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Fantasy Immersion and the Things that Ruin it.


PhilFleischmann

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16 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

Was it..,,  was it Runequest?  Starting to  crack out the "basic role-playing" engine?

BRP was the house engine for every RPG Chaosium did for years, I think Pendragon was the first of their games that really broke from it rather than just making mods.  I must have had half a dozen copies of the original little booklet from buying RQ2, Worlds of Wonder, Superworld, Stormbringer, Hawkmoon, Elfquest, Call of Cthulhu, etc, etc.  The new edition that came out last year is a big hardcover with a very reasonable price and more versatile than ever.

 

21 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

There was definitely a market.  Definitely still is.

"Do Everything" game engines are more popular than ever, and there's a huge amount of competition in the field at this point - which is part of the reason Hero isn't thriving.  Just off the top of my head, other currently available options include:

 

GURPS

Genesys

Cortex Prime

FATE

Savage Worlds

the Apocalypse Engine, ie what all those Powered By the Apocalypse games use

Cypher

Cepheus

BESM

Year Zero

several different things using d6 in the title, not least of which being the engine WEG used for the original Star Wars

 

and I'm probably forgetting a bunch, including who knows how many small-publisher efforts on DTRPG

 

Outside of the D&D crowd I'd say a majority of roleplayers these days are more interested in either "Do Everything" engines or extremely rules-light hyper-specific systems.  Mid-to-high complexity systems dedicated to a specific game/setting are somewhat out of style these days.  That should be good for Hero, but it's got a lot of competitors and a bad rep for being extremely high-crunch.  Unless it finds  away to promote itself better that's going to continue to be a barrier to gaining new players, although I doubt it's really bleeding many at this point.  There's worse things to be stuck in than a stable holding pattern, but it's not sustainable long-term.  People get old and quit or outright die, and Hero has been around long enough that fan base attrition through age is an increasing concern.

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Don't get me wrong, the best RPG campaigns I ever played in were 4e Hero.  But that meant putting up with some imperfections that stemmed from the Universal System changes.  Generic powers not 'feeling' like magic was one, as alluded to last page.  But by far the biggest problem was that power costs for supers are just not appropriate for fantasy.  2pts per inch of Flight is too damn cheap in fantasy, and that's just one example.

 

The 'do everything' engines nowadays accomplish that by being so rules light that in some cases there's barely even a system.  Even then most of them abandon any attempt at true universality--Starforged has some significant rules changes compared to Ironsworn, and every PbtA or FitD or Fate Core game I've seen published likewise has at least some add-ons that are specific to the setting of that particular book.  The rules-lightness is intentional, of course, so as to flatten the learning curve for new gamers.  But ironically, if there are hardly any rules to learn, then there is little benefit to using those rules as a universal ruleset.

 

That said, Hero did get closer to being a universal system than any other system I've seen that had more than a page of rules.  GURPS couldn't handle the high end, Palladium was famously unbalanced, and OSR is a joke as anything other than fantasy.  I haven't seen anyone try to do anything other than fantasy/horror with BRP, though I'm sure something is out there. 

 

And for all my complaints, 4e FH was the one version that actually had a balanced weapon chart.  Apparently that is hard to do.

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On 7/26/2024 at 11:28 PM, Old Man said:

 

And for all my complaints, 4e FH was the one version that actually had a balanced weapon chart.  Apparently that is hard to do.

 

 

Hadnt really thought about that before, so I pulled everything out and smoked it over for a few minutes....

 

You're right!  That seems to have been more difficult for some authors than it was for whoever did the 4e chart.  :lol:

 

 

of course, that may be more intentional than we think, as FH uses the additional balancing metric of cost in money as well as cost in points. 

Edited by Duke Bushido
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10 hours ago, Old Man said:

I haven't seen anyone try to do anything other than fantasy/horror with BRP, though I'm sure something is out there.

Design Mechanism has done supers (and a much better job of it than Superworld ever managed) with Destined, and there's whatever Luther Arkwright qualifies as (alt-history?  dimension hopping?  sort-of-time travel?) qualifies as, plus some other science fiction of varying degrees of firmness.  Their output is a mix of BRP, its close cousin Mythras and some modded Runequest and d100 system, all of which share enough similarities that they overlap a fair bit and are pretty trivial to port between. 

 

There's others out there but they're the most prolific single publisher AFAIK.

 

Heck, Chaosium did straight hard scifi with Ringworld back in the day using modded BRP, and Hawkmoon was post-apocalytic sci-fantasy, not straight fantasy.  As Worlds of Wonder demonstrated, the engine can do anything.

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8 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

Hadnt really thoight about that before, so I pulled everything out and smoked it over for a few minutes....


You're right!  That seems to have been more difficult for some authors than it was for whoever did the 4e chart.  :lol:

 

Not to disparage the hard work that people put into 5e and 6e, but it annoys me personally when (for example) spears are a full DC better than any other weapon in the chart*, and you wind up with a campaign that's made up of spearmen.  Or when there are egregious typos in the weapon chart, surely the single most referenced table in the entire game.

 

 

Quote

of course, that may be more intentional than we think, as FH uses the additional balancing metric of cost in money as well as cost in points. 

 

I have never participated in a fantasy campaign that gave a damn about tracking money beyond the first session. 

 

 

 

* And can be thrown.

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On 7/20/2024 at 8:39 PM, GDShore said:

I ran campaigns in Calgary and Red Deer on alternate weekwends, 2 sessions each week average of 6 to 8 hours each. (sometime longer never shorter) over an 18 month span (average) that's 220 to 300 hours of time. It gave the players/characters time to create a feast for mind and soul. There was no defined leader amongst the group and during that time I conducted 8 specific sub-campaigns designed to push a character to stretch themselves. This doesn't happen with the play in D&D because the "modules" are designed around a formulae, go from point 'A' to 'B' bashing beasties on the way, enter dungeon, smash your way through it, looting along the way not leaving so much as a bent copper farthing behind return to point 'A' or maybe point 'C' divide up loot ,,, Ende.

 

This is not a game system issue.  It is a players and GM issue. Two weeks ago, I played a mini-campaign in 5e D&D, my second ever use, my first being a similar venue last year.  Both were at D&D in a Castle, if anyone is familiar with that.

 

In one game, I, my wife, a mother and son and a fifth fellow who had only played online in the past made up the playing group. In the other, my wife, son and I, a second married couple and a single player made up the group.  We built our characters based on campaign parameters largely independently.  We would have played each campaign for about 25 hours or so (one prologue session and 6 morning/afternoon or evening sessions, 2 per day on the three days following the prologue).

 

Every character had moments to shine, moments to suck and significant character growth, largely growing directly out of the game (at least for my characters, who had no preconceived character arcs). Looting was not the point of either game, and so it did not happen.  Both DMs (Ted Adams or Nerdarchy last year and B. Dave Walters this year) ran spectacular games. I'll be trying to weave some of what I noticed in their styles into my own games. 

 

Those DMs pulled that off with player groups they had never previously met, and players who had diverse play styles and character preferences.  Playing with the same group over time, it would be much easier to achieve a similar result.

 

I have no doubt that either of them could have run an equally great game in any system they put their minds to running. The player and the DM make the game.  The system may help or hinder, but it can't save a bad GM/player group, and a good group will make a good game out of a bad system.

 

I also find it laughable to criticize "D&D" generically.  Up to 2e, it was one game.  3e was a brand-new game. So was 4e, and so is 5e.  Some similar trappings, but completely different games.  Not like Hero, where the base engine has remained stable through 6 editions (largely because it worked well from 1e).

 

20 minutes ago, Old Man said:

 

Not to disparage the hard work that people put into 5e and 6e, but it annoys me personally when (for example) spears are a full DC better than any other weapon in the chart*, and you wind up with a campaign that's made up of spearmen.  Or when there are egregious typos in the weapon chart, surely the single most referenced table in the entire game.

 

It probably should not be the spear at the forefront, but in the real world, as tactics and technology advanced, older weapons and armor were left behind.  Indigenous Canadians wore wood armor.  It didn't do anything to slow a musket ball, so they abandoned it when the Europeans introduced them to firearms.  But the Europeans adopted tomahawks, snowshoes and canes because they were better than their European comparables.

 

We didn't really have spears, war clubs, maces, short swords, long swords, battle axes and pole arms all widely used at the same time in history.

 

Actually, of all the weapons on the typical Fantasy list, which ones are still used in modern-day warfare?

 

The knife, for sure. And the spear. What do you think a rifle with a bayonet fixed is?  Not all spears are suitable to be thrown.

 

When is the last time you saw a soldier armed with a sword or a crossbow?

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30 minutes ago, Hugh Neilson said:

I also find it laughable to criticize "D&D" generically.  Up to 2e, it was one game.  3e was a brand-new game. So was 4e, and so is 5e.  Some similar trappings, but completely different games.  Not like Hero, where the base engine has remained stable through 6 editions (largely because it worked well from 1e).

 

There are plenty of things to mock D&D for that are common across all versions and variants.  Classes and levels, for starters.  "Vancian" magic.  The total lack of any game mechanic to enforce roleplaying. 

 

 

Quote

We didn't really have spears, war clubs, maces, short swords, long swords, battle axes and pole arms all widely used at the same time in history.

 

Sure we did.  I was there. ;)

 

 

Quote

Actually, of all the weapons on the typical Fantasy list, which ones are still used in modern-day warfare?

 

I'm not sure why we're appealing to 'realism' when the point is to have a fantasy game where players can choose weapons for their characters that have measurably different, but still balanced, in-game effects.  This is the Fantasy Hero forum, after all.  Claims that spears render all other melee weapons obsolete probably belong in the Late Middle Ages Military Simulation Hero forum. 

 

 

Quote

Actually, of all the weapons on the typical Fantasy list, which ones are still used in modern-day warfare?

 

The knife, for sure. And the spear.

 

This has nothing to do with effectiveness.  Knives are carried primarily as tools.  Spears persist throughout history because pointy sticks are cheap and plentiful, not because they are better than other weapons.  If reality matched the 5e weapons chart, no other melee weapons would ever have been invented or used.

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2 hours ago, Old Man said:

 

There are plenty of things to mock D&D for that are common across all versions and variants.  Classes and levels, for starters.  "Vancian" magic.  The total lack of any game mechanic to enforce roleplaying. 

Mechanics don’t enforce roleplaying. Roleplaying enforces roleplaying. I can have 300 pt of Disadvantages and if they’re never enforced, I have 300 pt for free. 
 

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40 minutes ago, Ninja-Bear said:

Mechanics don’t enforce roleplaying. Roleplaying enforces roleplaying. I can have 300 pt of Disadvantages and if they’re never enforced, I have 300 pt for free.

 

 

This is like saying football has no rulebook if there are no refs. 

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I've played games with lousy refs. There might as well not have been a rulebook.

BTW the Chinese used to call the spear "the king of weapons," before firearms. Think about it -- long reach, quick to thrust with, can parry, and can be accurately thrown.

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5 hours ago, Old Man said:

There are plenty of things to mock D&D for that are common across all versions and variants.  Classes and levels, for starters.  "Vancian" magic.  The total lack of any game mechanic to enforce roleplaying.

 

Leaving aside different mechanics creating a different (neither inferior nor superior, objectively, just different) playing experience - D&D must have done something right to create the entire industry and stay on top - I'll focus on "enforcing" role playing.  We can point to their marketing budgets, of course, but there was no marketing budget in 1974!  Financial management wasn't strong for much of its 50-year history, as we all know.

 

3 hours ago, Ninja-Bear said:

Mechanics don’t enforce roleplaying. Roleplaying enforces roleplaying. I can have 300 pt of Disadvantages and if they’re never enforced, I have 300 pt for free. 
 

 

Nailed it. You can role play a character in any game system, or fail to do so.  The only "role playing" mechanic in Hero is disadvantages/complications.  I've seen players treat these like challenges to be minimized away ("well, my high EGO roll lets me largely ignore my psychs") and I've seen players role play excellent characters with full personalities and character growth in systems with no need for specific mechanics.  D&D 5e RAW does actually require some role playing hooks, although the system isn't used much from what I see, and includes the inspiration mechanic to provide a direct benefit for role playing.

 

You can't have growth in Hero without burning XP to buy off disad's/complications - RAW does not allow replacing them with new disad's/complications gained in play. Does that enforce or discourage role playing? Players and GMs role play.  Game systems don't.

 

5 hours ago, Old Man said:

I'm not sure why we're appealing to 'realism' when the point is to have a fantasy game where players can choose weapons for their characters that have measurably different, but still balanced, in-game effects.  This is the Fantasy Hero forum, after all.  Claims that spears render all other melee weapons obsolete probably belong in the Late Middle Ages Military Simulation Hero forum. 

 

This has nothing to do with effectiveness.  Knives are carried primarily as tools.  Spears persist throughout history because pointy sticks are cheap and plentiful, not because they are better than other weapons.  If reality matched the 5e weapons chart, no other melee weapons would ever have been invented or used.

 

If there were a "most advanced weapon", I agree it would not be the spear.  Spears came along very early and were replaced by swords, pole arms, axes, etc.  Their real advantage was low cost, as you note, and limited training requirements.  The bayonet advantage now is that you can turn the rifle into a spear, so no need to carry two weapons.  Knives are small, so practical as a backup or stealth weapon.

 

The low granularity of Hero System makes it tough to have a wide array of melee weapons, each with measurable advantages and drawbacks. A single DC or +1 OCV bonus is a lot.

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12 hours ago, Old Man said:

 

 

This is like saying football has no rulebook if there are no refs. 

Yup, haven’t you played back yard football? Or playground baseball with ghost runners? We never had an umpire or referee just kids playing. Better still, we have traffic laws, does that stop people from speeding (I can’t drive 55!) And yes I pass people on the right. Against the law my wife constantly tells.  So again you can have all the rules you want, it’s the people (player/GM) that enforced anything.  

11 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

I've played games with lousy refs. There might as well not have been a rulebook.

BTW the Chinese used to call the spear "the king of weapons," before firearms. Think about it -- long reach, quick to thrust with, can parry, and can be accurately thrown.

The Vikings highly favored the spear too.

 

One thing I really like about Matt Eastman -Schola Gladiatoria. Is that he always talks about context, context, context. 

Edited by Ninja-Bear
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And what is Roleplaying? Is it funny voices? I like what Matt Colville said that you could be describing what your character does in Third person-that is Roleplaying. (Here I dislike the idea in OSR that the player need to figure out the trap not the character. I don’t want to use my limited brain power to figure this out give me a die role).

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Well I have fallen well behind in this thread-- lots of people have already pointed out that "spear _greater_ sword" is tactically and historically accurate, etc.

 

So I am going to skip to a small tangential suggestion:

 

The actual,unbalanced-but-realistic weapons chart should be in either (and preferably both) the Combat and Adventuring book and / or the Action HERO splat book (I am sorry: the current name, surviving all the way from 4e, is, for even my no-real-sense-of-shame self, just too, too _way_ to cringey to say aloud).

 

Different versions- more specifically-weighted versions- should appear in the sub-genre splat books-- let's say Turakian Age is weighted towards greatswords and hammers, while Valdorian Age is weghted toward cutlas and rapists while Atlantean Age is weighted toward bows and who knows-

 

At any rate, this would serve not just as handy references, but a page or two of solid guidance on running a game in this subgenre: it establishes very elegantly an idealized parameter for "this type of game:"  these weapons and the forms of combat for which these weapons are ideal are the norm, or the desired norm, for the societies of this sub-genre.

 

Similarly, lightening certain weapons (again, _for that particular subgenre_) not only downplays the utility of that weapon, but it makes it less desirearable, and specialties built around it far less common.

 

Subtle campaign advice in the information-dense form of a chart.  It just doesn't get better than that.

 

 

And having said all that, let's go back to the oft-questioned concept of how a game "feels."  This is the sort of minor, mostly-invisible bit of rules guidance that helps Genre X feel like aomething more that relabeled Champions.

 

 

 

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I agree; that is the crux of what I was pushing in terms of feel.  We should have as reasonably-realistic a weapons chart somewhere in the main rules proper, and I think in Action HERO, at least the primary splat book, but the sub-genres such as "Johnny Walker on Mars" or "Jungle Adventures" or "Subway Avergers" or "Eighties Gun Porn" or "Wandering Barbarian"  or "Swords and Circuitry" or such-  should have a weapons chart that skews toward the feel of that subgenre-  a built in flair of sorts that defaults to 'cinematic," in as much as it matches what might be expected of that genre. 

 

 

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4 hours ago, Ninja-Bear said:

And what is Roleplaying? Is it funny voices? I like what Matt Colville said that you could be describing what your character does in Third person-that is Roleplaying. (Here I dislike the idea in OSR that the player need to figure out the trap not the character. I don’t want to use my limited brain power to figure this out give me a die role).

 

There are a lot of "what is role playing?" views. For some, it's social interaction as a break from combat. For others, it's cosplay and/or funny voices.  Still others view it as speaking in first person or, as you allude to, basing character success on player actions.

 

For me, it's characters that have a personality.  Characters that sometimes make sub-optimal choices because that's in-character. Characters whose personality and backstory don't vanish when they become inconvenient in-game.  Characters with low social stats and skills whose players don't wax eloquently to charm the Princess or mislead the Vizier. Characters whose views might actually grow and change over the course of a story arc or campaign, not remain the same as they started despite all new experiences.

 

With that variety of definitions, rules that enforce role playing for some work against it for others.

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6 hours ago, Ninja-Bear said:

Yup, haven’t you played back yard football? Or playground baseball with ghost runners?

 

Sure, but I would never claim that I was playing actual by-the-book football or baseball.

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Quote

At any rate, this would serve not just as handy references, but a page or two of solid guidance on running a game in this subgenre: it establishes very elegantly an idealized parameter for "this type of game:"  these weapons and the forms of combat for which these weapons are ideal are the norm, or the desired norm, for the societies of this sub-genre.

 

In terms of flavor and concept, I like this, but... it falls prey to the monoculture trap of genre fiction.  You know, the single biosphere planets in sci fi.  A planet will have multiple cultures and tendencies.  This area may use scimitars.  This one use maces.  That said... you just inspired me to something odd and interesting: different armor/weapon stats in different cultures.  Sure, in this part of the world, swords are most commonly used and they are a bit more effective.  But in that part of the world, they are into spears.  Your Razor Sword of Slashing rules in Morien, but in Yugavia its just not quite as dominant.

 

The justification?  That's how magic works in Jolrhos.  Its somewhat chaotic and uncontrolled, and the more a culture focuses on something, the more the local spirits affect how it works in real life.  So... Thanks Duke, you gave me a unique and interesting spin on Fantasy gaming :)

 

As I think about it, there is another justification: in this culture, maces are the legendary weapon, the kid pulled a mace from a stone to become a king.  People have studied maces, and came up with the ultimate designs.  Blacksmiths have come up with unique, special techniques to make the ideal mace.  Swords, not so much, they're just a blade that people also use, nobody worked so hard on them.

Edited by Christopher R Taylor
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  • 2 weeks later...

The following head-scratcher tends to appear in video games featuring dungeons, but, every now and again, tabletop adventures (inadvertently?) display a similar absence of logic.

 

Characters brave impossible odds to reach the heart of danger in the lion's den...and they come across a rival adventuring party or even just a lone adversarial NPC who somehow managed to bypass all the monsters without a fight, all the traps without any telltale signs of springing or disarming, all the hard barriers without so much as a single scratch to the architecture and that damn byzantine lock system safeguarding the final vault. This is especially egregious if the character(s) in question lack substantial magical ability or knowhow of concealed lethal mechanisms (i.e., they lack a Thief or other comparably skilled individual); doubly-so if everyone is low to mid-level at best. Even worse is when they manage to leave no footprints, bootprints, hoofprints, wheel tracks or signs of camp/rest on their approach to the structure.

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I recall, way back in 1e, an encounter in a published high-level module had the PCs came across a couple of holy men encamped in one of the rooms.  The party chatted with them briefly. They seemed happy enough where they were.  As they were leaving, one player said "wait a minute - where are they getting their food?"  As the group turned around, they saw their back line fast asleep and two jackalweres where the holy men used to be.

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