A philosophical question: what's your opinion of House Rules? And by this I don't just mean the ones we come up with on our own, but also the ones published in the million-and-one supplements that seem to flood the market for every game (they tend to be barely play-tested, so are little more than official house rules).
My own rant is that house rules tend to screw up the game, which is fine if that's what people want to do. However, when most people screw up the game they don't think, "Whoops, I didn't want to do that." Rather, they think, "stupid, crappy game."
Actually, I first noticed this with Monopoly, where I had a group of friends refuse to play it because it "takes too long." When they did finally play the game, what do I discover? Why, they didn't use the auction rule because "it's more fun this way", and they used the free parking rule, because "we like it like that."
Of course, those two rules between them add about three hours to the length of the average game.
Sorry, I've ranted too long. So, how do you turn this thing off?
Archived comment from Mort:
ReplyDeleteHouse rules, they have a good side and a bad side. As a starter I would like to point towards an article in Critical miss, which asks the question: Do d20 producers put extra powerfull stuff in their books to make people buy them? This is a fair question, and I think that some actually do. It makes sense, players always want the best things they can get their grubby little hands on, so if one book gives you this, while some other tries to maintain balance. You know which one will be more popular. Of course, for things like this it doesn't matter if it has been playtested, it is designed to be overpowered.
I don't usually make many house rules myself, most systems works well enough by themselves, even if some small things with a system can be annoying, you usually end up causing more problems by trying to fix them yourself, just put it down as a quirk of the system and get on with it. There are of course exceptions, like the Storyteller combat system. Which in my opininon is totally unplayable as supplied.
Of course, sometimes there are glaring holes in the rules, things missing basically, then I try to patch them together using an extrapolation of the rules supplied, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I think the signature of a well designed and thought out system is that you can easily add new things not yet in the system to it.
The only system I've really felt like totally rehashing is really the d20 version of Star Wars. But that is another discussion.
So what's the free parking supposed to do anyway? I think every time I play that damn game people are using different rules for it.
Archived comment from me:
ReplyDeleteOddly, I quite like the d20 Star Wars. Except for the starship rules, which had to be revised for the new core book (which I don't have). Certainly, I thought the Force was handled better than in d6, which didn't handle it well, IMHO. That said, I definately got the sense that d6 better modelled the original trilogy, and d20 better reflected the new films, which has to be a huge strike against the d20 system :-)
However, I did see on RPG.net that someone was using Adventure! for their Star Wars game. I keep meaning to look up their conversion, since it seems a perfect fit to me. Then again, Adventure! has the Storyteller combat system to contend with.
The version of the Free Parking rule I've seen runs as follows: Whenever you land on Income Tax or the other Tax square, instead of paying the bank, you place the money into a pool in the centre of the board. If a player subsequently lands on "Free Parking", they collect the contents of this pot, receiving what can be quite a substantial windfall.
I think the rule comes about because "Free Parking" is the only square on the board that doesn't have any effect. Of course, this is by design, but never mind...
Archived comment from Mort:
ReplyDeleteOh, the first edition d20 Star Wars is horrible, the revised much less so. Yeah I have them both, I'm a Star Wars fanboy.
But there are still so many things wrong with it, armour is absolutely, completely with no exception useless. Not even Boba Fett is cool with his armour. Damage resistance is so wrong it hurts my head thinking about it. Heavy blaster damaging a Star Destroyer? Gaughg!
And the combat system does not make for heroic space opera ala Star Wars, it's just too.. rigid. Vitality points are.. interesting but silly, you hit, but you don't hit, or maybe you hit a little?
And what's this bloody idea that smaller things should have a higher defense because they are small? Oh yeah, you see, that big thing there is easier to hit, but it can't hit us cause we are small and.. uh, stuff. Poppycrock, in d6 you had a manuverability bonus based on how good your ship was a dodging fire, so smaller ships were harder to hit because they could dodge easier, but the pilot still had to be a good pilot, now you can just close your eyes and let the force do the piloting for you, it doesn't matter anyway, your defense is going to be the same. The fact that a Y-wing has the same defense as an X-wing is pathetic.
But yes indeed, the force is nicely made, in d6 the force felt more like a tacked on extra than a properly designed thing, but as you said, those games were for the old movies, and shouldn't really feature jedi.
Archived comment from me:
ReplyDeleteHowever, in the films armour is absolutely, completely with no exception useless. The only characters to wear it are the Storm/Clonetroopers, the Fetts, and Darth Vader, and it doesn't do any of them much use.
Consider: the *troopers tend to be mown down by blind jawas, teddy bears, and anyone who even looks at a blaster. Of course, in other games they'd be called "mooks", and the game would be designed for this purpose. Jango Fett never (that I recall) takes any attack that he'd have to rely on his armour to protect against, right up until Shaft beheads him. Boba, determined to go one better than the old man, never gets hit until Return of the Jedi, when he manages to fly his armoured self into the mouth of a special effect. (Frankly, Boba Fett may look cool, but he's frankly a wuss. Jar Jar could take him.)
This leaves Vader, who admittedly does gain some benefit from his armour - there's one blow from Luke in Empire that actually strikes his shoulder.
That said, I agree that the handling of armour in Star Wars could be better.
As for the heavy blaster damaging the Star Destroyer, how does that come about? I would have thought the Star Destroyer had hardness the made it immune to that sort of madness. ('course, Lightsabers ignore hardness, but they're allowed to on principle.)
As for vitality points and starship combat, I'm forced to agree.
Archived comment from Mort:
ReplyDeletePoint well made on armour, but seeing how it's made in the rules makes you wonder why the armour wearing people hasn't noticed that they get hit more easily with not much added protection and just ditched the whole armour idea.
And don't you go dissing Boba Fett, it's not his fault he went up against a whiny farmboy who happened to be the biggest hero in the galaxy.
Blasters and Star Destroyers
AFAIK Star Destroyers have no hardness, as they are defined as vechicles. (It's only walls, doors and suchlike that have hardness no?) They do have a damage reduction number though, which I think is something like 20 for the hull. (Not 100% sure.)
A heavy blaster does 3d8 damage, which means that if you roll a tripple eight, you inflict four damage on the poor Star Destroyer, not much against it's super hull value, but still pretty silly.
But maybe I'm just reading things wrong...
Archived comment from me:
ReplyDeleteArmour, Star Destroyers, etc
Fair enough on the Star Destroyer thing - my knowledge of Star Wars d20 isn't as godlike as my l33t D&D skilz.
Critical Miss
On another note, I re-read that Critical Miss article you mentioned (I had previously looked at it when the issue was first published), and it's certainly an interesting theory that companies might try to sell books by providing more powerful, um, powers. And the various feats present in, say, the Quintessential books from Mongoose do seem more powerful on average than those in the core rulebooks. That said, I doubt the d20 sales figures are so high that that's likely to make a huge difference. Instead, I would have thought they'd do better by producing a "new" d20 game and marketting the hell out of the core rulebook.
Anyway, D&D third edition seems to be going the way of 2nd edition - there are now so many options, expansions and rule-sets that it's becoming a major task just for DMs to announce to the group what is and is not allowable. And, since it's not all balanced (and I suspect it never could be anyway), you can't just allow everything. By the same token, you probably don't want to ban everything, since there is a lot of good material out there.
Of course, 2nd edition only had one company publishing for it. 3rd edition has lots, which just speeds up the process. Must be nearly time for a new edition :-)
Archived comment from Mort:
ReplyDeleted20 Splatbooks
Yes, and it's too bad, but quite un-avoidable, once the license was out there it was a green light for all kinds of tripe to come crawling out of the woodworks. Some of it good, some of it bad, but too much for anyone to keep track of. First thing you will have to do to set up a D&D campaign these days is to thrawl through the books you want to use and pick which parts of them you want. Then again, you can make it easy for yourself and just allow the basic core books, or if you are feeling brave, the official WotC ones.
I think this is a theme which comes up more and more in D&D gaming, groups getting overwhelmed by the sheer amout of books and just sticking to what they know, the basic set of books. Which hurts all d20 publishers, well except WotC of course. You are probably right, releasing a new d20 game is probably a better idea than to release several splats which will quite likely be lost in the sea of books available.
Archived comment from Mort:
ReplyDeleteHrm, I had a look through the Star Wars Revised rulebook, and managed to find the rules for starships and blasters. Normal blaster weapons can't inflict critical hits on starships, so, I have to retract my statement regarding the Star Destroyer and the heavy blaster, I was talking out of my ass again, as Star Destroyers have a DR of 30 not 20.
AT-AT's on the other hand, have a DR of only 15, so those can get pretty hammered by some rebels with heavy blasters, or blaster rifles for that matter.
'That armour is to heavy for blasters', my ass!
Archived comment from me:
ReplyDeleteRe: d20 Splatbooks
I'm starting to wonder if Wizards are starting to feel the pain from the OGL strategy. I agree that people are probably going to go with what they know, and that is basically Wizards of the Coast material. However, the five official classbooks are notoriously bad, especially the first one (but only Tome & Blood gets pass marks, IMO), which encourages DMs not to use them. This might explain why the revised books are coming now (if the sales of supplements have dropped significantly), and also explains why Wizards now seem to only be publishing hardbacks, on the grounds that fewer, more expensive books seem to produce more revenue than many cheap books.
One of the things that most disappointed me about 3rd Edition, on the business side, was that when it first came out Wizards made a big thing of having a "rules council" that would vet any proposed new rules for balance before they were published. A good idea, and therefore one that seemed to drop by the wayside very quickly.
Of course, you can't vet third-party supplements in this way.
Classless d20
What I think there IS a market for is a classless version of d20, and particularly D&D. Additionally, if someone could build a level-less version of the game, that would probably also do quite well (relative to some RPG products, that is).
I have no interest in doing a level-less D&D, partly because I have no idea how to even start it, and partly because I have huge problems with level-less systems, which I'll cover at some other time. However, class-less D&D is something that I can take a brief stab at:
At the moment, my best guess is to adopt a system similar to the character creation system in Shadowrun, where the various aspects of a character are prioritised. Characters are then created by assigning priorities.
Ideas for priorities would then be things like: Skills, Saves, Feats, Spell-casting, and so on.
D&D seems to have built the classes somewhat along this line, with Fighters, for instance, having Skills and Saves rated Low, Feats rated High, and no spell-casting or special abilities. Unfortunately, Wizards haven't produced the system design bible, which is a shame since I'd love to see that thing.
Anyway, to build a character, you'd assign priorities to the mandatory elements (everyone must have a BAB, skill and save progression), and assign additional priorities to extra elements (spell-casting, special abilities), as desired. Of course, balancing the whole thing and making it work is an entirely different challenge.
I'll rant about skill-based and level-less systems at some other time.