I'm going to re-start my 3.X game, and FC caught my eye. From reading reviews online, I can gather a small amount of info:

Stuff I like:

• Classes (Assassin, Burglar, Captain, Courtier, Explorer, Keeper, Lancer, Mage, Priest, Sage, Scout, Soldier.) Looks like a solid mix.
• VP/WP means clerics need not be healbots.
• Action dice (I'm not too fond of them, but my players love them.)
• Skills (not too many, not too few.)
• Spell points.
• No dead levels.

Stuff I don't like:

• Wacky races (giants, dragonmen, treants)
• Expert (prestiege) classes. Not a fan; I usually don't use them.
• 24 pages of feats.
• Lots of crunch. More than 3.5? Can't tell.  

Anyone have any experience with the system?

Quote from: Aglondir;1026630I'm going to re-start my 3.X game, and FC caught my eye. From reading reviews online, I can gather a small amount of info:

Stuff I like:

• Classes (Assassin, Burglar, Captain, Courtier, Explorer, Keeper, Lancer, Mage, Priest, Sage, Scout, Soldier.) Looks like a solid mix.
• VP/WP means clerics need not be healbots.
• Action dice (I'm not too fond of them, but my players love them.)
• Skills (not too many, not too few.)
• Spell points.
• No dead levels.

Stuff I don't like:

• Wacky races (giants, dragonmen, treants)
• Expert (prestiege) classes. Not a fan; I usually don't use them.
• 24 pages of feats.
• Lots of crunch. More than 3.5? Can't tell.  

Anyone have any experience with the system?

I think it's the best edition of 3.x ever made. But it's not for the faint of heart. I'm in the middle of something - I'll try to address a few things in a bit.


Edit: Okay so the *thing* with Fantasy Craft (and if you search the forum I've said this at length in many threads) - it's a toolkit that should be approached with care, otherwise you'll gloss over a lot of important differences between 3.x and FC. Namely that FC is balancing numerically every subsystem against everything else. This is how it avoids the major issues that you have with 3.x and it's various flavors.

So I recommend reading the book cover-to-cover, don't skip any section that you assume you know. There's a LOT of little things that you'll assume are straightforward like 3.x/PF and you'll find out that the little changes have large implications elsewhere. PLUS the vast majority of the system is modular. You can tweak things up or down - it's designed that way. The assumptions are that the GM will read the ruleset, decide what options are in play, then apply it to a setting and let it rip.

I'll address some of your points:

• Classes - Not only are they a solid mix. They're almost the exact example of what your classic D&D sub-classes came to be. You'll find most of the core-classes from D&D are actually Specialties which look an awful lot like Backgrounds in 5e - but better tailored to the system.
• VP/WP means clerics need not be healbots. - Clerics do not heal at all (unless your God gives you that ability). Mages can heal. This cuts to the core of 2e's Speciality Priests which is what I personally like.
• Action dice (I'm not too fond of them, but my players love them.) - Don't worry about it. The Action-Dice mechanics aren't bad at all. The're a little meta, but they don't have to be.
• Skills (not too many, not too few.) - Agreed. And you can do a lot with those skills.
• Spell points. - Yep. And scaling magic.
• No dead levels. - Not only that. But they don't assume you'll get your "Class Cap Power" at 20. You get it at 16. This is a general nod to math-curve from older D&D editions where most games started to collapse under their own weight around there.

Bad List notes

• Wacky races (giants, dragonmen, treants) - Don't worry it's simply there to give you an understanding of system-flexibility. If you check out their online resources they show you how to build your own races.
• Expert (prestiege) classes. Not a fan; I usually don't use them. - Expert Classes in FC are *far* better designed than PrC's in 3.x. They really are not "prestige classes" they're specializations for players that want to play a certain "schtick" that isn't necessarily a core class. Or something that would require some specialized training. If you look at them, they still hold to the balance of the system. And of course, they're optional.
• 24 pages of feats. - Okay here's where you're going to have to remove the 3.x/PF Feat-experience out of your head. Feats in FC are pretty integral. They are *not* weak, nor designed to gatekeep you from a "schtick". They will define your style of play. And they're *powerful*. Like *really* powerful. They allow you to make nearly any kind of character and be effective. There are no limp-dick choke-point feats. There are no *bad* feats. They're all designed to really enhance your character. And they're designed to integrate with the equipment and combat features more intimately than standard 3.x/PF options. I wished 5e would have gone this route...
• Lots of crunch. More than 3.5? Can't tell.  - There is a LOT of crunch only because you need to decide as a GM what is in play. And you need to learn the differences. But once you grok all of it, and you figure out what you want to use and what not to use (see page 363 for a cheat-sheet for new GM's on what systems you need use as a baseline).

Some things you may not have realized:

Scalable monsters - The Beastiary in the book has basic stats and abilities for all the standard D&D monsters... but they're all scalable. They have attack, defense, initiative tables including damage - that allow you to scale *any* monster to any level *ON THE FLY*. This allows you keep things dangerous at all times, or to scale down things as necessary. It's an amazing little sub-system with deep control.


Non-Casters Are DANGEROUS - Because it uses a VP/HP system, a non-caster can potentially one-shot an opponent with a Crit (that bypasses VP and goes straight to HP). This is by design since historically in D&D (especially in 3.x/PF) you have the problem of the Quadratic Mage and Linear Fighter. Soldiers in FC are *killing machines*. Using their weapons of choice they will obliterate a caster if they can close on them. And the beauty of this is they made this mechanical feature possible without degrading the power of casters.

Social Classes - Social classes like the Courtier are not only playable, they're downright dangerous as hell while in their element. Combined with the right Feats and the right player, they are extremely formidable.

Stat Spread - ALL stats matter. No more stat-dumping.

Casters Get Love - You want to wear armor? You want to fight and be dangerous? Grab the right feats/backgrounds/specialties and get to it!

The GM section is excellent. AND if you're going to get Fantasy Craft - I *HIGHLY* recommend you getting the Adventurers Companion. It has a BUNCH of supplementary rules, classes, Feats that did not make it into the Core that add a lot to the system, plus I think 4 mini-campaign settings that are surprisingly well done considering the space limitations.

I love the skill list for FC.  I'm alright with d20 in general (my players like it more than I do), but I really should work on getting that skill list ported over.

I really enjoyed Fantasy Craft. Here are a few things I really liked about it.

• No feat taxes. Every feat is well thought out and useful.
• NPC creation system used for everything from regular NPCs to monsters. Create something once, then easily scale it to be an appropriate challenge for PCs of any level.
• Subrace feats. A way to include multiple types of X without requiring a ton of extra full race write-ups. And since they do use up a feat slot, they've been written so that the adjustments add up to a net positive on par with most regular feats.
• Classes have excellence in their niche, and usefulness outside of it. Rare is the situation where a particular character can't contribute something.
• Subdual and Stress damage system that makes non-lethal combat a viable, effective alternative to just killing things without making things much more complicated.
• Non-ideal stats won't kill a character concept, nor will they lock you out of anything important. I believe a handful of feats require a stat at 15, and the level(circle) of spells you can cast only depends on your class level, not your stats.

And a few things I don't care for, just to be fair.

• HP bloat(Vitality). Instead of the i-x ranking system used in most aspects of NPC creation, Vitality Points is simply an assigned base value that's then multiplied by the party level. For many NPCs, this causes them to increase much faster than the PCs ability to deal damage, which can make battles drag out. This causes the following issue:
• Action Dice hoarding. There's a whole list of things you can spend Action Dice on, and you might have some more depending on your class. But thanks to Vitality Point bloat, you'll mostly likely be hoarding your dice for the single action of activating critical hits, which bypass the large Vitality Point pool and go straight for the enemy's much smaller Wound Point pool. (Vitality increases with level, but Wounds do not, making the latter a smaller and smaller percentage of your total HP as your level increases; the same goes for NPCs). It's like . . . why do we even have all these uses when the system encourages hoarding like that?
• Static NPC Save Values. The NPC scaling system isn't perfect, but one of its goals is to keep an NPC roughly the same "challenge level" regardless of your party level. Easy at level 1, easy at 20. Difficult at 1, still difficult at 20. But saves for some reason are static. So you end up with saves that are easy at 1, utterly trivial at 20. Difficult at 1, easy at 20. Moderate at 20, insurmountable at 1. Saves just don't gel with the rest of the NPC scaling system or the goals thereof. It's weird.

There are more things on each list, but those are the ones that really come to mind even in the middle of the night when I'm about to pass out at the keyboard. I wouldn't call Fantasy Craft a perfect system by any means, but it fixes enough of my gripes with 3.x without introducing too many new negatives that I find it pretty tolerable and quite a bit of fun in play.

Also, I wouldn't say it's crunchier than 3.x. I think they're about even in that regard; they're just differently crunchy. I think coming to either of them fresh it would be about equal, but if you're coming to Fantasy Craft already familiar with 3.x then adjusting to all the little differences can make it seem crunchier than it actually is.

Pretty much agree with what's been said. Overall, is 'a' 3e D&D-style game. Frankly a good one. One that misses many of the issues that the actual 3e D&D had (although it also missed having a lot of supplements, so who know what it could have turned into). I think me and my groups would have gotten into it when it came out if 3e wasn't the last flagging tail end of our interest in crunchy games (after spending the 90s with GURPS and Champions and some of the crunchier parts of Traveller). If you like the basic premise and promise of the 3e model (including the crunch, and the build-a-character, and monsters you can advance to fit your needs, etc.), than it is a much less off-the-rails (although also much less supported) alternative to 3e of PF.

I haven't played Fantasy Craft, only read it. But from what I gather, you can simply drop much of the stuff you dislike. It seems like more of a toolkit than a RAW game. I've stolen some of its sub-systems (ie downtime) for my 5E game.

Quote from: Aglondir;1026630Classes (Assassin, Burglar, Captain, Courtier, Explorer, Keeper, Lancer, Mage, Priest, Sage, Scout, Soldier.) Looks like a solid mix.

Actually, there are many other classes, they're just in supplements.

QuoteVP/WP means clerics need not be healbots.

Yes.

QuoteWacky races (giants, dragonmen, treants)

Explicitly stated: they only exist if the GM's setting has them. The system can be customised for human-only games.

QuoteExpert (prestiege) classes. Not a fan; I usually don't use them.

Then don't use them.

Quote24 pages of feats.

Feats in FC are much better than those in 3.5, though.

QuoteLots of crunch. More than 3.5? Can't tell.

About equal, IMO.

Also: making NPCs is much easier than in 3.5, which should help (much like in older editions, NPCs aren't created the same way heroes are).

Thanks for the informative posts. Can someone explain: Subdual and Stress damage?

Quote from: Aglondir;1026777Thanks for the informative posts. Can someone explain: Subdual and Stress damage?

Both types are very similar. Subdual is physical, and stress is mental, but the mechanics are the same.
Neither interacts with VP/WP normally. Instead, you keep track of them as a value beginning at 0. Take 5 stress damage, you then have 5 stress damage.
When you take either type of damage, it triggers a save(fortitude for subdual, will for stress) with target DC 10 + half of your current total accrued damage, rounded down. Take 5 stress(rounded down), make will save vs. 12. If you later take 7 more stress, a new will save vs. 16 would be needed.
If you fail a save, you reset that damage type to 0 and take a level of a condition. Fatigued for subdual, or Shaken for stress. Each condition grants certain penalties that increase with each level, with a 5th level in either knocking you out.
Both heal pretty fast, stress ignores damage reduction and cannot affect unconscious targets, and further subdual damage inflicted on unconscious targets is converted to normal(lethal) damage and treated accordingly.

Quote from: Aglondir;1026630Stuff I don't like:

• Wacky races

Whhaaaa?

Who doesn't like Wacky races?

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