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[Sirus]

Running into that issue myself. I'm considering whether to run a second game just to try some of these more esoteric systems out.

[Rowanas]

Running into that issue myself. I'm considering whether to run a second game just to try some of these more esoteric systems out.

Fortunately I also have 7th Sea  and Savage Worlds games going on, but I don't want to drop out of my sunday group, even temporarily, even though I'd rather do anything with that time than play 5e.

[Kagus]

I was actually part of a group that was going to try out an online game of 13th Age because the DM recommended it. I started reading a little bit about it, and that's when the trouble began.

I wasn't a fan of the "What is your obvious plot hook?" Field of the character sheet. I ended up getting into a small fight with the DM about what to put there.

Then I read about "Roll to disagree with the DM" and I was already mostly lost. The DM was also pissed with me not digging the blatant plot-hookery, and that added to a bunch of other issues happening at the same time so the game ended up never getting started.

And that was my 13th Age experience! An argument about stew...


As for 5th, I dunno... I haven't really formed a proper opinion of it yet. Sure, there's a bit of heavy-handed streamlining in places, and spellcasters are at least as broken as they've always been, but I think my main gripe so far is just how much is left intentionally vague/up to the DM.

Sure, it "grants freedom" to allow the DM and players to shape a unique experience, but experienced DMs already know that they can tweak and bend rules as it suits them. Inexperienced masters, on the other hand, will be left with a whole bunch of tricky decisions to make and no firm framework to help them out in making them. DMs are already by far the minority compared to players, and 5th seems to raise the importance of getting a good DM while making it scarier for a newbie to try and become one.

It also increases DM workload, like they didn't already have enough to deal with.

[Trekkin]

I was actually part of a group that was going to try out an online game of 13th Age because the DM recommended it. I started reading a little bit about it, and that's when the trouble began.

I wasn't a fan of the "What is your obvious plot hook?" Field of the character sheet. I ended up getting into a small fight with the DM about what to put there.

Then I read about "Roll to disagree with the DM" and I was already mostly lost. The DM was also pissed with me not digging the blatant plot-hookery, and that added to a bunch of other issues happening at the same time so the game ended up never getting started.

And that was my 13th Age experience! An argument about stew...

That's been mine as well. It's built by and for people with a very specific idea of what counts as bogging down the game versus playing the game, and the non-combat parts are decidedly perfunctory. Backgrounds, for example, run mostly on player/GM agreement in the absence of specific guidelines. It's very much a product of the "yet another fantasy heartbreaker" theory of design that dramatic heroism means fighting lots of things and everything else is just there to give context to that.

[Jimmy]

Running into that issue myself. I'm considering whether to run a second game just to try some of these more esoteric systems out.

If you're looking for a fun system, I actually had a lot of fun with the Stars Without Number: Revised Edition that came out in 2017. Of course, I went the zany route, playing a backworlder who claimed he was a Wizard, lobbing grenade 'fireballs' at anything remotely threatening and getting kneed in the crotch by just about every female we came across.

[Telgin]

Fair warning that Stars Without Number is an OSR game so it's still heavily related to Dungeons and Dragons.  To put it simply, it's like DnD except you only have like 5 HP at level 1, skills are based on 2d6 instead of 1d20 (although combat is still d20s), and the AC system is more like precursors to DnD than modern versions where your AC goes down with better armor.  I remember we houseruled the death rules so people didn't drop like flies, but hitting 0 HP was a very high likelihood of dying, without 10 HP you have below 0 in 3.5.  Combat is very, very dangerous at level 1.

Of course, being heavily related to DnD in its mechanics might make it an easier sell to game groups who are used to that.  The revised edition stepped away from some of that though, I think, but I only have experience with the original.

I'm going to have a chance to try out a modern version of Traveller soon, and I can see that SWN took some inspiration from it.  This should be fun, since its game mechanics are actually fairly different from the D20 system.

[Kagus]

To put it simply, it's like DnD except you only have like 5 HP at level 1

You sound like someone who doesn't roll their first hit die and just takes maximum, like a chump.

[Criptfeind]

As for 5th, I dunno... I haven't really formed a proper opinion of it yet. Sure, there's a bit of heavy-handed streamlining in places, and spellcasters are at least as broken as they've always been, but I think my main gripe so far is just how much is left intentionally vague/up to the DM.

What do you mean about this? I've run both 3.5 and 5e and imo, although 5e has less like........ Really fiddly edge case rules hidden away in some book or another (In 3.5 if a player ask me how hard it is to jump into a top corner of the room, cut though the paper wall, and then climb across the ceiling to drop down on top of the shogun and how much damage physically dropping on him does, I can have an actual published answer, whereas in 5e I'd have to make something up) but for most of the actual stuff you use in play it's mostly covered as much as you want and the game doesn't seem that vague to me.

[MrRoboto75]

To put it simply, it's like DnD except you only have like 5 HP at level 1

You sound like someone who doesn't roll their first hit die and just takes maximum, like a chump.

I bet the mad lad doesnt have a negative con modifier either.

[Mephisto]

REAL role-players would be playing a CON 3 Barbarian. The worse your character's stats, the better you are at RPing.

[Kagus]

There are a number of spell instances, such as pretty much anything having to do with Illusion (Minor Illusion is particularly bad with this), plus a few other notable cantrips... Playing an Illusionist is only as powerful or useless as your DM decides it is at any given moment.

Whether or not an improvised weapon is actually an improvised weapon and thereby uses (and can benefit from) the Tavern Brawler feat, or if it's suitably weapon-like that you can just use it with your normal proficiency.

Is your lie "dramatic" enough that you can use Performance in place of Deception? When isn't it?

Tools.


There's something niggling (it's a word, I swear) in the back of my head about some other rule that's rather open to interpretation, but those were the things that came to mind offhand. Even just spells have a number of weird and/or muddy workings.

Some things are also just poorly described, such as how all of magic missile's darts strike simultaneously, meaning that an evoker wizard can add his INT mod to each dart... But a dragonblood sorceror can only add his CHA mod to one scorching ray, for example. Or that "nets should always be thrown with disadvantage", instead of giving it a minimum range of "ranged weapons are used at a disadvantage in melee" and a max range of "ranged weapons are used at a disadvantage when firing at long range" without actually mentioning that "yeah, we knew what we were doing, and this is how it works". Or how the crossbow expert skill officially regards the hand crossbow itself as "a one-handed weapon", meaning you can fire a single hand crossbow once and then fire the same one again as your bonus action... But if you're wielding something else in the other hand, you can't load it for a second shot, even though you're "ignoring the loading quality".

Except you can, because you can drop the other weapon as a "freer-than-free" action, reload as a non-action, and then pick up the weapon again as your turn's free action. Unless the DM says you can't because that's silly, of course.

[Telgin]

REAL role-players would be playing a CON 3 Barbarian. The worse your character's stats, the better you are at RPing.

To put it simply, it's like DnD except you only have like 5 HP at level 1

You sound like someone who doesn't roll their first hit die and just takes maximum, like a chump.

To be fair, that is pretty much how I played / am playing.  I knew what I wanted to play going in* and just let the dice fall where they would.  Ended up with a negative Constitution modifier and 4 HP at level 1, if I recall.  Warriors have a special ability that lets them ignore the first hit in each combat, which is the only reason my character is still alive.  That's actually kind of brokenly good.  I feel bad for anyone who isn't a warrior though.  Experts and psionic characters should stay away from bullets and lasers.

* There's a long story behind this but I actually wanted to play an engineer (Expert class) and let my stats tell me if I should play a warrior instead.  I rolled crappy physical stats that said I should play the engineer, but another player wanted to so I caved and played a warrior instead.  It worked out anyway.  She lost an arm to space rabies zombies and I didn't.

On that note though... yeah, I don't really like random stats in OSR games.  I'll play them without whining and play the bad stats up in RP, but I don't really like the idea in general if there's an alternative.  Amusingly, my Traveller character has atrocious stats due to the random rolling, but got stupidly lucky during character generation and somehow managed to graduate from the naval academy as an officer without any setbacks despite only having EDU 3, SOC 2, STR 4 and END 3.  DEX and INT were the only stats I had that were average.

[Kadzar]

I was actually part of a group that was going to try out an online game of 13th Age because the DM recommended it. I started reading a little bit about it, and that's when the trouble began.

I wasn't a fan of the "What is your obvious plot hook?" Field of the character sheet. I ended up getting into a small fight with the DM about what to put there.

Then I read about "Roll to disagree with the DM" and I was already mostly lost. The DM was also pissed with me not digging the blatant plot-hookery, and that added to a bunch of other issues happening at the same time so the game ended up never getting started.

And that was my 13th Age experience! An argument about stew...

I haven't played 13th Age, but, looking at the rules, it seemed like someone took D&D 4e and tacked on some narrativist rules, which really doesn't seem like it would work well.

Running into that issue myself. I'm considering whether to run a second game just to try some of these more esoteric systems out.

If you're looking for a fun system, I actually had a lot of fun with the Stars Without Number: Revised Edition that came out in 2017. Of course, I went the zany route, playing a backworlder who claimed he was a Wizard, lobbing grenade 'fireballs' at anything remotely threatening and getting kneed in the crotch by just about every female we came across.

A new supplement came out for it recently called Codex of the Black Sun that let's you play an actually wizard. Technically, you could play one in base Revised with a part of the Deluxe rules, but that was more a conversion guide to let you transfer spell list from older D&D and OSR games.

Fair warning that Stars Without Number is an OSR game so it's still heavily related to Dungeons and Dragons.  To put it simply, it's like DnD except you only have like 5 HP at level 1, skills are based on 2d6 instead of 1d20 (although combat is still d20s), and the AC system is more like precursors to DnD than modern versions where your AC goes down with better armor.  I remember we houseruled the death rules so people didn't drop like flies, but hitting 0 HP was a very high likelihood of dying, without 10 HP you have below 0 in 3.5.  Combat is very, very dangerous at level 1.

Of course, being heavily related to DnD in its mechanics might make it an easier sell to game groups who are used to that.  The revised edition stepped away from some of that though, I think, but I only have experience with the original.

I'm going to have a chance to try out a modern version of Traveller soon, and I can see that SWN took some inspiration from it.  This should be fun, since its game mechanics are actually fairly different from the D20 system.

Revised edition works with ascending AC, though most of the rest of your comments still apply. Also, it has foci, which are like feats, but actually very powerful and character-defining, one of which can make you basically unkillable.

REAL role-players would be playing a CON 3 Barbarian. The worse your character's stats, the better you are at RPing.

To put it simply, it's like DnD except you only have like 5 HP at level 1

You sound like someone who doesn't roll their first hit die and just takes maximum, like a chump.

To be fair, that is pretty much how I played / am playing.  I knew what I wanted to play going in* and just let the dice fall where they would.  Ended up with a negative Constitution modifier and 4 HP at level 1, if I recall.  Warriors have a special ability that lets them ignore the first hit in each combat, which is the only reason my character is still alive.  That's actually kind of brokenly good.  I feel bad for anyone who isn't a warrior though.  Experts and psionic characters should stay away from bullets and lasers.

* There's a long story behind this but I actually wanted to play an engineer (Expert class) and let my stats tell me if I should play a warrior instead.  I rolled crappy physical stats that said I should play the engineer, but another player wanted to so I caved and played a warrior instead.  It worked out anyway.  She lost an arm to space rabies zombies and I didn't.

I think that's pretty much working as intended. One of the basic concepts of the game is that, if you happen to get into a fair fight of any sort, something has gone horribly wrong, and at that point it's the Warrior's time to since it's the only class actually made for combat.

[Telgin]

That's a fair point.  We've only been in a handful of fights, most of them on our terms, which is why we came out okay for the most part.  The vacuum breathing alien velociraptor that ambushed on a derelict kind of sucked though, and almost killed the same party member that had nearly died twice before.

[Hanslanda]

The Sya-Gima

A 'spirit', that wanders the world seeking remnants of civilization and warning them of their coming destruction. The Sya-Gima most often takes the form of a sad old man or a magnificent talking Elk with gold fur. Sya-Gima doesn't push the issue of salvation, preferring to impart their warning then move to the next enclave with haste.

Brudd Ha'Jiir

A male who was once king during the Godswar, Brudd has forgotten himself and become a juggernaut of destruction, seeking only the next battle. He is an enormous and mighty Elf, wielding an equally massive axe. He cannot be dissuaded from seeking battle, though he has a deep love of riddles riddlesthat could... Perhaps... Break the dreadful spell of his berserk nature.

Probably more but mobile typing suuuucks.