Favourites:

2300AD
Traveller
Harn
Macho Women with Guns

Favourite Rule system:

Hero System.

Non-favourites - most of the others!

Brian

Yay MWWG! Go BTRC!

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"Rules are GOOD. Rules help control the fun!" -Monica Geller, Friends

No-one so far has mentioned the post DnD output of E Jary Jyjax (Danjerous Journeys and Lejendary Adventures). I’ve browsed through the first (and come away dazed & confused) and I’ve downloaded the quickstart rules for the second, which are good for a laugh, but little else! Anyone here played either of these games? Is it possible? Are they (as some claim) incremental improvements on DnD? Or are they simply excrement?

Neil

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Uxbridge English Dictionary:
Iconography: Filthy Byzantine pictures

Or perhaps both?

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Keith Mann
I really must get around to changing my .sig

I own and have played Dangerous Journeys! While there is certainly a load of excrement you have to burrow through to find the good stuff there is a fair bit of interesting material in them in my opinion. The world supplement is quite reasonable for a high fantasy campaign and I have converted Necropolis and played it through as a campaign for my Powers and Perils game (although that is a disclaimer in itself!). I also quite liked the Beastiary as it was filled for the most part with mundane creatures and have referred to it several times for other games. I wouldn't recommend it as a ruleset but there's some interesting source material.

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:: Tim Falkenberg ::
tim.admin@harnforum.com

Hmm, there is an interesting class of games here, I think, that are sometimes referred to as 'heartbreakers'. These games contain some really neat ideas, approaches and concepts, but are fatally or near-fatally marred by some element in their design or construction.

Examples include Powers & Perils (the mention of which brought this to mind - nice stuff you have done for P&P, Tim!) and Aria.

Powers & Perils has some lovely ideas and features, especially around alignments (which are applied to magical forces - including MUs - rather than to everyone), grouped magical powers and a world with truly epic scope, but uses systems that sometimes seem gratuitously involved and opaque.

Aria introduces a truly revolutionary approach to blending roleplaying and sort of wargame campaigning (you 'roleplay' a culture!) to generate heroes connected to their societies and a dynamic world - if only the author had written it in English rather than inventing some bizarre new language for it...

Anyone got any more of these?

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Balesir
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- Eschew Obfuscation!

Thank you kindly!



I have always imagined it was written by a grad student in a drug-induced stupor. As you say, some fascinating ideas but whoa!

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:: Tim Falkenberg ::
tim.admin@harnforum.com

Cyberpunk: Don't rightly know why. Never just felt comfortable around it. The world is un-imaginative imnsho

Shadowrun : Don't get me wrong, I was a part of a very long SR- campaign and I still recall those days with fond memories and would live them again if I could. But since I dislocated my wrist rolling the dice, the system itself has been something I have no wish to get back to.

D&D, AD&D any ed. : Ummm. Yeah. No thanks.

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Poorly paid academic. Will do research for food.

This is gonna sound funny and ironic but there is one game system I have been all to often associated with that I now would have to say is one that I can do without.

The rulesystem I speak of is D&D.

Now, some of you may know that I am one of the people who has been involved in converting Harn to d20 a few years back. I was the one calling on people to stop lambasting other systems but critque them based on their merit or lack thereof. Therefore I will say why I have grown tired of D&D and all things d20.

For starters it is amazingly complicated. It has so many rules and options that a person who only has a casual interest in RPG's like myself these days is absolutley crushed by the number of variables one must remember in order to play your character. I mean I have been playing D&D for the past 18 months at least once a week and I can tell you that my knowledge of the system is pathetic when I see how much has been written as add-on rules and such for the system. Granted the basics are pretty clear but if anyone in your group is the least bit motivated to get informed you are left in the dust by all the subtle nuances that exist when creating synergy bonuses with skills and feats and the like. Oi!

Secondly, the character advancement is exponential. Feats stack on feats, attacks stack on attacks and after 7th or 8th level your character does not resemble the person they were 18-21 sessions ago. Granted, unlike Harnmaster which provides for very little character advancement as far as skills and stats go (the average character in Harnmaster will have improved no more than 15% in a skill over the same period if they were lucky with rolls and used that skill incessantly), you definately see development of your character but it is all about the numbers and less and less about the actual character.

Thirdly, it tries to be all things to everyone and fails. Unlike Savage Worlds, which manages to tie roleplaying and miniature gaming together brilliantly, D&D can't do either very well. Skill development is stilted in most character classes due to low skill points and combat is requires extensive moderation and knowledge that it is a slow and laboured affair. Systems like Ars Magica and even Harnmaster to a certain extent are much less focussed on tactics and more on general strategy and prior development. This ensures that you stay "in the game" while combats occur and there is no need to change pace due to additional rules. Although in theory Skill and Combat are essentially the same (roll to beat target level) the addition of various feats and such make them two very different affairs in practice.

Finally, I have to agree with most people who posted that the magic level in default D&D is too high. But more to the point, there is no in game consequences to magic use and as a result it is abused and leads to a cavalier approach. The careless nature of the magic system (fire and forget) plus the lack of consequences make it little better than another weapon in the arsenal or armour from the armory. I actually think most game systems suffer from this fate and Harnmaster has the potential to follow this path except for fatigue and the way that societal pressure play a part in the game (if not represented in the rules).

Now, D&D is popular, it is very well represented in most centres where gaming occurs and it allowed me to get into gaming again after being without for quite awhile so there is a definate value to it and I will treasure the friendships I made playing it. And if there were a way to run a campaign that ran for a year ended satisfactorially by level 6 or 7 than I would see it in another light. But the reality is it is an unsustainable system that becomes more and more ridiculous as it progresses.

That is it. Rant over. Now Nick can sit back and say I told you so . But if I never play another game of D&D I'll be happy.

Oh and by the way I dislike Rolemaster for most of the same reasons I mentioned about D&D except it actually has a much more gradual advancement (the benefit of percentile vs. d20's). I haven't seen HARP but from what I have seen of the descriptions it appears that ICE is going the wrong direction IMHO.

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Chris Van Tighem
"Ever Stalwart"

I must agree to all who say D&D and AD/D. I think AD&D is the worst of them, D&D is playable if you have all the boxes and the more advanced weapon mastery system, but hey how fun can it be to meet a goblin at L1 and wap, he hits you and you're dead, oops, not even the old saying, if you fail the first time, try try again can cheer me up after such an experience.

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"Corpora lente augescent cito extinguuntur" - Tacitus
Fenhorn's Hârnpage

The system of rewards and character development used in a roleplaying game is an area I find increasingly interesting.

D&D has reward and character improvement systems that are pretty dysfunctional for long term play - you get rewarded for killing things and taking their stuff by becoming better at killing things and taking their stuff... The system is more-or-less bound to spiral out of control in the long term. It is interesting that the system is a little like a recreational drug in several ways - you need bigger and bigger fixes for your character to keep getting the 'buzz'. As a setup for an unashamedly 'gamist' system where the joy is in taking on an escalating series of tactical challenges it works very well for a limited game duration, but as the basis for other types of play it is problematic.

Somewhat disconcerting is that most other RPG rulesets have taken this broad methodology as the 'standard' and almost seem to have assumed it as 'what roleplaying is'. Traveller is about the only system I can think of offhand that does not have a mechanism whereby the character gets better (in system terms) as a basic assumption of play. HârnMaster goes a little way to countering this with the (optional) 'skill maintenance' rule - but in the process introduces considerable complexity and record keeping.

This thread is not really the place for discussion of possible alternatives - so I'll start another...

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Balesir
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- Eschew Obfuscation!

I wouldn't reccomend Ysgarth.
The TORG system is OK, but when it gets shifted to other genres (Shatterstar for example) it loses something.
Lots of the D20 product is rather wretched. Though that may be a bit broad and I know some who like D20 anything (heck I've even heard of those who like attempts to make D20 'gritty' though I've seen none that are better than the simple D20 modern change in the Death by Massive Damage rules)
Powers and Perils was just too much (the rules were very poor for an AH offering). Though Cinnibar is actually worse.
I was once given a game called "Battlelords of the 23rd Century" which was worth every penny I spent on it. Though sarcasm might be wasted on such a poor game.
Space 1889 is actually a pretty good game, but it is plagued with weak mechanics.
Buck Rogers, Noir, and OVer the Edge are all poor games, but hte winner for absolute worst is (drum roll please)....
Everlasting. That game has a system which at first glance seems pretty comparable to White Wolf (whether you like WW or not) but when you actually try running with it - characters capable of liting a truck singing mighty enchanted two swords cannot hurt normal human beings (as in give them a serious enough cut to require stitches) without at least two or three strikes. Strikes as in blows which land, not counting any which miss.
Even worse the whole thing was modular AND stand alone, so every supplement neded the same 250 repeated pages with a mere 50 or so of new content, making acquisition very pricey. Wonder why my wife found it on the bargain rack? Less value than Battlelords, even if they had been the same price.[/u]

Re Space 1889: GDW was alwats good for settings, often weak for rules. Kinda like FASA. Columbia is unusual (IMHO and all that) in that they make both good rules and awesomendous setting.

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"Rules are GOOD. Rules help control the fun!" -Monica Geller, Friends

FATAL has now earned a permanent spot on my list as the worst RPG of all time. Execrable.

FATAL has a strong reputation in that regard. It's widely regarded as being one of the three or four or so worst systems generally available (it being difficult to know exactly what abominations have been concocted in private gaming groups that nobody else ever sees). Where exactly it scores relative to such monstrosities as Rahowa (the roleplaying game of White Supremacy) or HYBRID (the... oh, I've no ing idea...) depends on what exactly you regard as the epitome of bad gaming.

Rahowa, for instance, has the benefit of being short, rather than the sprawling mass of excrement that is FATAL, but it does manage to consist of rather more concentrated venom, and has a game engine of at least comparable ineptitude. It's undiluted evil, but at least one gets the impression that the writer didn't spend very long working on it - something that clearly isn't true of FATAL's writer, more's the pity.

HYBRID, on the other hand, probably isn't offensive (although its difficult to tell). But it is mind-bogglingly badly written; the rules are so utterly abysmal that nobody actually knows what they are, even in the unlikely event they summoned up the willpower to read the full rulebook. As a piece of game writing and design (and I use those words in their loosest sense), it is far worse even than FATAL, but this is mitigated in many people's minds by the fact that it quite literally isn't playable.

Apparently DnD 3.5 has 'fixed' this problem and the GM guidebook has rules for non-jkilling xp and roleplaying xp awards.

I havent seen it and havent used it yet, but I'm starting in a 'Pirates' Dnd 3.5 adventure (as the Captain ) so I'll be very interested in pushing the Non-killing things Xp awards to the GM (I'm his HARN GM so he knows what I like! )

Has anybody read the DnD 3.5 GM rulebook on XP awards?

Regards,
Jason Brisbane
AIM:DarkeeninWA

Justifiers was terrible. Really, really bad. Jeez.
I don't even want to go into it.
I mean, in the weapon descriptions, it even had a picture of a rock (for when you want to throw a rock at someone) so you would know what a rock looked like.

Well, sort of - and so does the d20 Star Wars game, but the fact remains that what you get for experience is basically getting better at hitting things and surviving nasty traps, poisons, etc. (and in Star Wars your chance of being hit goes down...). D&D is really good at what it does (escalating action-movie challenges), but it still doesn't handle other types of game well. I actually don't think this is a problem - it just says you choose your system based on what you want to do with it. It's basically unrealistic to expect any system to handle all game types well.


Yup - but it's not really very specific, just some basic guidelines.

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Balesir
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- Eschew Obfuscation!

Bad RPG?

Delta Force - America Strikes Back! from Task Force Games (?)

I remember the review in White Dwarf (back when WD was still an RPG mag): "Wouldn't touch this game with a barge pole". Sound advice.
Crappy system, questionable content. Still is, twenty years later.

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- Johan

"Some place needs to be the worst place in the world. Why not here?" -Brusselt Airmol

Delta Force (Yes it was Task Force Games) was not necessarily a good RPG for a continuing campaign, but it did have superior mechanics for dealing with small arms, grenades and other aspects of modern combat which allowed for reasonable results (meaning they at least seemed plausible) without bogging down (the way Phoenix Command does) once the Game-master was familiar with the system. It is flexible enough that I once used it as the basis for a campaign where the players were space marines.
Delta Force is a long way from bad, even if it is very narrow in its focus.

A matter of taste I guess. IMO, the mechanics were way too "wargamey" (and, yes, "simulationist") for an RPG system, and the rules were really poorly written and presented. Getting familiar with the game would take the kind of time, effort and patience that I was not willing to invest in a system with such limited appeal.
And, yes, all those illustrations of blood-soaked Arabs shot to pieces kind of put me off to begin with...

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- Johan

"Some place needs to be the worst place in the world. Why not here?" -Brusselt Airmol

Those who value their sanity and don't wish it stripped away like as though they had beheld the Great Cthulu will NOT click this link:

http://philippe.tromeur.free.fr/hybrid.htm

Whoa... this must be the Mad Scientist's approach to RPG design. Here's my favorite quote:

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Chris

Gaaaah!!! My eyes, my eyes! Reading that rpg is like slitting your throat and watching your life rush out of you. Phew!

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ZzzZzZz
Formerly known as Angaros

Iä Iä!

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Running: AD&D / When a star falls
Running: MERP / Woses of the black wood