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| Mosquiton 1910th Post
  
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|  "Re(1):D&D, Tabletop RPGs, who plays 'em here?" , posted Thu 22 Aug 03:45  
quote:
So, anyone here play 'em? I got into tRPG's 'cause my older brothers played them and the books were real fun to read. From then I've played a few games, but I have the most fun tweaking existing rules or designing my own games.
I used to play older D&D and Shadowrun, and messed around with Rifts a bit. And yeah the books and manuals are just really cool to soak up. A few people at my office were running a 4th Edition campaign a while back but I didn't have any interest... probably because of the mathy, MMO, combat-focused feel of 4th edition itself.
My friend was actually designing a campaign with old D&D rules with an Aztec-inspired campaign setting which would have been really cool, but he never committed to getting it going since he was planning on finding a new job eventually (which he did).
So if we're going to stay in the present tense here, I guess sadly my answer is no. :/
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| Maese 703th Post
Red Carpet Regular Member
| "Re(2):D&D, Tabletop RPGs, who plays 'em here?" , posted Thu 22 Aug 14:51
quote:
So if we're going to stay in the present tense here, I guess sadly my answer is no. :/
Same here. In an ancient and veeeery distant past my bunch of friends used to meet on weekend afternoons to play AD&D, Vampire: The Masquerade, and the like for hours on end. Sadly, as time passed my buddies seemed to lost interest on table RPGs, and our roleplaying meetings fade to an end. Ironically they took refuge on videogames (around the PS2 era), after so many years of having to hear things like "what's so great about those silly games where you don't have real freedom to do wahetever you want?" everyday when I was the only videogamer on the pack. Poetic justice, I guess.
I do remember that the RoleMaster LotR companion was, for years, my only exposition to Tolkien's universe, and how I preferred it vastly to the books (or movies, for what's worth). In my opinion, Tolkien was an awful storyteller but an incredible creator of worlds. Probably table RPGs are the main reason that made me think like that: the stories and characters we created every weekend seemed much more vivid and interesting than the ones Tolkien himself presented on his books. Which was a pity, given how rich and full of possibilities his Middle Earth is. But probably I'm trodding on swampy grounds here, so i'd be better to stop and not derail the thread so much.
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| HokutoAndy
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| "Re(1):D&D, Tabletop RPGs, who plays 'em here?" , posted Thu 22 Aug 18:45
AD&D was my intro. THAC0 was pretty weird, but once you got the hang of it, was good. It was clunky at points ("So negative armor is good?" "Save vs Wands, Death, and Breath?" and relied a lot on DM arbitration, so your experience varies with the DM.
From AD&D came Wizardry, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Shin Megami Tensei, Pokemon. Like the horned rabbit in Dragon Quest, that was a D&D fan made monster that would eventually turn into Nidoran for Pokemon.
D&D3rd edition was their first concentrated effort at making a rules system as the 'physics' of the game. Skillpoints, crafting rules, and all that.
Some accidents though:
As a result of making all attribute modifiers give +1 for every 2 points (so CON 18= +4 hitpoints per level) all of the monsters jumped up dramatically in hitpoints. This stealthily made fighters and fireballs get worse and worse as you level, an AD&D troll has like 40 hitpoints, a 3e troll has close to 80, but the 3e longsword and fireball was unchanged in damage. This also meant that spells such as "Sleep" and "Stinking Cloud" went up dramatically in power as they bypass hitpoints and just have you roll a save or suffer the consequences.
An optimized combination for a spellcaster at level 1 using sleep was to carry a hatchet, because hatchets do x3 damage on a critical hit, and when you hit a sleeping opponent you can make it an auto-critical. So you walk into the room full of goblins, and put them into a sleep where they never wake up.
When you begin to master the system though, D&D3rd edition begins to unravel into "Clerics, Druids, Wizards, and their side-kicks", a simple example being that the Druid can eventually transform into a bear (all the time, he can cast magic as a bear), have a bear companion, and summon bears, and each of those bears is better at fighting than a Fighter.
Or... take the cleric. He is suppose to buff up other party members, right? But it was soon discovered that... instead of Cleric+Fighter, Cleric+Cleric meant you had two guys rub themselves with magic until they were cat reflexed, bull strengthed shining giants who can also heal and totally scare undead.
But... because a DM runs the game, he can patch the game. What often happened is that the Fighter would get an artifact sword, artifact armor, artifact boots to boost him in power (and thus ignoring D&D3e's guidelines of how much magic loot one should get per level), if needed. And then the Monk gets a magic amulet to turn into a tiger.
So you thought you were COnan, but you're actually playing Ironman. Quite a few folks were rather upset by that revelation, if the wizard picked up his sword, he could wield it even better as he transformed into a four armed troll that also teleports.
D&D4e was made as a response to this, as the major complaint of 3e was "This is Caster Edition". They had good intentions, but poor execution.
The Math:
While 3rd edition D&D turned into "rocket launcher tag" where the wizard who jumps the other wizard to trap his soul in a jar in one move was the winner, 4e swung too far the other way and made fights last even longer.
The Feels: D&D4e standardized warriors and magic users into the same format, where each has an ability they can use an unlimited number of times, an ability to use once per encounter, and one to use per day. It was upsetting for many folks. Later classes have moved away from this, but too little too late.
*A quick fix to 4e: divide monster hitpoints by 1/4th and double their damage output. Fights go by faster and feel more dangerous.
There's a new edition of D&D in the works now, who knows how it'll turn out.
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| Mosquiton 1912th Post
Gold Carpet V.I.P- Platinum Executive
| "Re(2):D&D, Tabletop RPGs, who plays 'em here?" , posted Sun 25 Aug 14:56
quote:
From AD&D came Wizardry, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Shin Megami Tensei, Pokemon. Like the horned rabbit in Dragon Quest, that was a D&D fan made monster that would eventually turn into Nidoran for Pokemon.
D&D3rd edition was their first concentrated effort at making a rules system as the 'physics' of the game. Skillpoints, crafting rules, and all that.
D&D has been massively, hugely influential on videogames hasn't it?
Sometimes I get upset thinking about how the concept of hit points has permeated so deeply in videogames. It's certainly a great idea with many merits, and it's a great fit for a lot of different designs, but I feel like in many cases hit points are an abstraction that's not always neccessary. And as 4th Edition illustrates some implementations work better than others.
It's part of why I feel like D&D is brilliant and amazing, but maybe too influential. Tolkien-influenced fantasy aesthetic. Yes, it's brilliant, but there are so many shitty derivations and imitations... I do enjoy seeing original stuff.
Have any crazy/weird/interesting systems or settings come out in the last decade or two?
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"D&D, Tabletop RPGs, who plays 'em here?" , posted Thu 22 Aug 01:13
