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Author Topic: Lejendary Adventures Q&A  (Read 11868 times)

Rithuan

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Lejendary Adventures Q&A
« on: July 31, 2018, 08:55:08 PM »
Hello and thank you for reading!

For some time now, I wanted to open a thread here to post questions regarding this game: Lejendary Adventures.

I know is not a popular game (or not many people plays it). But this forum might be the right place to preserve the knowledge (from Bluspnge and Lunamancer, among others) and have the closest thing to a Q&A.

So, let's begin!

Q: Armor and Activations
Armor, and activations that provide armor, usually give a speed penalty.  According to the player's handbook p182 and the character sheet on page 203, the AEP (Activation Energy Points) are calculated by the unmodified Speed.

Now, in the Essential book (p 67) "the Speed loss rating is the reduction from the Avatar's speed Base Rating for purposes of movement and action while wearing the armor." Does this mean that the extraordinary abilities like Theurgy or Enchantments will suffer a penalty when using armor?


Thanks again,

MonsterSlayer

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Lejendary Adventures Q&A
« Reply #1 on: July 31, 2018, 10:13:32 PM »
Quote from: Rithuan;1051065
Hello and thank you for reading!

For some time now, I wanted to open a thread here to post questions regarding this game: Lejendary Adventures.

I know is not a popular game (or not many people plays it). But this forum might be the right place to preserve the knowledge (from Bluspnge and Lunamancer, among others) and have the closest thing to a Q&A.

So, let's begin!.....

Thanks again,


Sounds cool but how about someone begin by telling the rest of us a brief synopsis of the game.

I never heard of if. Is it SciFi? Fantasy? What?

Rules light (guessing not) or loads of crunch?

You went from zero to a hundred there and the left the rest of gawkers in the dust.

Rithuan

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Lejendary Adventures Q&A
« Reply #2 on: July 31, 2018, 11:02:59 PM »
Oh, by all means.
Lejendary Adventures (LA) was the last game that Gary Gygax wrote with Trigee Enterprise on 1999 and was later republished by Troll Lords on 2005. The game is a fantasy RPG, rules-light by design. In a few words, LA is:
- a skill based game with a Percentile dice.
- each skill is a skill-bundle, so is not rare to see synergy or overlapping among them
- it has three core attributes that play more the role of HP, MP and save rolls
- Does not have classes, but the game has Orders. This play the role of membership for the great archetypes in-game (Mages, Knights, Thieves, etc.) Orders as a social status grant equipment and skill bonus.


It has soo many spells, optional rules and a convoluted character generation that I would challenge the concept of how rules light is. It's rules light for the players but requires more effort for the GM

KingofElfland

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Lejendary Adventures Q&A
« Reply #3 on: August 01, 2018, 09:00:29 AM »
Is it not a reworking of his Dangerous Journeys Mythus game that TSR sued GDW to have shut down? I have all the DJ books and loved the art, professions, and magic, but his reinvention of every core term was painful. Also, math. There was averaging and dividing and whatnot. Character creation could take hours. But the game itself was okay after the initial work was done. The magic spells and different types of magic was really inspiring, but the rest was too much work for too little payoff. I wonder if LJ fixes that.

Kuroth

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Lejendary Adventures Q&A
« Reply #4 on: August 01, 2018, 10:40:36 AM »
Be sure to check the Lejendary Adventures section over on Dragonsfoot  Rithuan.  Gygax provided a fair amount of insight and such on the game there, with helpful advice on a few areas. Not trying to dissuade you from writing about it here, of course.
Lejendary Adventures at Dragonsfoot
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Rithuan

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Lejendary Adventures Q&A
« Reply #5 on: August 01, 2018, 06:46:31 PM »
Oh yes, most of my questions were answered in Dragonsfoot and En. There is a lot of information, but unfortunately, after Gary's passing, there is no such a thing as a compressive FAQ.

I know that lejendarylands.org used to have discussions of the game, but I can't access the forum through the Wayback machine

Kuroth

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« Reply #6 on: August 02, 2018, 10:34:40 AM »
The errata discussing changes to non-ordered avatars is useful over on at that link. It helps make the orders less essential, by equalizing non-ordered somewhat.

As to your first question, energy is found by the unmodified speed.  Armor modifies speed for movement and actions.  So, energy is the same armor or no.
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Rithuan

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Lejendary Adventures Q&A
« Reply #7 on: August 07, 2018, 11:16:00 AM »
Quote from: Kuroth;1051182
As to your first question, energy is found by the unmodified speed.  Armor modifies speed for movement and actions.  So, energy is the same armor or no.

Thanks for the reply. So for the energy or AEP, I'm confident that it uses unmodified speed. My question aims to the actions: If actions depending on speed are modified, is spellcasting (like Theurgy or Enchantments) modified?

Thanks!

Kuroth

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Lejendary Adventures Q&A
« Reply #8 on: August 07, 2018, 12:04:06 PM »
Energy available as a product of unmodified speed as a constant is the only by the book rule, as far I ever could tell.  I think Gygax meant that the ref (Lejendary Master) could apply a modifier to some aspect of extraordinary abilities, on a case-by-case basis.  So, sometimes a ref may possibly apply a greater time cost or energy cost to activate an extraordinary ability, for example. A ref could also modify how the extraordinary ability manifests itself specific to the encounter particulars.   Where the book discuses general actions, activation of extraordinary abilities is listed in context of time required in a count, which might make a ref lean toward a time cost penalty for wearing armor, if they wanted to impose such a rule.

You will encounter a fair number of questions of this type in the game, where the game attempts to be exact and vague at the same time. Given what Gygax was trying to achieve with Lejendary Adventures, the ruling that you the Lejendary Master choose to apply is always going to be the correct one.  I prefer making modifications specific to the extraordinary ability, rather than a standard rule.

It's really just a straight-up percentile based game, with a lot of ref on the spot adjudication.  I often think that the game could have been a three page game, minus the spell and monster listings.  I would drop the orders altogether, along with tablets, of course.  Just let players assign percentiles for their abilities within a range too, without the character creation in the book.  After all, the monster and spell descriptions are the neat part of the game.

Edit: If you have a continued interest in Lejendary Rithuan, I have a draft copy of AsteRogues that might help with some of your questions.  It was available for anyone to download at one of those sites for Lejendary back in the day.  I don't recall which one.   AsteRogues was Gygax's science fantasy game using the system in Lejendary Adventures.  Being a playtest draft, it is just a Word document.  So, if you would like to have it to help with any question you may have about Lejendary, just send a private message where I may send it to you.
« Last Edit: August 08, 2018, 05:06:05 AM by Kuroth »
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Blusponge

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Lejendary Adventures Q&A
« Reply #9 on: August 12, 2018, 10:18:25 AM »
Took me a while to get here and it was already on the second page.  ::sigh:: Such is the lot for LA fans.  On to the questions!

Quote from: Rithuan;1051065
Now, in the Essential book (p 67) "the Speed loss rating is the reduction from the Avatar's speed Base Rating for purposes of movement and action while wearing the armor." Does this mean that the extraordinary abilities like Theurgy or Enchantments will suffer a penalty when using armor?

As Kuroth pointed out, LA is full of little rules inconsistencies that will drive you batty if you aren't careful.  This LOOKS like one, but it really isn't.

Activation Energy Points (AEP) are generated by multiplying your Speed by 4, IIRC.  That's it.  No modifier.

The Speed Penalty from armor has more to do with Initiative (there are something like 3 different methods, but IIRC, the core is d10+modified speed) and Avoidance Rolls (essentially saving throws). Giant boulder about to fall on you?  Roll some version of your modified Speed (x4, x3, x2, or x1).

There are probably a few other uses for the modified Speed BR, but I believe those are the two biggies.

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AsenRG

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Lejendary Adventures Q&A
« Reply #10 on: August 12, 2018, 01:56:15 PM »
OK, I haven't seen the game, so let me ask something:).
You mentioned skills are broad, so there's overlap and synergy. I can imagine what the overlap would look like. What does the synergy look like;)?
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Rithuan

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Lejendary Adventures Q&A
« Reply #11 on: August 12, 2018, 08:42:47 PM »
Quote from: Kuroth;1051937
Edit: If you have a continued interest in Lejendary Rithuan, I have a draft copy of AsteRogues that might help with some of your questions.  It was available for anyone to download at one of those sites for Lejendary back in the day.  I don't recall which one.   AsteRogues was Gygax's science fantasy game using the system in Lejendary Adventures.  Being a playtest draft, it is just a Word document.  So, if you would like to have it to help with any question you may have about Lejendary, just send a private message where I may send it to you.
Thanks for your post, Kuroth. It was illuminating. Yes, I think I follow your post regarding Lejendary AsteRogues in this forum (actually, It was the reason I created an account, some years ago). I follow your trail to the 2.1 version of the system. Do you think it provides additional insight into the original LA rules?
Quote from: Blusponge;1052670
As Kuroth pointed out, LA is full of little rules inconsistencies that will drive you batty if you aren't careful.  
HAhaha, that was awesome. Thanks and welcome Blusponge!!
Quote from: Blusponge;1052670
The Speed Penalty from armor has more to do with Initiative (there are something like 3 different methods, but IIRC, the core is d10+modified speed) and Avoidance Rolls (essentially saving throws). Giant boulder about to fall on you?  Roll some version of your modified Speed (x4, x3, x2, or x1).

There are probably a few other uses for the modified Speed BR, but I believe those are the two biggies.
Oh, I wasn't aware that the Avoidance Rolls are based on modified speed. You're right. It's on p180 of the LR4AP. Thank you!

@AsenRG: The Synergy, in this case, is very straightforward. Some skills will explicitly mention that they create an additional benefit for other skills, damage, health or Energy points. There is no interpretation or ruling about it.

Blusponge

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Lejendary Adventures Q&A
« Reply #12 on: August 12, 2018, 11:29:04 PM »
Quote from: AsenRG;1052676
What does the synergy look like;)?


So two very obvious examples baked right into the rules would be Weapons and Archery, and Ranging and Rustic.

Basically how synergy works in LA is, when circumstances dictate that two Abilities the avatar possesses applies to a task, the GM may permit 10% of one of them to apply to the other for purposes of the roll. So let's say you are trying to arrange an ambush in the dark streets of a urban city. This is normally the purview of Tricks, but if the avatar also possesses the Urbane ability (essentially Streetwise), the GM might allow her to apply 10% of the avatar's Urbane Rank to her Tricks Ability for setting the ambush.  You might grant more synergy than that, but 10% is usually an easy figure to apply on the fly.

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Kuroth

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Lejendary Adventures Q&A
« Reply #13 on: August 13, 2018, 09:29:20 AM »
Quote from: Rithuan;1052695
Thanks for your post, Kuroth. It was illuminating. Yes, I think I follow your post regarding Lejendary AsteRogues in this forum (actually, It was the reason I created an account, some years ago). I follow your trail to the 2.1 version of the system. Do you think it provides additional insight into the original LA rules?
I found that he reworded some areas of the Astrerouges that can help make a decision on how to land on a ruling in Lejendary. It is also interesting to see how he chose to adapt the game to a different setting.  I had a campaign in Conan's Hyboria using Lejendary.  So, I wanted to see how he adjusted Lejendary, even though it was for science fantasy.  

One of the things I found helpful for the game in general was notice that all of those special rulings in the Lejendary Master's Guide have a commonality in the modifying percentages applied.  They also help relate at what incidence modifiers may be applied to the various activies that characters get up to in game.  They act as examples for such rulings on the spot in game better than a bunch of rules to remember or have a bunch of notes.  

The game is sort of like Original D&D in that everyone ends up running it a bit differently, because of its very nature, and that is ok.

I found your explanations interesting too Blusponge!
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Lunamancer

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Lejendary Adventures Q&A
« Reply #14 on: February 23, 2019, 11:14:54 AM »
Forgive the lateness of my reply. I don't check this site regularly anymore. I found this because once or twice a year I do a google search on Lejendary Adventure.

Here's the best way I know how to explain LA.

Skip the players book (Lejendary Rules for All Players, aka LR4AP) and go straight to the monster book (Beasts of Lejend, aka BoL).

Go back to basics. You have a table top and a bunch of guys are going to fight. The very first thing you need to know is how much you can move your guy so that your opponent is within your attack range or weapon's reach. Once within range, the second thing you need to know is what is your probability of hitting. Then third thing you need to know is how many hits it takes to put your opponent down.

And so to represent these three primordial needs of an action-oriented role-playing game, Lejendary Adventure skips all the hoopla and gimmicks and fanfare and simply gives you what you need. Health, Precision, and Speed. The monsters are then rounded out with two more stats, Attack and Defense, that answer the likely two first details questions that come up from that schema. Aren't some people going to hit harder than others? Aren't some going to defend better than others? There are additional stats that some monsters possess--abilities, powers, anti-power checks, and invulnerabilities. But the five that are common to all are Health, Precision, Speed, Attack, and Defense.

Avatars (player characters) are focused a little differently but still fit the mold. They all have abilities. Some will also have powers. They generally do not have invulnerabilities or anti-power checks. Those are for things like evil spirits and deital minions. And of course attack and defense modes of human and human-like creatures are going to be mainly dependent upon tools (weapons and armor) and their skills (abilities to use them). This is what is covered in LR4AP.

Everything else is filled in from there according to the needs of play. So questions like "Can I fight with two weapons?" "How does parrying work?" "Can I dodge?" "How does morale work?" "What if I want to prospect for gold?" "What if I want to climb a tree, swing from a vine, and dive into water below?" These are handled in the game master's book (Lejend Masters Lore, aka LML).

So question. what does the armor speed penalty affect?

Answer? Whatever makes sense.

It affects movement speed. It affects attacking speed (which may be used in initiative). Does it affect avoidance checks? Depends. If you're avoiding some sort of physical damage attack, then most likely yes. If you're avoiding a mental attack, such as an attempted mind control, then no. Does it affect your abilities? Generally, no. But if it makes sense to the ability, the penalty may apply. Or even a much harsher one. Stealth is a Precision-based Ability, so a Speed penalty would in no way hamper it. But sneaking around in mail will certainly carry a penalty.
That's my two cents anyway. Carry on, crawler.

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