Quote from: Joethelawyer;372437I think it was Erik Mona who discussed this in a video I saw a while  back, where he noted that in different regions in the USA there were  different RPG playstyles.  Has anyone ever noticed this?  Either  regionally in the US or globally in different countries?

 I noticed this when I was in the Army and ran campaigns at various duty stations both here and in europe.

One guy we brought to our campaign sat staring at me with a grin on his face while the party walked about town bartering for equipment for example (all 1st level characters).  I asked him what was wrong and he said, "nothing. this is awesome. We always start out at the dungeon entrance."

There's a discussion over on the Kenzer boards at the moment about parties highering NPCs such as torch bearers.

Apparently my group was alone in this practice. We always hired an NPC torch bearer(usually a halfling) to free up hands to bear weapons/shields and so forth.  The GM usually used the hireling as a conduit to funnel information to the PCs and the players usually became fond of such hirelings. Even spending money to have them healed and so forth.

In fact that practice inspired a LOT of KODT strips over the years.

I'm a little surprised so many readers are posting they had never considered such a thing before reading it in KODT. WHich I find odd. There were pay rates for torchbearers in the book and even those nifty hireling mini sets.

I still have the original halfling torch bearer from that set and he was perpetually in the middle of the party marching order at every game -- even if the party had a magical light source.

Quote from: Settembrini;372500The German tribes have peculiariteis, too.

The Forgers are mostly found near the coast, Shadowrun is played at the Rhine & Ruhr, Bavaria is a wasteland (save Munich, but that doesn´t count) and Midgard is only to be found in secretive Southern circles. (...) DSA can be found everywhere except in the area of the Midgard tribe.

There was a strong Midgard diaspora in the north as well, in Hanover (thanks to a certain game store where all employees were avid Midgard GMs) and Brunswick (because the editorial team of the official Midgard fanzine, Gildenbrief, hailed from there -- in fact their influence was so strong that the local small press publisher Drachenland morphed from AD&D fanboys to official Midgard supporters, documented in their multi stat modules as I decribed a few months ago).

Quote from: Benoist;373156I've never heard of Midgard. What was it like?

In short:

Midgard was the first RPG published in Germany. It is the closest thing we have to the US old school, in that there was a cosim/wargame connection. It evolved from the circle that played Armageddon, a continous game that simulates (for thirty years now) the history of the fictional world Magira:



More pictures and game info here:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17522/armageddon-das-strategische-fantasyspiel

One of the players discovered RPGs in 1978, and modeled a Magira-based game after EPT and D&D. The first edition of Midgard (published 1981) was a digest-sized book. The rules features were

• percentile attributes
• classes (warrior, adventurer, priest, wizard) and levels
• elective skills according to class and IQ stat (some percentile, some d20+some bonus vs. a target number)
• d20-based combat (d20+weapon skill vs. d20+parry skill)
• life and fatique points (most hits doing only fatique=hit point damage, but hits with a certain margin of success also doing life damage; with armor reducing the amount of damage)
• spell lists
• spells being powered by fatique points
• saving throws (d20+class bonus+half level vs. 20)

All in all a game that resembled something like Légendes Celtiques, or Palladium Fantasy with only a third of the classes, skills, and spells.
From a simulation point of view it made more sense than either Red Box D&D and Das Schwarze Auge, which would arrive 2 years later.

But the designers were content with their small fan produced and distributed booklets, and left the development of (and fights over) the market to D&D and DSA. I wonder what the German scene could have been if the Midgard makers had been more aggressive, more business savvy. But they wanted to stay in their day jobs, with role playing (publishing) only as their hobby. (And that was probably very wise...)

http://www.midgard-online.de/cgi-bin/show?id=information/verlag/020_englische-flagge.html

The Multisim edition of Rêve de Dragon--the beautiful slipcase edition--is a good match to later Midgard (2nd/3rd ed) in terms of crunch and attitude, despite their very different approach to settings.
The current edition (4th) IMO suffers from rules bloat, the full game being four massive hardcover books, a total of 1500 pages (from 280 pages in the 2nd ed).

When D&D3 appeared some Midgard players were quite annoyed that its system was heralded and praised as the next best thing since sliced bread - to them Midgard looked like a "proto-d20".

Quote from: Benoist;373156Never been to L'Oeuf Cube. One of the most famous hobby stores in the country (always had a bunch of ads in each issue of CB, too, as you remember, I'm sure).

My first visit to L'Oeuf Cube happened in 1994, during the MTG craze. It was the first (and as I think of it, the only) shop where I saw velvet ropes on the pavement in front of the store, separating a huge crowd of people from the narrow store entrance. The shop was very small back then and would hold only a handful of customers.

I felt the RPG selection of Jeux Descartes (just a few blocks away), Games (at Forum des Halles, that store that doesn't exist anymore) and another store near La Défense was way better.

Last year I found the reverse true - the selection at Descartes has slimmed down considerably (up to the point that it was not worthwhile the visit at all) while L'Oeuf Cube had even expanded from a (mostly) CCG store to an extremely well-stocked, full service RPG store. That's where I found dK (even the OOP first edition).

I heartily recommend the store.

Quote from: Benoist;373156Nephilim, 2nd edition, is a jewel amongst games. The game materials produced for it are just as awesome

Le Souffle du Dragon is the only Nephilim supplement that I own (apart from the 1st ed rule book).

Quote from: Benoist;373156whereas Nephilim 3, aka Nephilim: Révélation, sucks ass and sedimented all the very cool background ideas into a ridiculously huge metaplot. That, and the mechanics of N3 aren't based off Basic RPS anymore, and suck really bad.

I never read anything official of why the system was replaced. I thought that it was due to the end of the license with Chaosium?

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;373416In short:

Midgard was the first RPG published in Germany(...)

Wow, man. That's a seriously cool summary there. I really liked Legendes Celtiques. I imagine I'd like Midgard, then.

Which edition do you prefer, personally? I'm guessing not the "rules bloated", recent one.

Has anybody thought of doing some sort of Midgard retroclone, or anything comparable?

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;373416My first visit to L'Oeuf Cube happened in 1994, during the MTG craze. It was the first (and as I think of it, the only) shop where I saw velvet ropes on the pavement in front of the store, separating a huge crowd of people from the narrow store entrance. The shop was very small back then and would hold only a handful of customers.

I felt the RPG selection of Jeux Descartes (just a few blocks away), Games (at Forum des Halles, that store that doesn't exist anymore) and another store near La Défense was way better.

Last year I found the reverse true - the selection at Descartes has slimmed down considerably (up to the point that it was not worthwhile the visit at all) while L'Oeuf Cube had even expanded from a (mostly) CCG store to an extremely well-stocked, full service RPG store. That's where I found dK (even the OOP first edition).

I heartily recommend the store.

Cool beans. I'm going back to France this Summer. Don't know if I'm going to stop in Paris, but that's always a good thing to know.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;373416Le Souffle du Dragon is the only Nephilim supplement that I own (apart from the 1st ed rule book).

AH DUDE. This Campaign ROCKS, doesn't it?

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;373416I never read anything official of why the system was replaced. I thought that it was due to the end of the license with Chaosium?

It's possible. Maybe they let it expire, or had to design the new system because their license with Chaosium expired. Whatever the case, I think it was a sad day for the game. I hugely biased of course in this case, what with my rampant Basic RPS fanboyism and anti-storygaming thing going on. YMMV.