On topic: I suffered a home fire a few years ago which ate my bookshelf of gaming material while I was getting everyone out of the building. Had lots of stuff that I would flip through, but never ran as such, like old Warhammer books, lots of 2nd ed Forgotten Realms and Darksun. 1st ed Cthulhu stuff. TMNT rules. MERP stuff. Bunch of random things. I do consider myself lucky that no-one was hurt in that fire. *symbolic gesture of mt. dew for the fallen books*
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Quote from: Simlasa;803070Yeah, the crunch made sense, and tied back to the setting... which kind of made it more frustrating because it all had a reason for being there. It was flavorful crunch.
I'm noticing the same thing now as I tinker with the magic rules for my homebrew setting... coming up with all sorts of flavorful ideas that are tied to how the magic works in that place... but realizing it's just too much to move smoothly in game.

(Not to totally sidetrack, but I wanted to comment on this thread of the conversation.)

There were two major time sinks involved in resolving action tests in Earthdawn (1e). Each attack could be 2-3 rolls (attack roll, opponent's active defense, damage). Characters can have multiple attacks, and you can see how the below resolution used to take a while.

• The first part was figuring out the Step Number and Die Pool to use. While nominally very simple (add an Attribute Step to a Power Rank, look the Dice up on the Step Chart on your character sheet), this often involved multiple other bonuses/penalties on top of the number written on the sheet for the talent/skill. Things like -1 for every Wound taken after the first, Harried modifiers, if you have a Defensive or Aggressive stance going, temporary spell effects, etc. Having to change your dice pool multiple times in a combat wasn't the most intuitive for players.

This was addressed from Classic/3e forward by saying that temporary modifiers (+3 Aggressive attack, or Harried mods, for example) can be applied after you roll (with the old style as an optional rule).

I think from the previews in 4th edition we are using the old-style s the base with the 3e version as the optional rule.

• The second part of the roll was always determining the degree of success, which usually mattered, possibly for a followup roll. The classic example is the "Armor Defeating" success, 2 SLs above a hit.. and as a GM I would always do a SL lookup at some point to base scene descriptions on.

This meant looking up the difficulty number and roll result on a chart to see which Success Level column the result fell in. The math gave a rage for each difficulty that worked out to a set number of success levels. Things like bypassing armor completely required 2 success levels above a hit. In 1e the ranges for each success level grew as the difficulty increases, leading to the same # of levels for each difficulty number (based on the scaling math of the exploding dice pools). *phew*

In 4e, the new rules completely skips this whole chart lookup for a simple equation based on 5s(+1SL) & 10s(+2SL) above the difficulty number. This change means you most likey get slightly more success levels for rolling bigger pools, as a trade off for a set range for each SL.
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Combine these new mechanics and the player will now usually roll the dice they have written down on their character sheet (which may change between sessions as they spend Legend Points), add/subtract temporary mods from the die results, and the GM can tell in a second how many successes above/below the difficulty they got. Ideally, this reduces up to 6 chart lookups in one attack (for dice-pools and result levels), to simple math everyone can do in play.

I see a lot of people (on international forums too) who loved ED and suffered through the crunch and who also comment that another edition really isn't worth it unless there's a radical change to the mechanics. The Step System is still there in 4e, but I think this *IS* a radical change to the system and definitely for the better.

I actually really want to run Keep on the Borderland and Slave Pits of the Undercity with the new Earthdawn rules & setting tropes. Just waiting for the base rules to be settled before I want to try converting the oD&D stats. Seems like 2 levels = 1 'Circle' would work best, based on the 30 level BECMI scale...

Huh. I don't even remember active defense rolls being a thing. I thought it was simply a different target number for Defense vs. Armor based on Dex and encumbrance. Defense could be conditionally boosted via defensive maneuvers like giving ground, thus increasing the TN, but I thought the number itself was generally static.

Of course, it's literally been 5+ years since the last time I played; it's entirely possible I've simply forgotten how combat in ED actually worked. I gotta' say, though, the more I read/learn about 4th Edition the more I can't wait for that damn book to finally be released.

Quote from: trechriron;802581Just for this EXACT reason, I refuse to sell any RPG books ever again. I have sold off books only later to regret it, and even re-purchased them because I felt I could use them.

Yah. This. Here.

In 2010 I did a big RPG purge and got rid of all my non-judges guild 0D&D stuff... Your know... two White Booksets for about $80 apiece (and I kept one though, still using it, thank goodness), all the supplements, Chainmail, Swords & Spells, Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry, and Gods, Demi-gods & Heroes. At the same GenCon I sold everything in my Star Wars RPG collection as well including about 400 minis, and all the WOTC SWRPG books.

A year later my boy suddenly takes a great interest in Star Wars, and is all about being a Star Wars fanboi, and all I have is the SAGA Core rules book. Had to pick up a bunch of books again like the Arms & Equipment Guide, The Galactic Campaign Guide, The New Jedi Order Sourcebook... Still looking for a copy of the Dark Side Sourcebook at a reasonable price...

Then in 2011 I get a request to run 0D&D at GenCon and have registration overbooked for all three games scheduled for this...

Also for fires, natural disasters, and other fun stuff, my RPG collection is insured, Cost to replace everything is currently just under $25,000, though I think that's a bit low... Not properly counting in the labor and time for the handpainted minis, however did an inventory just last September for the insurance company. For most of the folks here... this is probably a small RPG collection.

I would no longer ever get rid of any of what I consider "my" books, but a while back I got rid of a bunch of the review books sent to me, the ones I was quite sure I'd never ever use.