itt: post your favorite system and one criticism you agree withit's a fair cop that the fucking game didn't fix its monster math properly until 2010. I mean, that's years of playing with shitty monsters that do no damage and take a year to die. fuck off
why do you have to roll an actual character to make a monster to fight ree
Exalted 3E
I adore it and the setting, but it's got far too many fiddly little rules that are hard to remember, and if people aren't really on top of remembering their charms and dice pools, each turn is a long slog. Only with a very high level of competence (compared to other systems) do rounds stop taking a damn half hour.
3.5.
I think it is fair to call out people trying to shoe horn every fucking thing into it. I use it for dungeon crawls when the group is in the mood and I shoot down any attempts for other dms to use it to run something outside of what it can do.
>>46430491
5e.
It really is Babby's First D&D.
>>46430491
You posted my favorite system and one of the criticisms I agree with, but I'll contribute another.
I like skill challenges in concept but in practice they're irritating as fuck to get working with my players.
>>46430520
>>46430581
I always thought that was a mark in its favor, given how many people's first RPG D&D actually is
Risus
Losing capabilities due to taking damage is best suited for gritty games, which Risus sure as hell isn't. It would be better if combat was just a straight "best 2 of 3" every time.
>>46430674
I agree with this, though I think 5e could've gone a bit further in terms of simplicity. Moldvay/Cook Basic = 128 pages for character creation, combat rules, monsters, treasure and everything. 5e's three core books stack up to well over 900 pages.
>>46430491
D&D 3.5
Casters really can do everything better than the base martial classes if you just stick to the core books. It only gets worse with splat books, but the one time that a book gets made to try and give a boost/powerup for martials everyone loses their god damn minds because, "but... but... It's not just smacking something with a sword or blowing them up with a spell!"
It doesn't help that said book is pretty complicated in terms of the class' mechanics to get the martials to a power level closer to casters when you try to adhere to the core rules.The book is Book of Nine Swords, aka Book of Weeaboo Fightin' Magic
>>46430491
4e
I don't agree with your assesment - monster math was bnot perfect but, outside of a few outliers that were identified pretty soon, it worked decently enough even with the old stats. If you compare the Monster Vaults to MM1, you'll see that they changed less than one would think.
That said, one fair criticism is about option bloat. With powers it's somewhat manageable, although some classes have it worse than others (fighters and wizards have 15+ choices per level), but feats? Feats suck. There's like two thousands of them and most have very circumscribed effects. In my dream nu-4e I would expand themes, work the math fixes in the core progression, and scrap the feats to make them more like those in 5e.
>>46430491
Barbarians of Lemuria. While it matters less because of how light the game is, and how easy it is to tweak or improvise, the math of the game isn't particularly tight. Heavy armor can reduce damage to almost nothing so that death only comes with a thousand cuts. From the standpoint of how easy it is to progress through experience, there are good and bad ways to allocate your points during character creation. Etc.
>>46430491
Savage Worlds
Stun-lock where a character spends the entire encounter shaken is the opposite of fun.
Pathfinder/ D&D 3.5
I don't like not being able to do simple and cool acrobatic ect things without having to have the feat for it every time.
Anima:
I agree with most, namely that is arguably the hardest game to learn from zero, or at the very least up there unless you're very well versed in math.
>>46430491
Earthdawn. That postapocalyptic setting, excellent foes, everyone uses magic, the meshing of setting and mechanics, it's awesome.
And then players look at the steps table and they're like, what the fuck is this shit, sure we can't just play pathfinder? It may produce the perfect rng curve you want even taking different-sided dice into account, but by God and St. George is it ugly to look at and use the first few games.
>>46430835
>In my dream nu-4e I would expand themes, work the math fixes in the core progression, and scrap the feats to make them more like those in 5e.
I 100% agree with you. For the life of me, I have no idea why they preserved the 3.X feat system as they did.
Although I might prefer nu-4e feats be a bit less 5e and a bit more Fantasy Craft.
Small feat trees, if at all; and they give you very distinctive abilities on top of typical feat elements--see pic related.
Of course, both are assuming different things about the way the rest of the game is balanced and keyed.
I'm actually pretty bummed out that 4e doesn't have as breezy a content license as 3.X and 5e have. There's a hell of a lot you could do with its core mechanics.
>>46431798
Is that from Fantasy Craft?
>>46432043
It is.
>>46430531
Also going with Exalted 3E, with my complaint being Charm bloat.
>>46430835
Check Strike!
It doesn't have as much content as 4e, but it cuts away basically all the bloat, while retaining much of the variety.
>>46433741
Oh, and just to be in the spirit of the thread:
The layout is fucking terrible, and the out of combat part of the system is anemic.
Baby's first point-buy generic system, I know, but still a great time if you play to its strengths.
It makes some of the best use of the d20 of all the games I've seen attached to that, but the unfortunate reality is that it's a swingy mechanic and it'll always be a swingy mechanic. A lot of the time that's okay, but lower power levels (which I prefer) start edging towards situations where luck outweighs skill by a lot.
Also, I don't know if this is a common complaint but having optimization more or less baked into the system makes for fairly samey characters a lot of the time. I'm running something now where players have 10 * PL character points instead of 15, and that seems to be helping (though I had to out and out tell them that pushing things to the PL limit wasn't needed, as NPCs weren't either)
>>46430581
Eh.... It's the first D&D to be capable of horror because the simplification and MM changes.
>>46434312
Shit forgot to contribute.
RuneQuest 6 is my favorite system... but if you think people choosing a spell or class ability takes a lot of time imagine when tactics are life and death and each attack or party gives a list of 8 possible effects when successful.
>>46434211
The problem with M&M points is that some abilities are so cheap for the ridiculous advantage that they give while others can cost an arm and a leg just to do a kind of cool thing that doesn't matter a whole lot. My experience was always that reducing points doesn't do much to stop the OP stuff but really makes people cut back on the cool flavor powers that cost more than they are worth.
>>46434342
I've seen the "super-cheap OP powers" in action, but never run into any issues with the converse, aside from the massive price tag on Transform because the authors know how much mileage nerds could get out of that sort of thing.
It doesn't hurt that I'm playing a fairly silly game to start, to the point that most powers are flavor first and effect second. But I'll see where things go a few sessions in.
>>46434312
How's 5e any better than any of the old editions for horror?
>>46433741
Already did, and I don't like it for a number of reasons. Thank you anyways.
>>46434433
It isn't, but 5e fans have to cling to something to keep going.
>>46434517
Anything really bad in particular? I have been thinking that I'd just recut the entire thing for home use.
>>46433741
Stop shilling Strike!
Why does /tg/ keep shilling Strike?
>>46434609
Never!You didn't reply to my shilling the last two days. I was starting to feel lonely. PS.: I really need to come up with a stock response for your second line.
Best combat mechanics of any RPG, ever. One of the worst editing jobs I've ever seen in a published game, which makes understanding the ruleset a fucking nightmare.
>>46434527
Spoken like a desperate pathfag
>>46430739
The funny thing about the tone of Risus is that it is all in the aesthetic and the writing. The mechanics do not inherently suggest a lighthearted or humorous game.
In any case, I think I like your best two out of three idea. It could be argued that that method would be better for many narrativist games than the conventional Hit Point mechanic.
>>46435113
Risus's dice mechanics lend themselves to comedy. 1-dice cliches in particular are jokes at a character's expense.
I have variant rules that I use for more serious games:
- Add two dice to all your rolls.
- Your score is the total of the highest 3 dice.
Which moves 1-dice from "butt monkey" to "trained rookie" and puts everyone on the same power level, while high-dice characters are more likely to succeed at everything but not able to do the impossible.
>Fantasy Craft
>Vitality bloat gets pretty bad
>>46437566
Oh and the rulebook layout is complete ass.
This system is by far the most versitile of them all. Hard to get most people to use it though because they think it can only be used in an anime setting.
>>46434595
I don't want to derail the thread, but in general I don't like the way it tries to pass for a generic system, while presentig relatively specific archetypes and powers. The mechanical tightness was one of the aspects I liked in 4e, sure, but I also (mostly) liked the fluff and emerging gameplay. Strike! read, at least for me, as the labor of love of someone who deeply cares for the mechanics but not so much for the story. I didn't try it out so I can't speak for specific issues (i hear that there is something with the swinginess of crits on a d6), so if it works for you great, but I didn't see the heir to 4e that was promised.
>>46435672
Sounds a little like the WaRP system, perhaps you should check it out
D&D 3.5
D&D is shit and i am a bad person
>>46434334
give them a hard time limit in which to choose an effect.
>>46430491
>>46430603
>>46430835
Adding to this, some of the classes were mechanically and thematically neat, but executed horribly. Looking at you, Seeker. Vampire should've been a theme instead of a class with next to no options or support.
It's really hard to get your friends to agree to play Maid RPG.
>needing a system
>2016
Improv called. It says you're over paying/excessively breaking the law for your hobby, bitch!
>>46430835
>the feats to make them more like those in 5e.
5e feats makes my inner Johnny me really sad.
There has to be some middle ground that allows you to explore and come up with interesting builds without all the bloat.
>>46441335
It's been said before, but Fantasy Craft is pretty good when it comes to feats. There's enough for variety, but all of them are very worthwhile.
>>46441472
I'd say RuleofCool's Legend has the best feats of any d20 fantasy game ever.
Then again, in line with the themes of this thread, while I adore Legend it's basically an unfinished game, which lost its main developer mid-project and thus has fuck all GM support and monster generation guidelines.
>>46434731
Yeah. That is a large chunk of what prompted me to start working on a variant of it with some actual editing.
>>46441557
Link to said variant?
Because that is something I would like to take a look at.
>>46430767
Something I wish they would've done is had a Basic D&D 5e like you described and then an AD&D 5e being what we got in case someone wanted more in depth rules and options.
>>46441511
Seems pretty interesting looking at it.
>>46441608
Right now it's nothing but a heap of jotted down notes. As I said: Started. It's far from done.
Or even sure exactly what I'm doing in some parts.
In part because I keep stopping to ponder if there is anything I'd really want changed in the core mechanics besides names. Because come on, having that many damn terms be about water may be fluffy for Wuxia but it's hell on new players to remember the difference between Rivers and Lakes and what Flowing dice is.
Stuff I'm not perfectly happy with (Though they are terrible) as is:
>Minions + Damage/Toughness interaction. (Or at least, how they just don't interact)
>Armour in general
>Elemental Chi (Elemental Chi is just better than non-elemental)
>Secret Arts (More specifically the recovery from them)
>Deeds/Virtues (They really promote making one virtue at 5 and hammering it like a drum)
>>46434433
I meant in the past couple decades, but for some reason forgot to type it.
