One of the games I've never had a chance to play but dearly want to do something with in the near future is Midnight from Fantasy Flight Games. I've got the 2e core book along with the elf campaign box set; all the other supplements I have are in PDF. The game has one of the best settings I've ever seen and I know it was moderately popular a decade ago, but most of the information I've seen on it is from people singing its praises after reading it but not actually playing the game. I read all the books several years ago but never took the time to dig too deeply into the mechanics.

So has anyone here played the game before and able to speak about it, for good or ill? It makes some drastic departures from typical D&D 3.5, and I'm really curious as to how well the rule changes work out. I'm not a huge fan of those rules but the setting is just so intriguing I'd love to tackle it eventually if the game isn't a complete nightmare of balance and rules issues.

I played it for a long time - when my pc died at level 6 she was the last survivor. At least how my GM ran it, it was too deadly for the rich roleplaying the setting encouraged. 3e melee rules meant we kept having pcs randomly killed off. Also the spellcaster class is vastly more powerful than everyone else. Our caster would cast spells, attract Shadow, which would then get half the party killed while he easily escaped.

My recommendation would be to run the setting in 5e; 3e material is very easy to adapt and the balance issues would be far less. It would also be a very fine setting for 4e D&D which has a more fitting heroic ethos.

That seemed like it would be one of the inherent drawbacks to casters I was curious about. Rather than slapping heavy mechanical restrictions on magic like some games do, Midnight put setting conditions on magic use and artifacts. "Here's all this power, but if you use it..." Was the player being sloppy and uncaring towards the danger he was bringing, or was the Shadow just that pervasive that even the smallest thing brought doom on everyone's heads?

4e is definitely out as my group doesn't care for it. I don't know how much work it would really take for a 5e conversion, so it's a possibility. I know there's an extensive Savage Worlds version of Midnight out there, but I stopped reading after seeing how many rules from other SW games it referenced without actually listing out how said rules worked. If I did try any sort of conversion, it would likely be SW or 5e depending on just how difficult it looked like the job would be.

Anyway, thanks for the reply.

We ran a fairly long campaign of it, which we took to calling "Al Qaeda against Sauron."  We played freedom fighters, but quickly got into interesting debates about what kinds of civilians are legitimate targets if they give shelter to the enemy, whether collecting trophies from orcs was a war crime, and whether it was ethical to steal food and goods from the populace to keep the rebellion going.  It got uglier when we got to one of the free dwarfholds while it was under siege, a chapter I call, "We will eat rats (and goblins) to survive."  

It, uh, got pretty dark.  We had a good time, but forget all those indie-games, the bleakest, most violent game I ever ran was in D&D 3.x.

Quote from: Brand55;975700That seemed like it would be one of the inherent drawbacks to casters I was curious about. Rather than slapping heavy mechanical restrictions on magic like some games do, Midnight put setting conditions on magic use and artifacts. "Here's all this power, but if you use it..." Was the player being sloppy and uncaring towards the danger he was bringing, or was the Shadow just that pervasive that even the smallest thing brought doom on everyone's heads?

4e is definitely out as my group doesn't care for it. I don't know how much work it would really take for a 5e conversion, so it's a possibility. I know there's an extensive Savage Worlds version of Midnight out there, but I stopped reading after seeing how many rules from other SW games it referenced without actually listing out how said rules worked. If I did try any sort of conversion, it would likely be SW or 5e depending on just how difficult it looked like the job would be.

Anyway, thanks for the reply.

With a little work, 5e would be great for it.

I ran it in both 3.5 and Savage Worlds. I love the setting, but I hate the 3.5 rules, and SW did a good job, not a GREAT job.

My players and I found the setting too dark to work.  Although we tried.  Desperately.

Quote from: Brand55;975700Was the player being sloppy and uncaring towards the danger he was bringing

Yeah, because with full 3e caster power dialled up to 11, he could easily escape. It was just the rest of us playing the non-casters who suffered. It would have taken a far more mature player to avoid casting.

Quote from: Future Villain Band;975705We ran a fairly long campaign of it, which we took to calling "Al Qaeda against Sauron."  We played freedom fighters, but quickly got into interesting debates about what kinds of civilians are legitimate targets if they give shelter to the enemy, whether collecting trophies from orcs was a war crime, and whether it was ethical to steal food and goods from the populace to keep the rebellion going.

Yeah, that was my experience exactly. I remember debating whether we should kill off some half-starved human survivors for 'collaborating with the enemy' because they'd 'let' the orcs take their food.

If you want the full Insurgency Experience, it definitely does that. Because thanks to 3e Alignment you KNOW you are GOOD and THEY are EVIL, it really lends itself to Misery Tourism in a way more nihilist settings don't.

I haven't really looked at converting anything to 5e before. What do people usually do with prestige classes? Treat them as new classes? Roll them in as subclasses?

Quote from: Brand55;975811I haven't really looked at converting anything to 5e before. What do people usually do with prestige classes? Treat them as new classes? Roll them in as subclasses?

They could be converted to subclasses but if a player wanted that I'd expect them to draft the conversion. Normally I pretty much ignore most of an NPC stat block when running it in 5e. I hated those stat blocks when running 3e/PF and I love getting to ignore all the crap. For conversion:

5e AC: take the 3e AC over 10, divide by 2, add 10. So eg AC 20 > AC 15. Very high AC may occasionally need capping but I've not seen this, a 3e/PF AC 40 > 5e AC 25. Epic Tier 5e PCs are often attacking at +14.
5e Attributes: As is 1-20. Over 20 divide the 5e AC over 20 by 2 and add 20, eg STR 25 > STR 22. Max 30.
HP and damage: x 1.5. (Spell-type damage can often be left as-is).
Attack Bonus: calculate using Proficiency + STR or DEX bonus.

For the Midnight heroic path thingies like Ironborn I'd likely apply the bonuses straight, or half the numbers if they look too big.

Midnight holds a special place for me among settings.  Without a doubt our longest running campaign, well over two years and perhaps even three years.  The setting is admittedly grim, but that is a feature as opposed to a defect.  Playing against the backdrop of the Shadow was actually liberating.  Each character had his own motivation, but there was an automatically unifying theme.  It wasn't a question of "Do you want to fight the living embodiment of evil?"--but rather, how are you going to take the fight to the Man . . . I mean the Shadow.  Many good times were had.

I ran it ages ago, in its 1st edition version, so I guess I could only speak the setting. It's very good, but if played as-written it makes it extremely difficult for the PCs to really achieve anything meaningful.

From what I remember from the rules, magic users were weakened, with spells like Fireball not being available until something like 7th level.

Quote from: Longshadow;976795From what I remember from the rules, magic users were weakened, with spells like Fireball not being available until something like 7th level.

Not really. There was a spell point system and AIR they got spells from Druid as well as Wizard/Sorc spell lists, but not Cleric. They probably got fewer spells/day in total than standard 3e, but overall Channelers were unbelievably powerful.

My wife ran a game for our group for a while and it was a lot of fun.

We both really like the setting. The material is first rate.

Personally I didn't care for the channeling rules myself, but the rest of the game was fine.

I'd love to see this back in print again. Possibly for FFGs GeneSys ruleset or a 5e update.