I ordered Reign: Enchiridion the other day. It's a digest-sized version of the game Reign, a tome which I have not bought or read because I can't be bothered with 300+ page rulebooks any more, and because other peoples' precious settings usually bore me and certainly won't be used. Reign: Enchiridion has all of the setting guff excised and is, basically, a generic rule-set for running fantasy games with the One Roll Engine to go alongside Nemesis (for horror) and Wild Talents (for supers). It's also only around 100 pages long and is A5-sized, which as we all know is how God intended game books to be.
For the price, it's an excellent product. The core mechanic for ORE is a model of efficiency and usefulness; intuitive to use but very flexible and friendly towards strategic and tactical play without being overly crunchy. The book contains tools for creating schools of magic and random generators for monsters, spells, and advanced skills and combat methods. It provides options for doing character gen through point-buy and random generation. And there is a nice unity throughout: anything that you do, whether creating a character or generating a mystical martial art, is done by simply rolling a fistful d10s and looking for matches. It also has a small but significant boon: decent shield rules.
There are some niggles. The author, Greg Stolze, is clearly somebody who has drunk the White Wolf koolaid when it comes to "story": his GMing advice is all about plot immunity for players and giving them orgasms (at one point, it is recommended that you "give the player a chance to strut" by having enemies deliberately play to his strengths; at another, you are told that death is the consequence for failing to cast a certain type of spell..."but never for PCs"). There is an abstract wealth mechanic. (Insert roll-eyes smiley of your choice here.) And I'm not a fan of "worthless enemies", a concept that was either lifted from 4e D&D or inspired by it: having a different set of standards for the PCs and NPCs when it comes to combat is the way of madness, or at least meaningless games. But those are to be expected from a game system that was written in the time and context in which this was, and are easily ignored.
On balance, it is a good, quick-to-learn generic fantasy system that is much more elegant than the other examples I can think of and much easier to learn. Since the ORE system already has a variant for Call of Cthulhu-type horror, that means it now ticks two of my main gaming boxes (non-D&D fantasy and Call of Cthulhu-type horror); that's not bad for about £8 incl. p&p.
By "worthless enemies" do you mean a low level often single hit point opponent? If so, I think they originated in Feng Shui as part of that game's attempt to emulate action movies, although I'm sure someone can turn up an earlier instance of the concept.
ReplyDeleteSort of. You have a concept of "threat level" which is basically like a one hit point opponent, and they band together to form bigger "threats". So if you have 14 threat 1 opponents they act like a single mob with 14 dice, and so forth. (I didn't read those rules in detail, because I don't plan on using them!)
DeleteOh yes, that is a little bit different to what was done in Feng Shui and D&D4.
DeleteThey do something similar to what you describe in Deathwatch and 13th Age, with multiple weaker opponents being treated as one bigger enemy. It does seem like it would be easier to run them at the table but it also seems dishonest somehow.
It is dishonest. It's that "awesomeness" thing: let's make it so the players get to feel like they have massive cocks, basically.
DeleteThe enemies may have little cocks, but in compensation, they can put them together to form one larger one...
Delete4e D&D's Minions are a lot more theatening than AD&D's 0th level Fighters, the real 'worthless enemies'. While 4e default is to use them for genre emulation, I use them for world-sim by translating low level standard monsters to minions 6 levels higher, just for convenience and speed of play. I give mine a Damage Threshold instead of 1 hp so they don't feel fake or cardboardy. A bunch of 9th level minions such as typical orc warriors can threaten a 9th level 4e PC, whereas a bunch of 1 hit die AD&D orcs can't usually threaten a 9th level AD&D PC.
ReplyDeleteAre Feng Shui's mooks more like AD&D Ftr-0 wallpaper?
I mind that less because in AD&D everyone is playing by the same rules, and if somebody has reached 9th level they've earned the right to kick the arses of 0th level Fighters by the bucket-load. I don't like this idea that the PCs start off as being so special they actually explicitly have a different set of rules to normal people.
DeleteActually, there's nothing that says every NPC is automatically unworthy. It's only presented as an option. But since the standard combat rules use hit locations by default, I can see it as an option that can come in rather handy in the type of large battles it's been proposed for.
DeleteHm, I take your point - but a 1st level 4e D&D PC is no better/stronger than a 'human town guard' (3rd level NPC) - they might just have the edge on a 'common bandit' (2nd level NPC). The GM can certainly alter the default NPC power demographics to make 1st level PCs superheroic vs normal people by making his town guards low-level minions, but the default is that 1st level PCs fight kobolds and goblins and don't even mess with orcs until ca 3rd level, and gnolls only at around 5th - so actually a slower progression than pre-4e. The simplified NPC stats are primarily just that, a simplification for ease of use. Low-level minions are usually stuff like (some) kobolds and rats, stuff that would be one-hit kills in pre-4e, too.
DeleteI had less of a problem with the idea of giving players a chance to strut. Especially in the context that that advice is given. When a character gets the ability to do something awesome, they're going to be disappointed if they don't get to do that thing. The example was that of a character who has learned to escape from any grapple instantly. If he never gets to use his immunity to grapples because every grappling enemy is going to know that the tactic is useless, why did he pay all those points for it?
ReplyDeleteAnd should you, as GM, never include grappling enemies once a character gains that power? No. Not only because of the "strutting" aspect, but because to have whole classes of opposition disappear off the map messes with the integrity of the world. If one of your players found a +5 sword of ogre smashing, would the party no longer encounter ogres?
The main feature I like about Reign (and I'm a little surprised that you didn't mention it) is the Company Rules. I like the idea that they are not as intertwined with the rest of the game system as some other "kingdom management mini-games." I'm currently planning on using them in my 1e game once the characters get to the level where they gain holdings.
Well, my reply to that would simply be that the GM shouldn't be "including" enemies on the basis of who the PCs are and what skills they have. They should "include" enemies based on the integrity of the game world and random tables. If the PCs happen to meet grappling enemies on that basis, then that PC will have a use for that immunity, just like in D&D if a PC has a +5 sword of ogre smashing he should encounter exactly the same ratio of ogres he would have encountered otherwise.
DeleteI agree; this is one reason random tables are so valuable, and why their loss has been so harmful to the game. No-random-tables works ok in Call of Cthulu, but most games are not CoC!
DeleteRunning 4e D&D I often feel the lack of them; I found a nice random generator for treasure, but for monsters I generally have to resort to pseudo-random stuff like using the contents of published modules but sandboxing it (treating it as a living environment, adding randomness to what monsters appear where), using pre-4e modules, using a grab from the contents of my minis box for what monsters turn up, etc. I'm finding that Google Image search is a nice way to get partly randomly generated NPCs, eg today a search for 'nature priest' turned up a pic of Galileo, so I ended up with a moon-worshipping priestly astronomer...
It's absolutely absurd that random generators disappeared from D&D: the whole game depends on them. Random encounters most of all, for the simple reason that expecting a DM to actually script all his encounters in an insanely complex system like 3rd edition is just beyond unreasonable.
Delete3e did still have the random encounter tables; it didn't work as well as pre-3e due to the much steeper power curve. With 4e's lack of tables I think it's actually an 'incomplete structure' game, as Justin Alexander described them. This makes it similar to most RPGs, but inferior to other iterations of D&D in ease of use. OTOH you could say that 4e has a sort of 'minis board game' standard play mode where the GM just stats up one or two monster encounter groups ahead of play, the PCs fight those, then the group call it a night. That's pretty easy to do, easy to make fun, and is actually a complete game structure even if it might not be satisfying to many people as a 'proper RPG'.Encounters taking TOO DAMN LONG is often a problem - took us 4 3-hour sessions, 8 weeks, to fight 4 battles with the Zhentarim in a minor story arc - but if the goal is to eat up time/play long-term at a leisurely pace with minimal prep, it can work ok.
DeleteAre you sure? Maybe I'm totally misremembering about 3e but wasn't that where CR got introduced?
DeleteOh, but I do agree about the company rules. Like the whole of ORE itself, it's deceptively simple and very flexible.
Delete3e has random encounter tables that list CR - average CR and CR by encounter. Some of the official ones are pretty worthless as they give encounters like "5th level gnoll fighter" without any stats for that gnoll - and statting him out would take half an hour! Thus I and others tended not to use them in practice; but there is 3e DMG advice on creating and using them. The main thing is to give areas their own typical Encounter Level, like a dungeon level. I think that's a good idea even for pre-3e.
DeletePathfinder has been pretty solid with encounter tables though, but falls down due to lack of random treasure generation - the Beginner Box has very nice random treasure tables though, making it a more complete game than the enormous core rules!
As usual nobody nor their cousins has read the 3e DMG (3.0; not sure 3.5 is the same.) Failing that, it obviously seems that the game is flawed for not having random encounters. But they are there.
DeleteAs are there pre-generated tables of PC classes and NPC classes for all levels, with skills and feats and everything; and modifiers for non-PC races, too. So creating a 5th level gnoll fighter takes exactly 5 minutes (including the time to copy the relevant information;) 2 minutes if you want to copy only attack bonus, damage and saves.
Random encounters also solve the (non-existent) problem of "15 minutes adventuring day;" the PCs simply don't have the luxury to go outside and rest and recharge whenever they want, because a random encounter can be just behind the corner. I handed the PCs their arses more than once with just random encounters.
Again, the 3e DMG shows that encounters need not be balanced; actually, they MUST NOT be balanced. A nice table shows the percent of encounters for a given EL:
10% easy
20% easy if handled properly
50% challenging
15% very difficult
5% overpowering
The first seminal D&D 3e adventures published by WotC followed the above structure, and in fact you find many encounters in which the PCs MUST FLEE or deal in a non-violent way to "win." Even the 4e DMG advocates something similar, but the emphasis is more on an uniform balance.
The pregen Fighter-5 has all human-style gear though, if you just add on basic gnoll stats - which will take more like 10 minutes IME, it's quite fiddly with the attribute mods, the way monster hit dice affect skill values, etc - you still basically get a human Fighter in a hyena suit. Creating a gnollish gnoll Fighter from scatch is easily 30 minutes. For one NPC.
DeleteGreat review, David.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised that you made no mention of Reign's so-called "company rules" for domain management. That seems to be one of the big features of this game. Reign was recommended to me recently as a good system for running a campaign based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, precisely because of this integration of domain level play. I haven't had a chance to look at it, though.
I have found the company rules a little bit murky in play, especially in contrast to the organizational rules that came out shortly thereafter for the FATE-based Legends of Anglerre RPG.
DeleteThe combat rules in REIGN are great, however. Combat is so fast paced! I ran a fun REIGN of Rome Marathon at a con a few years ago. It was a 6-hour game in which the PCs were the leaders/prime movers of a gladiatorial company.
I haven't had the chance to look at them in-depth either, certainly not in play. I really like ORE as a generic system, and could definitely see myself using it for historical gaming like your Rome example.
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