Quote from: two_fishes;500647As far as I know Quest XP is something that's baked into the DMG. The DM in the game
I'm in now uses it and he's trying to run a by-the-book 4e game.

That's good to know.  I have seen 4e entirely from the player's point of view so I have only vague ideas about how the system works for the DM.

Quote from: two_fishes;500647Unfortunately not. I was playing in the DM's game just prior to him trying out these rules, but I had to move. We had talked about different ways to improve play in a larger scope than dungeon crawling with visits back to town for refueling and getting new missions. One of the things we had found was that when we played a more urban game, we usually didn't need to have more than one or two fights in a game day, so we could always arrange to be at full strength. We also wanted better ways to plug the characters into the world, with meaningful rewards and consequences. I especially wanted things like followers and building castles, and etc as we started to get to higher levels. The DM wanted to be able to do a sandbox sort of game, maybe even a hexcrawl, with an environment that responded to the PCs and also move along without their direct action.

We had done a few combats as skill challenges, without a grid, and some of rules he came up with came out of that. He was really interested in finding ways to resolve less important fights more quickly, and save the grid for really central encounters.

Yep, I can totally see where he is coming from.  As a side note, my experience with 4e and some of the discussion in this thread has me considering *adding* miniatures to my future S&W games, at least for the more important encounters.

Other things that very well make an appearance from 4e: Minions and Skill Challenges.


-TGA

By the way, if any EN Worlders out there can clarify this for me, is there (or was there) a separate forum for 4e house rules?  

On a related note, I don't frequent forums that focus on 4e but in those forums is there active discussion of houseruling the game?

I am just curious how big a deal those issue are in the 4e community.


-TGA

Quote from: Windjammer;500664No, I'm a 3.5 DM to the bone, and always will be (unless 5E knocks my socks off). My scorn of the Pathfinder traitors knows no bounds, it's like dropping one's first love for a pair of fake boobs. Seriously though, I bounce back and forth between 3.5 and 4E. I'm very bad at making up my own stuff that will mechanically fly in 3.5, which is why I enjoy GM'ing, winging, and making up shit way more in 4E. I bought the White Box boxed set of S&W directly from John Adams at Christmas 2010, and am itching to play that with my group - if that comes about, I'll sure drop you a note as to how that went down. God knows, S&W could replace 4E as my go-to alternative to 3.5. Heaven forfend.

As for 4E, when I DM, all the house rules I specified above are in effect (except for potion side effects) and a couple more. The most important one is material restrictions on what's legit for char gen and char progression: no DDI-exclusives, no errata beyond those printed in PHB 2, no material published post-June 2010 (except if we were to run Dark Sun). Older restrictions were: no dragonborns, no tieflings, no PHB 3 races, and no power source other than martial, divine, and arcane. That was me and our 4E group in 2009. Except for the first two, that restriction is basically what WotC did with Essentials in late 2010, interesting consensus of good taste there.

At the moment I'm not the one GM'ing our 4E games though, one of my friends is. He's running an Eberron campaign where our PCs are rather poor, so magic items are far and few between. Before that, he ran a FR game for us, which was weird as well - again, hardly any magic items ever, and 95% of all opponents were humans. Before and during that our group also played March of the Phantom Brigade, but I was down with work then so I didn't participate; I understand though that they played that mini-campaign straight with no house rules at all,  as it was D&D Encounters. If we go further back, to June 2008, I've run and played 4E in various guises, but these are the most recent ones, and they are comparatively vanilla 4E.

Thanks for sharing your experiences!  Please do drop me a line when you get a chance to play Swords & Wizardry.  I would love to hear what you think of it.

Frankly, I never gave 3.x D&D much of a chance.  I *may* have played it once - I really don't remember whether we got past the "fucking around trying to make characters" stage.  And that wasn't the game's fault to be honest.  As I said earlier, I just didn't have my heart in the effort to look at newer D&D.  Ironically it was my discovery of Swords & Wizardry that got me looking more closely at fantasy gaming again and has probably made me more open to playing newer editions of D&D in the first place.

-TGA

Quote from: Fiasco;500773LotFP is a great option. Labyrinth Lord or the original Moldvay/Cook Basic/Expert rules it's based on is also good.

You can't go wrong with starting with Moldvay Basic D&D (and hence Labyrinth Lord) in my book.  It is exactly were I started my journey in 1983!  


-TGA

Quote from: Rincewind1;500878Thanks all - this is damn convoluted. Guess I best stick to LotFP for now, as it seems good anyway .

I wish it wasn't as convoluted as all that, but that is what you get when the whole point is to "make it like you want"!

In the end, you can pick from any of them and still have a blast.  They are all just relatively small variations on the original D&D.


-TGA

Quote from: Windjammer;500786Good lord, I'm sorry that your missing my qualifier 'Seriously though, ...' meant you took offense at what I wrote, and that you got ganged up on and put on ignore lists. I'm always amused how quickly this happens on this site, and over what trifles. Seanchai had to piss me off and troll me for 2 years before I ever engaged the IL - and that was my first and last time. That was mightily hard earned! And now you put his hard work to shame by simply failing to get a bad joke on my part. Life really isn't fair.

So yes, 3.5. = first love, and PF = fake boobs. It's not that the latter sucks, but I don't think it's a worthy substitute for the real thing (allowing that tastes may differ).I'm unsure about a lot of rules stuff that came out for the PF system after the core book.



I'm a 3.5 completist, and my bad taste shirked from no supplement no matter how crappy. Only Weapons of Legacy - that was one step too far. I also got the entire Dungeon print run for 3.5, and every adventure path Paizo published for 3.5. (7 or 8 of them in total). Maybe if I ever run out of gaming material I might consider converting PF stuff to 3.5. I'm rather touchy on convertability, and would be as hesitant to port 3.0 material into my games as PF material. But that's just my personal take on it, don't let that take you offense again.

I never missed a beat in your comment despite what others might have assumed.  I did not take offense to what you said.  I just wanted a bit of clarification.   It is all good.  You sound like me as far as the "completist" since I bought everything for 3.0/3.5 and PF.

As far as the IL is concerned, it matters not to me whatsoever.  All I see is SN's and posts.  Nothing more but certainly less...

Quote from: Rincewind1;500881I really need just a basic mechanic  to put my layers on it, so to speak ;p.

I'll probably buy myself S&W pdf next, if it's avaible. Shipping'd slay me.

Not sure where you live, but Noble Knight Games carries S&W Complete softcover at a decent price and relatively sane overseas shipping (to my neck of the woods anyway). I should know, mine arrived today! Huzzah

S&W Complete is good stuff. When I played D&D with Planet Algol and his group over Christmas, one of the players had it with him. I have my own copy of course. I'll note, among other things, that the Ranger included in there is nothing short of amazing.

Quote from: The Butcher;500925Not sure where you live, but Noble Knight Games carries S&W Complete softcover at a decent price and relatively sane overseas shipping (to my neck of the woods anyway). I should know, mine arrived today! Huzzah

Thanks for info

Hm. Probably going to invest into some S&W then. Or maybe 4e books,  that Darwinism guy sounds persuading.

Quote from: Benoist;500937S&W Complete is good stuff. When I played D&D with Planet Algol and his group over Christmas, one of the players had it with him. I have my own copy of course. I'll note, among other things, that the Ranger included in there is nothing short of amazing.

I've owned it in PDF for some time now, but my print copy has finally arrived. And in good company, too: Vornheim, Cities of the Young Kingdoms: The South (for MRQII Elric) and Two-Fisted Tales. It's probably what I'll use for my next campaign, too.

I got rid of stat minimums in Emern, and now Rangers are a bit too good, so I'm thinking of rebalancing by allowing Fighters to upgrade the damage of their weapons by one die-type. So a d6 shortsword deals d8 when a fighter uses it.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;500965I got rid of stat minimums in Emern, and now Rangers are a bit too good, so I'm thinking of rebalancing by allowing Fighters to upgrade the damage of their weapons by one die-type. So a d6 shortsword deals d8 when a fighter uses it.

That's a nifty house rule. Are you generating stats 3d6 in order though?

Quote from: Benoist;500972That's a nifty house rule. Are you generating stats 3d6 in order though?

Yeap. I'll occasionally let them swap two if they really want to.

Edit: I also got rid of racial and alignment restrictions.

Quote from: The Good Assyrian;500892Frankly, I never gave 3.x D&D much of a chance.  I *may* have played it once - I really don't remember whether we got past the "fucking around trying to make characters" stage.  And that wasn't the game's fault to be honest.  As I said earlier, I just didn't have my heart in the effort to look at newer D&D.

I'd be a lot more confident to proclaim that it was 3.5.'s own fault and not yours to make char gen so hard to understand when one comes to the game 'cold' so to speak. Because honestly? The only way I survived my first contact with 3.5. (which was as a player) was by having read a bit of D&D for Dummies. That book breaks down the system, including char gen and combat (the two things which strike most newcomers as 3.5 at its most intricate), in easy, straightforward, and diluted terms. I hadn't RPG'ed for a while, never in English, and really appreciated that someone sat me down and explained the difference between skills and feats to me, and other basic stuff. That's what that book did for me, and it's still one of the items in my RPG collection I'm most fond of, though I'm sure to an experienced RPG or D&D player it's only pedestrian stuff.

Still, if you ever feel like taking a second look at D&D 3.5 (not saying that you should, just saying if), I'd recommend googling the PDF of that book or buying a used copy for little money. The point of 3.5, as much as of 4E, is to see beyond the apparent complexity of the game, and see how easy a game it really is at root. The only 'complexity' in it is quantitative proliferation. Yes, there are obviously a lot of subsystems in either game (esp. 3.5., 4E got rid of most of them), but both games are simple at root, and only require the DM to really know more than 5% of the rules. I wish the 3.5 core books had communicated that as strongly to me as the Dummies book did.

Quote from: Benoist;500972That's a nifty house rule. Are you generating stats 3d6 in order though?

PLUS ONE On the house rule...