Reign
I finally managed to acquire @Greg Stolze 's Reign. (It's surprisingly hard to get in Europe, and shipping from the US costs a whopping €75. But a German webshop had it.)
I may talk about questionable book organization later, but first I want to talk about how frigging awesome character creation is. Of course there's boring point buy, but there's also Random, and true to its One Roll Engine, random takes only one roll. And that one roll got me:
A lowly beggar who first became a street entertainer, then joined the army as a foot soldier, but soon was promoted to leader of his squad. There, on some mission, presumably against a magical cult, he had a profound mystic experience that awoke some magical abilities in him, and also bestowed some unlikely education on him, making him a student of the occult. But the trip also left him with some unexpected windfall in the form of a really nice sword.
That's quite a lot from a single roll, isn't it? Not every roll produces results that are easy to work with, though. I'm still struggling to figure out how a noble byblow (I gather that means "bastard") became both a squad leader and a master sage.
My son gave it a try, and he had a champion in the army, press ganged into the navy, where due to some mistaken identity shenanigans he was recognized as the long lost son of a prominent noble. (We originally thought he was both a front line fighter and a gladiator, but that turns out to be impossible; he's a champion instead.)
It's a weird an glorious system. Most stats end up rather average, though. I think the tables can be improved upon, so you don't get multiple royal cobblers in the same group, and the rules recommend you customize these tables for your own campaign, so that's awesome and I will.
teilten dies erneut
Martijn Vos
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • •Reign is one of those systems that I was hoping might turn out to be the perfect RPG. Because that's what I'm looking for, and I'm sure it must exist, but none of the previous contenders weren't quite it. The previous contender was Burning Wheel, which I'd heard a lot of good stuff about, and the way Beliefs work is really great, and a big part of what I'm looking for. Only the rest of the system was extremely fiddly with excessive amounts of detail in some places (the enormous skill list) but fantastic bits in other places (lifepaths), but also some gaping holes (anything in between Fight and Bloody Versus).
Reign is next on my radar, and some stuff I read about it makes it sound it might be almost perfect. The dice system is unique and really interesting, but ultimately I fear it might be a bit gimmicky. You roll a dice pool of d10s, and all dice that come up with the same number form a set. You can roll multiple sets, and for each action you declared (which could be more than one), you pick one of your sets. The number of dice in the set is its width, the number on the dice is the height. Getting two different dimensions out of a single roll is a really cool idea. The problem is that the system tends to use these two dimensions for more than two things, which can have weird results.
For example, hits to your legs are easier to parry than hits to your head. I think that's the big one to me. Another one is that quick attacks that go first, also do more damage. I have less issue with that, but with 4 effects mapped to the two dimensions of the roll, I do wonder if two rolls wouldn't have made more sense.
Something I really love about it is that, unlike Burning Wheel, this system is intentionally a toolbox, meant to be tinkered with. Lots of optional rules and suggestions how to adapt it. These seem to be 5 chapters on combat; not sure if they're all the same system or alternatives, but clearly you can start easy and add detail as required.
#ttrpg #reignrpg #burningwheel
Martijn Vos
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • •One optional rule you can add, is Martial Paths and Esoteric Disciplines. They basically give you 5 levels of special bonuses for a skill. This could be a simple way to add some more crunch for players who want it, and there seems to be one for every skill, although I haven't verified that. Honestly, I think you kinda owe it to have at least one for every skill, unless there's a really good reason not to.
My biggest problem with them is that they have some really esoteric names. Some people will love that, but I don't. It would honestly be a lot easier if their name included the name of the skill they worked with. Instead, we get Blades For The Empress which doesn't involve blades, but the sorcery skill.
Also, some of the bonuses seem very small compared to just raising the skill. As far as I can tell, raising the skill always costs just 1 point, so spending a point on a bonus that gives you +1d only in specific circumstances, is not a good deal. That's only worth it once you've maxed out your skill, which I suspect can happen pretty quickly with a linear cost of only 1 XP.
#ttrpg #reignrpg
Dylan
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •Martijn Vos
Als Antwort auf Dylan • •@Dylan
If I end up using it (and the prospects for that are pretty good), I'll definitely post about it. My plan is to use it for the reinvented Kingmaker-style campaign that I'm discussing in another post.
Lester Ward
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •Martijn Vos
Als Antwort auf Lester Ward • •@Lester Ward
Nice to see MathJax used, but on mobile, those two formulae get squished together. Separating them might help.
But to be honest, the treatment of exact chances of certain combinations of sets is less interesting to me than issues like blows to the head being harder to parry, and therefore easier to make, than blows to the hands and feet.
My brief stint practicing HEMA taught me the exact opposite: hands and feet are vulnerable (or at least the sword hand and the forward placed foot), whereas head and torso tend to be surrounded by shield and sword to parry them, not to mention having eyes well positioned to see the blow coming.
Making a result of 10 hit the head sounds logical at first, because rolling 10 sounds harder than rolling 1, but that's only true when you need to roll higher. For exact matches, 1 or 10 makes no difference, except that the 10 is harder to parry. So my guess would be that Reign combat tends to see more head hits than leg hits, especially between skilled opponents who know how to parry.
Is that correct?
Lester Ward
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •Martijn Vos
Als Antwort auf Lester Ward • •@Lester Ward
Yeah, that sounds like something I've been considering. Maybe let the attacker even choose which waste die determines the hit location, because it's something you often do have some control over. Maybe you don't want to hit them in the head, for example.
Or skip hit locations entirely.
Lester Ward
Als Antwort auf Martijn Vos • • •