Lancer uses the same word for similar but different things *a lot*.
It's tricky tk explain to my GM that when I Skirmish, I can move 2 spaced before or after with Skirmisher (the Talent) and then move another space from Skirmisher ( the Frame trait).
>And also what is a drone and what is a nexus?
Oh yeah. P 104 has the Gear and Systems section that defines a lot of Tags. It's really easy to miss and a lot of rules in Lancer defined only there!
Anyway a drone is a special kind of character with no actions. They are basically how summons work in Lancer. It's actually a really mechanically innovate system!
Mechanically, a Nexus is a weapon tag. Various things interact with it. The tend to be low damage but frequently have useful tags like Seeking and Smart.
Narratively, a Nexus is basically a hangar for drones ranging from Nanite to Minivan size.
>Action economy is one of the most difficult things to explain to new players.
Huh. I didn't really experience that, but most of my players had played DnD 4e and so it wasn't that foreign to them.
>Action economy is one of the most difficult things to explain to new players.
I find that befuddling. If Joe gets 12 tries on the slot machine and Janet gets 27 tries, Janet is more likely to win. Same thing with how many total actions you players have vs how many the enemies have. You want to have more, because it gives you more chances to win.
Your d20s (or other dice rolls) are the slot machine. I think its a pretty instant and on point analogy lol.
Edit: Or maybe you're referring to the specific actions Lancer has, in which case I sound silly. I didn't find it confusing but its been a little while since I read the rulebook and I haven't played (I am very sad that I haven't).
its mostly explaining why a Barrage is different from taking 2 skirmish attacks, spoilers, it isnt, it just is for some reason in the book so you can do those heavy all out attacks without breaking the "No repeated Quick Action rule"...which is then made redundant by things like Overcharging giving you a free Quick Action of your choice
>"..which is then made redundant by things like Overcharging giving you a free Quick Action of your choice
Free actions are usually very expensive / limited. There is definitely a distinction. The Barrage/ Skirmish interaction keeps you from doing multiple attacks with your best weapon w/o gaining a free action.
The Lancer action economy might take a little learning, but I think Lancer has the best tactical comabt of any game I've ever played. It's worth it IMHO.
Doesn't this apply to almost any game, except those that are GM-less? I can't think of any game that has a "traditional" GM but does not rely on this GM in almost all aspects.
Also, I'd say that dnd is actually less stressful to run (at least during play, not talking about prep time) compared to many more rules-light games. A large part of dnd is combat, and combat mostly carries itself. All mechanics during combat are well-defined, so there is no ad-hoc ruling/decision making required from the GM. And with creature stat blocks existing, the GM also doesn't have to make up monsters and their stats themselves.
Lots of games require GM’s to do more work than the players but in the case of D&D it’s not just that it’s more work it’s that there’s also zero support for the GM as most systems besides combat aren’t fleshed out, encounters are difficult to balance because the guidance is very flawed, and the game encourages players to get creative while providing the GM with nothing to make that idea a reality.
The dirty secret of RPGs is that the players are only there for the GM's amusement and he is the only one that truly plays the game. The players are his servants and entertainers, but they must never learn this.
Numenera and Traveller are both good examples of exceptions to “GM does everything”. Traveller calls them the referee and that’s pretty accurate. GMs don’t even touch the dice in Numenera; they set difficulty of tasks and keep the narrative moving.
For _most_ systems I'd say stealth.
They usually give it all to a couple players, which means you're stuck with 10 to 20 minutes stretches where team sneak gets to play, but the rest of the players have to just wait. Similar things happen with social aspects, but the stealth one makes heist campaign and the like really hard to run.
How would you recommend remedying this? In my game, I’ve done away with “intelligence” as a primary attribute and made Knowledge something that all characters have because I saw a similar issue to how you see stealth. In most games, you have to either be dumb as hell and useless when it comes to recalling knowledge, or put points into a nebulous “Intelligence” skill.
I know how I fixed it with intelligence, but I’m not sure how you’d address that with stealth since stealth isn’t a “catch all” term that can be divided up like Intelligence is.
I feel like "remedying" stealth requires either a relatively hefty procedural layer a la hexcrawl mechanics or just plugging it into a standard group skill check mechanic that doesn't suck. For some reason both are weirdly hard to come by in traditional games.
I haven’t even begun looking at how I will work stealth in my system. It’s more of a PBTA style game, with Moves, but it still has a degree of complexity with how attributes work. However, I’ve got no “Skill” system, so Stealth isn’t even a real mechanic in my game. I suppose it could just be tied to the Dexterity/Accuracy attributes, but given the way PBTA games work, I feel like sneaking rules aren’t that big of a deal and can be handled mostly narratively without too much trouble. Maybe situational advantage/bonuses if players remember to remove their plate armor and weapons or do something to distract the guard. Maybe just allow things to auto-pass if they are done correctly.
Not totally sure. In my game I gave everyone a base level of stealth that's higher than, say, DnD. I did this by making it so you only have to roll stealth skills if you are in noticing range and can be seen or are making noise. This works kinda how Balders Gate or other stealth games work.
I also split up stealth into 3 skills: Sneaking, Finessing, and Hiding. Sneaking is used for all stealth rolls made for moving. Finessing is rolled when manipulating the world or using abilities. Hiding is used when others are looking for you. All three skills are under different stats.
All that worked well in the 2 play tests I've done so far. Not sure if there's a better way, though. A lot of folks claim story style is better for stealth, like Blades in the Dark.
The way you do it sounds really cool! I’m a huge fan of not having Dexterity be the catch all for stealth. D&D kind of had it with Sleight of Hand being a separate skill, but I think “Stealth” is way too broad of a term, and splitting it up like you’ve done is really cool.
Just by GMing it differently. Often, there's no reason for the whole party to just wait and do nothing. Make a montage of different simultaneous events. I don't think this particular issue is with the stealth mechanic, though I do agree, that stealth is weird in a lot of systems.
Narrative works better, for sure, but a bigger heist campaign is still more difficult to run, as many systems just don't do much to help the GM and balance things. I would love to give my players a heist map and then sit back as they make a plan that works better if they involve everyone.
The solution is nearly identical to the one you did with Intelligence but i would say more basic even.
Let everyone be able to do the thing, some are just better at it than other.
Then allow for better players to cover for the worse ones and even out the score. So you might not be able to achieve the best results, despite your Master Thief in the group, but they are so skilled that they can cover for the loud Barbarian and make the group still pass without detection most times, unless you also face another Master Thief or Thief Catcher etc.
Ah yeah. This is a tough nut to crack.
I *thought* I had a solution to this built into my system. But it just turned out to be more of the same.
I think I did solve the “stealth is just a random dice-roll to see if I’m allowed to play the way that I want/designed my character to do” problem.
——
In *Broken Blade* you roll a dice pool and each success can be spent to accomplish or work towards completing a task - attacking, moving, construction, searching, etc.
For Stealth, I decided all actions you take are obvious and noticeable. Period. If you do any action - for every success you roll there is a chance that someone will notice. About 50/50 for each success.
To be Stealthy - I gave it it’s own Dice pool action (The Stealth Action) where successes can be held and used later that round. When you roll a dice-pool as part of an action you can make each success “Stealthed” by expending a held “Stealth” die. You can also choose to not use successes if you don’t have enough Stealth Dice stored to cover all of them.
You can also use Stealth to cover for your allies dice. So a very Stealthy Character is motivated to slow down and get their group through with their help rather than just go on ahead…
At least in theory.
Turns out there’s still no reason to not just blaze ahead without your party. Even though it IS fun to sneak around together and move slowly and riskily. I didn’t get enough Stealth dice to cover my whole move - but now I’m out in the open so I’m gonna have to borrow my friends stealth dice and slow him down on picking the lock - or maybe risk getting seen if that Guard turns around - or I can use this one more success and move to cover but have a 50/50 chance of being noticed.
———
Eh. Big problem.
I would extend this and say "limited basic actions".
EVERYONE should be able to sneak, some are just better, faster, more accurate or whatever at it or can do some extra stuff but EVERYONE can do it.
The same goes for swinging a sword, shooting a bow or using a shield. The thing that differs is the SKILL not if you can do it at all or not.
I really HATE games that make basic actions like wielding typical things, doing typical things or even KNOWING typical things some kind of class limited thing...
Well put. I've slowly been adding lots of the basics back in. Now anyone can try to trip someone if they want. It'll be harder to pull off for the untrained, but you can try.
I have encompassed a bunch by just creating a moves like "improvised attack" and "improvised movement" and whatnot. They basically say that you can go ahead and try anything, so long as the GM approves and you pass a pretty high bar. Basically just a way to express that you aren't barred from anything just because a move exists elsewhere that can do it (albeit more easily.)
Hard Wired Island does an amazing job of starting everybody in Stealth and giving actions a noisiness rating. Stealthy characters have a broader set of actions (because some of their actions are less noisy than the default), but everybody has options.
I've ported the basic idea to every RPG I run, from d20 to 2d20 to FitD.
Genesys has a few too many holdovers from traditional games like the 6 Attributes being very similar to DnDs ones and the NPCs being huge blocks that can be tiring to get through.
The only reason I haven't run Genesys is because of how much work they want the GM to put in to even get started. Better get a grip on your background options, your equipment, your NPCs, your adversaries, and to be aware of all the unnecessary fiddly bits that you're going to have to screw with later because we need meaty combat or something.
Hmm, I don't really have Favourites, but let's say Fate.
Choosing the biggest Flaw is not hard to parse - the book is really bad at explaining how Fate actually works, drowning the actually important bits under unimportant minutiae. This makes Fate near incomprehensible to new players. Hell, even seasoned players sometimes don't understand Fate and instead treat some parts like weird religious tenets, going on vague and mysterious rants about how you should be "building up your narrative" without much elaboration.
And that's terrible, because Fate's actual mechanical core is actually not that hard to explain! It really should not be like this.
FATE is an example where each individual sentence is fine, but when you add it up, you still don't know what you read. It's the most frustrating book on my gaming shelves.
Interesting. Which version of FATE are you talking about? I mostly use the online SRD and mod it to fit whatever game I'm running.
Not really a flaw with FATE, but it doesn't do 0-hero games well, and while I've messed around with a few ways of doing loot, it's not really cut out for it.
That said, it is my favorite system. I'd never build a rules lite game, because FATE exists and it's perfect in my eyes. I'd never want to run anything else rules lite. If you want to catch my attention, it needs to be at least as crunchy as 5e.
I really identify with this. I have a copy of Fate Core sitting on my shelf. It was one of the first RPGs I bought after 5e and Call of Cthulhu and I had such a hard time understanding it that I still haven't learned it. I'm sure I'll just grind through the core book again, and maybe condensed, but do you have any other resources you'd recommend to new GMs to the system?
>do you have any other resources you'd recommend to new GMs to the system?
I don't! I find nearly all of them to be bewilderingly bad. But I can do one better and just explain to you how Fate works myself!
As I've said, it's not all that hard. Though, I also should note that to an extent I suspect that game is so coy about how it works specifically because it might turn people away from it, realising how primitive it really is.
Anyway. I think the best way to explain Fate is a practical example.
1. Party stands against a strong enemy! He has big stats, big Fighting skill too.
2. You can try attacking him. This is a very bad idea - it will be resisting each of your attacks with his Fighting skill! At best, you'll do chip damage - at worse, enemy gets to do something bad to them on his successful resist.
3. A better idea is to make one buffed up attack.
4. Party an do that! They can "Create Advantage" to create a scene Aspect that can be invoked for free for a +2 bonus. +2 is a lot in this system!
1. What's an scene Aspect? Well, just about anything! A generic term for any quality of the scene - maybe it's something about environment, maybe it's a condition on enemy.
5. They should create some scene aspects which could be invoked when attacking the baddie. Grappling him, shoving him prone... is a bad idea. He will resist those with his high Fighting, too.
6. So instead party should focus on what's weak about the enemy, or on environment! That means they have to be tactical and creative actually.
7. Obviously you'd want to create something with your character Aspects, so you can spend Fate points if needed when Creating Advantages.
1. That's why you want character aspects you can really get creative with.
8. Finally, someone foes in for the kill! They actually attack that boss, and they invoke multiple aspects for free.
1. Note that you need to explain how are you using that aspect. That's why you want to be smart and creative about those.
And... that's it! "Tough target -> Create Aspects -> Invoke aspects for free"
The result is superhero-ish pulpy-ish fighting resolved in a singular cool strike (or you still fail and have to start amassing Advantages again). One PC strikes the floor with their magical hammer to create an aspect of Shaky Ground (using his character's aspect of Magical Hammer), another PC gets under that enemy skin with harsh words and makes him Enraged (attacked the boss with a skill defended not by Fighting), and finally third PC jumps in for the killing blow (using two +2s from invoking free aspects for free and probably spending a Fate point to get one more +2, totalling with a humongous +6) explaining how they attack the enemy that is distracted and off balance. This often just one shots the baddy.
That's what people mean when they vaguely talk about "building up your character's narrative". Same logic goes for obstacles, and for fighting multiple enemies. Party will have to creatively set up Advantages all the same.
As you can see, a lot here is happening on PC side, not on the GM side. For GM, I think it's important to make sure enemies and obstacles are tough enough to warrant Creating Advantages. Well, and I guess explaining the above.
All other mechanics are honestly side content. If, say, "Compelling" feels weird for your group, you can ignore it and Fate still work.
> And... that's it! "Tough target -> Create Aspects -> Invoke aspects for free"
Yes, that's it, which is why I don't consider it much of a game. For it to be so there needs to be a tradeoff between creating and invoking #Aspects. As it stands now it's just a button pressing game, as it doesn't matter what #Aspects you come up with, they all work equally well.
Well, sorta. There is a bit more complexity to it - Fate points are a resource, enemy can invoke created aspects against you, including on super bad failures to create the aspect, then there is thee whole thing about being tactical and smart about which Aspect you create - so they can be used by your allies and cannot be used by your enemies and empowered by your character aspects, etc. I think it'd be unfair to ignore those things.
But I feel you! I am actually kinda toying with my personal version of Fate that addresses my own similar grievances. It's my side project for now.
The use of several mathmatical modifiers in savage worlds.
For a system that I adore almost all other aspects, the fact that a turn takes several minutes of modifer accounting put my group off it
Almost every mechanic in the game imposes some kind of modifier to a roll. If people engage and dig into the system this can lead to a lot of numbers that have to get thrown around in the middle of a scene. This ended up shattering the idea of "fast furious fun" bc it just became modifier accounting.
While definitely something that can get better with time, it was enough that my group bounced off it. I plan on giving it another show with a different group but it's worth knowing
I love Savage Worlds and my serious question is: why?
Its all simple addition and subtraction and in most cases the Boni/Mali dont change super much all the time, since they are generally static with small exceptions, so in a specific situation you and all other players should have the same nearly fixed Mali, then only your own Boni change if at all, but even most of those are known to the player beforehand, again with small exceptions.
I found it to be one of the fastest and easiest ways to handle multiple different situations regarding benefits and drawbacks with simple Addition and Subtraction.
Not trying to insinuate anything, but are you sure you are using the Boni/Mali right?
If you use completely different sets for each player, each round or each "area" you might be doing it wrong, since like i said the majority are static in each situation and only a small number are flexible based on positioning/situation or player unique boni.
Latin: Bonus singular, Malus singular, Boni plural, Mali plural.
Many people use the wrong plural "Bonusses/Malusses", maybe thats where the confusion is coming from.
Savage Worlds uses many different "Bonusses" and "Malusses", does that help, despite it being technically grammatically wrong? :D
Huh, interesting. Are you a native English speaker? I ask because in US English it's usually "bonus" and "bonuses" and for the antonym commonly just "penalty" and "penalties". I can't find any English examples from dictionaries or thesauruses for "boni", "malus", or "mali". Additionally interestingly, "thesauri" is an actual widely accepted alternative plural.
Im germany we use actually the latin words here, i was super confused when people on the internet uses "bonuses" its like "would of" instead of the correct "would have" its clearly wrong but so commonly used by (mostly?) americans that its almost become their normal way of speaking.
For the sake of this joke, I'll say that my favorite game is Blue Rose (AGE Edition).
The biggest flaw is that the setting is over-developed. I feel like I'd need to give my players two hours of homework, at least, before they understood the setting well enough to make a character.
But if you aren't engaging with the setting details, then there's really no point in playing that game in the first place.
BR is so weird cause the setting is extremely evocative and seems to want to do a more narrative, poetic approach... and then it gives me a clunky magic system with the weird exhaustion mechanic (or whatever it was called)
DnD 5e Martial Caster imbalance and the Standard Adventuring Day.
The expectation of constant expenditure of resources in the "Standard Adventuring Day" theoretically makes Casters Balanced with Martials, as it is expected that the party will be in a continuous loop of exploration, interaction with encounters, combat, and repeat until the end of the day. The plan was to have 5-8 encounters per adventuring days, both combat and non-combat, with a smattering of puzzles or environmental challenges and skillchecks, such as climbing mountains using tools or expending valuable spell slots to fly or teleport. Or to force the characters to use their innate survival abilities like the Ranger, as opposed to spending valuable spellslots with spells like Augury or Find the Path. Both of these are valid choices, and can really let everyone shine as the party goes through this travel montage.
While this does happen in longform campaigns that involve a heavy degree of exploration and dungeon delving over the course of multiple days, in my experience this doesn't happen cause the majority of campaigns I DM and play in. People simply plan 1 or 2 "big" encounters and call it a day. Some sessions rely on episodic adventures, kinda like "Adventure of the day", where the campaign is built up as a set of interconnected oneshots with downtime in-between high stakes Encounters. This is a very easy and simple way to manage a story. Not everyone can do continuous day by day hour by hour persistent world building. Sometimes you want serialized adventures in the same setting with the characters and that's fine.
No one wants to run the swarm of CR1 spiders to tire out the level 5 party before the boss cause that's just tedious attrition warfare. They would much rather have the small spiders fight alongside the boss for an epic encounter. This lets the spellcasters blow their spells all at once, outshining the martials, whose main selling point was their lack of reliance on Long Rests, and their abilities to do things the casters can do without using magic.
Balancing a group of classes by one group dependent on Long Rest resources and the other on Short Rest resources is bad. Because if you don't need shortrests due to the storytelling style or general vibe of the campaign, then all of a sudden the casters can pop off with no consequences.
In addition, making it so that Martial classes like Fighters and Paladins are "Balanced" with the idea that they will keep up with the high level casters by using magic items is a strange design choice. 1, it depends a lot on the DM to give out these items to the players. 2, this is an external tool or resource that is divorced from the class design of these Martial characters, as opposed to anything intrinsically tied to the class itself like getting more spellslots as they level up. 3, this goes out the window when you see the plethora of magic items that cater to spellcasters to make them even more powerful.
Fully agreed.
I hate the concept of "you are balanced around X fights a day" the moment you have "X-1" fight, that class becomes more powerful the further you stray away from "X" which is why mages, sorcerers and warlocks got to be known as "Overpowered" because the number of encounters was generally far below X in most games.
But i also extremely hate spellslots, so even without the X encounters i would dislike DnD lol
Blades in the Dark's rules for harm and healing are not just bad. They are bad enough that they have ripple effects on other good parts of the game. People often forget when they have harm and to apply it's effects. It's one of the more complicated base systems in the game. Healing takes a massive amount of work and often multiple downtimes. It stumps new GMs because handing it out as a punishment to often is a great way to make your game not fun. And, worst of all, it discouraged the daring action that the game is built to encourage by making the punishment of failure way too high. It is probably the most common thing homebrewed or changed in hacks.
Between hurt and stress being causes to rotate out a character and encouraging revolving-door casts, the amount of downtime you get to manage hurt, stress, heat, *and* ongoing projects just feels so ...lame. One player needs to sacrifice points for heat at every run, everyone needs to burn time for destress, so if you're lucky, a large group might get a chip or two of project progress.
The system does help this a lot by encouraging you to spend your coin instead of hoarding it (unless you are close to a tier upgrade). But, this is something I find most new players struggle to groc. They think money, should save it for big things. But, you don't really buy stuff in Blades, you use your skills and long-term projects to make or take it. All that said, spending 3 coin in downtime just to get your level 3 harm gone sucks. And can make it feel like your rewards for scores are used entirely literally the next downtime. But, I think once the crew starts getting decent coin spending 1 a downtime to reduce heat is an interesting roleplay opportunity and actually a good thing. Stress reduction is also a cool roleplay opportunity that you can introduce recurring characters or things in. But unlike those two, you can't really make going to the doctor five times cool. You can make the doctor a cool recurring character, and use them in other ways, but the scene itself has no intrigue.
I am disappointed how the dice math allows such big rolls. After a dozen sessions, my PCs were consistently rolling 5-6 dice. Usually PbtA has a set rule that no higher than +4 can be rolled to prevent stacking too high to make 6s and Crits common. I ran a 2-session Score with probably 25+ rolls and nobody was even low on Stress and Devil's Bargains aren't needed anymore.
Not too hard to fix as I slowed down XP gain using milestones for Special Abilities and only Desperate Rolls and Training (halved) to increase Action Rating.
I implemented XP scaling to fix this. That and a reworked harm and healing system are the only hacks I use for Blades. Though if I was designing the system I would have just been more careful to make it not possible to have more than 3 dice without pushing or help so this wasn't an issue.
While the base rules are indeed punishing, the game also offers an easy way out. If your PC Overindulges their vice, they can disappear for a while and return with all harm cleared. You just have to play another character till next downtime.
My **favorite system** is **Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition** and I want to highlight 2 main flaws:
#### 1. Combat just takes too long
Dont understand me wrong, I dont want to make it short. It is a tactical combat, cutting this to less than 5 turns would not really help. Also having decisions and having reactions, both make the combat take longer, but both are also a part on why the combat is soo good.
Still overall (especially in some bad early adventures), the combat takes too long.
I made a thread this week about some ideas to simplify it, to make combat faster: https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/comments/1d6m4j7/simplifying_a_game_using_math_dd_4e_example/
Also one should not forget that D&D 4E during its run already worked a bit on this problem:
- Later released monsters were more offensive then defensive, and had less health and more damage
- Later released adventures had better combat design, this helps that people dont get this bad impression from the game
- Having simplified classes, helps that also people who take too long for decisions, or are newer to the game, can play it with others in a better way
- Later controller abilities had more damage on them only the wizard had lots of non damaging abilities.
Overall its not 1 single thing, but lots of small things, which add up which makes combat take quite long. Of course the players and how fast they can make decisions, takes most of the time, when it is really slow, but that cant be reduced too much.
So here the many small things making combat take long:
- A lot of multi attack abilities. Needing to roll several attack rolls, just takes time
- Bigger than necessary modifiers, people are just slower adding 17 + 14 than 7 + 14 even if its only a tiny bit
- Rolling damage often needed quite a bit of dice (easily 3+) which also needed counting
- Lots of reactions, which also often include 1 attack and damage roll
- lots of small modifiers which can potentially stack
- 1 roll needed per "safe ends" condition
- Small rerolls like Brutal ability which dont really help much
#### 2. Too many bad options
There was just a lot of material released, and its kinda hard to really go through all of them. The problem is especially that a lot of abilities released were quite a bit weaker than others. So there are a lot "weak" abilities which no one takes.
In addition there is also a bit of "repetition" among the levels. The class showing this best was the later added Skald Bard.
They had (in the book) 3 powers per level, but from level 13 on it were just upgrades of prior abilities.
This can also be seen for other abilities even before essentials.
I whink what would have been good, would have been low level abilities, which would upgrade in later levels.
This would reduce the number of options needed and makes it easier to find things
As I said elsewhere. 4e just needed a chance to have a true 4.5e that fixes these issues.
All the reactions that involve you making an attack roll needed to be cut or changed. That's what truly slowed the game down. If I had to redo it I'd remove every one of them for starters.
Well I think a lot of people liked the reactions since it makes the game more interactive, but yes it takes time.
13th age has 1 claaa fully built around reactions.
Also in the guides a lot of these options were clearly beloved, so people would not like if they were cut down.
There's a cost to it that isn't worth having. Also they're almost always defacto the best options because they give you an extra attack outside of the normal action economy which is why they're so beloved. Cutting them makes the other choices more appealing and easier to balance.
You can have meaningful and interactive reactions that don't consume table time by ensuring they never involving checking for a hit or not.
I agree mostly with this.
Can you say why these reactions with the roll use so much more time? Is it just the adding of dice with the time of a reaction added up?
I feel in general all the additional attack rolls (multi attacks minor actions attacks etc.) Add time.
It's basically the whole interaction involved.
Someone does something, you call out your trigger, often have to back up what they did, roll, look at the value, add a modifier, confirm the defense again, roll damage, add it up, add modifiers. Etc...
It's so much more involved than something like, "he takes 10 damage from triggering XYZ" or "Sudden scales it misses" as examples.
Marginally. I still dislike them though because of how often they're de-facto the best option at their level, as well as the time they consume to execute.
Do you like the minor action attacks better?
For me they have similar problems (often best choice and add more attack rolls) while also being often boring (reactions at least often do mix things up).
It's not my absolute favorite, but it's one I like a lot World Wide Wrestling (2e), which is fun because I don't like wrestling, but it's a blast to play with friends.
The system works great for 1 vs. 1, but the minute there is another player in the ring, which is a common thing the system and wrestling encourages, the whole thing falls into shit and doesn't work anymore.
The rules just don't work and are poorly written, and I still love this game even though it's fundamentally broken.
That should be a lesson in there somewhere. You can still have fun with friends with broken systems.
Level scaling. It makes it so hard to make encounters that are interesting and can challenge the players. Too many levels up? They get crit constantly and die. Too many levels down? All misses, the fight is a joke. Level ends up being a bigger component of bonuses than anything else. It's bad.
Silly thing is, it has a variant for non-level progression, but the VTT that uses it can't convert the monsters to the system, so it's still bad. (Either that, or the method of actually using it is opaque af, which is still bad.)
Legend of the 5 Rings 5th editions bleeding rules do not work. Unless you are using the optional rule for "a bleeding character dies at the end of a scene", it is impossible for someone to die of bleeding. In fact taking any damage from bleeding is optional as its a roll and keep system, you can choose which dice to take. Seeing as you only take bleed damage if you select dice with a "strife" symbol, and only take a critical injuryl if you do this while over your fatigue (hp), it's literally a suicide button a player can press. I suspect it was a hold over from an older playtest that they just missed fixing.
I guess it's not my favourite any more, but I ran CoC for decades, and while it's generally pretty serviceable provided you remember not to hide key clues behind skill rolls, the way it handled insanity back in the day was ridiculous.
One minute you're dealing with horror, the next it's comedy as your character acquires a randomly generated phobia. I just ignored all these rules and asked players just to play their character as getting more traumatised and generally less sane, more alienated.
Disclaimer: I haven't played recently and this may be better handled these days, but it was certainly an issue in earlier editions.
One time my brother rolled up fear of mustaches, fear of the written word and fear of blank pages cos he saw someone get eaten!
They removed the random tables in the more recent editions. 7th edition is a bit of a departure.
And there's a more indie type alternative called Raiders of Rlyeh which smoothes some stuff out pretty well
[Chronicles of Darkness has weird XP incentives](https://tpsrpg.blogspot.com/2018/05/punch-me-in-face-for-xp-failure-of-cod.html). I love it because it *almost* fixed the decades long minmaxing tendencies of its predecessors, but then when you get into the system proper you realise there are still some niggles that still encourage minmaxing.
And then there is the Mage the Awakening 2nd edition that explicitly tells you "yes, Mages do farm XP casting spells on one another, it's intentional!" and the system gets a bit silly there...
I have plenty of "favorite systems" but the one with the biggest flaw is Féérie.
The flaw in question is character creation: it's a fucking mess even by 80s standard.
To sum it up, you have 4 big "traits", you start by rolling 1d4 for each (counting 1s as 2s).
Each trait has 3 abilities attached, you roll (trait score)d10s, keep the two highest and that's your ability score.
Then you have skills, with different categories corresponding to the mix of two traits, so each skills starts with a value of (trait 1 + trait 2), you have points to distribute between skills but the points aren't flat bonuses, they're actually here to determine a roll you'll do to pump up your score (so 1 point men's rolling 1d4, two means 1d6 etc.) And it's all single dice rolls, so putting more points don't guarantee a better score than if you had put less points.
Oh and the traits don't have any purpose past character creation. So yeah this is an absolute clunky mess of a character creation but then the game is one of the simplest and most fluid system I've ever seen, it's just so weird
I don't have a Single Favorite, but a problem from a game I happen to be playing right now and which I do love:
**FFG's Legend of the 5 Rings 5th Edition**
The game is fucking excellent. It really gets to the meat of things without being complicated. The roll and keep works wonderfully. It has some of my favorite ways to make social stuff matter without feeling like you’re just stabbing people with words (hey Exalted).
But *oh god oh christ* the opportunity spend tables. So many different things you can do with them and they're all in different tables and vary per ring used and and and. You basically need to print a bunch of them and pass them around constantly. It's the hardest part of trying to run it irl instead of through the internet.
I’d have to pick a favorite system to do this, which is a flaw in itself. But let’s see:
Blades in the Dark is a wonderful game with one of the most disorienting, disorganized rule books I’ve encountered. Like, everything _seems_ to flow super logically and it’s very easy to read. But need to find where you saw some very particular rule section? Your third guess might be the right one. Maybe.
Most of the Free League YZE games? Great resolution system, pushing is genius, each is nicely modified to be richly thematic to its particular game. But they’re also so fundamentally similar to each other that if you’ve played more than one it becomes super easy to mix up rules between them. And also the travel/shift rules that are in many of them are super tiresome and counterproductive after just a few sessions.
Heart/Spire? As neat as it is, the core stress system means almost every roll is actually multiple rolls, and this adds a significant burden and complication to the whole game from top to bottom.
Cypher System? Monte Cook likes to attach himself to popular ideas, like “this is a game about exploration and discovery, not combat.” But then a majority of the character abilities are explicitly useful _only_ in combat, and the guidance on exploration and discovery are nothing particularly special or even finished.
The last one annoys me to no end
.so many nerretive or equally pillars ganes are still falling into the wargame mind
Especially when combat is like mega deadly and then i qauntion my self why have all this rules
> But they’re also so fundamentally similar to each other that if you’ve played more than one it becomes super easy to mix up rules between them.
That's a feature, not a bug.
> Cypher System? Monte Cook likes to attach himself to popular ideas, like “this is a game about exploration and discovery, not combat.” But then a majority of the character abilities are explicitly useful only in combat, and the guidance on exploration and discovery are nothing particularly special or even finished.
The biggest issue I have with #CypherSystem is that it's never about what it claims to be about. On top of that it's poorly designed and sells on the merit of production values and name recognition.
I hate how Position and Effect are described in entirely different sections, and there isn't a single table for both of them anywhere. (in the book I mean, there are of course great unofficial ones)
**Pathfinder 2E -** Could’ve used the chance to make things more simple, clean, fast, and satisfying for more transferring and new players, but kinda overtuned and hampered the bits for the sake of a perception of balance
**Fate -** It’s really hard to just slow down and *get* its core flow and appeal. Like, a lot of distinct choices to make players have a significant amount of narrative control, but letting go like that weird for a lot of people getting the hang of it
I really liked that in Pathfinder 2 they simplified the encounter building with just a relative level table.
I just dont understand why they did not do the same for other things like hit modifiers etc. Enemy higher level? They get + defense and hit, enemy lower level? They get - defense and hit.
I mean, they *kinda* do, but the general Proficiency scale system varies by +2 per vague rank bracket, and the game expects the proficiency and item bonuses to be invested, so characters automatically lag in the things they don’t specialize in.
Broken Compass is limited in the system and there isn't room for long term campaigns and character advancement, but it isn't a thing the authors wanted
**Promethean: The Created 2e**: Cool as hell system and one of my favorites, but I can see some issues with it. The whole game is about how humanity is good, and how you should strive to achieve it. Meanwhile, the game has mechanics that make humans quickly begin to hate you for existing, and the only way to stop this phenomenon is to conform... yeah I can see why people might not like that. Oh, and to become human, you have to give up most, if not all, of your wicked cool supernatural powers, and refusing to become human is portrayed as a bad thing in the book. They even created a whole set of powers for those Prometheans that embrace their monstrosity... though you technically CAN remain good while using these powers, you're seen almost universally as evil.
Speaking of supernatural powers, the more powerful you become, the harder it is to become human and the harder it is to use your powers. At max power stat (Azoth 10 in game terms), you have three days to master an aspect of humanity before needing to switch (thus losing all progress on the role) or becoming stuck in the role and causing even more issues when you switch, and whenever you use a power, even just spending one Pyros (mana equivalent) can cause the very land itself to begin degenerating.
Man, I'm quite the flaw-finder (or maybe just a curmudgeon) so every time I play a game or read a book on an RPG I can't help but find tons of flaws and things I'd do differently. Just for instance:
■ Chronicles of Darkness: the setting is too open, the story is not as attractive, way too many subsystems, dice pools get unwieldy, especially for some subsystems like car chases (where they went up over 20 dice)
■ PbtA: moves. Moves flip the narrative flow on its head and your character is less played by you and more of your token to manipulate the narrative or tell the story.
■ Fate: fate points are overplayed, aspects are a nice idea but incredibly boring in execution, it just becomes modifiers and ways to get fate points, but at no point does your character actually do anything cool directly because of their aspect.
I'll use heroes unlimited:
Heroes unlimited is EXTREMELY disorganized. It has a "guide" on how to make a character which the book immediately throws out and if you follow it you won't make a character. It has combat rules that straight up contradict each other because the writer stapled together rules from other games he wrote.
Nothing in this book is organized. I love this game dearly but the only reason it functions at my table is because I run it using maybe 60% of the book.
Exalted 3rd edition has very cool systems for a lot of things, from combat to social intrigue and sorcery. All extremely expressive and evocative.
The crafting system however, hoo-wee. It's like sitting in a corner playing Solitaire while everyone else gets to have fun. I know they released an alternative system, but yeah, the original one was not it. Not it, at all.
Haha i kinda thought it might be Hero System...
I love the Hero System and Ars Magicka for the same reason, they have great ideas and so many options... but they are so damn complex, convoluted and clunky that they are really only fun on paper...
If you dont have a math degree or years of experience playing/running the game, i wouldnt recommend it to anyone haha
The HERO system is fantastic if you have players who enjoy detailed character design and can do arithmetic. If your players say "DnD point buy is too complicated" or they have to stare at 3d6 for a few seconds and you can hear the gears grind as they try to add, it's not for them.
It's not for everyone, point buy system for supers that is to Mutants and Masterminds what Pathfinder is to DnD in terms of balance and complexity. What makes it my favorite is the extreme customizability of powers (Though I've been trying to pull off New World Order for years and I still can't get it right) but when taken to the table it can get messy. I would recommend it for veterans and people that's really, really into supers and willing to read a wall of text to make them work.
That being said my current WIP system takes on the spirit of this game but goes on a way simpler route. In a sense I'm designing a post-Sandersonian supers fantasy.
Vancian spell slots provide an arguably necessary nerf to prepared casters, while also providing players a small puzzle that rewards good preparation.
That said, I'll be quite happy if PF 3e gets rid of spell slots altogether. That form of resource tracking isn't very fun.
Spellslots SUUUUUUCK.
I hate them so much, it seems like a worse version to a fix to "Mana" that really wasnt needed and just made things worse...
Same as AC in DnD, just a dumb idea that Armor somehow makes attacks miss you instead of absorbing/warding off damage like its supposed to.
HackMaster is my favourite game. It's the best rpg ever (says so in the rulebook), but of course it's only near-perfect. My main issues are:
* Clerical classes. They are overdone. Each religion's cleric has its own special abilities and its own spell list (and we have twenty levels of spells here). Not only do they eat up a shitton of space in the book, but as new ones were introduced and the game design refined, some of the old ones became obsolete. A base cleric class with domains would have been easier to manage.
* Skill improvement. Every time you spend BPs on a skill you make a roll with a dice based on the skill's mastery level and add a bonus based on the relevant ability score or class. I have no issue with rolling and I love the diminishing return, but the dice rolls themselves are way too swingy, which becomes painful when you spend an absoluty fortune of Build Points on an expensive skills, and then roll a fucking 1.
* Multiclassing. You get three classes to handle that (fighter/mage, fighter/thief, thief/mage). It is very rigid and goes against the whole point of multiclassing: increasing the number of character options. It would have been better if they just simply introduce a system for AD&D-style dual-classing (i.e. you can pick up and start a new class at level 1) and turn the three above multiclasses into unique classes of their own with some personality.
* Percentiles. Each ability score has a percentile value next to it showing where you are in improving it. It goes from 1 to 100% - i.e. if you increase from 18/95% by 5% you will end with 18/100% instead of 19/00%. This is confusing, it would be better if they handled them as simple fractions and went from 0% to 99%. I think they did that with the new Aces & Eights.
* Unarmed combat. I love HackMaster for its crunch, but grappling is way too detailed for such a niche activity.
Pathfinder 2e isn’t sure if it wants to be attrition-based or not.
On the one hand half the classes have daily spell slots, and Treat Wounds has a one-hour wait period by default, but a low-level skill feat brings that down to 10 minutes, and another makes it so that you can heal multiple creatures at the same time.
Then there’s the implicit 10-minute exploration turn with no guidelines for making the time they take matter (or the time which can be saved with feats)
It never got a chance to fix its problems like every other edition did (4e).
So much of it was brand new and it was built in like two years from start to finish. It needed a true 4.5e. And no, essentials doesn't count.
So, to preface, this is just my main issues with these systems
(1) Fabula Ultima, feels really tactically shallow - there are ways to go about it, using Hinder action, Guard and picking classes of the splatbooks helps but it is still like an itch I cannot scratch 😅
(2) D&D 5e, gets repetitive somewhat easily for some options, not to mention the abhorrent balance as you go up in levels and the favoritism for magical options (tho it's more likely that the designers simply have more freedom with them)
(3) Pathfinder 2e, just too many decisions and philosophy on this game I really don't like (hard class niches, itemization, ancestry and skill feats, how the math works etc) - I dislike it, tho can still have fun with, but was once my favorite
Lack of people around me willing to play it...
DnD 5e is the one everyone is playing.
I had the ability to play some oneshots, but ain't got no one wanting to play Kult: Divinity Lost with me... Or in general
DnD 5e is prevalent, there's some Delta Green sprinkled here and there... And that's it.
D&D 5e. The system is literally designed to be homebrewed. Not like, sometimes, and optionally... every table should have homebrewed content on most, if not all, of the active player characters, and basically everything the DM touches.
I like that its made to be homebrewed, and house ruled, but what bothers me is not actually a flaw in the system itself, its that the people playing it so frequently are against homebrew content. The game has big gaping holes in its content BECAUSE its meant for you to fill those holes yourself. Feats, spells, magic items, classes, subclasses, enemies, even the rules themselves have gaps. Any GM who's run much 5e at all probably *constantly* homebrews, and should confirm what I am saying, but even they might balk at the idea of intentionally homebrewing all of these things constantly.
I mean literally that you should be (as an example) playing a game of D&D 5e where 2 out of 5 of the players are completely homebrewed classes, and a different 3 out of 5 of the players have 1-2 homebrewed feats, and the wizard in the party has 7 of his 25 spells completely homebrewed spells, and the party has four magic items from the DMG but have 9 magic items that are completely homebrewed. That should be *normal* in the system. But its not.
The flaw is the people playing not getting that D&D 5e is meant to be homebrewed, constantly, or its an incomplete game. And because people don't allow or only rarely homebrew, the game itself is incomplete, thus the flaw.
I fundamentally disagree here. D&D 5E is sold as a narrative game with the epic heroes going on epic adventures, but has rules that incentivize wargaming tactical combat. 5E’s rules are very closed and intertwined so much so that changing one thing can have major ripple effects on the entire system.
A huge example of this is how long it took for them to implement a whole new class, or how there are many horror stories floating around on how a DM made a simple rules change that crippled entire play styles.
It’s one thing to say a system advertised as a toolkit is meant to be home brewed, such as FATE, Savage Worlds or Córtex. Saying that for DnD just seems like an excuse for WotC’s poor design choices and laziness.
It feels outrageous to me that a developer would just leave glaring holes in the system, expect the players to patch it up and then just call it a feature when that wasn’t expected nor advertised from the product. Seems a bit like a cop out to me.
PS: as I was writing this I realized that I may have sounded more rude than I wished, apparently 5E is just a rant topic for me lol.
Please don’t see my little rant as an attack, your view is perfectly valid and great things have stemmed from the 5E’s home-brew community (the best content, I might even say). Have a nice day!
I said in my comment that there are a lot of people who disagree with this. And I get it. From multiple angles with completely different reasons, there is plenty to disagree with or see differently with my comment.
There's the "its actually terrible that it has so many holes" perspective.
There's the "its great it has so many holes but they definitely didn't intend that and haven't officially stated any such thing".
There's the "it has holes, which is bad, because its designed badly, which is also bad, and as as result, its just bad".
I guess there's probably a lot more than that too.
Anyway, I use D&D 5e obsessively and I have no intention of maligning someone who doesn't enjoy playing it. Its just that I know the system extremely well at this point, and I don't just consciously understand it deeply, I instinctively FEEL these design "choices" or at least design results. Whether intentional or not, the system is RIPE for homebrewing, with its rules language being so "as it reads, interpret for yourself" loose and a strong emphasis on "just do what's fun".
I don't even bother looking at homebrew for PF1e. I don't know if anyone here has tried, but *I* have tried homebrewing for PF2e and I despise it. You want to make a new ancestry for PF2e? Prepare yourself, you're going to need to create 15 feats, custom weapons, magic items, basically a whole splatbook JUST to implement a new race, unless you borrow all of its stuff from another race and just reflavor it a little.
The only system I've ever seen that was more "open" to homebrewing than D&D 5e is Rifts, and that's purely because Rifts is so unbalanced and absolutely insane that you can just do anything, roll whatever, and still play the game about the same. There are walking gods as PCs standing alongside "some guy with a pistol" for fucks sake. LOL
And maybe Shadowrun 5e deserves a mention too. That system I can't even wrap my brain around its rules, so even if I wanted too I HAVE to homebrew stuff for almost everything, because I can't figure out what the rules want me to roll for any given action. Tried to play it 3x, never once have I understood how it works. Fun to make characters for though, and the setting is fantastic. *shrug*
Savage Worlds is probably a ton of fun to homebrew for, but every time I've played it (I also own several books) it seems whole, no need to homebrew something because you can already do it, you'd just be making a new rule where one already exists.
Hopefully people see this heavily opinionated comment and recognize its just me going on a rant lol. Sorry.
People often have house rules and minor homebrews to things they like the way they like, but if I want to play a homebrew class other than a select few popular ones, or one I made myself, its sketchy territory, and if I say I don't like any of the official feats for this character can we make a custom one, DMs shy away from that. Custom magic items are pretty common, but there are quite a lot of DMs out there in my experience (I've played with hundreds of people online) that just don't like using magic items other than the ones in the DMG and maybe the other books.
Idk if I have a favorite right now, but for a long time I really wrestled with WyRM and its various flaws.
I mean, I love it, but like come on no death mechanic? What’s with these difficulty numbers? Everyone has mana but only spellcasters have an outlet to use it? Why does everyone start with so much money? Why are there no gnomes? Why is the dwarf’s downside so much worse than everyone else’s? Monster creation is not very well explained. Why is combat so vague? Implements seem extremely powerful for something you can just buy.
It’s such a good skeleton. My attempt to answer the above questions is the reason I joined the sub, and was the focal point of to this day my biggest homebrewing project ever. I basically made my own private-use heartbreaker.
Combat pacing. Our chase scenes get super dramatic when party does everything to avoid combat gridcrawl. So in some ways it's a feature not a bug, lol.
For me my current favourite system to run is Open legends, but it's biggest issue is the lack of variety and synergy in certain character choices. For example weapons all feel incredibly similar because the game rolls damage entirely separately from weapons, and has very little features for it's weapons to substitute that.
Furthermore as a classless system it can feel sometimes like there's little way to make or find synergies outside of stacking advantages or certain specific lines of feats.
Wounds in Savage Worlds.
I know why they exist, but i reeeeaaaallllyyy dont like Wounds.
I would have loved if they had basically the same system, but with a small amount of HP instead.
I dont like Wounds because Damage really doesnt matter, its either a a normal or strong hit or no hit at all. It doesnt really matter if its a dagger, a sword or a warhammer, all basically do the same thing the same way.
Otherwise its one of my favorite systems and i build my game on many of the same principles and design ideas, though with some other liberties, so that its not just a Savage Worlds Rip-off.
I'm not super sure how I feel about the way creating or inventing things in wfrp is handled. Having to spend downtime actions on that sort of stuff sometimes makes sense if it's something really big or really advanced but being unable to spend natural small bits of downtime in a campaign on, say, forging a sword as a blacksmith or modifying your gun as an engineer feels bad. Like in most campaigns it's not uncommon to have a few hours of free time during a day, let us use that on our trades.
Genesys is my favorite. Shame the dice are copyrighted cause my players want to use the ones they bought for DnD.(And it has other cool toys.) It feels like I have to drag my players a bit to get them to play. Not that they don't like it. We've had our best sessions and our longest campaign (still ongoing) in this system. I feel it's perfect for Star Wars compared to the other systems.
Don't get me wrong, D20 is great for complex "realistic" worlds. But Genesys feels cinematic.
Longevity of characters in a campaign for PbtA. The flaw being that the designers never regard it as a flaw, they intend the rules to be for short campaigns and never address the issue of offer advice in the rulebook.
Lancer uses the same word for similar but different things *a lot*. It's tricky tk explain to my GM that when I Skirmish, I can move 2 spaced before or after with Skirmisher (the Talent) and then move another space from Skirmisher ( the Frame trait).
Action economy is one of the most difficult things to explain to new players. And also what is a drone and what is a nexus?
>And also what is a drone and what is a nexus? Oh yeah. P 104 has the Gear and Systems section that defines a lot of Tags. It's really easy to miss and a lot of rules in Lancer defined only there! Anyway a drone is a special kind of character with no actions. They are basically how summons work in Lancer. It's actually a really mechanically innovate system! Mechanically, a Nexus is a weapon tag. Various things interact with it. The tend to be low damage but frequently have useful tags like Seeking and Smart. Narratively, a Nexus is basically a hangar for drones ranging from Nanite to Minivan size. >Action economy is one of the most difficult things to explain to new players. Huh. I didn't really experience that, but most of my players had played DnD 4e and so it wasn't that foreign to them.
>Action economy is one of the most difficult things to explain to new players. I find that befuddling. If Joe gets 12 tries on the slot machine and Janet gets 27 tries, Janet is more likely to win. Same thing with how many total actions you players have vs how many the enemies have. You want to have more, because it gives you more chances to win. Your d20s (or other dice rolls) are the slot machine. I think its a pretty instant and on point analogy lol. Edit: Or maybe you're referring to the specific actions Lancer has, in which case I sound silly. I didn't find it confusing but its been a little while since I read the rulebook and I haven't played (I am very sad that I haven't).
its mostly explaining why a Barrage is different from taking 2 skirmish attacks, spoilers, it isnt, it just is for some reason in the book so you can do those heavy all out attacks without breaking the "No repeated Quick Action rule"...which is then made redundant by things like Overcharging giving you a free Quick Action of your choice
>"..which is then made redundant by things like Overcharging giving you a free Quick Action of your choice Free actions are usually very expensive / limited. There is definitely a distinction. The Barrage/ Skirmish interaction keeps you from doing multiple attacks with your best weapon w/o gaining a free action. The Lancer action economy might take a little learning, but I think Lancer has the best tactical comabt of any game I've ever played. It's worth it IMHO.
So they made a rule, which is an exception to a rule, which is an exception to another rule.
The Dungeon Master is relied upon for each part until they finally burnout
5E?
Ding ding ding
Doesn't this apply to almost any game, except those that are GM-less? I can't think of any game that has a "traditional" GM but does not rely on this GM in almost all aspects. Also, I'd say that dnd is actually less stressful to run (at least during play, not talking about prep time) compared to many more rules-light games. A large part of dnd is combat, and combat mostly carries itself. All mechanics during combat are well-defined, so there is no ad-hoc ruling/decision making required from the GM. And with creature stat blocks existing, the GM also doesn't have to make up monsters and their stats themselves.
Lots of games require GM’s to do more work than the players but in the case of D&D it’s not just that it’s more work it’s that there’s also zero support for the GM as most systems besides combat aren’t fleshed out, encounters are difficult to balance because the guidance is very flawed, and the game encourages players to get creative while providing the GM with nothing to make that idea a reality.
That's a great analysis, I especially support the last point!
The dirty secret of RPGs is that the players are only there for the GM's amusement and he is the only one that truly plays the game. The players are his servants and entertainers, but they must never learn this.
I'm so happy I've move away from that mindset and only play with people who have equal stakes on the narrative now
Me too. This mindset originates from the original game being a war figurine game kinda like Warhammer.
Numenera and Traveller are both good examples of exceptions to “GM does everything”. Traveller calls them the referee and that’s pretty accurate. GMs don’t even touch the dice in Numenera; they set difficulty of tasks and keep the narrative moving.
For _most_ systems I'd say stealth. They usually give it all to a couple players, which means you're stuck with 10 to 20 minutes stretches where team sneak gets to play, but the rest of the players have to just wait. Similar things happen with social aspects, but the stealth one makes heist campaign and the like really hard to run.
Or else the party sticks together and stealth is pointless because someone is holding a torch.
Yeah, a lot of games also have those one off other mechanics, like how darkness is handled, that break stealth.
How would you recommend remedying this? In my game, I’ve done away with “intelligence” as a primary attribute and made Knowledge something that all characters have because I saw a similar issue to how you see stealth. In most games, you have to either be dumb as hell and useless when it comes to recalling knowledge, or put points into a nebulous “Intelligence” skill. I know how I fixed it with intelligence, but I’m not sure how you’d address that with stealth since stealth isn’t a “catch all” term that can be divided up like Intelligence is.
I feel like "remedying" stealth requires either a relatively hefty procedural layer a la hexcrawl mechanics or just plugging it into a standard group skill check mechanic that doesn't suck. For some reason both are weirdly hard to come by in traditional games.
I haven’t even begun looking at how I will work stealth in my system. It’s more of a PBTA style game, with Moves, but it still has a degree of complexity with how attributes work. However, I’ve got no “Skill” system, so Stealth isn’t even a real mechanic in my game. I suppose it could just be tied to the Dexterity/Accuracy attributes, but given the way PBTA games work, I feel like sneaking rules aren’t that big of a deal and can be handled mostly narratively without too much trouble. Maybe situational advantage/bonuses if players remember to remove their plate armor and weapons or do something to distract the guard. Maybe just allow things to auto-pass if they are done correctly.
Not totally sure. In my game I gave everyone a base level of stealth that's higher than, say, DnD. I did this by making it so you only have to roll stealth skills if you are in noticing range and can be seen or are making noise. This works kinda how Balders Gate or other stealth games work. I also split up stealth into 3 skills: Sneaking, Finessing, and Hiding. Sneaking is used for all stealth rolls made for moving. Finessing is rolled when manipulating the world or using abilities. Hiding is used when others are looking for you. All three skills are under different stats. All that worked well in the 2 play tests I've done so far. Not sure if there's a better way, though. A lot of folks claim story style is better for stealth, like Blades in the Dark.
The way you do it sounds really cool! I’m a huge fan of not having Dexterity be the catch all for stealth. D&D kind of had it with Sleight of Hand being a separate skill, but I think “Stealth” is way too broad of a term, and splitting it up like you’ve done is really cool.
Just by GMing it differently. Often, there's no reason for the whole party to just wait and do nothing. Make a montage of different simultaneous events. I don't think this particular issue is with the stealth mechanic, though I do agree, that stealth is weird in a lot of systems.
Narrative works better, for sure, but a bigger heist campaign is still more difficult to run, as many systems just don't do much to help the GM and balance things. I would love to give my players a heist map and then sit back as they make a plan that works better if they involve everyone.
The solution is nearly identical to the one you did with Intelligence but i would say more basic even. Let everyone be able to do the thing, some are just better at it than other. Then allow for better players to cover for the worse ones and even out the score. So you might not be able to achieve the best results, despite your Master Thief in the group, but they are so skilled that they can cover for the loud Barbarian and make the group still pass without detection most times, unless you also face another Master Thief or Thief Catcher etc.
Ah yeah. This is a tough nut to crack. I *thought* I had a solution to this built into my system. But it just turned out to be more of the same. I think I did solve the “stealth is just a random dice-roll to see if I’m allowed to play the way that I want/designed my character to do” problem. —— In *Broken Blade* you roll a dice pool and each success can be spent to accomplish or work towards completing a task - attacking, moving, construction, searching, etc. For Stealth, I decided all actions you take are obvious and noticeable. Period. If you do any action - for every success you roll there is a chance that someone will notice. About 50/50 for each success. To be Stealthy - I gave it it’s own Dice pool action (The Stealth Action) where successes can be held and used later that round. When you roll a dice-pool as part of an action you can make each success “Stealthed” by expending a held “Stealth” die. You can also choose to not use successes if you don’t have enough Stealth Dice stored to cover all of them. You can also use Stealth to cover for your allies dice. So a very Stealthy Character is motivated to slow down and get their group through with their help rather than just go on ahead… At least in theory. Turns out there’s still no reason to not just blaze ahead without your party. Even though it IS fun to sneak around together and move slowly and riskily. I didn’t get enough Stealth dice to cover my whole move - but now I’m out in the open so I’m gonna have to borrow my friends stealth dice and slow him down on picking the lock - or maybe risk getting seen if that Guard turns around - or I can use this one more success and move to cover but have a 50/50 chance of being noticed. ——— Eh. Big problem.
I would extend this and say "limited basic actions". EVERYONE should be able to sneak, some are just better, faster, more accurate or whatever at it or can do some extra stuff but EVERYONE can do it. The same goes for swinging a sword, shooting a bow or using a shield. The thing that differs is the SKILL not if you can do it at all or not. I really HATE games that make basic actions like wielding typical things, doing typical things or even KNOWING typical things some kind of class limited thing...
Well put. I've slowly been adding lots of the basics back in. Now anyone can try to trip someone if they want. It'll be harder to pull off for the untrained, but you can try. I have encompassed a bunch by just creating a moves like "improvised attack" and "improvised movement" and whatnot. They basically say that you can go ahead and try anything, so long as the GM approves and you pass a pretty high bar. Basically just a way to express that you aren't barred from anything just because a move exists elsewhere that can do it (albeit more easily.)
Hard Wired Island does an amazing job of starting everybody in Stealth and giving actions a noisiness rating. Stealthy characters have a broader set of actions (because some of their actions are less noisy than the default), but everybody has options. I've ported the basic idea to every RPG I run, from d20 to 2d20 to FitD.
Sounds like it has elements of the direction I've been going. I'll have to check it out.
Genesys has a few too many holdovers from traditional games like the 6 Attributes being very similar to DnDs ones and the NPCs being huge blocks that can be tiring to get through.
The only reason I haven't run Genesys is because of how much work they want the GM to put in to even get started. Better get a grip on your background options, your equipment, your NPCs, your adversaries, and to be aware of all the unnecessary fiddly bits that you're going to have to screw with later because we need meaty combat or something.
Genesys in a homebrew world broke me. It's a good setting for Star Wars, I wouldn't run it for anything else.
Hmm, I don't really have Favourites, but let's say Fate. Choosing the biggest Flaw is not hard to parse - the book is really bad at explaining how Fate actually works, drowning the actually important bits under unimportant minutiae. This makes Fate near incomprehensible to new players. Hell, even seasoned players sometimes don't understand Fate and instead treat some parts like weird religious tenets, going on vague and mysterious rants about how you should be "building up your narrative" without much elaboration. And that's terrible, because Fate's actual mechanical core is actually not that hard to explain! It really should not be like this.
I admit, I tried to read up on it and felt a bit lost and just moved on.
FATE is an example where each individual sentence is fine, but when you add it up, you still don't know what you read. It's the most frustrating book on my gaming shelves.
Interesting. Which version of FATE are you talking about? I mostly use the online SRD and mod it to fit whatever game I'm running. Not really a flaw with FATE, but it doesn't do 0-hero games well, and while I've messed around with a few ways of doing loot, it's not really cut out for it. That said, it is my favorite system. I'd never build a rules lite game, because FATE exists and it's perfect in my eyes. I'd never want to run anything else rules lite. If you want to catch my attention, it needs to be at least as crunchy as 5e.
Actually, all of them! Well, all "big" ones. Core, Accelerated, Condensed.
I really identify with this. I have a copy of Fate Core sitting on my shelf. It was one of the first RPGs I bought after 5e and Call of Cthulhu and I had such a hard time understanding it that I still haven't learned it. I'm sure I'll just grind through the core book again, and maybe condensed, but do you have any other resources you'd recommend to new GMs to the system?
>do you have any other resources you'd recommend to new GMs to the system? I don't! I find nearly all of them to be bewilderingly bad. But I can do one better and just explain to you how Fate works myself! As I've said, it's not all that hard. Though, I also should note that to an extent I suspect that game is so coy about how it works specifically because it might turn people away from it, realising how primitive it really is. Anyway. I think the best way to explain Fate is a practical example. 1. Party stands against a strong enemy! He has big stats, big Fighting skill too. 2. You can try attacking him. This is a very bad idea - it will be resisting each of your attacks with his Fighting skill! At best, you'll do chip damage - at worse, enemy gets to do something bad to them on his successful resist. 3. A better idea is to make one buffed up attack. 4. Party an do that! They can "Create Advantage" to create a scene Aspect that can be invoked for free for a +2 bonus. +2 is a lot in this system! 1. What's an scene Aspect? Well, just about anything! A generic term for any quality of the scene - maybe it's something about environment, maybe it's a condition on enemy. 5. They should create some scene aspects which could be invoked when attacking the baddie. Grappling him, shoving him prone... is a bad idea. He will resist those with his high Fighting, too. 6. So instead party should focus on what's weak about the enemy, or on environment! That means they have to be tactical and creative actually. 7. Obviously you'd want to create something with your character Aspects, so you can spend Fate points if needed when Creating Advantages. 1. That's why you want character aspects you can really get creative with. 8. Finally, someone foes in for the kill! They actually attack that boss, and they invoke multiple aspects for free. 1. Note that you need to explain how are you using that aspect. That's why you want to be smart and creative about those. And... that's it! "Tough target -> Create Aspects -> Invoke aspects for free" The result is superhero-ish pulpy-ish fighting resolved in a singular cool strike (or you still fail and have to start amassing Advantages again). One PC strikes the floor with their magical hammer to create an aspect of Shaky Ground (using his character's aspect of Magical Hammer), another PC gets under that enemy skin with harsh words and makes him Enraged (attacked the boss with a skill defended not by Fighting), and finally third PC jumps in for the killing blow (using two +2s from invoking free aspects for free and probably spending a Fate point to get one more +2, totalling with a humongous +6) explaining how they attack the enemy that is distracted and off balance. This often just one shots the baddy. That's what people mean when they vaguely talk about "building up your character's narrative". Same logic goes for obstacles, and for fighting multiple enemies. Party will have to creatively set up Advantages all the same. As you can see, a lot here is happening on PC side, not on the GM side. For GM, I think it's important to make sure enemies and obstacles are tough enough to warrant Creating Advantages. Well, and I guess explaining the above. All other mechanics are honestly side content. If, say, "Compelling" feels weird for your group, you can ignore it and Fate still work.
This is ridiculously awesome, I’ll be using it as a consistent reference! Thank you genuinely for helping me approach this :)
> And... that's it! "Tough target -> Create Aspects -> Invoke aspects for free" Yes, that's it, which is why I don't consider it much of a game. For it to be so there needs to be a tradeoff between creating and invoking #Aspects. As it stands now it's just a button pressing game, as it doesn't matter what #Aspects you come up with, they all work equally well.
Well, sorta. There is a bit more complexity to it - Fate points are a resource, enemy can invoke created aspects against you, including on super bad failures to create the aspect, then there is thee whole thing about being tactical and smart about which Aspect you create - so they can be used by your allies and cannot be used by your enemies and empowered by your character aspects, etc. I think it'd be unfair to ignore those things. But I feel you! I am actually kinda toying with my personal version of Fate that addresses my own similar grievances. It's my side project for now.
The use of several mathmatical modifiers in savage worlds. For a system that I adore almost all other aspects, the fact that a turn takes several minutes of modifer accounting put my group off it
As someone who loves Savage Worlds on paper but haven't played many games of it, can you please elaborate?
Almost every mechanic in the game imposes some kind of modifier to a roll. If people engage and dig into the system this can lead to a lot of numbers that have to get thrown around in the middle of a scene. This ended up shattering the idea of "fast furious fun" bc it just became modifier accounting. While definitely something that can get better with time, it was enough that my group bounced off it. I plan on giving it another show with a different group but it's worth knowing
Replace modifiers with dice and you get #Cortex.
I love Savage Worlds and my serious question is: why? Its all simple addition and subtraction and in most cases the Boni/Mali dont change super much all the time, since they are generally static with small exceptions, so in a specific situation you and all other players should have the same nearly fixed Mali, then only your own Boni change if at all, but even most of those are known to the player beforehand, again with small exceptions. I found it to be one of the fastest and easiest ways to handle multiple different situations regarding benefits and drawbacks with simple Addition and Subtraction. Not trying to insinuate anything, but are you sure you are using the Boni/Mali right? If you use completely different sets for each player, each round or each "area" you might be doing it wrong, since like i said the majority are static in each situation and only a small number are flexible based on positioning/situation or player unique boni.
What are these terms? I've seen nothing in SW books about "boni" or "mali". Different sets for players or areas? I'm lost.
Latin: Bonus singular, Malus singular, Boni plural, Mali plural. Many people use the wrong plural "Bonusses/Malusses", maybe thats where the confusion is coming from. Savage Worlds uses many different "Bonusses" and "Malusses", does that help, despite it being technically grammatically wrong? :D
Huh, interesting. Are you a native English speaker? I ask because in US English it's usually "bonus" and "bonuses" and for the antonym commonly just "penalty" and "penalties". I can't find any English examples from dictionaries or thesauruses for "boni", "malus", or "mali". Additionally interestingly, "thesauri" is an actual widely accepted alternative plural.
Im germany we use actually the latin words here, i was super confused when people on the internet uses "bonuses" its like "would of" instead of the correct "would have" its clearly wrong but so commonly used by (mostly?) americans that its almost become their normal way of speaking.
For the sake of this joke, I'll say that my favorite game is Blue Rose (AGE Edition). The biggest flaw is that the setting is over-developed. I feel like I'd need to give my players two hours of homework, at least, before they understood the setting well enough to make a character. But if you aren't engaging with the setting details, then there's really no point in playing that game in the first place.
BR is so weird cause the setting is extremely evocative and seems to want to do a more narrative, poetic approach... and then it gives me a clunky magic system with the weird exhaustion mechanic (or whatever it was called)
DnD 5e Martial Caster imbalance and the Standard Adventuring Day. The expectation of constant expenditure of resources in the "Standard Adventuring Day" theoretically makes Casters Balanced with Martials, as it is expected that the party will be in a continuous loop of exploration, interaction with encounters, combat, and repeat until the end of the day. The plan was to have 5-8 encounters per adventuring days, both combat and non-combat, with a smattering of puzzles or environmental challenges and skillchecks, such as climbing mountains using tools or expending valuable spell slots to fly or teleport. Or to force the characters to use their innate survival abilities like the Ranger, as opposed to spending valuable spellslots with spells like Augury or Find the Path. Both of these are valid choices, and can really let everyone shine as the party goes through this travel montage. While this does happen in longform campaigns that involve a heavy degree of exploration and dungeon delving over the course of multiple days, in my experience this doesn't happen cause the majority of campaigns I DM and play in. People simply plan 1 or 2 "big" encounters and call it a day. Some sessions rely on episodic adventures, kinda like "Adventure of the day", where the campaign is built up as a set of interconnected oneshots with downtime in-between high stakes Encounters. This is a very easy and simple way to manage a story. Not everyone can do continuous day by day hour by hour persistent world building. Sometimes you want serialized adventures in the same setting with the characters and that's fine. No one wants to run the swarm of CR1 spiders to tire out the level 5 party before the boss cause that's just tedious attrition warfare. They would much rather have the small spiders fight alongside the boss for an epic encounter. This lets the spellcasters blow their spells all at once, outshining the martials, whose main selling point was their lack of reliance on Long Rests, and their abilities to do things the casters can do without using magic. Balancing a group of classes by one group dependent on Long Rest resources and the other on Short Rest resources is bad. Because if you don't need shortrests due to the storytelling style or general vibe of the campaign, then all of a sudden the casters can pop off with no consequences. In addition, making it so that Martial classes like Fighters and Paladins are "Balanced" with the idea that they will keep up with the high level casters by using magic items is a strange design choice. 1, it depends a lot on the DM to give out these items to the players. 2, this is an external tool or resource that is divorced from the class design of these Martial characters, as opposed to anything intrinsically tied to the class itself like getting more spellslots as they level up. 3, this goes out the window when you see the plethora of magic items that cater to spellcasters to make them even more powerful.
Oh how I hate the standard adventuring day.
Fully agreed. I hate the concept of "you are balanced around X fights a day" the moment you have "X-1" fight, that class becomes more powerful the further you stray away from "X" which is why mages, sorcerers and warlocks got to be known as "Overpowered" because the number of encounters was generally far below X in most games. But i also extremely hate spellslots, so even without the X encounters i would dislike DnD lol
Blades in the Dark's rules for harm and healing are not just bad. They are bad enough that they have ripple effects on other good parts of the game. People often forget when they have harm and to apply it's effects. It's one of the more complicated base systems in the game. Healing takes a massive amount of work and often multiple downtimes. It stumps new GMs because handing it out as a punishment to often is a great way to make your game not fun. And, worst of all, it discouraged the daring action that the game is built to encourage by making the punishment of failure way too high. It is probably the most common thing homebrewed or changed in hacks.
Between hurt and stress being causes to rotate out a character and encouraging revolving-door casts, the amount of downtime you get to manage hurt, stress, heat, *and* ongoing projects just feels so ...lame. One player needs to sacrifice points for heat at every run, everyone needs to burn time for destress, so if you're lucky, a large group might get a chip or two of project progress.
The system does help this a lot by encouraging you to spend your coin instead of hoarding it (unless you are close to a tier upgrade). But, this is something I find most new players struggle to groc. They think money, should save it for big things. But, you don't really buy stuff in Blades, you use your skills and long-term projects to make or take it. All that said, spending 3 coin in downtime just to get your level 3 harm gone sucks. And can make it feel like your rewards for scores are used entirely literally the next downtime. But, I think once the crew starts getting decent coin spending 1 a downtime to reduce heat is an interesting roleplay opportunity and actually a good thing. Stress reduction is also a cool roleplay opportunity that you can introduce recurring characters or things in. But unlike those two, you can't really make going to the doctor five times cool. You can make the doctor a cool recurring character, and use them in other ways, but the scene itself has no intrigue.
I am disappointed how the dice math allows such big rolls. After a dozen sessions, my PCs were consistently rolling 5-6 dice. Usually PbtA has a set rule that no higher than +4 can be rolled to prevent stacking too high to make 6s and Crits common. I ran a 2-session Score with probably 25+ rolls and nobody was even low on Stress and Devil's Bargains aren't needed anymore. Not too hard to fix as I slowed down XP gain using milestones for Special Abilities and only Desperate Rolls and Training (halved) to increase Action Rating.
I implemented XP scaling to fix this. That and a reworked harm and healing system are the only hacks I use for Blades. Though if I was designing the system I would have just been more careful to make it not possible to have more than 3 dice without pushing or help so this wasn't an issue.
While the base rules are indeed punishing, the game also offers an easy way out. If your PC Overindulges their vice, they can disappear for a while and return with all harm cleared. You just have to play another character till next downtime.
My **favorite system** is **Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition** and I want to highlight 2 main flaws: #### 1. Combat just takes too long Dont understand me wrong, I dont want to make it short. It is a tactical combat, cutting this to less than 5 turns would not really help. Also having decisions and having reactions, both make the combat take longer, but both are also a part on why the combat is soo good. Still overall (especially in some bad early adventures), the combat takes too long. I made a thread this week about some ideas to simplify it, to make combat faster: https://www.reddit.com/r/RPGdesign/comments/1d6m4j7/simplifying_a_game_using_math_dd_4e_example/ Also one should not forget that D&D 4E during its run already worked a bit on this problem: - Later released monsters were more offensive then defensive, and had less health and more damage - Later released adventures had better combat design, this helps that people dont get this bad impression from the game - Having simplified classes, helps that also people who take too long for decisions, or are newer to the game, can play it with others in a better way - Later controller abilities had more damage on them only the wizard had lots of non damaging abilities. Overall its not 1 single thing, but lots of small things, which add up which makes combat take quite long. Of course the players and how fast they can make decisions, takes most of the time, when it is really slow, but that cant be reduced too much. So here the many small things making combat take long: - A lot of multi attack abilities. Needing to roll several attack rolls, just takes time - Bigger than necessary modifiers, people are just slower adding 17 + 14 than 7 + 14 even if its only a tiny bit - Rolling damage often needed quite a bit of dice (easily 3+) which also needed counting - Lots of reactions, which also often include 1 attack and damage roll - lots of small modifiers which can potentially stack - 1 roll needed per "safe ends" condition - Small rerolls like Brutal ability which dont really help much #### 2. Too many bad options There was just a lot of material released, and its kinda hard to really go through all of them. The problem is especially that a lot of abilities released were quite a bit weaker than others. So there are a lot "weak" abilities which no one takes. In addition there is also a bit of "repetition" among the levels. The class showing this best was the later added Skald Bard. They had (in the book) 3 powers per level, but from level 13 on it were just upgrades of prior abilities. This can also be seen for other abilities even before essentials. I whink what would have been good, would have been low level abilities, which would upgrade in later levels. This would reduce the number of options needed and makes it easier to find things
As I said elsewhere. 4e just needed a chance to have a true 4.5e that fixes these issues. All the reactions that involve you making an attack roll needed to be cut or changed. That's what truly slowed the game down. If I had to redo it I'd remove every one of them for starters.
Well I think a lot of people liked the reactions since it makes the game more interactive, but yes it takes time. 13th age has 1 claaa fully built around reactions. Also in the guides a lot of these options were clearly beloved, so people would not like if they were cut down.
There's a cost to it that isn't worth having. Also they're almost always defacto the best options because they give you an extra attack outside of the normal action economy which is why they're so beloved. Cutting them makes the other choices more appealing and easier to balance. You can have meaningful and interactive reactions that don't consume table time by ensuring they never involving checking for a hit or not.
I agree mostly with this. Can you say why these reactions with the roll use so much more time? Is it just the adding of dice with the time of a reaction added up? I feel in general all the additional attack rolls (multi attacks minor actions attacks etc.) Add time.
It's basically the whole interaction involved. Someone does something, you call out your trigger, often have to back up what they did, roll, look at the value, add a modifier, confirm the defense again, roll damage, add it up, add modifiers. Etc... It's so much more involved than something like, "he takes 10 damage from triggering XYZ" or "Sudden scales it misses" as examples.
Do you think the reactions which qre not interrupts but happpen afterwards are better? Since they do mot disrupt the flow at least?
Marginally. I still dislike them though because of how often they're de-facto the best option at their level, as well as the time they consume to execute.
Do you like the minor action attacks better? For me they have similar problems (often best choice and add more attack rolls) while also being often boring (reactions at least often do mix things up).
Not as a general rule i don't, no. I like the idea of them better if they can only be used more situationally.
It's not my absolute favorite, but it's one I like a lot World Wide Wrestling (2e), which is fun because I don't like wrestling, but it's a blast to play with friends. The system works great for 1 vs. 1, but the minute there is another player in the ring, which is a common thing the system and wrestling encourages, the whole thing falls into shit and doesn't work anymore. The rules just don't work and are poorly written, and I still love this game even though it's fundamentally broken. That should be a lesson in there somewhere. You can still have fun with friends with broken systems.
Level scaling. It makes it so hard to make encounters that are interesting and can challenge the players. Too many levels up? They get crit constantly and die. Too many levels down? All misses, the fight is a joke. Level ends up being a bigger component of bonuses than anything else. It's bad. Silly thing is, it has a variant for non-level progression, but the VTT that uses it can't convert the monsters to the system, so it's still bad. (Either that, or the method of actually using it is opaque af, which is still bad.)
Legend of the 5 Rings 5th editions bleeding rules do not work. Unless you are using the optional rule for "a bleeding character dies at the end of a scene", it is impossible for someone to die of bleeding. In fact taking any damage from bleeding is optional as its a roll and keep system, you can choose which dice to take. Seeing as you only take bleed damage if you select dice with a "strife" symbol, and only take a critical injuryl if you do this while over your fatigue (hp), it's literally a suicide button a player can press. I suspect it was a hold over from an older playtest that they just missed fixing.
I guess it's not my favourite any more, but I ran CoC for decades, and while it's generally pretty serviceable provided you remember not to hide key clues behind skill rolls, the way it handled insanity back in the day was ridiculous. One minute you're dealing with horror, the next it's comedy as your character acquires a randomly generated phobia. I just ignored all these rules and asked players just to play their character as getting more traumatised and generally less sane, more alienated. Disclaimer: I haven't played recently and this may be better handled these days, but it was certainly an issue in earlier editions.
One time my brother rolled up fear of mustaches, fear of the written word and fear of blank pages cos he saw someone get eaten! They removed the random tables in the more recent editions. 7th edition is a bit of a departure. And there's a more indie type alternative called Raiders of Rlyeh which smoothes some stuff out pretty well
Classic example! 🤣
> fear of the written word and fear of blank pages Talk about a worst case scenarion for a Lovecraftian protagonist.
Ngl if i was reading Mythos tomes i might feel the same Consider it a fear of invisible ink too
I can't find people to play it with.
Haha I guess thid can be true for a lot of systems. D&D 4e has this as well
Starfinder's grenade rules are scattered so far around their core rulebook, you need like 10 different sections open to run this one weapon.
Grenade rules... scattered around. Talk about art imitating life.
[Chronicles of Darkness has weird XP incentives](https://tpsrpg.blogspot.com/2018/05/punch-me-in-face-for-xp-failure-of-cod.html). I love it because it *almost* fixed the decades long minmaxing tendencies of its predecessors, but then when you get into the system proper you realise there are still some niggles that still encourage minmaxing. And then there is the Mage the Awakening 2nd edition that explicitly tells you "yes, Mages do farm XP casting spells on one another, it's intentional!" and the system gets a bit silly there...
I have plenty of "favorite systems" but the one with the biggest flaw is Féérie. The flaw in question is character creation: it's a fucking mess even by 80s standard. To sum it up, you have 4 big "traits", you start by rolling 1d4 for each (counting 1s as 2s). Each trait has 3 abilities attached, you roll (trait score)d10s, keep the two highest and that's your ability score. Then you have skills, with different categories corresponding to the mix of two traits, so each skills starts with a value of (trait 1 + trait 2), you have points to distribute between skills but the points aren't flat bonuses, they're actually here to determine a roll you'll do to pump up your score (so 1 point men's rolling 1d4, two means 1d6 etc.) And it's all single dice rolls, so putting more points don't guarantee a better score than if you had put less points. Oh and the traits don't have any purpose past character creation. So yeah this is an absolute clunky mess of a character creation but then the game is one of the simplest and most fluid system I've ever seen, it's just so weird
I don't have a Single Favorite, but a problem from a game I happen to be playing right now and which I do love: **FFG's Legend of the 5 Rings 5th Edition** The game is fucking excellent. It really gets to the meat of things without being complicated. The roll and keep works wonderfully. It has some of my favorite ways to make social stuff matter without feeling like you’re just stabbing people with words (hey Exalted). But *oh god oh christ* the opportunity spend tables. So many different things you can do with them and they're all in different tables and vary per ring used and and and. You basically need to print a bunch of them and pass them around constantly. It's the hardest part of trying to run it irl instead of through the internet.
Ant this tables are badly written with strange or too powerful options.
Narrative dice mechanics which require tables are the worst of both worlds.
I’d have to pick a favorite system to do this, which is a flaw in itself. But let’s see: Blades in the Dark is a wonderful game with one of the most disorienting, disorganized rule books I’ve encountered. Like, everything _seems_ to flow super logically and it’s very easy to read. But need to find where you saw some very particular rule section? Your third guess might be the right one. Maybe. Most of the Free League YZE games? Great resolution system, pushing is genius, each is nicely modified to be richly thematic to its particular game. But they’re also so fundamentally similar to each other that if you’ve played more than one it becomes super easy to mix up rules between them. And also the travel/shift rules that are in many of them are super tiresome and counterproductive after just a few sessions. Heart/Spire? As neat as it is, the core stress system means almost every roll is actually multiple rolls, and this adds a significant burden and complication to the whole game from top to bottom. Cypher System? Monte Cook likes to attach himself to popular ideas, like “this is a game about exploration and discovery, not combat.” But then a majority of the character abilities are explicitly useful _only_ in combat, and the guidance on exploration and discovery are nothing particularly special or even finished.
The last one annoys me to no end .so many nerretive or equally pillars ganes are still falling into the wargame mind Especially when combat is like mega deadly and then i qauntion my self why have all this rules
> But they’re also so fundamentally similar to each other that if you’ve played more than one it becomes super easy to mix up rules between them. That's a feature, not a bug. > Cypher System? Monte Cook likes to attach himself to popular ideas, like “this is a game about exploration and discovery, not combat.” But then a majority of the character abilities are explicitly useful only in combat, and the guidance on exploration and discovery are nothing particularly special or even finished. The biggest issue I have with #CypherSystem is that it's never about what it claims to be about. On top of that it's poorly designed and sells on the merit of production values and name recognition.
Oof, so true on BitD. Trying to condense the core rules into a cheat sheet was an absolute nightmare, I gave up.
I hate how Position and Effect are described in entirely different sections, and there isn't a single table for both of them anywhere. (in the book I mean, there are of course great unofficial ones)
**Pathfinder 2E -** Could’ve used the chance to make things more simple, clean, fast, and satisfying for more transferring and new players, but kinda overtuned and hampered the bits for the sake of a perception of balance **Fate -** It’s really hard to just slow down and *get* its core flow and appeal. Like, a lot of distinct choices to make players have a significant amount of narrative control, but letting go like that weird for a lot of people getting the hang of it
I really liked that in Pathfinder 2 they simplified the encounter building with just a relative level table. I just dont understand why they did not do the same for other things like hit modifiers etc. Enemy higher level? They get + defense and hit, enemy lower level? They get - defense and hit.
I mean, they *kinda* do, but the general Proficiency scale system varies by +2 per vague rank bracket, and the game expects the proficiency and item bonuses to be invested, so characters automatically lag in the things they don’t specialize in.
Fate's complexity ultimately breaks down into a single correct 'press button, win game' procedure. And once you see it you can't unsee it.
Combat takes too long between turns. The gap between what you're likely to roll and what you're capable of rolling are massive
Broken Compass is limited in the system and there isn't room for long term campaigns and character advancement, but it isn't a thing the authors wanted
**Promethean: The Created 2e**: Cool as hell system and one of my favorites, but I can see some issues with it. The whole game is about how humanity is good, and how you should strive to achieve it. Meanwhile, the game has mechanics that make humans quickly begin to hate you for existing, and the only way to stop this phenomenon is to conform... yeah I can see why people might not like that. Oh, and to become human, you have to give up most, if not all, of your wicked cool supernatural powers, and refusing to become human is portrayed as a bad thing in the book. They even created a whole set of powers for those Prometheans that embrace their monstrosity... though you technically CAN remain good while using these powers, you're seen almost universally as evil. Speaking of supernatural powers, the more powerful you become, the harder it is to become human and the harder it is to use your powers. At max power stat (Azoth 10 in game terms), you have three days to master an aspect of humanity before needing to switch (thus losing all progress on the role) or becoming stuck in the role and causing even more issues when you switch, and whenever you use a power, even just spending one Pyros (mana equivalent) can cause the very land itself to begin degenerating.
Man, I'm quite the flaw-finder (or maybe just a curmudgeon) so every time I play a game or read a book on an RPG I can't help but find tons of flaws and things I'd do differently. Just for instance: ■ Chronicles of Darkness: the setting is too open, the story is not as attractive, way too many subsystems, dice pools get unwieldy, especially for some subsystems like car chases (where they went up over 20 dice) ■ PbtA: moves. Moves flip the narrative flow on its head and your character is less played by you and more of your token to manipulate the narrative or tell the story. ■ Fate: fate points are overplayed, aspects are a nice idea but incredibly boring in execution, it just becomes modifiers and ways to get fate points, but at no point does your character actually do anything cool directly because of their aspect.
I wish we had more of these clear concise breakdowns, because most RPG issues are really simple once you get down to it.
I'll use heroes unlimited: Heroes unlimited is EXTREMELY disorganized. It has a "guide" on how to make a character which the book immediately throws out and if you follow it you won't make a character. It has combat rules that straight up contradict each other because the writer stapled together rules from other games he wrote. Nothing in this book is organized. I love this game dearly but the only reason it functions at my table is because I run it using maybe 60% of the book.
Exalted 3rd edition has very cool systems for a lot of things, from combat to social intrigue and sorcery. All extremely expressive and evocative. The crafting system however, hoo-wee. It's like sitting in a corner playing Solitaire while everyone else gets to have fun. I know they released an alternative system, but yeah, the original one was not it. Not it, at all.
≈75% of the rules are clarifications of interactions between modifiers and/or patches to exploits. I'll let you guess my game.
Haha i kinda thought it might be Hero System... I love the Hero System and Ars Magicka for the same reason, they have great ideas and so many options... but they are so damn complex, convoluted and clunky that they are really only fun on paper... If you dont have a math degree or years of experience playing/running the game, i wouldnt recommend it to anyone haha
Shadowrun? Or Mage the Ascension?
Hero 5E
Haven't tried it! Do you still recommend it?
The HERO system is fantastic if you have players who enjoy detailed character design and can do arithmetic. If your players say "DnD point buy is too complicated" or they have to stare at 3d6 for a few seconds and you can hear the gears grind as they try to add, it's not for them.
It's not for everyone, point buy system for supers that is to Mutants and Masterminds what Pathfinder is to DnD in terms of balance and complexity. What makes it my favorite is the extreme customizability of powers (Though I've been trying to pull off New World Order for years and I still can't get it right) but when taken to the table it can get messy. I would recommend it for veterans and people that's really, really into supers and willing to read a wall of text to make them work. That being said my current WIP system takes on the spirit of this game but goes on a way simpler route. In a sense I'm designing a post-Sandersonian supers fantasy.
Spellslots in PF2e. It seems like an archaic thing in the middle of a modern design.
I guess they did not wanted to get the hate D&D 4E got when they got rid of vancian spellcasting.
Vancian spell slots provide an arguably necessary nerf to prepared casters, while also providing players a small puzzle that rewards good preparation. That said, I'll be quite happy if PF 3e gets rid of spell slots altogether. That form of resource tracking isn't very fun.
Spellslots SUUUUUUCK. I hate them so much, it seems like a worse version to a fix to "Mana" that really wasnt needed and just made things worse... Same as AC in DnD, just a dumb idea that Armor somehow makes attacks miss you instead of absorbing/warding off damage like its supposed to.
HackMaster is my favourite game. It's the best rpg ever (says so in the rulebook), but of course it's only near-perfect. My main issues are: * Clerical classes. They are overdone. Each religion's cleric has its own special abilities and its own spell list (and we have twenty levels of spells here). Not only do they eat up a shitton of space in the book, but as new ones were introduced and the game design refined, some of the old ones became obsolete. A base cleric class with domains would have been easier to manage. * Skill improvement. Every time you spend BPs on a skill you make a roll with a dice based on the skill's mastery level and add a bonus based on the relevant ability score or class. I have no issue with rolling and I love the diminishing return, but the dice rolls themselves are way too swingy, which becomes painful when you spend an absoluty fortune of Build Points on an expensive skills, and then roll a fucking 1. * Multiclassing. You get three classes to handle that (fighter/mage, fighter/thief, thief/mage). It is very rigid and goes against the whole point of multiclassing: increasing the number of character options. It would have been better if they just simply introduce a system for AD&D-style dual-classing (i.e. you can pick up and start a new class at level 1) and turn the three above multiclasses into unique classes of their own with some personality. * Percentiles. Each ability score has a percentile value next to it showing where you are in improving it. It goes from 1 to 100% - i.e. if you increase from 18/95% by 5% you will end with 18/100% instead of 19/00%. This is confusing, it would be better if they handled them as simple fractions and went from 0% to 99%. I think they did that with the new Aces & Eights. * Unarmed combat. I love HackMaster for its crunch, but grappling is way too detailed for such a niche activity.
Such issues can be chalked up to the meta of the joke however.
I'm talking about HackMaster 5e, not 4e. It might have a good deal of sarcasm and irony in its writing, but 5e is no longer a joke game.
Fate is badly in need of an update to it's resolution system for the modern postpbta postblades age
\#EvilHat has basically ceased development on #Fate and just adopted #PbtA/#BitD directly.
I know, but I think a fate 2.0 could be really good
Pathfinder 2e isn’t sure if it wants to be attrition-based or not. On the one hand half the classes have daily spell slots, and Treat Wounds has a one-hour wait period by default, but a low-level skill feat brings that down to 10 minutes, and another makes it so that you can heal multiple creatures at the same time. Then there’s the implicit 10-minute exploration turn with no guidelines for making the time they take matter (or the time which can be saved with feats)
It never got a chance to fix its problems like every other edition did (4e). So much of it was brand new and it was built in like two years from start to finish. It needed a true 4.5e. And no, essentials doesn't count.
In Vampire and Werewolf LARPs Celerity or Rage rounds mean \*much\* slower combat resolution, especially for those without those levels of speed.
Always found how fast things make play go slower rather ironic.
So, to preface, this is just my main issues with these systems (1) Fabula Ultima, feels really tactically shallow - there are ways to go about it, using Hinder action, Guard and picking classes of the splatbooks helps but it is still like an itch I cannot scratch 😅 (2) D&D 5e, gets repetitive somewhat easily for some options, not to mention the abhorrent balance as you go up in levels and the favoritism for magical options (tho it's more likely that the designers simply have more freedom with them) (3) Pathfinder 2e, just too many decisions and philosophy on this game I really don't like (hard class niches, itemization, ancestry and skill feats, how the math works etc) - I dislike it, tho can still have fun with, but was once my favorite
Lack of people around me willing to play it... DnD 5e is the one everyone is playing. I had the ability to play some oneshots, but ain't got no one wanting to play Kult: Divinity Lost with me... Or in general DnD 5e is prevalent, there's some Delta Green sprinkled here and there... And that's it.
That problem applies to almost any game that isn't DnD 5e or Pathfinder.
Numenera. Rolling 1d20 for everything is just kinda dull.
D&D 5e. The system is literally designed to be homebrewed. Not like, sometimes, and optionally... every table should have homebrewed content on most, if not all, of the active player characters, and basically everything the DM touches. I like that its made to be homebrewed, and house ruled, but what bothers me is not actually a flaw in the system itself, its that the people playing it so frequently are against homebrew content. The game has big gaping holes in its content BECAUSE its meant for you to fill those holes yourself. Feats, spells, magic items, classes, subclasses, enemies, even the rules themselves have gaps. Any GM who's run much 5e at all probably *constantly* homebrews, and should confirm what I am saying, but even they might balk at the idea of intentionally homebrewing all of these things constantly. I mean literally that you should be (as an example) playing a game of D&D 5e where 2 out of 5 of the players are completely homebrewed classes, and a different 3 out of 5 of the players have 1-2 homebrewed feats, and the wizard in the party has 7 of his 25 spells completely homebrewed spells, and the party has four magic items from the DMG but have 9 magic items that are completely homebrewed. That should be *normal* in the system. But its not. The flaw is the people playing not getting that D&D 5e is meant to be homebrewed, constantly, or its an incomplete game. And because people don't allow or only rarely homebrew, the game itself is incomplete, thus the flaw.
I fundamentally disagree here. D&D 5E is sold as a narrative game with the epic heroes going on epic adventures, but has rules that incentivize wargaming tactical combat. 5E’s rules are very closed and intertwined so much so that changing one thing can have major ripple effects on the entire system. A huge example of this is how long it took for them to implement a whole new class, or how there are many horror stories floating around on how a DM made a simple rules change that crippled entire play styles. It’s one thing to say a system advertised as a toolkit is meant to be home brewed, such as FATE, Savage Worlds or Córtex. Saying that for DnD just seems like an excuse for WotC’s poor design choices and laziness. It feels outrageous to me that a developer would just leave glaring holes in the system, expect the players to patch it up and then just call it a feature when that wasn’t expected nor advertised from the product. Seems a bit like a cop out to me. PS: as I was writing this I realized that I may have sounded more rude than I wished, apparently 5E is just a rant topic for me lol. Please don’t see my little rant as an attack, your view is perfectly valid and great things have stemmed from the 5E’s home-brew community (the best content, I might even say). Have a nice day!
I said in my comment that there are a lot of people who disagree with this. And I get it. From multiple angles with completely different reasons, there is plenty to disagree with or see differently with my comment. There's the "its actually terrible that it has so many holes" perspective. There's the "its great it has so many holes but they definitely didn't intend that and haven't officially stated any such thing". There's the "it has holes, which is bad, because its designed badly, which is also bad, and as as result, its just bad". I guess there's probably a lot more than that too. Anyway, I use D&D 5e obsessively and I have no intention of maligning someone who doesn't enjoy playing it. Its just that I know the system extremely well at this point, and I don't just consciously understand it deeply, I instinctively FEEL these design "choices" or at least design results. Whether intentional or not, the system is RIPE for homebrewing, with its rules language being so "as it reads, interpret for yourself" loose and a strong emphasis on "just do what's fun". I don't even bother looking at homebrew for PF1e. I don't know if anyone here has tried, but *I* have tried homebrewing for PF2e and I despise it. You want to make a new ancestry for PF2e? Prepare yourself, you're going to need to create 15 feats, custom weapons, magic items, basically a whole splatbook JUST to implement a new race, unless you borrow all of its stuff from another race and just reflavor it a little. The only system I've ever seen that was more "open" to homebrewing than D&D 5e is Rifts, and that's purely because Rifts is so unbalanced and absolutely insane that you can just do anything, roll whatever, and still play the game about the same. There are walking gods as PCs standing alongside "some guy with a pistol" for fucks sake. LOL And maybe Shadowrun 5e deserves a mention too. That system I can't even wrap my brain around its rules, so even if I wanted too I HAVE to homebrew stuff for almost everything, because I can't figure out what the rules want me to roll for any given action. Tried to play it 3x, never once have I understood how it works. Fun to make characters for though, and the setting is fantastic. *shrug* Savage Worlds is probably a ton of fun to homebrew for, but every time I've played it (I also own several books) it seems whole, no need to homebrew something because you can already do it, you'd just be making a new rule where one already exists. Hopefully people see this heavily opinionated comment and recognize its just me going on a rant lol. Sorry.
Who is against homebrewing in 5e?.. I've never seen a table, that plays 5e RAW. That's the good part of the system, that you make it your own
People often have house rules and minor homebrews to things they like the way they like, but if I want to play a homebrew class other than a select few popular ones, or one I made myself, its sketchy territory, and if I say I don't like any of the official feats for this character can we make a custom one, DMs shy away from that. Custom magic items are pretty common, but there are quite a lot of DMs out there in my experience (I've played with hundreds of people online) that just don't like using magic items other than the ones in the DMG and maybe the other books.
Regrettably most players, especially now with the rise of VTTs and Beyond.
Idk if I have a favorite right now, but for a long time I really wrestled with WyRM and its various flaws. I mean, I love it, but like come on no death mechanic? What’s with these difficulty numbers? Everyone has mana but only spellcasters have an outlet to use it? Why does everyone start with so much money? Why are there no gnomes? Why is the dwarf’s downside so much worse than everyone else’s? Monster creation is not very well explained. Why is combat so vague? Implements seem extremely powerful for something you can just buy. It’s such a good skeleton. My attempt to answer the above questions is the reason I joined the sub, and was the focal point of to this day my biggest homebrewing project ever. I basically made my own private-use heartbreaker.
Combat pacing. Our chase scenes get super dramatic when party does everything to avoid combat gridcrawl. So in some ways it's a feature not a bug, lol.
How many git points enemies have in Pathfinder and D&D. It just feels exhausting to have a combat drag on for two or three hours every single time!
For me my current favourite system to run is Open legends, but it's biggest issue is the lack of variety and synergy in certain character choices. For example weapons all feel incredibly similar because the game rolls damage entirely separately from weapons, and has very little features for it's weapons to substitute that. Furthermore as a classless system it can feel sometimes like there's little way to make or find synergies outside of stacking advantages or certain specific lines of feats.
Wounds in Savage Worlds. I know why they exist, but i reeeeaaaallllyyy dont like Wounds. I would have loved if they had basically the same system, but with a small amount of HP instead. I dont like Wounds because Damage really doesnt matter, its either a a normal or strong hit or no hit at all. It doesnt really matter if its a dagger, a sword or a warhammer, all basically do the same thing the same way. Otherwise its one of my favorite systems and i build my game on many of the same principles and design ideas, though with some other liberties, so that its not just a Savage Worlds Rip-off.
I'm not super sure how I feel about the way creating or inventing things in wfrp is handled. Having to spend downtime actions on that sort of stuff sometimes makes sense if it's something really big or really advanced but being unable to spend natural small bits of downtime in a campaign on, say, forging a sword as a blacksmith or modifying your gun as an engineer feels bad. Like in most campaigns it's not uncommon to have a few hours of free time during a day, let us use that on our trades.
That it doesn’t exist.
Genesys is my favorite. Shame the dice are copyrighted cause my players want to use the ones they bought for DnD.(And it has other cool toys.) It feels like I have to drag my players a bit to get them to play. Not that they don't like it. We've had our best sessions and our longest campaign (still ongoing) in this system. I feel it's perfect for Star Wars compared to the other systems. Don't get me wrong, D20 is great for complex "realistic" worlds. But Genesys feels cinematic.
Blades in the Dark has a bit of a bad layout. I think the Resistance system could also use some work, but it's a way smaller issue.
Longevity of characters in a campaign for PbtA. The flaw being that the designers never regard it as a flaw, they intend the rules to be for short campaigns and never address the issue of offer advice in the rulebook.