Dungeons and Dragons

[Mr. Flay]

Step 5 and 6 are the most vital ones in my experience. Its pretty common for people to make characters that have no business being in the same party together by default.

Agreed, but those are all good rules.

Is there a reason you're playing D&D, Bub? I only ask because it's more complex than a lot of other systems... if you just want to try the "D&D thang", that's great.

[Mr. Flay]

If there's another system that's easier/more economical then feel free to give suggestions.

LOTS of easier, though I admit that I haven't played 4th Ed so if you're going for that it does appear to be easier overall (and 3rd is easier than 2nd, etc).

What are you guys going for? Hack and slash? Drama and pathos? Is the medieval/fantasy setting important? How many players do you have?

A few I would look at:

• Pathfinder
  (like D&D 3, but better balanced/more interesting at low levels; also fewer/bigger books)
  
• Don't Rest Your Head
  (nightmares and insomnia and the secret world behind the world, brilliantly simple mechanics, rough on the DM, doesn't support a large group well)
  
• Wild Talents
  (small cheap book (or just a PDF, fascinating mechanics, better suited to superheroes/mutants/giant robots than fantasy overall)
  
• Kobolds Ate My Baby
  (simplified, good for drinking beer and playing, you will die a lot)
  
• Risus
  (one-sheet PDF download, even simpler than Kobolds, exceedingly silly, works in any setting)
  
• Heroes Unlimited
  (character generation is complex as hell, but gameplay is straightforward; creates anything from superheroes to mutants to robots to aliens to secret agents. These are out of print, but can be picked up at secondhand stores usually for 10-20 dollars)

That's off the top of my head...

[Mr. Flay]

(fixed - ArcDream's website has gotten clumsy, so I put in a link to the PDF version and the print)

[Mr. Flay]

Pathfinder is a fork off of D&D 3.5/reaction against D&D 4.0. It fixes some of the balance problems and makes low levels more interesting.

Clerics were/are WAY overpowered in 3.5 if you're a powergamer. Druids too, though most people play them traditionally enough that they're not such a big deal.

[Mr. Flay]

I hated Savage Worlds. Our playthrough turned out to be very uninteresting, because we could never succeed on anything daring, and we just ended up plinking each other death.

And yeah, Sudo is not your friend.

Wild Talents is my new favorite, though it needs some optional rule settings to deal with the brokenness of Hard Dice (perpetual 10s on a d10). Chargen is a bitch though.

[Mr. Flay]

Just finished reading the Dresden Files RPG book (4 pound/400 page monster that it is). Good setup and the worldbuilding stuff ALONE is worth it, but my gods is FATE complicated.

Also, not sure how the spellcasting rules will actually flow in play. Anyone actually played this thing?

[Mr. Flay]

Um...are we talking about the same game? I mean, I'm playing the core FATE rules in a campaign and it is EXTREMELY simple. You only roll one thing, all the time, ever. Skills are simple, aspects are fairly easy to understand...where's the complexity?

Well, there's rolling a Maneuver to place a temporary Aspect on the target, and then you invoke-- or is that tag?-- that Aspect once for free. And then there's scene aspects and how they work. Not to mention all of the different Stunts and their effects, which are like feats or class features in d20. Then there's the fact that being a skill-based system with so few skills, it's hard to get used to just how

broad

those skills are, and how the specific trappings of each skill work. Especially as modified by the Stunts.

The stress track and consequence system is also somewhat complicated and counter-intuitive for anyone who is accustomed to traditional RPGs.

I'm not saying it's a bad game-- it's my

favorite

game, after all-- but that as rules weight goes it's more in the 'medium' camp than the 'light' camp.

Spirit of the Century

is likely the simplest implementation of the core rules, and it's still difficult for a lot of veterans of other games to understand.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. It's still not as complex as d20 or 2nd Ed or GURPS, but it's not quite a one-roll-and-done like it is sometimes described. Plus I find the spellcasting rules in Dresden Files RPG to be kind of overly complex, though the role-spell feature will likely help a lot (memorize it, cast it with no/few options).

I mean, I'm liking Wild Talents' One Roll Engine pretty well right now for simplicity of

learning

, but the applications can still get complex.

Simple? RISUS. Don't Rest Your Head. Beer and Pretzels.

[Mr. Flay]

Thirded. Story should trump mechanics in basically any situation you can do so, at least until the dice actually start rolling.