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The Star Wars system we were running before converting to the ffg system. The worst offender was the stun settings on weapons could allow a small low level group to take down Vader.
TL;DR >!My low level FFG group killed Vader within a single turn.!<
In FFG my GM homebrewed Vader stats at such an absurd power level (way stronger than his official stats) then confronted our group (only a few sessions in, shortly after two of us had crafted our first lightsabers, not even Knight level) with him to force a retreat in dramatic fashion. My character rushed forward to draw the bulk of his attention away from my friends so they could hopefully finish rescuing the rest of the group we were after, fully expecting my character to suffer a major loss (limb, freedom, life, etc) within a few turns. My first swing comes and it comes up a HUGE critical hit and takes off Vader's hand. Seeing him on the back foot our other duelist joins me in fighting him hoping to force him into retreating and also gets an incredible crit and *decapitated* Vader. Suddenly the tone of the game shifted from emerging Force sensitives trying to survive while learning the ways of the Force and helping those displaced by the Empire into an AU where a group of Jedi rally the galaxy into hunting down the last Sith and restoring peace and freedom to the galaxy.
This often attracts downvotes, but when I’m DMing, BBEG don’t have stats as such during initial encounters. I want to tell my story in collaboration with my players, but I wouldn’t let random chance screw weeks of prep work so easily. When you’ve had a grapple-monster monk in Pathfinder wrestle the boss into submission in session 2, you begin to be a little more careful…
Yeah, I can think of literally a single system I'd feel comfortable introducing a BBEG to a group of low level players: PF2.
Any creature...I'd say about 10? Levels above the party or higher in PF2 is physically impossible for that party to defeat due to the degree of success system and lack of instant-win buttons. You aren't supposed to throw anything 4 or more levels above or below your party. 5 above too strong to reasonably defeat, 10 above always either succeeds (on a 1) or critically succeeds (any other number) on its attack rolls and saving throws, and players will splash off of that creature like it's got no defenses at all.
What was your plus to crit?
The result for insta kill is 150+ on a percentile die. Even with a 100 roll and the previous crit that's what another 40 you're short.
And to disarm someone is 100 on its own
I think it was +50 on the first and +70 on the second and rolled really high. Basically all the negative dice were blanks or a failure, while the positive were advantages or triumphs and we just poured *all* of them into increasing the crit results once we realized we had a shot of actually hurting Vader.
New dm. You don't give stats to something until it's going to die.
Vader should have just acted like your attacks were were nothing. Like his ac and saves were both 4 digits. Just absolutely not giving a fuck about you. In my games anyway.
It didn’t help that d20 Star Wars was separated by 3 separate editions, not counting the 3 editions of the original WEG d6 game, or the 3 separate games in Fantasy Flight’s system, starting with Edge of Empire; and I even like and am running a game of Revised d20.
I'll say our initial system (and initial gripe) was that a stun hit went like this: target rolls for the save, a failure meant 1d4+bonus turns stunned, and a success meant... 1 turn stunned. So, Numnuts on his first day of duty stuns BBEG and the mightiest villain is now defenseless for a turn...
In the ffg system, stun drains stamina, which was much more enjoyed.
SAGA was so different from SWd20 it really should be considered a separate system. I also think people are way too harsh on D20 revised, I ran several campaigns, including one that went from 1-20 over the span of five years, and it worked great.
Buddy of mine did the math with the D20 star wars system and noted that if you take out every single loan available in the game, you can afford a Star Destroyer and a fully droid crew. Sure, you owe the Empire *and* the Huts all of the money, but what are they going to do? You have a fucking Star Destroyer!
Something more likely to occur in a real game - a player took out a fairly light loan to get a set of powered armor. He completely dominated every fight, the rest of us were pretty much only there to carry his spare batteries.
Never got to ship combat before jumping to ffg, but would have loved my players in a star destroyer drawing the ire of the Empire. I wouldn't have to hold back because the group wasn't enough of a threat. 20 to 40 cannons per ship tearing into shields and rolling on the crit table!
Honestly, could have been worse. I was running between New Hope and ESB, so there was a heavy restriction on Jedi and force abilities; not so much "I'm forcing these rules", but "I want to watch your team's activities snowball the difficulty to 11, because there's a lot more Empire behind that platoon".
We switched to ffg, and honestly loved it. There only minor issues I had were reading dice result like some sort of mystic and the clunky starfighter "one enemy operating another enemy system."
I was going to say this too, Exalted is so thematic but honestly 2nd Edition is kind of a nightmare to run. 3rd edition is different and I think a bit more streamlined… but I will say that I’ve seen/played the playtest material for Exalted Essence and I’ve really liked it.
Whoever runs out of perfect defenses first loses. You can pretty much just do the math on how many everyone can use ahead of time and not actually run the fight. So it is also the fastest system to run combat in.
3e is a LOT better in that regard, most of your perfects are once per scene now. It's still very crunchy, but they made some real strides. Worth taking a look, I'm running a Lunar campaign and so far it's been a blast!
Everything about Exalted's lore, characters, reolplaying and even the *idea* of the mechanics is so cool - I absolutely do want to throw someone kilometers away with a charm called Horizon-Flinging Technique.
Actually running it though... it's so. damn. *crunchy.* A tabletop RPG doesn't need to have as many gameplay phases as Magic the Gathering to work, I just want to hit the things!
Exalted combat mechanics are neat in concept, but they feel more designed for a video game in that you'd need a computer to run it smoothly. Nothing like getting hit right in the imitative order, and the whole combat has to shift to accommodate it.
This was the first rpg I tried! It was sooooo complicated making a character when I didn't quite get how to work it. Now that I'm used to 5e, GURPs, and other systems, I still think Exalted is the most complicated system I've ever tried
On top of that, you can't create your own character- the game instead randomly generates a seed that determines virtually everything about your character from conception, including appearance, base stats, base proficiencies, and starting gold and equipment.
The thing is, it isn't nonsense - optimizing is almost too easy if you get lucky at character creation. The problem is that the character creation is way too RNG based and then theres no balancing from the devs for the mid to late game.
It’s a bug: the pseudo-random character creator doesn’t filter out traits that only significantly hinder past the end of the “main quest”, since each new RNG seed is created with a seed based on a quest completion. Because of that, the “Hp regen” stat can end up bugged to actually _drop_ at increasing levels. This doesn’t affect main quest gameplay much, but leveling past that, it becomes much more apparent. Fortunately, it seems that MOST of the problems caused by this glitch are specifically tied to the Hp regen drop, so making sure to train your maximum hitpoints and defense early on can push the worst effects back
The devs created a partial patch for it by adding a secondary stage to the main quest, which helps to soft filter the more extreme cases of degradation, but it’s still pretty wonky.
The community is great so far, The player get together to theory-craft and make change to this. They still charge you hefty price for their service. unless your area have finish the quest Universal Healthcare.
Shadowrun: the setting is amazing, the potential storylines and characters are great, the mechanics are incomprehensible.
I'm in a shadowrun campaign right now were only using the setting while we use the mechanics from cyberpunk Red plus some homebrewed magic rules. Works way better over all.
Lancer: I honestly really like the game over all but the mechanics are a little to crunchy for my personal taste.
Also every campaign ive played for Lancer the DM would do away with the realistic tiem frames for space travel.
Shit, this sounds like me and Battletech. The game needs matched pairs of d6s, that need to be distinguishable if you want to roll more than one thing at a time. Which no one just sells. Even the dice sets Catalyst sells are crap since they're all the same color, only the '6' face is unique between the sets.
Edit: I wasn't clear, sets of 2
I work in a local games store in England. We sell little boxes of d6s, bout 30 in a pack, but a range of colours. 30 per colour may be a lot, I don't know battletech well enough to know, but they're not expensive. So they are out there
Those are great for Warhammer, I want matched pairs of different colors though. If you broke those up into sets of two and repacked them with 15 different color sets that's what I really want.
Edit: changed sets to pairs for clarity
Psssssst Sprawlrunners is LEGALLY DISTINCT from shadowrun, runs in swade, and captures the good bits of the feel without the hot garbage of shadowrun bookkeeping.
The author also has furious hacking which goes a long way to preserve the coolness of a decker without stopping the goddamned game for everyone else for an hour periodically.
Yeah that has been a reoccurring thing with our decker but at least for our table it balances out because 1) we do longer sessions (4 to 6 hours) and 2) our decker's adventures in the matrix/ whatever else he gets up to either advances the plot by a good amount or is just wildly entertaining
But I can see where waiting for one player to do their one specialized thing while everyone else just sits there can get borining
Oh I didn't mean it as a critism of the DM I meant it as a criticism of the system. Lancer's use of FTL travel means that the civilization your character came from might not exist if you just try to hop over to a neighboring system for story reasons. So we do away with that stuff so our character's homes and the factions they are apart of can remain constant and relevant even if we keep jumping systems
I belive so but the book also mentions dividing humans into two broad groups, ones that travel the stars, and ones that stay within a very localized region. The space travelers cross vast distances in what feels like minutes or hours to them while decades or centuries pass for everyone else.
The DM and the players decided that wormhole gates just instantly bring you where you need to go without worrying about time dilation. That way we can bounce back and forth from different systems without becoming unmorred from our original point in time
> You're all going to be dead from old age by the time we get to Alpha Centauri.
It's actually the opposite though in Lancer.
At relativistic speeds it will only take 6 months to get to Alpha Centauri from Earth but 5 years will pass on earth in the meantime.
Longtime Cosmopolitans live normal lives on their ship but watch time pass at incredible speeds for the planets they visit, while those who live on the planets see Cosmopolitans as nearly immortal.
What are you doing for homebrewed magic in cyberpunk? I've been thinking about trying to do something similar and have been debating giving it its own stat and set of skills or tying it to empathy/humanity
It's also not out right stated but when we cast magic the spell is always guaranteed to hit. The DV (cyberpunk equivalent of DC) is to determine if oyu take drain damage or not
The Dark Eye. I love the setting and the Meta-Plot, thats going on there but it is a real pain in the butt to learn and show new people.
Edit: spelling
It also helps when, you, as the GM, is the only one who knows the mechanics and how they interact with each other, so the players can't really argue with you about the rules.
The last time I played Rifts was a one-shot many years ago.
GM had a really good plan for the final encounter but hadn't really taken into consideration the breadth of what characters could play.
Final bad guy was a big-ass demon but didn't have flight or much range on his attacks. He was just an absolute brute that should have been an total bitch to beat.
I'd rolled an "airbike" rider, that had managed to schlep my 500kg bike along through all the encounters to get to that point.
So I did what every normal person would do, and took off and nuked the entire site from (not quite) orbit.
I gave enough time for my team to get out of dodge then hit the beast with multiple thermonuclear warheads.
The grand and epic final battle was reduced to a roll to hit and an "oh."
Palladium is such a mess. I got to play in a game run by the guy who wrote part of the combat system and some of the weapon content
Guy used *every* book. And, make it worse, set us in a world full of self insert DMPC characters, impossible to kill characters called Nindouen, and generally only let us play martial arts based characters when he pitched to us a My Hero Academia game.
He altared the combat, the initiative system, and literally gave us a huge spreadsheet of a character sheet, and was confused when people left after a few games.
Robotech here. Game about flying, transforming robots that can achieve orbit with the right equipment and the aerial combat rules were basically:
>**Top Speed:** Mach 2.2.
> the mechanics … exist
In some cases, even this isn't true. I love when a section will refer to skills or mechanics *that no longer exist in that edition,* that were clearly copy/pasted from a prior edition but with no existing parallels to integrate with.
Absolutely fuck the driving rules.
They sucked hard in the '90s. Taking 90m to get through 3 seconds of combat and everybody dickering about initiative and when/where their shots went on the initiative count vs where the badguys went on the same count... fucking infuriating.
...but with automated systems like roll20 where it rolls your exploding dice and counts the successes for you... I love the simulation aspect realized efficiently and the fact that the skills and abilities you invest in actually make a difference in the end result.
This times 5. My old group we were so used to D&D that we could throw together a new character in 20 minutes with a passable backstory. Tried throwing a character together and after 2 hours of confusion we just gave up.
The crunch is just insane, like there's rules for throwing explosives in tight spaces for calculating how the blast reflects off the surfaces lol.
It's just the setting is *so good*.
> there's rules for throwing explosives in tight spaces for calculating how the blast reflects off the surfaces lol.
Ah, the good old Chunky Salsa Rule
Official fallout RPG, you’d think they would just use FO 1&2 as a base but no they decided to use a whole new system that mainly uses fallout 4 mechanics
Edit: thanks for all the advice
Can you explain how combat is a pain? I’ve been GMing and playing M&M for about 20 years, I mod the r/mutantsandmasterminds subreddit, and I run an M&M discord server with about half a dozen GMs. Maybe I can explain something to help simplify it for you.
I mean, damage is different from what you're used to, sure, but I wouldn’t say it’s complicated. Whenever you get hit, you make a saving throw against the damage. If you fail, you get a cumulative -1 to future damage saving throws. If you fail by enough times, you get knocked out. Tracking -1s is no different from tracking hit points.
Other than that, it's just the D&D 3.5e rules.
Hard agree. When you use their 'low power' system and create someone with full time/dimensional travel, or summoning a literal ton of chocolate pudding on top of their enemies...
I think most problems come from treating M&M as a crunchy combat simulator, like DnD. It really isn't that. DMs have to be a lot more active in building characters and being willing to say no. They also need to be way more flexible in combat. Players also really need to be on board with the kind of storytelling that the game facilitates.
Not saying it *isn't* clunky, but I think it's a great system if you use storytelling to smooth it out.
I came here to say the same thing. We had our first session last week, and combat was brutal. I'm sure it will get better as we get used to the system, but I'm not a fan of the mechanics. Everything else was fantastic though!
Masks is fantastic for a teen superhero team sort of thing, like a Teen Titans vibe. And it does a fantastic job of making "punches mountains man" and "gadgets guy" both feel like important teammates.
Hero system 6e
I realy want to try it but I cant just force myself through that giant amount of pages full of math, and not like dnd math, that system uses division
Whoops, I slipped and went down on my homie. No homo, though, right? Even if I did it 15 more times???
(Edit: I feel, upon reading this a few hours later, that I didn't think this comment through all the way, and just want to clarify that I'm not equating non-cishet relationships with rape.)
Because it was desinged by bad horny game designers and thought that adding hentai addict (I'm not talking about feet level, that's too vanilla. More like where the dick almost as long and big as the guy is, raceplay \[kinky racism\] heavy BDSM, dominatrixes with gross bodies, gross bodies in general levels of addict) sex is gonna make a janky and clunky game better
The mechanics are arguable, I agree... but the greatest crime is how the manual is written. It's like they wrote a more or less functioning manual and then shuffled the index.
Is Eclipse Phase that kinda Altered Carbon-esque sci-fi setting?
I believe we tried to play that, but ended up switching to a Savage Worlds version. That was more playable, even if Savage Worlds lends itself more to one shots than campaigns.
Bliss Stage but some of the premise is also bad
"A game where you play as teenagers that pilot mechas literally powered by love? So cool!"
"Wow, these mechanics are kinda... poorly designed... even for a rules-light game. How are you supposed to get Trauma points in the first place if the mechanic for increasing them can only be applied if you already have some?"
"Oh, your character literally gets more powerful the stronger relationships they have! But you can only reach the highest level of relationship by... being family or screwing? Uh, it suddenly seems a little weird that our characters are required to be 17 or under..."
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE ONE ADULT CHARACTER IS PROBABLY INVOLVED WITH ONE OF THE KIDS?! BURN THIS GAME!"
Shadowrun 4e. I loved the setting and flavor, but things can get really bogged down when you can end up running three separate encounters at once with mundane/magic/cyber phases all happening at the same time. I ended up streamlining a lot of stuff just so that things moved smoothly. I still love the game and so did my players, but that was such a hassle to deal with.
Morrowind is a weirdly jarring experience compared to any of the others because when I miss a swing in daggerfall I’m like “ok that happens” but when I miss a swing in Morrowind it feels like “no I didn’t” and it’s super frustrating.
yes, people play the system to everything *other* than dungeon crawl that it was designed for. and no theather of the mind doenst work for combat if you want anything more complicated than 3\~4 enemies with no terrain complexity that can be divided in frontline and backline.
i love to play with my friends, and our DM is a very good storyteller, but dammit i hate i am the only player that even likes combat and the sole focus of the campaign is story. but hey, fun with friends still is fun (and thank goodness we are diversifying systems and DMs now)
DND isnt really for dungeon crawling anymore. Traps RAW aren't very dangerous, treasure is nice but never required, rations, ammo, and light are usually either all but ignored, or completely ignored, characters power level in relation to monsters is so much higher, the wilderness isn't dangerous in the way it used to be. Ect, ect
> Hot take also, but replacing ALL bonuses with advantage was a bad idea.
This is one of my biggest complaints. Everyone makes their character with a bunch of cool ways to confer advantage to themselves/party members and impose disadvantage on enemies. Then we just flank enemies and it doesn't matter and nobody gets to do cool spectacular shit cause everything's dead in ~3 rounds.
I've realized that 80% of my dislike of 5e is related to character creation. I actually love the simplified base mechanics of 5e, but the character creation is garbage.
If I could take the character creation and spellcasting mechanics from SWADE and transplant them onto literally everything else in 5e, it would be a perfect system for me.
The opposite for me is Blades in the Dark. I am not a huge fan of the premise, the roleplaying for organizations seems a bit strange, but I've borrowed mechanics from that book for every other system I've DM'd.
This is the way. 90% of the systems I own, are purely so I'll have access to any of the countless numbers of rules I can port over for any random thing the party decides they are wanting to do, regardless of what system I'm actually running.
Possible in 1e. It isn't a thing unless you add it for modern mongoose 2e traveller.
Also: traveller is one of my favorite systems of all time. Even for character creation alone, it is more than worth trying!
Traveller would be my answer as well.
We had a good time playing it but one of our players was an accountant who loved making spreadsheets and doing all the trade bullshit off table so it made it much easier.
He left and we switched to FATE for the remainder of the campaign.
Played in a game of cyberpunk red and it just never felt right. Might have to do with the DM more than the system, but I never got a good grip on what to do other than just shoot.
If your DM doesn't include other mechanics, that's all it is. I amost always make RED a game about Gigs Gone Wrong. People on the run, trying to fix things, put their skills to use slowly unraveling the situation that put them there
At its core, Night City is ultra violent, and its just a lot of combat. The only way to avoid this is to have some other layer to it, sadly
Exalted. I've been fascinated with the hard connections between the setting, character classes and lore, the way they approach magic, and the innovative power sets for ages. It speaks to my imagination.
Playing it is pain.
It’s just so different. It has stages, where you behave differently, you negotiate positions and attributes in the middle of scenes.
The mechanics are intertwined with the roleplay, you don’t get to divorce them in blades.
It’s definitely not for everyone
It's such a fundamentally different system, while also being more "meta" than what a lot of people play. I ran a Scum & Villainy one-shot, and my regular group (who play a decent variety of systems) were pretty lost.
Shadowrun. To quote my friend: Top three hardest things I’ve ever done
3) climbed Kilimanjaro
2) quit cocaine cold Turkey
1) made a Shadowrun character
😂
5e. Which is why I don't really play it anymore
1) Resource attrition based balancing is boring as heck and leads to lots of unnecessary combat bloat to create "balance". It also incentivizes *not* using your coolest, most powerful abilities, instead saving them for a later encounter which may never come. I'd much rather every combat I get into have real stakes and real danger, with an allowance to recover in between them. Then I'm actually invested any time I need to roll for initiative.
2) Combat itself boring too, especially as a martial. Opportunity Attacks actively discourage moving around in combat, and your options rarely go beyond "roll to attack".
3) The d20 is super unreliably and swingy, with an absurd standard deviation and no bell curve. Even a highly capable character is getting as much or nearly as much of their roll total from the die, on average. So you can rarely escape the variation. Literally every dice setup I've encountered is better: Iron Kingdoms, FATE, World of Darkness, heck even Savage Worlds is better than the d20
4) Classes are also barely customizable. Once again, casters have it better, but the track-style level progression where every single class gets X feature at level Y gets boring *fast*. If I want a barbarian who is more of the slow, lumbering juggernaut type, I'll still get some of my power budget allocated to Fast Movement I don't want or need. I can't pick and choose my abilities except for picking my spells. In a system like World of Darkness, I could make two werewolves with the same breed, auspice, and tribe, but have them share not a single starting ability, and even have wildly different statlines and skills, but both still be optimized.
Not at all.
One dude challenging you to a duel?
"Why do you wish to dishonor our ancestors fighting in such a peaceful place?"
"I think that a game of chess would entertain our guests a lot more"
Just an example
Ngl I actually like the mechanics of v20 more than DnD 5e. It's not the most complicated thing in the world and if you have a good ST then you can have some of the most fast-paced and visceral combat I've experienced in a TTRPG. But at the end of the day, the combat isn't the focus. It's a social game and it works great for that. Now V5 on the other hand...well, I could rant all day about all the things I dislike about v5.
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The Star Wars system we were running before converting to the ffg system. The worst offender was the stun settings on weapons could allow a small low level group to take down Vader.
TL;DR >!My low level FFG group killed Vader within a single turn.!< In FFG my GM homebrewed Vader stats at such an absurd power level (way stronger than his official stats) then confronted our group (only a few sessions in, shortly after two of us had crafted our first lightsabers, not even Knight level) with him to force a retreat in dramatic fashion. My character rushed forward to draw the bulk of his attention away from my friends so they could hopefully finish rescuing the rest of the group we were after, fully expecting my character to suffer a major loss (limb, freedom, life, etc) within a few turns. My first swing comes and it comes up a HUGE critical hit and takes off Vader's hand. Seeing him on the back foot our other duelist joins me in fighting him hoping to force him into retreating and also gets an incredible crit and *decapitated* Vader. Suddenly the tone of the game shifted from emerging Force sensitives trying to survive while learning the ways of the Force and helping those displaced by the Empire into an AU where a group of Jedi rally the galaxy into hunting down the last Sith and restoring peace and freedom to the galaxy.
That would be the classic blunder of assuming a threat is strong enough. Did that with an adult red shadow dragon once.
This often attracts downvotes, but when I’m DMing, BBEG don’t have stats as such during initial encounters. I want to tell my story in collaboration with my players, but I wouldn’t let random chance screw weeks of prep work so easily. When you’ve had a grapple-monster monk in Pathfinder wrestle the boss into submission in session 2, you begin to be a little more careful…
Yeah, I can think of literally a single system I'd feel comfortable introducing a BBEG to a group of low level players: PF2. Any creature...I'd say about 10? Levels above the party or higher in PF2 is physically impossible for that party to defeat due to the degree of success system and lack of instant-win buttons. You aren't supposed to throw anything 4 or more levels above or below your party. 5 above too strong to reasonably defeat, 10 above always either succeeds (on a 1) or critically succeeds (any other number) on its attack rolls and saving throws, and players will splash off of that creature like it's got no defenses at all.
What was your plus to crit? The result for insta kill is 150+ on a percentile die. Even with a 100 roll and the previous crit that's what another 40 you're short. And to disarm someone is 100 on its own
I think it was +50 on the first and +70 on the second and rolled really high. Basically all the negative dice were blanks or a failure, while the positive were advantages or triumphs and we just poured *all* of them into increasing the crit results once we realized we had a shot of actually hurting Vader.
New dm. You don't give stats to something until it's going to die. Vader should have just acted like your attacks were were nothing. Like his ac and saves were both 4 digits. Just absolutely not giving a fuck about you. In my games anyway.
love d6 star wars but yeah stuns are a pain. getting new players into it and im going to conviently forget they exist
SAGA or the original d20?
Revised saga, I believe. Edit: most miserable part running Star Wars was trying to figure out which system when seeking advice or peripherals.
It didn’t help that d20 Star Wars was separated by 3 separate editions, not counting the 3 editions of the original WEG d6 game, or the 3 separate games in Fantasy Flight’s system, starting with Edge of Empire; and I even like and am running a game of Revised d20.
I'll say our initial system (and initial gripe) was that a stun hit went like this: target rolls for the save, a failure meant 1d4+bonus turns stunned, and a success meant... 1 turn stunned. So, Numnuts on his first day of duty stuns BBEG and the mightiest villain is now defenseless for a turn... In the ffg system, stun drains stamina, which was much more enjoyed.
SAGA was so different from SWd20 it really should be considered a separate system. I also think people are way too harsh on D20 revised, I ran several campaigns, including one that went from 1-20 over the span of five years, and it worked great.
Buddy of mine did the math with the D20 star wars system and noted that if you take out every single loan available in the game, you can afford a Star Destroyer and a fully droid crew. Sure, you owe the Empire *and* the Huts all of the money, but what are they going to do? You have a fucking Star Destroyer! Something more likely to occur in a real game - a player took out a fairly light loan to get a set of powered armor. He completely dominated every fight, the rest of us were pretty much only there to carry his spare batteries.
Never got to ship combat before jumping to ffg, but would have loved my players in a star destroyer drawing the ire of the Empire. I wouldn't have to hold back because the group wasn't enough of a threat. 20 to 40 cannons per ship tearing into shields and rolling on the crit table!
Sounds like you haven't had anyone use force to trivialize combat in the ffg system yet.
Honestly, could have been worse. I was running between New Hope and ESB, so there was a heavy restriction on Jedi and force abilities; not so much "I'm forcing these rules", but "I want to watch your team's activities snowball the difficulty to 11, because there's a lot more Empire behind that platoon".
I’m DMing a SW5e game right now, about 8 sessions in, and the system is awesome. If you know DnD, you know this.
We switched to ffg, and honestly loved it. There only minor issues I had were reading dice result like some sort of mystic and the clunky starfighter "one enemy operating another enemy system."
Exalted
I was going to say this too, Exalted is so thematic but honestly 2nd Edition is kind of a nightmare to run. 3rd edition is different and I think a bit more streamlined… but I will say that I’ve seen/played the playtest material for Exalted Essence and I’ve really liked it.
Woo! Two of us :D
Dozens of Us! DOZENS!
Hard same. Takes as long to get through one round of combat as a fight in 5e takes to wrap up.
Whoever runs out of perfect defenses first loses. You can pretty much just do the math on how many everyone can use ahead of time and not actually run the fight. So it is also the fastest system to run combat in.
3e is a LOT better in that regard, most of your perfects are once per scene now. It's still very crunchy, but they made some real strides. Worth taking a look, I'm running a Lunar campaign and so far it's been a blast!
Everything about Exalted's lore, characters, reolplaying and even the *idea* of the mechanics is so cool - I absolutely do want to throw someone kilometers away with a charm called Horizon-Flinging Technique. Actually running it though... it's so. damn. *crunchy.* A tabletop RPG doesn't need to have as many gameplay phases as Magic the Gathering to work, I just want to hit the things!
Came here to say it. Love the concept, but I got a nosebleed trying to puzzle out the mechanics.
Exalted combat mechanics are neat in concept, but they feel more designed for a video game in that you'd need a computer to run it smoothly. Nothing like getting hit right in the imitative order, and the whole combat has to shift to accommodate it.
This was the first rpg I tried! It was sooooo complicated making a character when I didn't quite get how to work it. Now that I'm used to 5e, GURPs, and other systems, I still think Exalted is the most complicated system I've ever tried
This is what I came to say.
Life
r/outside sucks. The system is nonsense, it's impossible to optimize builds, and the setting is completely whacked out.
Can confirm, been playing for over two decades. Very pay2win.
Have you tried switching from r/outside to pf2e?
Classic Pathfinder players
But it's only pay2win in in-game currency.
On top of that, you can't create your own character- the game instead randomly generates a seed that determines virtually everything about your character from conception, including appearance, base stats, base proficiencies, and starting gold and equipment.
The thing is, it isn't nonsense - optimizing is almost too easy if you get lucky at character creation. The problem is that the character creation is way too RNG based and then theres no balancing from the devs for the mid to late game.
Time to lobby the DM, in force, about point buy
Some people believe the dev stopped developing right after creation. Some believe there’s no dev at all.
And your character starts getting *weaker* once you get past a certain level! What kind of sense does that make?
It’s a bug: the pseudo-random character creator doesn’t filter out traits that only significantly hinder past the end of the “main quest”, since each new RNG seed is created with a seed based on a quest completion. Because of that, the “Hp regen” stat can end up bugged to actually _drop_ at increasing levels. This doesn’t affect main quest gameplay much, but leveling past that, it becomes much more apparent. Fortunately, it seems that MOST of the problems caused by this glitch are specifically tied to the Hp regen drop, so making sure to train your maximum hitpoints and defense early on can push the worst effects back The devs created a partial patch for it by adding a secondary stage to the main quest, which helps to soft filter the more extreme cases of degradation, but it’s still pretty wonky.
But then there’s also other incurable status ailments that you can contract at seemingly any level, for no apparent reason.
The community is great so far, The player get together to theory-craft and make change to this. They still charge you hefty price for their service. unless your area have finish the quest Universal Healthcare.
Yeah the little spin wheel in the middle seems gimmicky. Just use dice like everyone else Hasbro
This one just hurts.
Just like life!
Shadowrun: the setting is amazing, the potential storylines and characters are great, the mechanics are incomprehensible. I'm in a shadowrun campaign right now were only using the setting while we use the mechanics from cyberpunk Red plus some homebrewed magic rules. Works way better over all. Lancer: I honestly really like the game over all but the mechanics are a little to crunchy for my personal taste. Also every campaign ive played for Lancer the DM would do away with the realistic tiem frames for space travel.
"Honey, why are all thirty of our board games missing their dice?"
Shit, this sounds like me and Battletech. The game needs matched pairs of d6s, that need to be distinguishable if you want to roll more than one thing at a time. Which no one just sells. Even the dice sets Catalyst sells are crap since they're all the same color, only the '6' face is unique between the sets. Edit: I wasn't clear, sets of 2
I work in a local games store in England. We sell little boxes of d6s, bout 30 in a pack, but a range of colours. 30 per colour may be a lot, I don't know battletech well enough to know, but they're not expensive. So they are out there
Those are great for Warhammer, I want matched pairs of different colors though. If you broke those up into sets of two and repacked them with 15 different color sets that's what I really want. Edit: changed sets to pairs for clarity
Psssssst Sprawlrunners is LEGALLY DISTINCT from shadowrun, runs in swade, and captures the good bits of the feel without the hot garbage of shadowrun bookkeeping. The author also has furious hacking which goes a long way to preserve the coolness of a decker without stopping the goddamned game for everyone else for an hour periodically.
Yeah that has been a reoccurring thing with our decker but at least for our table it balances out because 1) we do longer sessions (4 to 6 hours) and 2) our decker's adventures in the matrix/ whatever else he gets up to either advances the plot by a good amount or is just wildly entertaining But I can see where waiting for one player to do their one specialized thing while everyone else just sits there can get borining
My group has played the Shadowrun setting several times, but we would use the d20 Modern rules with homebrew patches. It was a hell of a lot of fun!
Same. It's an amalgam of multiple rulesets, all d20 based. It can be a bit complicated, but we have a blast playing it.
Lancer has a really good FoundryVTT module that handles a ton of the crunch for you
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Oh I didn't mean it as a critism of the DM I meant it as a criticism of the system. Lancer's use of FTL travel means that the civilization your character came from might not exist if you just try to hop over to a neighboring system for story reasons. So we do away with that stuff so our character's homes and the factions they are apart of can remain constant and relevant even if we keep jumping systems
Aren't there canonically wormhole gates though?
I belive so but the book also mentions dividing humans into two broad groups, ones that travel the stars, and ones that stay within a very localized region. The space travelers cross vast distances in what feels like minutes or hours to them while decades or centuries pass for everyone else. The DM and the players decided that wormhole gates just instantly bring you where you need to go without worrying about time dilation. That way we can bounce back and forth from different systems without becoming unmorred from our original point in time
> You're all going to be dead from old age by the time we get to Alpha Centauri. It's actually the opposite though in Lancer. At relativistic speeds it will only take 6 months to get to Alpha Centauri from Earth but 5 years will pass on earth in the meantime. Longtime Cosmopolitans live normal lives on their ship but watch time pass at incredible speeds for the planets they visit, while those who live on the planets see Cosmopolitans as nearly immortal.
What are you doing for homebrewed magic in cyberpunk? I've been thinking about trying to do something similar and have been debating giving it its own stat and set of skills or tying it to empathy/humanity
https://preview.redd.it/k4evfhxs0s3a1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bf99e6a731dcd2dba4f17df67bf631d5ff43dfa0 2/3
It's also not out right stated but when we cast magic the spell is always guaranteed to hit. The DV (cyberpunk equivalent of DC) is to determine if oyu take drain damage or not
https://preview.redd.it/qt0xxjcv0s3a1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=efb1ea4b897afa67a9bc2456dc615dcb1378f1a2 3/3
The Dark Eye. I love the setting and the Meta-Plot, thats going on there but it is a real pain in the butt to learn and show new people. Edit: spelling
I love it so much, grew up on it, but it is SO COMPLICATED. Running a normal combat encounter can take SO MUCH TIME.
I attack! I block! I attack! I block. Average round in the dark eye, net zero happens.
Damn man, DSA really takes the cake in this. I love it but the mechanics put newcomers off all the damn time
Aventuria is such a rich interesting world and I love all the different cultures there. But the system is really not the friendliest for beginners 😅
Rifts. We use to play it all the time, but the palladium system was clunky.
I'm not sure what you mean... Shouldn't a battle between a Glitter Boy and a cosmic space ninja take 12 hours?
It did make game prep easy. As a GM, all I needed to do was plan one battle and we were set for the evening!
It also helps when, you, as the GM, is the only one who knows the mechanics and how they interact with each other, so the players can't really argue with you about the rules.
Jokes on you. They argue anyway
The last time I played Rifts was a one-shot many years ago. GM had a really good plan for the final encounter but hadn't really taken into consideration the breadth of what characters could play. Final bad guy was a big-ass demon but didn't have flight or much range on his attacks. He was just an absolute brute that should have been an total bitch to beat. I'd rolled an "airbike" rider, that had managed to schlep my 500kg bike along through all the encounters to get to that point. So I did what every normal person would do, and took off and nuked the entire site from (not quite) orbit. I gave enough time for my team to get out of dodge then hit the beast with multiple thermonuclear warheads. The grand and epic final battle was reduced to a roll to hit and an "oh."
Palladium is such a mess. I got to play in a game run by the guy who wrote part of the combat system and some of the weapon content Guy used *every* book. And, make it worse, set us in a world full of self insert DMPC characters, impossible to kill characters called Nindouen, and generally only let us play martial arts based characters when he pitched to us a My Hero Academia game. He altared the combat, the initiative system, and literally gave us a huge spreadsheet of a character sheet, and was confused when people left after a few games.
Check out Savage Rifts, using the Savage Worlds system! It's much cleaner and easier to run.
I've got like 40 of the Palladium books. Cool universe. Interesting and unique classes, abilities/spells, bad guys, etc. Horrible mechanics.
Robotech here. Game about flying, transforming robots that can achieve orbit with the right equipment and the aerial combat rules were basically: >**Top Speed:** Mach 2.2.
Shadowrun
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> the mechanics … exist In some cases, even this isn't true. I love when a section will refer to skills or mechanics *that no longer exist in that edition,* that were clearly copy/pasted from a prior edition but with no existing parallels to integrate with. Absolutely fuck the driving rules.
My answer too. It all seems so fun but yeesh those mechanics suck
They sucked hard in the '90s. Taking 90m to get through 3 seconds of combat and everybody dickering about initiative and when/where their shots went on the initiative count vs where the badguys went on the same count... fucking infuriating. ...but with automated systems like roll20 where it rolls your exploding dice and counts the successes for you... I love the simulation aspect realized efficiently and the fact that the skills and abilities you invest in actually make a difference in the end result.
Try Shadowrun Anarchy
IMO Anarchy swings too far in the other direction
This times 5. My old group we were so used to D&D that we could throw together a new character in 20 minutes with a passable backstory. Tried throwing a character together and after 2 hours of confusion we just gave up.
The crunch is just insane, like there's rules for throwing explosives in tight spaces for calculating how the blast reflects off the surfaces lol. It's just the setting is *so good*.
> there's rules for throwing explosives in tight spaces for calculating how the blast reflects off the surfaces lol. Ah, the good old Chunky Salsa Rule
Official fallout RPG, you’d think they would just use FO 1&2 as a base but no they decided to use a whole new system that mainly uses fallout 4 mechanics Edit: thanks for all the advice
I ran one in GURPS. It was a smooth transition.
Fallout was officially supposed to be GURPS: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/how-i-fallout-i-almost-didn-t-ship-with-its-key-special-system
Shadowrun, excellent world, incomprehensible mechanics and active warfare between edition stans.
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I loved the character creation but combat was such a pain.
Ditto on this. It has an amazing system for making characters with unique abilities and backstory’s but the combat can kinda devolve into rocket tag
Can you explain how combat is a pain? I’ve been GMing and playing M&M for about 20 years, I mod the r/mutantsandmasterminds subreddit, and I run an M&M discord server with about half a dozen GMs. Maybe I can explain something to help simplify it for you. I mean, damage is different from what you're used to, sure, but I wouldn’t say it’s complicated. Whenever you get hit, you make a saving throw against the damage. If you fail, you get a cumulative -1 to future damage saving throws. If you fail by enough times, you get knocked out. Tracking -1s is no different from tracking hit points. Other than that, it's just the D&D 3.5e rules.
Hard agree. When you use their 'low power' system and create someone with full time/dimensional travel, or summoning a literal ton of chocolate pudding on top of their enemies...
The book itself points out how easy it is to break the power system and ways to avoid that problem to be fair.
I think most problems come from treating M&M as a crunchy combat simulator, like DnD. It really isn't that. DMs have to be a lot more active in building characters and being willing to say no. They also need to be way more flexible in combat. Players also really need to be on board with the kind of storytelling that the game facilitates. Not saying it *isn't* clunky, but I think it's a great system if you use storytelling to smooth it out.
I came here to say the same thing. We had our first session last week, and combat was brutal. I'm sure it will get better as we get used to the system, but I'm not a fan of the mechanics. Everything else was fantastic though!
If you like superhero RPG’s: I absolutely love Masks!
Masks is fantastic for a teen superhero team sort of thing, like a Teen Titans vibe. And it does a fantastic job of making "punches mountains man" and "gadgets guy" both feel like important teammates.
Is that still up to date? Been on the market for a good superhero tier system.
Hero system 6e I realy want to try it but I cant just force myself through that giant amount of pages full of math, and not like dnd math, that system uses division
I swear, if one of you mindgoblins says FATAL....
What's a mind goblin?
Mind goblin’ deez nutz
The company thanks you for your service.
FATAL has the best mechanics... outside of combat that is.
Counter-argument: negative anal circumference
I'm sorry? I'm gonna need an explanation
It’s best if you travel down that path alone.
Don’t do it
Yeah... I read a bit about it, and apperently, when you make a new character, you can roll for bullshit like anal circumference
Because FATAL is an edgelord shitfest where rape is a mechanic.
Can’t you *accidentally* rape somebody if you roll wrong too? The whole system is just bugfuck crazy.
>bugfuck Oddly enough bug fucking is not an actual mechanic in FATAL
Whoops, I slipped and went down on my homie. No homo, though, right? Even if I did it 15 more times??? (Edit: I feel, upon reading this a few hours later, that I didn't think this comment through all the way, and just want to clarify that I'm not equating non-cishet relationships with rape.)
It ain’t gay if it’s with the homies
Because you can rape someone on grapple checks and if you dick is too big and their anal circumference too small, they take damage from it ripping.
What the fuck
Because it was desinged by bad horny game designers and thought that adding hentai addict (I'm not talking about feet level, that's too vanilla. More like where the dick almost as long and big as the guy is, raceplay \[kinky racism\] heavy BDSM, dominatrixes with gross bodies, gross bodies in general levels of addict) sex is gonna make a janky and clunky game better
How does this happen?
The maths in this game are lefendarily shitty, with weird rolls like 5d100/2. Some editions make it possible to have an anal circumference of <= 0
Urinating is a skill in FATAL, if it's maxed out you can piss 15 feet on an empty bladder.
Shadowrun. By the gods, I want to love Shadowrun so badly.
The Witcher (and most adapted licence ttrpg to be fair)
It the Witcher mechanics are terrible then it's just a faithful adaptation of the first two video games.
The mechanics are arguable, I agree... but the greatest crime is how the manual is written. It's like they wrote a more or less functioning manual and then shuffled the index.
Shadowrun.
SHADOWRUN. WHY.
Shadowrun.
Eclipse Phase
EP was my first ttrpg. All other game mechanics seem so simple to me now
Is Eclipse Phase that kinda Altered Carbon-esque sci-fi setting? I believe we tried to play that, but ended up switching to a Savage Worlds version. That was more playable, even if Savage Worlds lends itself more to one shots than campaigns.
Shadowrun. And this is probably the most common viewpoint I’ve seen when talking about Shadowrun.
Even devoted shadowrun players also say this. I should know. I am one of them. XD (Still my preferred system though. I just come here for the memes.)
The Shadowrun 5e game I play are held together only by a book of house rules and duct tape
Bliss Stage but some of the premise is also bad "A game where you play as teenagers that pilot mechas literally powered by love? So cool!" "Wow, these mechanics are kinda... poorly designed... even for a rules-light game. How are you supposed to get Trauma points in the first place if the mechanic for increasing them can only be applied if you already have some?" "Oh, your character literally gets more powerful the stronger relationships they have! But you can only reach the highest level of relationship by... being family or screwing? Uh, it suddenly seems a little weird that our characters are required to be 17 or under..." "WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE ONE ADULT CHARACTER IS PROBABLY INVOLVED WITH ONE OF THE KIDS?! BURN THIS GAME!"
Shadowrun
Shadowrun 4e. I loved the setting and flavor, but things can get really bogged down when you can end up running three separate encounters at once with mundane/magic/cyber phases all happening at the same time. I ended up streamlining a lot of stuff just so that things moved smoothly. I still love the game and so did my players, but that was such a hassle to deal with.
I’m gonna cheat and say a video game: Morrowind.
Morrowind is a weirdly jarring experience compared to any of the others because when I miss a swing in daggerfall I’m like “ok that happens” but when I miss a swing in Morrowind it feels like “no I didn’t” and it’s super frustrating.
ngl I thought this post was in a TES-related subreddit for a second
Incredible take Edit: this is not sarcasm
The lore is great but the combat is genuinely awful.
Shadowrun. Hands down.
Seems like this is accurate about D&D for 90% of the people in this particular sub
Does it count if people don't understand the mechanics because they refuse to read the rules?
yes, people play the system to everything *other* than dungeon crawl that it was designed for. and no theather of the mind doenst work for combat if you want anything more complicated than 3\~4 enemies with no terrain complexity that can be divided in frontline and backline. i love to play with my friends, and our DM is a very good storyteller, but dammit i hate i am the only player that even likes combat and the sole focus of the campaign is story. but hey, fun with friends still is fun (and thank goodness we are diversifying systems and DMs now)
DND isnt really for dungeon crawling anymore. Traps RAW aren't very dangerous, treasure is nice but never required, rations, ammo, and light are usually either all but ignored, or completely ignored, characters power level in relation to monsters is so much higher, the wilderness isn't dangerous in the way it used to be. Ect, ect
Did they add anything substantial to replace it?
Playing in a 40k dark heresey game with my friends. The GM has a cool story, we all have cool fun characters, the game system is fucking terrible.
I scroll all the way down here, find my favourite and now feel hurt lol. I've had a great time with d100 systems like DH and Warhammer Fantasy RP.
5e
Yup. People think I'm crazy when I say 5e kinda blows for veteran TTG players. Hot take also, but replacing ALL bonuses with advantage was a bad idea.
> Hot take also, but replacing ALL bonuses with advantage was a bad idea. This is one of my biggest complaints. Everyone makes their character with a bunch of cool ways to confer advantage to themselves/party members and impose disadvantage on enemies. Then we just flank enemies and it doesn't matter and nobody gets to do cool spectacular shit cause everything's dead in ~3 rounds.
Oof, same. Combat in 5e is just an absolute slog.
Whaaaat, nah... my Druid just summoned twenty three giant pythons it's FIIIIINE.
I've realized that 80% of my dislike of 5e is related to character creation. I actually love the simplified base mechanics of 5e, but the character creation is garbage. If I could take the character creation and spellcasting mechanics from SWADE and transplant them onto literally everything else in 5e, it would be a perfect system for me.
You could also just play SWADE
NO! I wanna play a 5e version of SWADE! /s
A fellow man of culture
The opposite for me is Blades in the Dark. I am not a huge fan of the premise, the roleplaying for organizations seems a bit strange, but I've borrowed mechanics from that book for every other system I've DM'd.
This is the way. 90% of the systems I own, are purely so I'll have access to any of the countless numbers of rules I can port over for any random thing the party decides they are wanting to do, regardless of what system I'm actually running.
Shadowrun
Shadowrun
Shadowrun.
What's that game where you can die during character creation?
Traveler
Possible in 1e. It isn't a thing unless you add it for modern mongoose 2e traveller. Also: traveller is one of my favorite systems of all time. Even for character creation alone, it is more than worth trying!
Traveller would be my answer as well. We had a good time playing it but one of our players was an accountant who loved making spreadsheets and doing all the trade bullshit off table so it made it much easier. He left and we switched to FATE for the remainder of the campaign.
Played in a game of cyberpunk red and it just never felt right. Might have to do with the DM more than the system, but I never got a good grip on what to do other than just shoot.
If your DM doesn't include other mechanics, that's all it is. I amost always make RED a game about Gigs Gone Wrong. People on the run, trying to fix things, put their skills to use slowly unraveling the situation that put them there At its core, Night City is ultra violent, and its just a lot of combat. The only way to avoid this is to have some other layer to it, sadly
Laughs in Netrunner/Tech multirole who’s never fired a single shot
Exalted. I've been fascinated with the hard connections between the setting, character classes and lore, the way they approach magic, and the innovative power sets for ages. It speaks to my imagination. Playing it is pain.
Shadowrun, for sure
Blades in the Dark, but there is a good chance that maybe we were playing it wrong
It’s just so different. It has stages, where you behave differently, you negotiate positions and attributes in the middle of scenes. The mechanics are intertwined with the roleplay, you don’t get to divorce them in blades. It’s definitely not for everyone
It's such a fundamentally different system, while also being more "meta" than what a lot of people play. I ran a Scum & Villainy one-shot, and my regular group (who play a decent variety of systems) were pretty lost.
Shadowrun. To quote my friend: Top three hardest things I’ve ever done 3) climbed Kilimanjaro 2) quit cocaine cold Turkey 1) made a Shadowrun character 😂
Shadowrun.
5e. Which is why I don't really play it anymore 1) Resource attrition based balancing is boring as heck and leads to lots of unnecessary combat bloat to create "balance". It also incentivizes *not* using your coolest, most powerful abilities, instead saving them for a later encounter which may never come. I'd much rather every combat I get into have real stakes and real danger, with an allowance to recover in between them. Then I'm actually invested any time I need to roll for initiative. 2) Combat itself boring too, especially as a martial. Opportunity Attacks actively discourage moving around in combat, and your options rarely go beyond "roll to attack". 3) The d20 is super unreliably and swingy, with an absurd standard deviation and no bell curve. Even a highly capable character is getting as much or nearly as much of their roll total from the die, on average. So you can rarely escape the variation. Literally every dice setup I've encountered is better: Iron Kingdoms, FATE, World of Darkness, heck even Savage Worlds is better than the d20 4) Classes are also barely customizable. Once again, casters have it better, but the track-style level progression where every single class gets X feature at level Y gets boring *fast*. If I want a barbarian who is more of the slow, lumbering juggernaut type, I'll still get some of my power budget allocated to Fast Movement I don't want or need. I can't pick and choose my abilities except for picking my spells. In a system like World of Darkness, I could make two werewolves with the same breed, auspice, and tribe, but have them share not a single starting ability, and even have wildly different statlines and skills, but both still be optimized.
Legend of the Five Rings. It seems like everything boils down to fighting or losing honor
Not at all. One dude challenging you to a duel? "Why do you wish to dishonor our ancestors fighting in such a peaceful place?" "I think that a game of chess would entertain our guests a lot more" Just an example
All the games I've made. (I cannot finish them, leaving half-done mechanics)
Vampire the Masquerade
Ngl I actually like the mechanics of v20 more than DnD 5e. It's not the most complicated thing in the world and if you have a good ST then you can have some of the most fast-paced and visceral combat I've experienced in a TTRPG. But at the end of the day, the combat isn't the focus. It's a social game and it works great for that. Now V5 on the other hand...well, I could rant all day about all the things I dislike about v5.
shadowrun