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."
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.
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.
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.