You favorite tabletop RPGs and why
- Thread starter Hygro
- Start date
Never heard of them. Might check it out.
PhroX
Deity
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2009
- Messages
- 2,802
I'm not a huge player of TTRPGs, but I've played several versions of D&D and a few others like some of the Warhammer 40k ones and a superhero game I think was Champions but was a long time ago. I probably had the most fun with Dark Heresy, but that was more due due to the campaign and players rather than the system.
A couple of D&D things I really disliked were:
A couple of D&D things I really disliked were:
- Vancian casting - If I'm playing a spellcaster, it's because I want to cast cool spells. And yet the system seriously limits your ability to do so, to the extent you're actively encouraged not to cast your cool spells more often than not.
- The almost complete lack of active abilities for non-casters - It's boring just attacking every turn. Give me some interesting special attacks I can use. D&D isn't alone in this problem by any means, but it did stand out to me when playing.
Last edited:
Zardnaar
Deity
No one liked 4E. At least in numbers sufficient to matter. It got outsild by pathfinder.
Online numbers were available it was less popular than out of print editions of D&D while it was in print (3.5 and Pathfinder).
When it went out of print but before 5E landed it plummeted to under 5% of games at the time 3.5 was around 15% OSR games combined were more popular.
When 5E landed 4E online games plummeted down to around 1-2% similar to online games of AD&D 1E that had been out of print since 89.
Now 3E games are under 5% iirc 4E less than 1% it's less popular than OSR still. Basically online it's easier to play an OSR game (1E, B/X and OD&D or a clone) than 4E.
Zardnaar
Deity
Well they had to abandon it.
They could have kept the 4E engine though as it's quite good but you would have to dump the class and role structure. You could use that engine for a OSR or 3.X game.
I'm tweaking the old Star Wars Saga RPG that uses that engine but I'm adding parts of 5E into eg using 5E proficiency bonus instead of 4Es numbers. +5 to hit becomes advantage instead things like that.
My ultimate D&D would use a 4/5E hybrid system engine with microfeats or no feats.
Would also bring back some OSRisms.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
I don’t have many gripes with 5e, but I have a few:
1) low ac and large to hit bonuses, combined with high hit points on everything, takes the drama out of the fight and a bit tedious sometimes. I would prefer much tighter bonuses and fewer hit points. More drama in a fight, less attrition.
2) on that note, every class has a different flavor of “I do my specially named d12 damage attack” and it’s not good. It’s boardgamey/diabloey. Saying “I attack” isn’t really repetitive because it’s so basic the attention isn’t drawn to the phrasing. But if everyone uses their special class feature attack, you draw attention to distinctions without differences, which hurts verisimilitude and general vibe. Anything with a name should be less frequent than your default move.
3) balance. It’s not necessary. As long as everyone playing their ideal archetype gets good moments as the main hero for that role, that’s good.
1) low ac and large to hit bonuses, combined with high hit points on everything, takes the drama out of the fight and a bit tedious sometimes. I would prefer much tighter bonuses and fewer hit points. More drama in a fight, less attrition.
2) on that note, every class has a different flavor of “I do my specially named d12 damage attack” and it’s not good. It’s boardgamey/diabloey. Saying “I attack” isn’t really repetitive because it’s so basic the attention isn’t drawn to the phrasing. But if everyone uses their special class feature attack, you draw attention to distinctions without differences, which hurts verisimilitude and general vibe. Anything with a name should be less frequent than your default move.
3) balance. It’s not necessary. As long as everyone playing their ideal archetype gets good moments as the main hero for that role, that’s good.
After the umpteenth time being told to turn to 14, I gave up. Too many sly "gotchas" just kill the mood.They were good, Lone Wolf was better
Zardnaar
Deity
It was grittier than FF.
I liked them as well but prefer an overarching story as well.
FF was Star Trek, Lone Wolf DS9
.
There were some of the FF gamebooks that were connected, either by design or by accident. I think there might be a thread about that on the Fighting Fantazine forum.It was grittier than FF.
I liked them as well but prefer an overarching story as well.
FF was Star Trek, Lone Wolf DS9
The Sorcery! books are all part of the same overarching story, and you can carry over your gold, provisions, magical items, and stats from one book to the next. And there's a particular spell that if it goes wrong, you can end up back in any of the other books and have to redo everything until you get back to the Fortress of Mampang in the 4th book.
I realized that there's an obvious connection between Caverns of the Snow Witch and Forest of Doom - the only problem is that COTSW is #9 and Forest of Doom is #3. So if you play the books in order of publication you won't notice this "waitaminute..." moment until the denouement of COTSW and realize that it entirely makes sense to play them in order of story, not publication.
This is why I novelized COTSW, took another NaNo session to write some bridging material to connect COTSW to Forest of Doom, and then got started on that one. In the bridging material I laid the foundation for the events of several other FF gamebooks, as I had my character make the acquaintance of a child who will grow up to challenge Zagor in The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, in another 20 years.* My COTSW hero has a young son, who will grow up to be the Champion who makes it through Deathtrap Dungeon in another 20 years or so.
*Yes, I know my timeline is nothing like the official timeline, and I really don't care. I see player characters as characters, not just stats and lists of stuff, and I have a variety of PCs who are the hero(ines) of various of the gamebooks. Some of them are older or younger generations of the same family. Yes, I made a soap opera of some of the books, and that's okay.
I've discussed this with some of the veteran players on the Fighting Fantazine forum, how I've tweaked some of the canon details when I felt that some plothole or oddity needed to be explained (ie. the old woman who happens to give a valuable magical object to the hero of Scorpion Swamp - why did she do that, since just helping her up seems like it would merit a "thank you" but not such a generous artifact when she doesn't even know he's going to try to map the Swamp and will desperately need this thing).
The veterans on that forum said they had no problem with it, as long as I didn't tweak stuff to severely unbalance everything - and of course as long as I didn't try to violate copyright by claiming Scorpion Swamp as something I own.
Akka
Moody old mage.
These books are the bedrock of my childhood. I'm still treasuring my collection to this day, and I am still a rather avid gaming book reader (even a writer once, not a published one but part of a community focused on them).
Turning to 14 is not Lone Wolf, it's GrailQuest. Lone Wolf had no section specific to death ^^
I think Sorcery might be one the single best game book serie in existence, only second or tied to Blood Sword.
They both happens sequentially, but don't share a protagonist.
The only "real" sequel I can remember in FF is 21 ("Trial of Champions") to 36 ("Armies of Death"), where the MC is explicitely the same.
I remember at some time I tried to link the most compatible books in some sort of continuity to be able to play them sequentially with the same character, with some headcanon thrown in to smooth over minor inconsistencies ^^
Yeah, don't get me started on gaming book. I love them nearly as much as I love video game, and they make such a huge part of my childhood (and teenage years) that I am even more emotional about them
Last edited:
Akka
Moody old mage.
And you can read all but the last of them (legally) on Project Aon.
Zardnaar
Deity
Book 24 was the last one I read iirc maybe 25.
I own 1-23.
I own 1-23.
I bought or was given up to book 24 before they fell out of print, but managed to acquire 25-27 on eBay, as well as randomly finding book 28 in a second-hand bookshop on holiday one year. The owner clearly didn't know its value!
Zardnaar
Deity
Yeah I picked a few up and sold them on eBay. One went for 88 bucks 15 odd years ago. Cost to me was $2.
Chukchi Husky
Lone Wolf
The closest I've ever played to a tabletop RPG is a game called Bag of Dungeon, a portable dungeon crawler. I don't think any of my group would want to play an actual tabletop RPG because to them RPGs are games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
I sit corrected.
The beauty of Sorcery! is that you can play each book as a standalone or as the whole sequence of four. Obviously it's more fun and challenging to do it as a set of 4 and not cheat (though there are errors; these are listed on the Fighting Fantazine forum).
I decided to play the character as a mage, and since my copies are part of the original publication run, The Shamutanti Hills came in a double set with the Sorcery! Spell Book. I stayed up one night reading and memorizing the spell book, just as the character has to do, since the spell book is too precious to take along lest it fall into the wrong hands on the way to Mampang.
It was as long ago as when Khare: Cityport of Traps first came out that I started to see the possibility of turning this epic quest into prose. I gave my character a name and a backstory and a motive that was more than the standard "riches and glory" claptrap. The city is ruled by a group of Seven Nobles, so I created those noble families and decided how they relate to each other and the people of Khare.
A couple of years before getting hooked on King's Heir, I started novelizing The Shamutanti Hills. I made my 50k words and then some, but was nowhere near the end of the gamebook. The trick to novelizing gamebooks is to not telegraph where the dice rolls are and the places where you have to decide which way to turn (and therefore choosing which paragraph to go to).
My mage has a rather inauspicious introduction. She's in a hostel on the waterfront of the city, having just arrived on a ship. She's trying out a new magic spell using a Thokka egg... and ends up with an eggy mess all over the place. This is before she knows about the Crown going missing, and I wanted to make it clear that heroes make mistakes, have silly accidents, and are only human.
Blood Sword... yikes. For the longest time I didn't know there were 5 books, as only the first three made it to the bookstores here. I found the other two online and had to pay a fancy price for them. I hope they turn out to be worth it, as to this day I've never made it past the first book. But as with FF, I gave my four protagonists names and basic backstories, and diligently kept scads of maps and battle diagrams sketched out on graph paper. When I do gamebooks I keep track of every single paragraph I go to, in the exact order I go to them, regardless of how many times. When I start converting it to prose, this lets me re-create the events exactly as my character(s) experienced them.
I hate mapping out multiple vertical levels of maps on graph paper. It was an absolute nightmare to do this for House of Hell (no pun intended). That's one of the FF gamebooks I didn't finish because I got bogged down in the mapping on the second floor. But that's also one of the FF gamebooks I decided to novelize, though I haven't gotten very far yet.
Blood Sword also has multiple vertical map levels, and that got me frustrated to the point that I wasn't sure just where my characters actually were or how well the map would connect.
Most of the Ian Livingstone books can be connected in some way, though obviously not in order of original publication. For instance, Deathtrap Dungeon was originally #12 and Trial of Champions was #51, if memory serves.
Someone wrote an analysis of these connections between gamebooks and posted it on Fighting Fantazine.
And some of us never left them behind. I was 18 when I discovered Warlock of Firetop Mountain, and my copy is still in close to new condition (I realized that actually using the provided game sheet wasn't smart as the average gamebook requires a lot of erasing and rewriting and I didn't want to wreck the book).Yeah, don't get me started on gaming book. I love them nearly as much as I love video game, and they make such a huge part of my childhood (and teenage years) that I am even more emotional about them
I also have the Warlock of Firetop Mountain boardgame. It's a hoot, and the artwork is fantastic. It's worth the price for that alone, even if you never play it.
Oerdin
Deity
AD&D 2nd Edition forever!
