Not D&D

[quozaxx]

With 6th Edition, Fantasy Hero and Bestiary coming out relatively soon; I am considering Gming a Fantasy Hero game. But there are some barriers in my way.

 

1. I don’t know D&D terminology or anything D&D. I played D&D only a couple of times in the late 1970s. I don’t remember much about it. I have played Fantasy Hero (but have always preferred Champions type games). What do I need to know?

 

2. Deities: I am somewhat religious and do not like the idea of deities. It seems WAY too close to breaking the first and second commandment for my taste. How do I present this fact? (It would be an online game)

 

3. Hack and slash and greed game: Fantasy Hero games can sometimes be hack and slash. Go to point A, kill a monster, steal it’s treasure. Got to point B, kill a monster, and steal it’s treasure., etc. I distinctly remember going into a D&D cave and doing such “activities”. I would like to downplay this., but Fantasy Hero is partially about survival. If a band of orcs or ogres attack the players, they are going to want to defend themselves. So how do you downplay it?

[Escafarc]

Re: Not D&D

 

1) Not coming from a D&D background is a plus so don't worry about it. Use your own terms and concepts for things like Races and Magic.

 

2) Leave "Religion" out if that is a concern. You don't have to have Priest/Clerics in your game. You could just have Healers who are just highly skilled. Or just base your campaign religion on a real world one that you are happy with.

 

3) Talk to your players and tell them what kind of game you want to run. I run this type of game myself. One of the things I use is Resorce Points to de-emphasize to whole kill the monster and take their treasure thing.

[John Desmarais]

Re: Not D&D

 

1. The 5th edition Fantasy Hero book gave you all of the help you'd need on terminology. I assume the 6th edition book will be similar to it.

 

2. This under your complete control based on your setting. Look at something like the Dragonlance setting for D&D. For a very large period of time the deities of Krynn were "gone" and there were no true D&D-style Clerics in the world (herbal healers and frauds filled their role). Your setting, your rules. There is not law saying that your fantasy world must have D&D-style active deities (or cleric characters who draw power from them). Magical healing can be based on other concepts: personal power of the healer (like a wizard), free-floating natural energy, etc, etc.

 

3. Make your first adventure something very different from a hack-n-slash dungeon crawl to help set the tone for the players - something with no monsters at all. I like mysteries (particularly murder-mysteries), and they work pretty well in fantasy.

[Hugh Neilson]

Re: Not D&D

 

To point 1, D&D terminology is helpful only when communicating with D&Ders. Fantasy Hero will have terminology.

 

To point 2, set your game in a medieval Europe setting and maintain real world religion. Don't have Divine Spellcasters. Problem solved.

 

To point 3, the types of adventures and the way you award xp will set the tone. Make it clear up front what kind of game you want to run - that way, players who want a hack, slash, loot game can go join one elsewhere and you get players interested in the type of game you want to run.

[AlHazred]

Re: Not D&D

 

1. I don’t know D&D terminology or anything D&D. I played D&D only a couple of times in the late 1970s. I don’t remember much about it. I have played Fantasy Hero (but have always preferred Champions type games). What do I need to know?

You need to know nothing about D&D terminology' date=' and even less about D&D mechanics (er... if that's possible). Don't get me wrong, D&D had a big influence on the fantasy genre (both RPGs and popular fiction) in this country, but that just means most of the fantasy stuff you've seen already had D&D "built in." All you need to know about the D&D system is that it's a generic game system for fantasy-influenced games, and that it's not front-loaded like Hero. D&D and Hero System are equally complex; with Hero that complexity hits you right in character generation, while in D&D the complexity accumulates through character advancement. That's pretty much it.

2. Deities: I am somewhat religious and do not like the idea of deities. It seems WAY too close to breaking the first and second commandment for my taste. How do I present this fact? (It would be an online game)

There are several options here. First off, most of the religious people I game with do not mind strange deities in games -- after all, games are entirely fiction, a fact which is right in your face in a fantasy genre game. It's akin to actors in a play calling out to the Greek gods or whatever; everyone understands they're playing a role and that by definition it's a simulation of reverence and not true reverence. And if imperfect humans can understand this, then an omnipotent deity should have no problems.

 

Secondly, you can play in a setting which has the actual Christian Church. I've known people to do this in the pseudo-medieval Harn setting, and heard of it being done just about everywhere else. The illustrations in the first edition AD&D game books had priests with crosses and crucifixes in them, and many people assumed that those indicated how you were supposed to play their priestly characters. With the interesting interplay between political and religious factions of the early Catholic Church, I'd advise using it as a model if you intend to go this route. Specifically, examine the period shortly after the Sixth Ecumenical Council (Third Council of Constantinople, 681) to the Protestant Reformation (1517), as that's a period with a lot of political change, religious thought, and, you know, the Crusades so you can have religious warriors (especially good if you call them Templars and not Paladins -- Paladin refers to a specific historical group of Christian knights, after all).

 

Third, you can substitute religions with philosophies. In order to be believable, even common people must be assumed to be thinking about the nature of the Universe from time to time. This was before television reduced the minds of the masses to the consistency of tapioca pudding -- perfectly ordinary people came up with some fantastic ideas about the nature of reality and its relationship to thought and spirit. Competing metaphysical philosophies, like Stoicism (kind of like ancient Scientology -- a version stripped of religious content would not be difficult to imagine) and other Deterministic philosophies versus Probabilism and other Indeterministic philosophies could generate some interesting social dynamics in the setting.

3. Hack and slash and greed game: Fantasy Hero games can sometimes be hack and slash. Go to point A' date=' kill a monster, steal it’s treasure. Got to point B, kill a monster, and steal it’s treasure., etc. I distinctly remember going into a D&D cave and doing such “activities”. I would like to downplay this., but Fantasy Hero is partially about survival. If a band of orcs or ogres attack the players, they are going to want to defend themselves. So how do you downplay it?[/quote']Hero System has a robust Skill system and a wide range of Perks and Talents. If your players are of a mind to avoid violence, then your game could be an infinite series of social, political, and economic maneuvers between opposing power groups. This has a little to do with setting and nothing at all to do with game mechanics. However, it requires total buy-in from your players. Be up-front about what you expect from the campaign, and adhere to the idea of consequences. In the Real World, if a gang of people went around killing other gangs in their homes and taking their stuff, they would be objects of horror and hounded by law enforcement authorities -- don't be afraid to do this to them.

[Patriot]

Re: Not D&D

 

As far as the whole cleric thing goes Just make them Clerics of Good, or Clerics of evil. Tell your players to ham it up a bit And it should be fine.

My group tried this for one Anthromorphic-fantasy campaign And we wound up With a Stag who followed the forces of good who he named Sheboygan. The GM was in tears almost evey time when the player would try and teach the ways of Sheboygan.

[Kraven Kor]

Re: Not D&D

 

On the religion thing, I made the cosmology of my setting so that GOD - as in Jehovah - was the supreme being. The "deities" worshipped by many were false. They granted power, some of them were even "benevolent" but they were simply a higher order of being with their own agendas. Then a few folks knew of the "true God" and were trying to convince everyone to stop worshipping the false gods. Pretty much right out of the Old Testament.

 

Now, I'm not a religious type so this was not due to compunctions against this, but it worked and may work for you - listen to your conscience. That being said, keep in mind that this is a game, it is fiction, and God is generally portrayed to be a pretty forgiving entity. I think as long as you aren't acting out rituals to the make-believe deities or playing the game with a golden idol to one mounted on your wall, you should be OK.

 

My Mom kicked me out of the house at 15 years of age because she found Dungeons and Dragons books in my room. Probably just a bit of an overreaction, no?

[Ragnarok]

Re: Not D&D

 

As far as #2 goes, a decent way to get around the whole religion thing is leaving "religious" orders rather ambiguous. "Religions" in the game I just ran, and in the games I hope to run in the not-too-far-off future, drop deities in favor of some sort of general supernatural essence that flows around usually unseen and is tapped into like some sort of religious oil well. The religion is not really religion in the truest sense because it doesn't involve a deity; rather it is sort of the pursuit of certain beliefs personified in various supernatural essences.

 

Examples include "the Light" and "the Shadow" of the Warcraft universe.

 

Hope that helps.

 

 

 

P.S. - I don't really understand the beef with RPG religions, especially considering that many computer games such as Age of Empires contain the worship of actual historical deities, sometimes being actively worshiped by villagers. Also, there is the above-mentioned scenario with actors playing their role. Then again perhaps this whole issue stems from my difficulty understanding how a competent actual deity could possibly be offended by an obviously pretend game deity in the first place...

[Old Man]

Re: Not D&D

 

Conversely you could put your own religion in the game, if you're up to it. Mainstream religions still lay claim to supernatural effects.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Re: Not D&D

 

It is important to let the potnetial players know at the get-go that this isn't a D&D game transported to HERO. If they come in knowing it's your world and your rules they'll be a whole lot happier.

 

Even in that case, there will be fantasy habits you need to break players of. In D&D it's quite common that you can solve a problem by killing it. I've seen it in FH convention games where the moment the bad guy shows his face the PCs try to kill him. That doesn't make for very interesting storytelling! Finding some way to show that murder is not the preferred option for getting out of trouble would go a long way towards putting your stamp on the campaign.

 

Along those lines, you may want to do things like limit or eliminate PC assassin-types. Perhaps in your world assassins have very short life-spans given that murderers are usually hanged when caught and it's very hard to kill an important person without being detected. Likewise you don't need to have organized Thieves' Guilds in every town in your world -- organized crime might exist, but it wouldn't have that level of stability or respectability and might be more interested in vice (more profitable, less risky and always in demand) than burglary and pickpocketing.

[Chimera 12]

Re: Not D&D

 

Regarding religion: if what bugs you is having so-called divine spellcasters and deities that regularly appear in front of mortals in your game, nothing says you have to use those just because D&D is fond of them. (In fact, while I could be mistaken, I generally consider the modern "cleric archetype" largely an original D&D invention in the first place.)

 

There's nothing wrong with a setting in which deities are invisible and mysterious and their priests, while still performing all the duties of their real-life counterparts, get no special magic powers granted from on high at all. They could after all still learn magic just like anybody else, faith permitting of course...

[Kraven Kor]

Re: Not D&D

 

Actually, the D&D "Cleric" is based largely off the myths of the Knights Templar, IIRC.

 

And certainly God granted great power to his most faithful in the Old Testament - Moses and the ten plagues, parting the red sea, water from the rock while wandering the desert. The wolves who attacked the children for making fun of a bald man - Enoch, IIRC. And of course Jesus was attributed to many miracles - healing the blind and sick, "summoning" food, water to wine, walking on water, etc.

 

"All of this has happened before, all of this shall happen again."

 

And really, *any* magic not directly attributed to God is sorcery, spiritism, demonism, etc. If pretend gods are a sin, then so is pretend magic, or pretend murder, or pretend theft.

 

Again, only your own conscience can tell you what you should or should not participate in.

 

Essential nature of things

No distinction between

science and philosophy

religion or my enemies

my spirit or its tendency

to behave irrationally

Like a honeycomb

to the beehive

Well it all makes sense to me

That everything sweet

comes with a sting - Good Time People, Scott Rockwood

[kahuna's bro]

Re: Not D&D

 

trythe agcient astronaughts theory

for those unfamiliar it is theorized by whom i don't know ofhand that the magic of the mythological gods is extraterrestrial tyechnology and the aalleged gods are astronauts frm other worlds or dimensions

[Kraven Kor]

Re: Not D&D

 

trythe agcient astronaughts theory

for those unfamiliar it is theorized by whom i don't know ofhand that the magic of the mythological gods is extraterrestrial tyechnology and the aalleged gods are astronauts frm other worlds or dimensions

 

Yes, but that would be further from what the OP is asking - as that theory implies GOD is an Alien / aliens. If pretend gods are a sin, then pretending God is an Alien is blasphemy

[kahuna's bro]

Re: Not D&D

 

sorrry i meant no disrespect

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Not D&D

 

The Echoes of Heaven setting by Final Redoubt is strongly influenced by real world Christian theology, although it's fairly dark in tone...the world is more overtly corrupted and the forces of good have their hands full keeping Hell in check. Plus they have Hero System versions, so you don't need to convert anything.

[quozaxx]

Re: Not D&D

 

On the religion thing, I made the cosmology of my setting so that GOD - as in Jehovah - was the supreme being. The "deities" worshipped by many were false. They granted power, some of them were even "benevolent" but they were simply a higher order of being with their own agendas. Then a few folks knew of the "true God" and were trying to convince everyone to stop worshipping the false gods. Pretty much right out of the Old Testament.

 

Now, I'm not a religious type so this was not due to compunctions against this, but it worked and may work for you - listen to your conscience. That being said, keep in mind that this is a game, it is fiction, and God is generally portrayed to be a pretty forgiving entity. I think as long as you aren't acting out rituals to the make-believe deities or playing the game with a golden idol to one mounted on your wall, you should be OK.

 

My Mom kicked me out of the house at 15 years of age because she found Dungeons and Dragons books in my room. Probably just a bit of an overreaction, no?

 

My mother threw out my brother's D&D books and had a long talk with us about "Worshiping other gods". I don't think it helped out our cause when she caught my brother playing his character right when he was saying "Odin, Odin, Odin, Odin". Hence my apprehension to the subject.

[AlHazred]

Re: Not D&D

 

Well, Christian RPGs have been done, and could probably be adapted to Hero fairly easily. It's just a matter of looking at what's out there.

 

• DragonRaid Adventure Learning System - To be fair, the reviews on RPGnet basically paint it as an evangelical exercise with wonky mechanics, so converting it to Hero might actually make it playable.
  
• Holy Lands from Faith Quest games seems to be a fairly standard medieval fantasy RPG geared toward Christian tastes. Probably some good material there to borrow. And it's available free!
  
• Testament D20 was actually published by Green Ronin. It's roleplaying in the Biblical era. I've heard there's good source material there and source material in other places on the Web.
  
• The Minstrel's Song looks like it has some interesting races and cultures, and is also free.
  
• Visionary Entertainment produced the Everlasting RPG, about the forces of Light fighting demons from Hell in a secret war going on in the modern day. Don't know much about it beyond that as their site seems to be down.
  
• The Way is a Swedish Christian RPG set in several different periods. It's supposed to teach thinking about moral issues. Not a bad goal, in my book, but I can't speak as to its value as an RPG.
  
• Heck, this guy has some Christian RPG elements on his personal page (he's a minister) and also links back to Champions! (My favorite thing-I-never-knew-about-before: The Way, The Truth, & The Dice E-Zine! (!!!) Too bad it seems defunct, it's a great name for a gaming ezine!) He's also got files for RisenWorld, which is billed as another Christian RPG.
  

Sadly, most sites Christians write about RPGs end up looking like this one. I got four lines in and said, "No, thanks!"

[Markdoc]

Re: Not D&D

 

Sadly' date=' most sites Christians write about RPGs end up looking like this one. I got four lines in and said, "No, thanks!"

 

Oh c'mon - look at the heroes:

"Hero: Charles Spurgeon

Alignment: Lawful Calvinist

Stats: Doctrine +5, Faith +1, Relevance +2

Story: Charles is lawful but moderate, and will accept people if adhering to a base statement of faith. Comes pre-equipped with Cool Cigar of relevence +1."

 

"Cool cigar of relevance +1"? Who can resist that?

 

I'm guessing this is a parody.

 

cheers, Mark

[Curufea]

Re: Not D&D

 

Fantasy books often don't have provable, interfering/influencing Gods. I don't know why they became such a popular trope in roleplaying games as they have. The source material hardly encourages it. I prefer more realistic religions myself - as I can't justify the lack of powerful theocracies in a setting where Gods actually are known and proved. it breaks the believabillity of the setting.

[Kraven Kor]

Re: Not D&D

 

My mother threw out my brother's D&D books and had a long talk with us about "Worshiping other gods". I don't think it helped out our cause when she caught my brother playing his character right when he was saying "Odin' date=' Odin, Odin, Odin". Hence my apprehension to the subject.[/quote']

 

This is kind of why I gloss over many aspects of "role playing." It is one thing to say "My character prays to heal Bob." It is another to act out said prayer. I'm not religious and some games I've sat in on have creeped me out with how far into the character / setting the players were. Same with sex or romance for me - if a player wants to have such an element, I basically say "OK it happens, lets move on." I like to focus much more on the moral and ethical struggles, intrigue, and action sequences than on religion, politics, or sex.

 

Again, only your conscience can decide what is or is not OK for you to participate in when it comes to RPG's. I will simply reiterate that if you allow magic at all, you are skirting that same line. The 'logic' of this type of belief in regards to modern Christianity is that by pretending these things, you are wanting these things, and thus on a slippery slope. And again, you can always simply replace the typical fantasy cosmology with a more Biblical one - the Good Guys worshiping GOD, the Bad Guys ® worshiping False Deities (Demons / Satan.) And, lastly, even "good people" are frequently led astray, or "bad people" can seem to be benevolent on the surface.

 

The Devil knows well, the best intentions pave the road to hell. - Scott Rockwood, "Consequence."

[Egyptoid]

Re: Not D&D

 

just use the world of Wormy as your FH setting.

[DusterBoy]

Re: Not D&D

 

I favour an agnostic view of the universe. People believe in and worship the gods, but there is no empirical evidence for their existance. There are events which people call miracles, Acts of God, etc, but there is nearly always be a rational explanation, if people look for it. And then again, maybe not and everyone is left scratching their heads and left wondering "What just happened?" There is also a tradition of skepticism, of philosophers trying to explain Creation without recourse to God.

 

(Dull? I don't think so. . . just look at our own world, for comparison, especially around the third century AD, when Christianity was still a minority religion and many people still worshipped either the Teutonic gods (One-Eyed Odin, etc) or the Graeco-Roman pantheon. Christians back then, were in fact regarded as "atheists", in that they didn't worship the "right" gods.)

[Dino]

Re: Not D&D

 

I like to focus much more on the moral and ethical struggles' date=' intrigue, and action sequences than on religion, politics, or sex.[/quote']

 

I'm actually having a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea that you can have morality plays or intrigue in a game that doesn't involve religion or politics. Action can be mindless, but sex and religion are the driving forces behind human society.

 

On topic: I'm reminded that folks have been playing Tunnels & Trolls for years with no religion mentioned in it's pages. As Ken St. Andre explained it to me at DunDraCon, "The reason there are no clerics in my game is that unlike Gary [Gygax], I'm not hung up on religion."

[azato]

Re: Not D&D

 

This has been and issue I have wrangled with..and here are some random thoughts...no particular order and to no grand end...

 

1.) None of this is real. An author writing about a man having an affair...no sin has actually been committed.

2.) You could do something along the lines of what Lewis did with Narnia and play out the story of redemption in another way. Let us suppose there are other time/universes/races/ whatever...would redemption occur again and would it be different? We will never no, but it is quite possible to speculate on that.

3. As mentioned before, one could say that Jehovah is above all the other beings who appear to be gods. This would NOT be that much different than Justin Martyr's treatise that when Paul talked about the doctrines of demons of afore...that actually pagan pantheons and even some heroes of the past were actually demons who possessed powers and thus deceived the masses.

4.) I decided to go with a sword and sorcery....but the deities do exist the are just more distant.

5.) I think there are actually more problems inserting GOD into a role-playing game than leaving him out or introducing a pantheon. I would have more problems with God putting someone on a quest than having Odin doing the same.

6.) Nobody believes in the made up deites anyway. Nobody is actually giving the service nor worship.

7.) I think having flawed deities or at least with intense human foibles may actually demonstrate the inadequacies of any god but GOD.