character sheets took about a hour. We only used melee/ranged character, no spellcasting. We used paper to draw out the maps and crosses and lines as characters and enemies. And an Android app to roll dice. It was a blast, and I killed one of my players near the end (just to show that I could).
As we progressed with more games, we added more players, dice, miniatures (combination of old board games, and new warhammer miniatures) until we had a full DnD game. We also noticed we had used a few rules wrong. Which is no problem really, it's all about the fun, and we fixed those.
Finding a paper copy of the 3.5 DnD edition is pretty hard because they are no longer sold, but your favorite torrent site should have them in PDF form. However, on http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:System_Reference_Document [dandwiki.com] you have the "DnD 3.5 SRD" which is almost all the rules (except for EXP/level up rules) in a free form. With monsters and everything. Once you get the basic rules the SRD is all you really need, if you want to play D&D 3.5. (We just skip anything "epic" and "psionic", to keep it a bit simpler)
I took a look at Legend, and it looks quite a bit like 3.5 in my eyes. But I miss monsters. With the 3.5 SRD I have a whole huge list of monsters to use, for free.
If you have a group of friends willing to play, then it's just as simple as "go for it" really.
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I took a look at Legend, and it looks quite a bit like 3.5 in my eyes. But I miss monsters. With the 3.5 SRD I have a whole huge list of monsters to use, for free.
There is a monster book on the way, but it will not be free. (It is, in fact, how the Rule of Cool folks are planning to recoup some of their costs for the core book's release, so they don't have to eat quite so much ramen.)
Dan Aris
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As others have said, the best option is to find a local gaming or comic shop and ask around or join their Encounters session if you like D&D.
But if, like me, you have a hard time finding large blocks of time to play with friends, you could consider Play-By-Email (PBEM). It goes much slower than a face to face game, but you can play in small chunks of time at your convenience. I average around 10-15 minutes per day at the time most convenient for me instead of trying to coordinate schedules. If you ar
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It can be hard to break into (but well worth it) alas I can only provide a UK perspective but I suspect its valid elsewhere
The main problem is finding people to game with options include
one really radical solution is to start your own games day!! I go to
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If you live near any colleges or universities, there is a decent chance that a gaming club exists. Often they are lumped together with the sci-fi/fantasy club, anime club, or various other "nerd" clubs. Depending on the school, your age/gender and the specific group's dynamic, it may be more or less difficult to get into the social circle. I actually do most of my gaming with a club at a nearby women's college, despite the fact that I am (slightly) older than a typical college student, never attended the co
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I didn't realize Gygax was as alive and well as he's ever been...
Re:The Truth (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you met *his* wife than you would be trolling.
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The money collected would have to count as income, so it would be a wash at best.
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Actually, we never touch the money. It goes straight to CP, so it's never income. I did consider rolling an NGO to dodge taxes with it, I won't lie, but it seemed like it was mean-spirited.
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An article about a d20 RPG is news for nerds? I think not.
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Are you sure you're on the right website? What exactly do you consider worthy "news for nerds" in games.slashdot.org if not this?
People are really starting to stretch the whole "slashdot worthy" cliche these days. Before you know it, articles about Apple won't fit into the Apple category anymore!
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Donation page: http://www.chipin.com/contribute/id/9a1cf435b81867b5
damn back to real life (Score:1)
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Should be back. Hit it again, and let me know.
Jake.kurzer@ruleofcool.com
Looks fun! (Score:5, Insightful)
If I can convince some of my D&D buddies to chip in as well, might have to pick it up. The biggest problem with tabletop games (especially obscure or new ones) is that it can be hard to track down people to actually play with.
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The solution to this problem is to learn to be a Dungeon Master. Once a DM sets aside time to plan and run a game, all he has to do is get the word out and people show up.
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The downside being is that you have to DM a game.
5x the work, 1/10 the fun.
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Have to disagree there. I've easily spent three times as much gaming time as DM as I have actually getting to play. Maybe it just comes from being "The Roleplayer" archetype, but I think it's more that people who actually enjoy DMing more than playing are a rarity, kind of like real women on dating sites.
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I DMed for a while and really enjoyed the "me versus everyone else" aspect of it. It was a constant cat and mouse game of me trying to keep a band of yahoos on track and them doing everything in their power to derail every part of my campaign. Some stuff the players did was just inspired (all but one person jumping into a bag of holding so the last person could carry them across a rickety bridge) and some was just plain stupid (casting fireball while trapped in a giant spider's web. It torched half the p
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At least your party tries new things. Mine stood 10 minutes on a floor in a half destroyed building, we me telling them the crunch sounds ever got louder. Finally I had to collapse the building on them.
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I have enjoyed playing more than I enjoy DMing but....I've been a DM since 1978.
I currently have two active campaigns.
I enjoy my games because...
I set up a wide but shallow environment and let the players drive the direction of the campaign.
I develop in depth as they focus on an area.
I have secret cards that the players draw at the start of play. Only the individual player knows what is on their card. The cards let them break the rules, automatically succeed, etc. It produces a "movie" feel with unexpecte
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The biggest problem with tabletop games (especially obscure or new ones) is that it can be hard to track down people to actually play with.
Let me summarize my university years experience with DnD for you:
"Wanna come over and play DnD? Uh, I gotta study for a test, or do laundry or trim my ear hairs or something"
vs
"Wanna drink a couple cases of beer, eat some pizza, and play DnD? F yeah, can I come over and start right now?"
The downside is the DM needs to be at least somewhat sober, which makes the DM really pissed off when the players are falling down drunk.
Hint Hint, almost exactly one month from right now, too old to party types like mysel
Older versions of D&D are far more rules-lite (Score:1)
I still play (A)D&D with friends from time to time, but we play the way old versions of the game. We played Basic D&D (the "Moldvay" version that came out in 1981 with the magenta box) for a couple years, since it is extremely simple and easy to run for the DM. (There was also an Expert book for when characters went above 3rd level) Recently, we jumped to the first edition of AD&D, which many of us in the group have experience with, so it isn't a tricky change for us. AD&D is definitely
Which Legend? (Score:3)
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And besides of all that babbling how slick and consistent this D20-Legend is, RuneQuest (1977) will most probably still beat this hands down in terms of consistency and balance.
So I'd be going with that Legend [mongoosepublishing.com]
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A lot of people might be familiar with the system without realizing it, because Chaosium uses a simplified version of it for many of their games, including Call of Cthulhu.
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If you're sick of d20, then please take a look at Legend—it's not like it'll cost you anything but a bit of time. This system is designed to address many of the flaws in vanilla d20, and make it much more fun to play.
Dan Aris
My 10-minute-overview-review (Score:1)
Another combat-feat paper implementation of WOW. Mostly just different flavoured ways of dealing damage.
OK, Basic and 1st Edition Advanced was much the same, but extensive non-combat spells, thief abilities and milieu helpers in the DM's guide at least gave a grounding for something beyond chipping away at hit points.
Eh, I'm probably just jaded. This'll fly well with WOWers and geezers looking to get back to basics, and you can't argue with the price.
Re:My 10-minute-overview-review (Score:4, Interesting)
Another combat-feat paper implementation of WOW.
Nothing personal towards you but I find it ironic to see a PnP game being seen as a dup of computer game that is a dup of PnP games.
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Which makes the subsequent WoW-ization of many popular PnP games even more troubling. They're feeding off of each other in a viscious cycle of fail.
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Whoosh. And for a second whoosh, look up "jackass."
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But thanks for not making a point.
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It's called taking the piss.