I bought the Mongoose Legend pdf for $1 and thought it was decent.  I went back and bought the Monster book too.

But as I'm looking through it, I see that yet again there is an alternate fantasy game that I probably won't play because it really lacks in some areas.

For me, there are several really common problems I see that prevent me from wanting to play non-D&D fantasy games (I'm not including clones here):

* Spells: I find the spell lists for most other fantasy games are pretty weak and limited.  For example, in Legend, I instantly notice that the Sorcery spells killed my enthusiasm for playing the game.

* Monsters: Here's another issue where most other games come off as really limited compared to D&D for me.  I always end up missing the breadth of different monsters, or the depth of monster types/special abilities/background/etc.  Regardless of edition, D&D monsters always seem to me to offer a better variety with more interesting aspects than what I see in other games.  Again, Legend's monster book underwhelmed me completely.

* Magic Items: Here's something that D&D does OK with (but could be made more interesting) that I would expect other games to really improve on, but they rarely do.  Usually they end up just as dull for me as generic D&D magic items, but with less of a variety.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not stuck on D&D.  I find that non-D&D fantasy games usually have something better to offer with regard to character creation in general, skills, combat, races, etc.  I just don't get why these particular areas always seem to get neglected.

Anyone have anything they think D&D seems to always do better at, or that prevents their interest in non-D&D games?

Quote from: jgants;495369Anyone have anything they think D&D seems to always do better at, or that prevents their interest in non-D&D games?

Two things I think D&D tends to do better than other fantasy RPGs: defining a character's "niche" and being explicit about how powerful a character is.

The basic D&D classes (fighter, thief, cleric, magic-user) are easy to explain, archetypal, and recognizable.  One word at the topic of a character sheets makes who that character is and what they do much more understandable than a character sheet that defines that character through a handful of skills, advantages, edges, etc.

D&D level system makes gauging a character's "power" so much easier than it is many other fantasy systems.  Again, it's obvious that a 5th level character > a 3rd level character.  Compare that to a system where capability or power is tied to skill percentages, modifiers, etc. and it's clear which system is more obvious in its intent.

I definitely agree with you when it comes to spells and monsters, by the way.

Speaking of Legend, a guy from our group played a session of it last weekend. Apparently, combat is really-really complex and really-really slow - they were experienced BRP players, yet it took them almost an hour (or what felt like an hour) to go through a three-round combat sequence. Eeek.

PLAYER BASE
It's technically not a feature of the rules, but it surely makes playing a D&D game far easier than a non-D&D game.

I find this a bigger problem today than ever before. As RPGers age, too many of them are unwilling to try something new. Which is odd because I don't find this attitude among boardgamers who often verge on "new game crazy".

MALLEABLE
As Crapfinder and the OSR proved, its easy to add cool stuff to D&D without upsetting the system or the players. This malleability means there is a metric fuckton of 3rd party and free support for whatever edition you play. Having so much stuff at your fingertips certainly makes staying with D&D easier than leaving for something less supported.

I also agree on Archetype PCs, Level as Power, and the huge variety of Monsters and Spells. That said, I am always up for a game of Warhammer or Stormbringer.

Yeah I like the D&D spell lists and the way combat works (for the most part). Regarding the latter, in 0e combat is especially simple and it  is very easy to add house-rules that (e.g. for guns or critical hits) without making things terribly complex.  If a game starts out complex adding to it can fuck things up in this regard.

Quote from: Melan;495380Speaking of Legend, a guy from our group played a session of it last weekend. Apparently, combat is really-really complex and really-really slow - they were experienced BRP players, yet it took them almost an hour (or what felt like an hour) to go through a three-round combat sequence. Eeek.

There may have been a language barrier slowing things down here. Playing with native English speakers in their first combat, it took about 10 minutes to handle a straight up 2-on-2 fight, and less than 30 to deal with a complex scrum against the head bandit and his supporters with about 8 or 9 combatants.

If I had to guess, I would guess that your friends did three things which I see new people do, and which I first did when I played Legend, but that slow the game down and make it much more confusing to play.

1) They used locational damage for all combatants without an efficient way of tracking who had been hit where.

2) They did not track CAs by the use of beads, chips, ticks on a chart, but tracked them as if they were HPs, by erasing or marking them on the character sheet.

3) They didn't have, or had trouble reading, the combat maneuver cheat sheet.

To solve 1, the DM should either only use locational damage for major enemies, or they should draw a bunch of stick men / stick orcs on a scrap sheet of paper and write damage in. Also, once an enemy starts bleeding to death from having a location drop to negatives and failing a resilience roll, it's not worth rolling every round for them. They're laying there helplessly.

To solve 2, get and issue poker chips equal to the number of CAs a character has to the appropriate player. When you spend a CA, toss it into the pile in the centre. Top of the round, everyone grabs their poker chips back. This is much faster than trying to scribble little notes on how many CAs you've spent.

To solver 3, read the combat maneuver cheat sheet. Print one off for every PC and one for the DM. I came up with a set of spot rules to be printed on the back of the sheet. The combat maneuver sheets prevent people needing to flip through the book constantly to assess their options. Book flipping multiples the time required for any decision by the number of players involved, and for new players, checking out and learning the combat maneuvers is probably the most time and book intensive thing they have to do.

Quote from: jgants;495369Anyone have anything they think D&D seems to always do better at, or that prevents their interest in non-D&D games?

On to the main topic, I find D&D tends to be really good at giving even beginning players a structured form of play they can start with and follow. This matters a lot.

There are specific procedures for creating a character, exploring a dungeon, getting into combat, avoiding dangerous situations, buying equipment, whatever. On the GM's side, they tell you how to actually build a dungeon, other adventures, to an entire campaign world. And even if you are not a beginner anymore, these procedures serve you well, since they provide the mental framework for playing in or running a game, and they can be varied and combined to a considerable extent.

Although B/X, AD&D and 3e all did it differently, they had ready procedures laid out for players. In comparison, other games often tend to gloos over this, or suffocate players with a plethora of choices they cannot really handle when they start playing. "You can play any character you want and do anything you want to" is not a very good way to define the action of a roleplaying game. What is "any"? There are no navigation markers, or there are so many you get decision paralysis in another way. But if you distill it into a procedure like this:

Quote

• roll your ability scores [this way]
• choose a race from these options ("drop-down menu")
• choose a class from these options
• based on your choices, calculate your secondary statistics (Hp, saving throws, combat values)
• roll for starting gold and buy some equipment

...it suddenly becomes navigable. At every decision point (and these are laid out before you gradually, either via a formal procedure, or that clever bit of gaming technology, the character sheet), you are given a manageable number of possible picks, and they are distinct enough from each other that the choice can be made in a meaningful way.

The same stands for adventuring, another part of playing the game. Simple decisions can combine into really complex "plot" structures, but at their root, they are distinct. Actually, one of the reasons wilderness travel has usually been problematic in D&D in a way dungeoneering hasn't been, is that hex-crawling became forgotten - there were still hexes in products, people just didn't have a good idea about using them properly (teenage me included). You can't just move through complex territory easily, since distilling it to something you can navigate at a game table via verbal commands, or even describing it to players, can become insanely difficult. This is why a lot of wilderness adventures through time have defaulted to "as the characters travel down the road, they see..." - a string of encounters, maybe with a few detours. This is a structured form of adventure. But you could have hexes - and real exploration! - with the same amount of effort.

So to sum up, D&D breaks down the information of the game into navigable, structured chunks. A lot of games follow it intuitively, but often without understanding it (or even wanting to understand it). That's not to say this was all conscious on D&D's part. Maybe it helped that EGG was an insurance salesman and knew forms and bookkeeping (I have read this argument somewhere and it rings true). Maybe it came from wargaming.

And of course, D&D could get it wrong - 2e, for example, fell into the trap of giving you decision paralysis, not in character generation, but on the DMing side, by failing to provide new people procedural support. Of course, a splat-heavy 3e or 4e game could very well cause problems on the players' side - with the wealth of options and the builds they form into, D&D loses the virtues of its class system and becomes a complicated mess which is de facto point buy.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;495387If I had to guess, I would guess that your friends did three things which I see new people do, and which I first did when I played Legend, but that slow the game down and make it much more confusing to play.

Close enough, he mentioned 1) and 2), as well as something like action points slowing down things.

I think it would help if people said what other fantasy RPGs they had experience with that they were comparing it to - because there are an awful lot out there.  

My most common fantasy RPGs have been Ars Magica, Amber, HarnMaster, and Fantasy Hero, plus some of GURPS, Burning Wheel, Lord of the Rings, and various homebrews.  What I found about the comparison:

1) I think it's no surprise that D&D has the largest collections of spells, monsters, and items.  I think Ars Magica, HarnMaster, and LotR have excellent smaller collections of spells - though the latter two have no balance to them at all.  For monsters and items, none of these particularly stood out.  Fantasy Hero has the advantage of designing your own spells and items, which I got a lot of mileage out of, but its prebuilt ones were uninspiring.  

2) I've found the systems all to be easily customizable - I've never had any issue with that.  Actually, I'm puzzled by how one would think otherwise.  The one system I felt was hard to customize was Rolemaster in that it was harder to come up with new spells or classes, and very difficult to do new weapons.  

3) Amber, Fantasy HERO, GURPS, and LotR were explicit in power level, but the others weren't.

I have played d100 games like Legend in preference to D&D for many many years. It is fine that you don't like Legend, but I am happy to engage in a productive comparison.

1: Spells: I would agree that there are a lot of fun spells in D&D type games, and indeed there are many fun spells in d100 games. What is of note is that Legend is a much shorter game than D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder, so the range is simply smaller due to page count. I would say that d100 games like Legend or RuneQuest have a wider variety of 'types' of spells, and even supernatural activities like spirit travel and combat. If you play d100 games you often will use spells from games like Stormbringer, or Call of Cthulhu, and many of the sourcebooks for the games have new spells. Magic is also tied up closely to cults and religions, and often a new book of cults will have new spell lists. However I do think that there are some lovely D&D spells that would be well reimagined in the d100 world. I think that the Basic Fantasy book that Chaosium published may have done so.

2: Monsters: Well.. I refer to my previous comment that the Legend corebook is quite small, but I think you may have also bought the Monsters book. There are definitely less monsters in the d100 "genre", but more than enough to keep you happy. It is also worth saying that in d100 game no one is really a "monster", since all creatures are potential player characters and all creatures tend to be run as fully rounded personalities, and as such each creature of note is customisable and different. I know you can do this in D&D, but since all creatures are PCs and use the same rules then it's as easy as falling off a log. This also means that the huge range of D&D monsters which traditionally was to enable an opponent of the right hit dice for the opponents is not necessary. Want a weak monster, create a freshly spawned group of feral broo with a few sharp sticks.. Want a tough monster to face off your hero.. create a shaman broo with allied spirits, skills in the 90% range, several enchanted items, a chaos feature, and a portfolio of spells.

Of course you can re-imagine any of your favourite monsters from D&D. But before you do.. check if you're duplicating.. in which case file the numbers off.

Again, there are loads of non humans in the sourcebooks, the different worlds have a panoply of creatures, and often the cults and culture that goes with them.

3: Enchanted items. Most enchanted items are made using the basic spell structures. In d100 games there isn't much of the acquisition and use of magic items to boost characters for a level and then discarding them and getting some more, so characters often build up personalised collections of kit that often supplement their spells, but really awesome items tend to be quite unique and often the aim of quests. The game family hasn't focused as much on the same types of magic items as D&D, probably due to the fact that much of the magic and kit in d100 games tends to be based on the culture and religions. But again, most D&D classic items would work almost as is.

4: Combat. Ah well. I play quite a bit of Pathfinder and it is fast and many combat rounds go by very fast. Many combat rounds. In d100 games there is a lot of variety, I've played Legend combat and it's more crunchy than some other d100 games (OpenQuest is the lightest I'd say), and it's definitely more detailed and tactical than D&D. BUT IT'S SHORT. I say that in as much as it's deadly. Combats in these systems last 4-5 rounds and then one side is dead, and often several on the other side are crippled and calling for medic. I'd say Legend is almost too crunchy for me, I like the OpenQuest approach better, but once you know them they are easy to play.

5: Modularity. d100 systems are very easily adapted by porting bits and pieces in and out of other d100 games. Indeed the grandfather volume 'Basic Roleplaying' by Chaosium is in effect a toolkit for doing just that. So, if you don't like the combat in Legend, use the much simpler version in OpenQuest, or GORE or Renaissance SRD or Basic Roleplaying. Ditto with spell systems, skills, cults, factions, demonology etc etc etc.

The d100 family of games is as rich and diverse as the D&D family, and there are many flavours and tweaks. They tend to be more socially focussed, with a tight integration of individuals into cults, politics, with magic and religion intertwined. All creatures with intelligence are player characters and many a game is entirely non human. Combat is deadly and your armour and shield are your best friend. Magical items are less common since heroes usually use common magic in a similar fashion. The system is highly modular. Combat is slower and yet over quicker (in game time) and yet has multiple different versions.

I am very happy to elucidate and I welcome my fellow d100 grognards to chip in!

Tom

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Further reading: First 3 closely linked to Legend:

http://d101games.co.uk/books/openquest/ Fully OGL d100
http://www.clockworkandchivalry.co.uk/renaissance/ Black powder d100
http://ageofshadow.freehostia.com/ Very Tolkien like d100

The core grandfather:

http://catalog.chaosium.com/product_info.php?cPath=37&products_id=3712

And the epitome of socially based adventuring in myth and men:

http://www.thedesignmechanism.com/why-choose-runequest.php

Quote from: Melan;495391Close enough, he mentioned 1) and 2), as well as something like action points slowing down things.

Probably combat actions. Tracking them with poker chips or other chits, or even just strokes on a scrap sheet speeds things up a lot.

The two slowest parts of combat in MRQ2 are deciding which combat maneuver you want to use, and tracking the effects of a successful attack. Speeding them up is easy, but it's best to sit down beforehand and plan it out a bit.

While D&D does have more spells, the spells are much more specialised. RQ tends to have broader spells (especially sorcery) which duplicate the effects of multiple spells. For example, Animate (Earth & Stone) could replicate anything from a Summon Earth Elemental spell to Transmute Rock to Mud to Passwall to Wall of Stone to Stone Shape to certain uses of Fabricate or Mending.

D&D does do monsters real well, I will admit. My Emern PCs fought some cyber-leechmen last night and I didn't even have to spend a moment overcoming anyone's disbelief about there being such things as cybernetic leechmen living in an underground volcano on a pirate island.

Monsters is the big one for me, in terms of sheer variety and ease of use and customization.

I also really like pre-3e combat.  I can run 3-4 large combats in a session without them dominating our time.  Love that.

Simple combat.
D&D pre-WotC has an abstract and elegant combat system - cinematic, lethal, fast as hell. As long as you keep the crappy options that bog the whole thing down turned off, and can get past the occasionally abysmal information presentation.

Wealth of material.
Tens of thousands of monsters, spells, and magical items.

I love the Encyclopedia Magica, and the Priest's and Wizard's Spell Compendia. I really, really wish that someone could convince WotC that a full-on Monster compilation from the same era would sell really well.