Champions/Hero System: This was the first "generic" system I'd run into, and the first time I'd been exposed to the idea that I could basically come up with a character concept and make it happen, rather than shopping through a choice of races and classes and finding what was "close enough." However, it seemed it just wasn't a game that could be played without a calculator, and I hated dealing with END costs ... so much so, that I would routinely buy everything for my character (even running) to "0 END" just so I wouldn't have to deal with it, and I stayed well away from "pools." (I came in at 4th edition, so it might've changed significantly since then.) The phase system made me think of Car Wars, except that it wasn't designed to divide action smoothly across a round vs. moving in halts and starts. Rather, it seemed to be a mechanic mostly there just to handle the phenomenon of "Speedster" characters, but when it was generalized to all characters, it added a new level of complexity I'm not sure the game really needed. (As a GM, I'd routinely build all NPCs to go on the same Phases, just so I wouldn't have to deal with aberrations, except for whatever odd phases the PCs would go on.)
World Tree: I'm afraid that my eyes started glazing over when I was just trying to get through the big prologue about the world setting. Too ... bizarre. It's the sort of level of weirdness I'd be more inclined to introduce PCs as "visitors" to this universe rather than natives. It just seemed like too much of a learning curve just to figure out how to play a native inhabitant of this universe, to whom this weirdness shouldn't be weird.
And the initiative handling is mind-boggling.
Hmm. I had a lot of trouble with the initiative system in Champions, too. For whatever reason, it seems that initiative is often a stumbling block for me in systems I don't get along well with. ;)
D&D 4e: This is exactly why I'm wary of this game. More so than any previous edition of D&D, it seems like so many things are JUST TOO STRUCTURED. With certain game systems, it's pretty easy to extrapolate how I can handle odd PC actions; I just pick the closest relevant characteristic test, assign some sort of penalty or difficulty rating, and be consistent about it from that point on. 4e, however, feels so much like ... I dunno, a VIDEO GAME. If I go meddling too much in the mechanics, I might make the game "crash," or at the very least the play balance is likely to go out of whack in ways that I'm not sure I can anticipate.
D&D 3.5/Pathfinder: I've had a few issues with running D&D 3.5, and even more running d20 World of Warcraft (which suffered severe play balance issues, but was a third-party product anyway), and I could go into extreme detail on those ... but by and large we had fun, and it was playable. I'd just like to institute a rule that if anyone is going to play a spellcaster who can summon creatures or polymorph into them, you bring your OWN Monster Manual to the table (no, you can't borrow the DM's), and you do the calculations BEFORE the battle. No bringing combat to a halt and making us wait while you take a base creature and modify its levels because of some special Feat you got, etc.
It's not so great for "winging it," but that's not really what it's for; it's really for going through a dungeon that the DM has carefully plotted out ahead of time, used pre-fab monsters and magic items, or taken the time to carefully work out on his own.
GURPS: Actually, I think "you need Excel" could be applied to Hero System/Champions as well. (And I think one of the players in my Champions group actually DID use Excel to plot out his character, though this was before the time when we could bring laptops to the game to use Excel right there, on the spot, in the middle of a session.)
The first time I tried to read the World Tree rulebook, I had the same problem.
Oddly, I think the reason my WT game works is that all of my players have read sythyry. I think about half of them started reading Sythyry because I was going to run the game. The journal is much longer than the rulebook, but it's entertaining and tells a story, which makes it easier to read than a pile of world-building exposition. But you get the world-building information bit by bit as you read the journal, so that by the time you're done the setting doesn't seem that strange any more.
The biggest downside is that, while early Sythyry was low-power, mid-to-current Sythyry involves lots of high-powered individuals, which makes the magic system look like it can do all kinds of great stuff that your PC in a standard-level game will never ever have the skills/money for. :/
Re: Reading Sythyry: That makes sense. If I run a Star Wars campaign vs. a "generic space opera" campaign, the [i]benefit[/i] in doing so is that my players will have a common view of what sorts of things to expect in the Star Wars universe, if they've all seen the movies. It wouldn't work if I had anyone who was totally unfamiliar with Star Wars, and we might run into a few problems if we had very different levels of exposure to some of the "Extended Universe" material.
I COULD simply try to give a new, un-Star-Wars-familiar player a big info-dump on the Star Wars setting, but watching the movies would probably be more fun.
Anyway, this is one reason why I tend to gravitate toward settings where I can sum up what new players might know about the universe by pointing to some familiar genre (e.g., "this is a Wild West former gold-rush boom-town-that's-gone-bust, in the 1860s"). I don't expect the players to be history experts (though Wikipedia and other resources make it awfully easy to look these things up), but to at least have a rough idea of what to expect based on pop-culture representations. (E.g., dusty towns, cowboy hats, stagecoaches, trains, telegraphs, six-shot revolvers ... but NOT beehive haircuts, or '70s polyester shirts with big open collars. Curse those anachronistic '70s cowboy TV shows! ;) )
I might intend to introduce some strange element (ghosts and zombies, "Wild-Wild West" type weird-science steampunk gizmos, alien invaders), but that's something I can introduce over the course of the adventure -- though an individual PC might be "in on" some of the details (a "mad scientist" who has made some of his own gizmos, or a "huckster" who plays at just being an ordinary gambler but is secretly a spellcaster hunting supernatural artifacts). If I were to run another Classic Deadlands campaign, I WOULD NOT bother introducing players to all the weird "alternate history" stuff in that setting that was built up originally over a whole slew of supplements (California broke up and became "The Maze," the South won the Civil War, various foreign powers have laid claim over parts of the continental US, parts of the Dakota Territories are under control of the Sioux Nations, etc.). It's too much to take in all at once, and quite a lot of it might not even be relevant to an adventure that takes place in some dusty old former boomtown with tumbleweed blowing across the street by day and an undead revenant gunslinger haunting Boot Hill at night.
If, however, I ran a game where everyone was already well-versed on the extended Deadlands mythos ... you bet, I'd just run with it as written. In THAT case, it'd be more trouble than it was worth to "undo" all those alternate-history details to get to a common ground with the players.
I used to make Champions characters on paper -- and we were even using the old-school endurance rules which made end WORSE, if you can believe it. >:) But I eventually gave in and used a chargen spreadsheet one of the participants put together in Lotus 123. Most of the group did use the spreadsheet. I actually still have a directory full of character spreadsheets on my current computer from those days, 20 years ago. I have no idea how they survived so many system changes when lots of other stuff didn't. :)
Really, with your list of issues... you should try Legend. REALLY. She mentioned it because I fell in love with it and have been preaching it... but it's free (well, pay what you want). But the reason I fell in love with it is it seems to get everything right that 4e, Essentials, 3.5e, Pathfinder, Trailblazer, etc. didn't get... and it feels like D&D...
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-01-12 03:10 am (UTC)World Tree: I'm afraid that my eyes started glazing over when I was just trying to get through the big prologue about the world setting. Too ... bizarre. It's the sort of level of weirdness I'd be more inclined to introduce PCs as "visitors" to this universe rather than natives. It just seemed like too much of a learning curve just to figure out how to play a native inhabitant of this universe, to whom this weirdness shouldn't be weird.
And the initiative handling is mind-boggling.
Hmm. I had a lot of trouble with the initiative system in Champions, too. For whatever reason, it seems that initiative is often a stumbling block for me in systems I don't get along well with. ;)
D&D 4e: This is exactly why I'm wary of this game. More so than any previous edition of D&D, it seems like so many things are JUST TOO STRUCTURED. With certain game systems, it's pretty easy to extrapolate how I can handle odd PC actions; I just pick the closest relevant characteristic test, assign some sort of penalty or difficulty rating, and be consistent about it from that point on. 4e, however, feels so much like ... I dunno, a VIDEO GAME. If I go meddling too much in the mechanics, I might make the game "crash," or at the very least the play balance is likely to go out of whack in ways that I'm not sure I can anticipate.
D&D 3.5/Pathfinder: I've had a few issues with running D&D 3.5, and even more running d20 World of Warcraft (which suffered severe play balance issues, but was a third-party product anyway), and I could go into extreme detail on those ... but by and large we had fun, and it was playable. I'd just like to institute a rule that if anyone is going to play a spellcaster who can summon creatures or polymorph into them, you bring your OWN Monster Manual to the table (no, you can't borrow the DM's), and you do the calculations BEFORE the battle. No bringing combat to a halt and making us wait while you take a base creature and modify its levels because of some special Feat you got, etc.
It's not so great for "winging it," but that's not really what it's for; it's really for going through a dungeon that the DM has carefully plotted out ahead of time, used pre-fab monsters and magic items, or taken the time to carefully work out on his own.
GURPS: Actually, I think "you need Excel" could be applied to Hero System/Champions as well. (And I think one of the players in my Champions group actually DID use Excel to plot out his character, though this was before the time when we could bring laptops to the game to use Excel right there, on the spot, in the middle of a session.)
no subject
Date: 2012-01-12 07:44 pm (UTC)Oddly, I think the reason my WT game works is that all of my players have read
The biggest downside is that, while early Sythyry was low-power, mid-to-current Sythyry involves lots of high-powered individuals, which makes the magic system look like it can do all kinds of great stuff that your PC in a standard-level game will never ever have the skills/money for. :/
no subject
Date: 2012-01-13 03:02 am (UTC)That makes sense. If I run a Star Wars campaign vs. a "generic space opera" campaign, the [i]benefit[/i] in doing so is that my players will have a common view of what sorts of things to expect in the Star Wars universe, if they've all seen the movies. It wouldn't work if I had anyone who was totally unfamiliar with Star Wars, and we might run into a few problems if we had very different levels of exposure to some of the "Extended Universe" material.
I COULD simply try to give a new, un-Star-Wars-familiar player a big info-dump on the Star Wars setting, but watching the movies would probably be more fun.
Anyway, this is one reason why I tend to gravitate toward settings where I can sum up what new players might know about the universe by pointing to some familiar genre (e.g., "this is a Wild West former gold-rush boom-town-that's-gone-bust, in the 1860s"). I don't expect the players to be history experts (though Wikipedia and other resources make it awfully easy to look these things up), but to at least have a rough idea of what to expect based on pop-culture representations. (E.g., dusty towns, cowboy hats, stagecoaches, trains, telegraphs, six-shot revolvers ... but NOT beehive haircuts, or '70s polyester shirts with big open collars. Curse those anachronistic '70s cowboy TV shows! ;) )
I might intend to introduce some strange element (ghosts and zombies, "Wild-Wild West" type weird-science steampunk gizmos, alien invaders), but that's something I can introduce over the course of the adventure -- though an individual PC might be "in on" some of the details (a "mad scientist" who has made some of his own gizmos, or a "huckster" who plays at just being an ordinary gambler but is secretly a spellcaster hunting supernatural artifacts). If I were to run another Classic Deadlands campaign, I WOULD NOT bother introducing players to all the weird "alternate history" stuff in that setting that was built up originally over a whole slew of supplements (California broke up and became "The Maze," the South won the Civil War, various foreign powers have laid claim over parts of the continental US, parts of the Dakota Territories are under control of the Sioux Nations, etc.). It's too much to take in all at once, and quite a lot of it might not even be relevant to an adventure that takes place in some dusty old former boomtown with tumbleweed blowing across the street by day and an undead revenant gunslinger haunting Boot Hill at night.
If, however, I ran a game where everyone was already well-versed on the extended Deadlands mythos ... you bet, I'd just run with it as written. In THAT case, it'd be more trouble than it was worth to "undo" all those alternate-history details to get to a common ground with the players.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-12 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-24 07:14 am (UTC)