Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Lejends & Dragons
#1
It's been a couple of years since I played anything at all, really, but recently got hooked back in.

So it got me to thinking of a dilemma I've had, an insignificant one until 15 years ago when D&D 3E was released.

I've got tons of gaming books. Mostly D&D of various editions. Before 3E, I used to mix and match different versions. Everything was compatible like that. It required no conversion. You could easily have all non-human characters take on the demi-human classes as per OD&D, but allow them to multi-class according to the AD&D rules if you really wanted to.

My biggest gripe about 3E is it was horribly not backwards compatible. Yes, you can use the open license to make old-school clones, which has been done. But it's not as if I could pull a Pathfinder module off the shelf and run it in OSRIC without looking at stat blocks that are essentially total gibberish.

This is terrible, because if I want to be part of the larger "D&D" community, I have to learn a needlessly complicated system that I don't really like while all those treasures I've accumulated gather dust on my shelf. OR I could go to RPGnet, where the prevailing belief is that no one game can be all things to all people. It's best that each RPG should specialize in its narrow niche. And you feel a certain itch needs scratching, you go and pick up the RPG that does that one thing the best. Maybe a lot of people in the hobby outside of RPGnet believe that, too.

I say nonsense. One of the features about the vast majority of RPGs that is most endearing to the vast majority of players is the idea of growing a character over a long period of play. A narrow niche, itch-scratching, or flavor-of-the-month game just isn't going to cut it.

What I need is a game that is versatile enough to handle all different sorts of play so I don't have to keep jumping from system to system. And it should allow me to use all those game books I've collected over the years. Without overly-complex conversions. And without losing the feel of the material.

A tall order, you say?

Well, at least I can start by making something that works for the games I love the most. Lejendary Adventure and Dungeons & Dragons. Lejends & Dragons, if you will.

A percentile system is most natural, because at the end of the day, no matter how exotic an RPG's core mechanics are, a particular character at a particular time in a particular place attempting a particular task could yield a number of different possible results. Each of those results has some probability of occurring, and the probability can, in plain English, be expressed as a percentage.

So this amalgam is going to look more like LA than D&D in terms of mechanics, though I hope to capture the feel of the material (magic, monsters, etc) of D&D and allow you to take either approach to playing it--class-based or skill-based, beginning low-powered and rising in level or have a more moderate starting point and stay there longer. Or any mixture.

Just some things I'm discovering as I embark on a very exacting conversion process that I thought people might find interesting. (I always think an honest, value-free comparison of two RPGs is interesting).
  • Level 3 spells in D&D are roughly on par with Grade X activations in LA.*
  • A starting Avatar is about equal to a level 5 D&D character. Thus having access to Grade X activations (equivalent to 3rd level D&D spells) is right on.
  • A +4 sword--a powerful magic weapon by D&D standards--is equivalent to a 10 precision extraordinary sword in LA that adds 3-5 preternatural harm.
  • Situation modifiers are weighted nearly twice as heavily in LA compared to D&D.
  • One hit point in D&D is roughly equal to 2 points of Health in LA.**
  • Similarly, each point better of AC in D&D is roughly equal to 2 points of AP in LA.
  • Although not a part of this conversion in particular, skills possessed by a 3E character of 7th-10th level are about equivalent to a starting LA Avatar.

What I wonder is, am I really alone? Am I the only one who both wants to get use out of all the different RPG books I have on my shelf AND play one consistent character over a long period of time rather than hop from system to system?


*Many LA powers allow the option to add additional AEPs. These are obviously going to be more powerful than their grade otherwise suggests. But compare the most powerful Heart's Desire, which may eat up all your AEPs and has a chance for failure, to a 9th level Wish spell in D&D, which has no chance to fail. Magic in LA is clearly much weaker than in D&D, so the level 3 = grade 10 is a pretty fair assessment overall.
** Notice how common peasants in LA, then, tend to be sturdier than 0-level NPCs in D&D. This shows how exaggerated the power scale in D&D is. One house rule I began using about 3 or 4 years ago in my D&D games is to begin all characters with a number of hit points equal to their full CON score. Subsequent hit points are determined normally each time the character levels, so in the long run it doesn't change the game at all. It just increases survivability at low levels.
Reply
#2
Can it be both? Can I agree that I want one system to do all that but also want to occasionally dip into other systems?

"A +4 sword--a powerful magic weapon by D&D standards--is equivalent to a 10 precision extraordinary sword in LA that adds 3-5 preternatural harm."

Out of curiousity, why only 10? I would have figured at least 20.
"Save inches for the bathroom; we're using feet here." ~ Rob Kuntz (2014)

--brought to you by TOLHosting, the service without the site--
Reply
#3
(06-20-2015, 05:41 AM)Kersus Wrote: Can it be both? Can I agree that I want one system to do all that but also want to occasionally dip into other systems?

"A +4 sword--a powerful magic weapon by D&D standards--is equivalent to a 10 precision extraordinary sword in LA that adds 3-5 preternatural harm."

Out of curiousity, why only 10? I would have figured at least 20.

You can play as many games as you like. You notice it more when you play an RPG that isn't among the top 5 brands that the "game of choice" from one person to the next keeps people from playing together. Wasn't the whole point of bringing rules into what is essentially a game of make-believe to bring everyone onto the same page?

It's tempting to convert the +4 sword to 20 precision in LA just on the bases that each pip on a d20 is worth 5%. Seems reasonable that 4 of them add up to 20 on a percentile system.

The reason a +4 sword only converts to a 10 precision bonus is because of the way Extraordinary items are treated in LA. That 10 precision doesn't just bump up your chance to hit by 10 points. It subtracts from the die roll, increasing by 10 points the odds of getting an '01'--maximum harm, bypassing armor. When you consider that in an armor absorption system such as LA, armor can reduce a percentage of "hits" to zero damage.

Keep in mind, in D&D, a "miss" can be interpreted as being a total whiff, or it could indicate that there was a hit, but the armor rendered it ineffective. (This is the answer to the common objection to D&D's system that wearing heavy, bulky armor should make you easier to hit, not harder.) Thus extraordinary precision bonus in LA is in a sense pulling double-duty. Especially if you're trying to emulate the spirit of D&D using LA rules.

You can also confirm this crudely by calculating "expected harm" per attack. This is imperfect because the two systems are different enough that the conversion has to be "calibrated" to a common case. The further you deviate from that case, the more the calculation will be off. A +4 weapon in D&D is actually a fairly meaty deviation. But comparing the two systems, the average expected harm per attack in LA is satisfactorily close to twice the expected damage per attack in D&D. (It should be roughly double because 2 health converts to 1 hit point.)

But this is the level of precision I seek to bridge the two systems. Yes, I want to preserve the mathematical probabilities and effects. But I also want to dig deeper than the superficial mathematics of it. I want to ask how something we could easily imagine--hitting someone, but the hit entirely absorbed by armor--is expressed in each of the two systems, and make sure that isn't left out of the equations.
Reply
#4
Well said.

As far as game rules, I'll play anything but I'll only run certain games. I can always run LA off the cuff in an instant. I can do the same with anything from OD&D to OAD&D but LA is smoother and requires almost no reference for me (players may need to look up Activations but magic use is a slow point in "spell' driven systems).

I played D&D5e and enjoyed myself however I could never imagine trying to run it. I can't see never running ORE or Silhouette ever again though and that's partially because, for me, a system that combines one of them with LA may well be the one true system for me.

Check out this blog post of mine about that "one" RPG. http://furiouslyeclectic.com/node/30
"Save inches for the bathroom; we're using feet here." ~ Rob Kuntz (2014)

--brought to you by TOLHosting, the service without the site--
Reply
#5
(06-22-2015, 01:12 AM)Kersus Wrote: Well said.

As far as game rules, I'll play anything but I'll only run certain games. I can always run LA off the cuff in an instant. I can do the same with anything from OD&D to OAD&D but LA is smoother and requires almost no reference for me (players may need to look up Activations but magic use is a slow point in "spell' driven systems).

I played D&D5e and enjoyed myself however I could never imagine trying to run it. I can't see never running ORE or Silhouette ever again though and that's partially because, for me, a system that combines one of them with LA may well be the one true system for me.

Check out this blog post of mine about that "one" RPG. http://furiouslyeclectic.com/node/30

"One"ism can get a bit tricky semantically. It's like when someone says something like, "Knowledge is an illusion; we can't know anything for certain." In response, I ask, "Are you certain of that?" Or if someone says, "There is no objective truth, everything is subjective and a matter of opinion," I'll ask, "Is that objectively true, or is that just your subjective opinion?" People understandably oppose "One-True-Way"isms in RPGs. But isn't absolute opposition to that itself a single path presumed superior to others?

I'm the kind of person who looks forward to trying new things. However, I don't have all the time and energy in the world to learn the more complex rule systems.

Don't get me wrong. I think complexity serves a purpose. I think it tends to generate loyalty among the fans who get a more in-depth, detailed system. And when there are so many RPGs to choose from, many of them free (virtually all free if you count pirated material), I think loyalty is essential to make the game system economically viable.

The barrier to entry is a pain.

I started playing RPGs at an extremely young age, and my first game was D&D. t's instructive to examine what that experience was like. D&D was easy to get into. We had hit tables, you rolled a d20 to hit, your weapon dictated which die to roll for damage. And a number of other things you might like to do--such as look for secret doors or traps--were spelled out in the rules and came down to a simple die roll. You could easily play it just like a board game, and it was very child- and newb-friendly. The barrier to entry was non-existent.

As I continued to play, over time, there were more things I wanted to try in the game that weren't directly covered by the rules. And I began imagining and wanting to play characters that didn't fit perfectly into one of the four classes. But remember. I was able to mix and match OD&D, AD&D, and AD&D 2nd Ed. There was multi-classing, secondary skills (these seem forgotten when people claim there were no non-class skills offered in 1st Ed core), non-weapon proficiencies, specialty priests, the various kits 2nd Ed offered, and so on.

To someone who had never played the game before, all this material must surely be overwhelming. But the beauty of D&D was that the game functioned just as well with or without all the add-ons. The other thing that makes D&D easy to learn on the front end is the idea of beginning at low levels and growing to higher levels. I'd say about 80-90% of the game is essentially "off limits" when you make your first character. As you level, more of the game becomes accessible in a gradual sort of way.

Compare that to 3E. I disliked the feat system and thought the redundancy of both skills and feats was just too much for a core that was already overly-complicated. Not only that, the "feat trees" made it such that you can't play effectively with blinders on regarding your 1st level character build. You have to look ahead to the greater options available at higher levels. But at the same time, you can't just play 3E out of the box and drop feats. The system won't function. It's fragile to tinkering.

In fact, this reminds me of a perfect analogy to computer games. I was just talking to my brother 2 days ago--I had been doing some de-cluttering and I came across my old disc of DOOM 2 hacks. Now look, Quake was a superior game in almost every way. But it still lived in DOOM's shadow. And that's because DOOM was so hackable a game, people were able to tinker and customize the thing. Graphics of monsters in DOOM were 2-D from 5 different angles. These were a lot more easily modified with the home computer technology available at the time than were 3-D renderings.

So I'm going to come out and admit, yes, I believe in a one-true-way. And that is a good system for long-term play (so this statement says nothing about all those indy games that are great for one-offs) ought to be resilient to tinkering. There may not be game police that show up at your door for playing wrong, but a system that falls apart when tinkered with is a pretty strong deterrent to tinkering.


Just for the sake of adding a little heat, I'll end with my main criticism of ORE. I'll say up-front that my gripe with it is not going to do as much to keep me from playing it as newer versions of D&D do. But I think it suffers from the exact characteristic of newer games in general. It's a victim of its own streamlining.

One thing I've seen tinkered with endlessly over my years of experience is initiative systems. Already, you have a problem when initiative is assumed in that one roll. But I think more than the specific mechanism itself, my beef is the declaration of actions prior to initiative. Yes, if you play OD&D and AD&D strictly by the rules, you had to pre-declare your actions before initiative was rolled. Thing is, I rarely ever came across any group that played that way. I tried to force myself to run a game that way a few times, but it never lasted long before I ditched the rule. I think it's just unnatural.

And more to the point, it locks you into one of the flaws of table-top gaming--a necessary evil of the medium, that for organization's sake, combat MUST be turn-based. (Yes, I know some systems claim they are not turn-based, they are pip-based, but all that's just a hi-res turn-based system.) I think this has a lot to do with why this is an area so heavily tinkered with. And because it's so heavily tinkered with, and everyone is out to "build a better mousetrap" it's tempting for designers to offer up a "solution" in their systems. I just think it's a bad move. I have my own solution. I like it better than any other I've seen. You might not. The system is best left flexible.
Reply
#6
To give the conversion system I'm working on a test spin, I've tried converting a few monsters. In doing so, I'm finding it fun. It forces me to re-read all these monster descriptions, which refreshes my mind with adventure ideas. And it's just really neat to see some old D&D critters statted up in LA. Here's one I used to love to use...


Anhkheg
Appearing: 1-6
H: 25-50 P: 50 S: 12, 6 burrowing
Attacks: Powerful mandibles hold and crush for 1-12 Harm +17-20 Physique bonus that ignores ordinary armor (anhkhegs with 40 or more Health have a +21-25 Physique bonus instead), and secretions cause 3-5 acid Harm each ABC held. Or squirt acid up to 30 feet for 21-25 Harm.
Defense: 16 overall, due to a chitinous shell, 12 underside.
Reply
#7
Weapon Specialization!


To be honest, I was never a fan of this optional rule in D&D. But I've decided to include it in my conversion.

First, let me take a couple of steps back, first. Since weapon restrictions are verbal and qualitative, not quantitative, it's not hard to just transfer them over as is. Sure, the effects of those restrictions may differ since LA weapons almost all use d20 for harm, but I've already account for that in converting the combat system. I will be porting over the K/S Sub-Areas from Dangerous Journeys Combat, Hand Weapons, Lethal because I think those categories work well. So weapon proficiencies will be more generous--instead of choosing a single weapon, they will choose a category of weapons. Specialization, however, will be limited to a single weapon.

The effects of specialization is to effectively gain 20 points of Weapons Ability for the specialized weapon, a 5-point harm bonus due to skill, and a +2 bonus to attack Speed with the specialized Weapon. The bonus to Weapons and Speed count towards the requirements for multiple attacks (and parrying if Minstrelsy of Swashbuckling Abilities are possessed). So fighting with two weapons requires only a Weapons Ability of 61 and a Speed of 13. With good rolls, this is a possibility for a starting LA Avatar generated under the normal rules. Two attacks with a single weapon that is specialized only requires 81 Weapons and 15 Speed, or 161 Weapons and 15 Speed for 3 attacks.

Even without utilizing multiple attacks, the effects of these bonuses in combat for the specialized character are just as significant as they are in AD&D. It's very potent. The drawback, as per Dangerous Journeys, is that unskilled Sub-Areas operate at only half capacity. For the LA equivalent of a 1st Level AD&D Fighter (40 weapons Ability), this would meaning fighting with an effective Weapons Ability of only 20 with non-proficient weapons. Not only does this one-half rule match Dangerous Journeys perfectly, the effect is also exactly (or close enough) equal to the non-proficiency penalty from AD&D. A happy convergence of all three systems.
Reply
#8
I've done some quick and dirty conversions of Saving Throws. You know, I can't help but think people would have loved this even for playing LA on its own.

Paralyzation, Poison, or Death Magic = Health
Petrification or Polymorph = Speed + Intellect
Rod, Staff, or Wand = Speed x 3
Breath Weapon = Speed x 4 (or Speed x3, with a roll under Speed x1 indicating 0 harm instead of half)
Spell = Speed x 2 (or Intellect vs mind influencing powers such as Seduce to Evil)

10% of Luck Ability should be deducted from the roll in all cases.

A couple things that should be noted. It was a rule in AD&D that any attack that fits into two categories saves as the earlier category. So a Spell that causes death saves as Death Magic. A wand that causes Polymorph counts as a Polymorph. For LA purposes, Breath Weapon should be considered a broader category of "Area Effect Damage", so a spell that causes damage in an area effect should save as Speed x3 rather than Speed x2.

Another thing I'd note, that in D&D even psychological paralysis called for a save versus paralysis--to get out of the way of a heavy falling object or a portcullis crashing down often called for a save vs paralysis. In LA, such a thing would clearly have nothing to do with health, so it's tempting to break each save up into sub-categories. Paralysis, then, could be Precision + Speed instead of Health. Avoiding Death Magic (which has more to do with magic avoidance rather than physical robustness) might call for Speed x 5 instead.
Reply


Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)