Quote from: Melan;462983Epic fantasy where Frodo and Sam die when Father Willow sucks their brains out, and they are replaced by Bromwine the Hobbit and Sam's Cousin. Then Merry and Pippin steal a cache of magic items from Tom Bombadil, and so decked out, breeze through the wilderness to Bree. There, Sam's Cousin and Bromwine are killed in an ambush where lowlives try to get at the magic items, and they are saved by a mysterious man named Strider, who is added to the party. Sam III joins a bit later. They set off towards Rivendell at a leisurely pace.

Mind you, I would play that game.

It does sound fun.

Age of Fable's right though. Starting at level 0 is zero to hero territory, hero's journey and all that.

To be honest, having tried to use it for such I actually think the whole old school D&D is good for sword and sorcery play thing is massively overstated.

Quote from: Melan;462983Epic fantasy where Frodo and Sam die when Father Willow sucks their brains out, and they are replaced by Bromwine the Hobbit and Sam's Cousin. Then Merry and Pippin steal a cache of magic items from Tom Bombadil, and so decked out, breeze through the wilderness to Bree. There, Sam's Cousin and Bromwine are killed in an ambush where lowlives try to get at the magic items, and they are saved by a mysterious man named Strider, who is added to the party. Sam III joins a bit later. They set off towards Rivendell at a leisurely pace.

Precisely. The whole comparison to fiction is taken WAAAYY overboard.
RPGs, and D&D, don't play like pieces of fiction. Fucking deal with it people already.

Quote from: Benoist;463046Precisely. The whole comparison to fiction is taken WAAAYY overboard.
RPGs, and D&D, don't play like pieces of fiction. Fucking deal with it people already.

Yes, but people routinely want to play games inspired by fiction. They have done since, oh, the 1970s. Deal with it.

Quote from: D-503;463065Yes, but people routinely want to play games inspired by fiction. They have done since, oh, the 1970s. Deal with it.

Bah. Keep having your problems with your games and arguing about shit that ultimately doesn't matter, then. Have fun.

Needing weird dice is a killer for me. Even if I somehow managed to buy the things we'd then only have one set for the group.

Plus it just seems gimmicky.

The spell botch table too looks way too vicious. Assuming I have managed to level up my mage I'd be annoyed after all that work to lose them to some random spell failure. Fine at low levels. Less funny later on.

The roll four guys and funnel thing may not work. We used in my group to roll up two and the second would come online as soon as the first died. Sometimes we allowed someone to roll up a few and make a choice.

More than once, because it is random, someone ended up with four pretty similar fighting men. Random can lead to the same outcome each time, it doesn't guarantee any kind of range.

Quote from: Benoist;463068Bah. Keep having your problems with your games and arguing about shit that ultimately doesn't matter, then. Have fun.

I game every week and most of the time we have a great time. I'm fine with that.

I'll tell you what else was common in the '70s and early '80s. Looking to fiction both in print and film for inspiration. Nowadays rpgs are insular. They look to rpg tropes for their inspiration. That's not how it always was though.

I think the refusal of much rpg design to look outside the hobby has led to an impoverishment of design compared to the creativity of the early hobby. Your philosophy allows for no Bunnies & Burrows, no Gangbusters, no Traveller. All of them were inspired by fiction beyond the hobby itself.

Quote from: D-503;463073I game every week and most of the time we have a great time. I'm fine with that.

I'm glad you have a good time.

It's just that when I see so many discussions on gaming boards about "my players won't follow the adventure path" or "my GM is railroading" or "this game sucks because it isn't like [insert TV/book/comics franchise here]" or "I've modified X game N times to try and recreate [insert TV/book/comics franchise here] plots and I'm getting frustrated" or any of the gazillion other subjects that come up on message boards on a daily basis like this, I can't help but think that something's gone terribly wrong for these people. They're not having fun: they're obsessing over recreating a very specific fiction genre, all the while wondering what they're doing wrong, while the answer really is: don't try using role playing games to write collaborative pieces of fiction; actually play a role playing game.

But hey. Like you mentioned earlier, the well's been poisoned in that regard a looong time ago. It's unlikely to change, particularly when the approach of RPGs as serial pieces of fiction and 'canon' and all these kinds of things basically helps publishers roll out the supplement treadmill (oh yes, all this stuff is linked). I'm just going to say my piece and move on. Maybe somebody will pick up something out of our exchange, maybe not. All you can do is open your mouth and hope someone might listen.

Quote from: D-503;463073I think the refusal of much rpg design to look outside the hobby has led to an impoverishment of design compared to the creativity of the early hobby.

I have a near polar opposite opinion. I think RPGs have been impoverishing themselves from the very start by constantly trying to be something they are not, instead of assuming they are actually role playing games, which are great games to play on their own merits, with their own processes and specificities, as a medium of their own.

Unreliable magic and retarded dice, alone, are deal-breakers.  Add that this is Yet Another D&D-alike and I can safely kick this one to the curb.  I have D&D; I don't need anything else.

Benoist,

I actually agree with pretty much everything in your last comment.

If that seems to contradict my previous position I can only inform you that, like the tripartite god, my position makes sense but not necessarily a sense comprehensible to mere mortal man.

Quote from: DKChannelBoredom;462992... when I first thought of this, without checking the rules, I imagined the 0-level characters "coming out" as Halflings/elves/dwarfs when reaching level  1... "yes, you know me as Harvey the Ditch Digger, who fought side-by-side with you in the dungeon of the Kobolds, but all along I was actually ... a Halfling!"

Huh, I may be wrong but when I read it I thought you picked your class at level 0, you just didn't get anything from your class till you reached level 1.  I noticed in the XP table that they gave XP for each individual class at level 0.

So, you'd roll your random occupation, then choose what class you wanted to be, and then go out on an adventure that will probably kill you.

Quote from: D-503;463109Benoist,

I actually agree with pretty much everything in your last comment.

If that seems to contradict my previous position I can only inform you that, like the tripartite god, my position makes sense but not necessarily a sense comprehensible to mere mortal man.

I'll take that at face value. All good, man, no worries.

Based on my first read, I want to play a demo of the game, but no pre-order because I doubt it will be worth playing more than what I already own.

GOOD
Variable spell effects
Criticals & fumbles

BAD
Too many "been there, done that" D&Disms
Author voice is offputting, like Hackmaster minus the funny
Level 0 / 4 dudes thing

UGLY
Lame dice

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;462980+1. I agree with that as well, actually. I don't know how I'd houserule this away either, since the deed rules work off the bonus +d3-d7 fighter die that only fighters get to roll.

I was thinking of simply applying the very same rules across the board, for every character of every class; Fighters should still be better at it on account of the attack die (or whatever it's called). Other classes should roll a normal attack roll (possibly with a penalty?).

I had a good laugh reading the indignation blowing at the face of the nitpickers here (you can skip to the last comments for the punch line)

I've down-loaded a copy of the beta, and I'm impressed. The important thing for me is that this is a set of rules that has a real old-school sense of passion and enthusiasm about them; there no post-modern angst here, as far as I can see anyway. This is expressed in things like the wonderful artwork, the entertainingly eclectic mix of game mechanics, the naïve enthusiasm for 'funky dice', and a clear authorial voice that lets you know that the writer is passionate about rpgs and what the 'agenda' is for their rules. All these things make me like the rules and want to play.

People who are getting bent out of shape about the zero level characters stuff are rather missing the point, I think. Sure you could ignore this, or make it a special option, but this would simply serve to make the game blander and rob it of one of its UGPs (unique gaming points); with so many fantasy rpgs around, there needs to be something that makes a game stand out from the crowd, otherwise why bother? I guess you could say that the funky dice and plethora of tables you roll on are enough of a UGP for the game, but personally I think that the 0 level character rules do a lot to distance the game from the kind of 'character optimisation' tropes that are typical of modern play. It also does a lot to focus the game on the old school 'story through play' approach; the lack of control over the creation of your character means that you will find out about your character through play too. This won't be for everybody, I'm sure, but there are so few games that take this approach now that I'd be loath to see it down-played in the final version of the rules.

If I was going to give Joseph Goodman any advice, it would be to think long and hard about making a really good GM's screen to tie into the launch of these rules. With so many charts to refer too, a GMs screen is a must, I think.