Legend: some dude's d20 clone

[Seerow]

The +1/8 levels racial skill bonus also seems way too small. +2/8 levels would have been better, I think. Maybe even +2/6 levels or something.

I'm still reading through the book, but I think you're looking at this from the 3.5 mindset. It seems that Legend has made skill bonuses much rarer to balance save DCs more carefully, getting a +1-4 bonus to that skill is a bigger deal than it is in 3.5 where a bonus less than +20-30 seems like a waste of time.

[Blicero]

The +1/8 levels racial skill bonus also seems way too small. +2/8 levels would have been better, I think. Maybe even +2/6 levels or something.

I'm still reading through the book, but I think you're looking at this from the 3.5 mindset. It seems that Legend has made skill bonuses much rarer to balance save DCs more carefully, getting a +1-4 bonus to that skill is a bigger deal than it is in 3.5 where a bonus less than +20-30 seems like a waste of time.

I'm aware of that, and it's definitely a move in the right direction. I'm just speaking from a simple probabilistic perspective. (And paraphrasing Tome liberally.)

Let's say that you normally have a d20 modifier of +5, and a TN of 16. Without any bonus, you're making 50% of those checks. Now you get a +1 to that roll. This means you now pass 55% of those tests. In other words, out of the next 20 rolls you make, 1 of those rolls would normally be a failure, but now it's a success. One roll. Out of twenty.

Clearly having that +1 is better than not having it. But having it is still barely noticeable. It is entirely likely that anyone who doesn't actually look at the bonused character's attack modifiers would not even realize if a particular modifier were +7 or +8 after any given session. And that's just stupid. For a d20 RNG, you generally want the smallest possible bonus to be +2 or +3. Because those numbers tend to make an actually noticeable difference.

[Username17]

The full buy-in rules are hard to find, because they are in "chapter 11" and the chapters are un-numbered in the index and the numbers exist only as 12 faint red roman numerals hidden in the text. I haven't even found all of them yet, because the index quite clearly lists (but does not number) 11 chapters, but the last one is numbered XII, so apparently there is a secret one in there somewhere. So it took me a while to track down what the rules actually were for "full buy in" multiclassing. And they are actually quite awful. In fact, the wealth-by-level rules are in general quite awful, but the rules and abilities that interact with them exacerbate all their genuinely terrible qualities.

The basic idea is that you still have wealth by level, but these are allocated to you in discrete very large chunks where you get actual level appropriate items every couple of levels rather than getting money and items and upgrades in some sort of continuous way. I can see what they were going for there, the idea is that you have discrete power fall on people rather than handing out gp wondeirng if the player is going to cash everything out to get a ring of blink several levels early or invest in more incremental numeric bullshit or just save it up and have nothing interesting happen at all for the time being. But making it so incredibly chunky really underlines what an incredibly stupid idea wealth by level actually was.

And now we get to "Full Buy In". The idea is that you find less magic items and have more personal power. No, I have no idea how that could possibly work. See, it's not that you get less power from magic items, or that you can't use as many magic items at one time. It's not even that the party finds less magic items. It's that you personally, in a party of 2-5 other adventurers, find less magic items. In exchange for that, you get extra personal power. What the fucking fuck?

They suggest it for one shots. And indeed, that is literally the only place where it is even capable of being parsed. Since the character can jolly well come into the game with less magic items. Once play starts however, it's unenforceable. Nothing actually happens if the FBI character picks up extra swag except that all the other players then feel small in the pants.

And in any case, this entire attempt at a quantized wealth system is wholly incompatible with one of the main design goals of the document: predictability.

Predictability means that if a monster uses a bow in a fight, player characters can expect to find a bow – not a longsword – on the monster’s corpse afterwards.

Nice dig at 4e there, and I approve. But this WBL thing runs counter to that. Because it goes beyond the simple question of killing an enemy archer and having there be an actual bow that the players can pick up - predictability means that powerful characters can do stuff and make money for doing it. If these items exist in the world, players should be able to go get them, and that makes WBL crap fall right apart.

-Username17

[Seerow]

Re: The full buy in thing. I think what the magic item rules represent is how many magic items you can actually bind, not how many you find. So a character can find an artifact at level 1, but couldn't bind it until level 17. Or a high level character could have 20 lesser magic items, but only have 5 binded. Basically it lets the DM get away with putting in as many magic items as he wants without worrying too much about fucking over balance. Similarly a DM could run a campaign with much rarer magic items using the full buy-in rules.

[Koumei]

So, Weaponised. Does this mean that an attack that would normally be 1d6+KOM becomes KOM, or does it become 2xKOM? For instance, if the MC stats up, to pick a random monster, a dickwolf, as an Utter Brute with Rage, Serpent Style and the third Ranger track (FBI), does its unarmed attack, the bite, become "Con mod" (at level 1 that will be 3) or "Double Con mod" (so 6)?

And it looks like the rules for weapons are sort of... it appears there are two different sets of rules, and you use one set or the other, but it doesn't actually say that: [Holdout] weapons are 1d6+KOM, [Special] are... 1d8+KOM or something, unless you use them as two-handers, and two-handed are... I forget.

So a nice, simple "Look, if it's a fucking 1-handed weapon that isn't some easily concealed thing, it's all the same. I don't fucking care about the difference between a guisarme, glaive, carbine-voulge, Swiss Army Polearm or lochaber".

But then it actually goes and lists a whole bunch of weapons, such as the unarmed attack (which is 1d4, apparently without KOM (aside from the Monk changing it from 1d4+KOM to 1d8+KOM), but is also a [Holdout] weapon so should actually be 1d6+KOM), the great axe as 2d6 and so on.

[Prak]

As far as I could tell (and I didn't read through every single weapon), the first part is "here are the three categories" and the second is "various weapons have traits." I think it's a single system, though I suppose there can be a granularity dial between "three levels of weapon damage" and "three levels, plus a bunch of traits."

[JesterZero]

Re: The full buy in thing. I think what the magic item rules represent is how many magic items you can actually bind, not how many you find. So a character can find an artifact at level 1, but couldn't bind it until level 17. Or a high level character could have 20 lesser magic items, but only have 5 binded. Basically it lets the DM get away with putting in as many magic items as he wants without worrying too much about fucking over balance. Similarly a DM could run a campaign with much rarer magic items using the full buy-in rules.

That was my understanding as well. The item allowance tables (or whatever they're called) show where the character gains "slots" for the different tiers of items. Presumably there is some mechanism to swap items out via "attunement" but that never gets explained.

But yeah. Basically standard item track gives you 12 slots and the full buy in gives you an extra track but only 3 slots.

[CatharzGodfoot]

At 18th level, you can still use A Stitch in Time as an immediate action, which means that you can effectively use it as a swift action as well. Which means the blender is good to go.

Looks legit. At 18th, between the tracks and the relic you'd have either:

• 1xStandard, 1xMove, 5xFree, 3xSwift OR
• 1xStandard, 1xMove, 5xFree, 2xImmediate

That's pretty sick. Even more so if you're using the Blaze Bolter like you mentioned.

The thing is, you can take all your swift actions, let your turn end, and then immediately take all of your immediate actions. Which kills all of your swift actions on the next turn, but at that point who cares?

[imperialspectre]

Sorry for the absence; I'm trying to finish off a semester of grad school and haven't been as active on forums over the past couple days.

I also have some Undead Qestions/Issues:
Liches should use KOM for for Netherworld Grasp rather than Int?
Mummy damage reduction is weak relative to other sources of DR. Not sure if this is intentional.
The Undead 6th circle (Heartstopper) should probably only work on [Positive, Healing] effects.
What happens if you trade away your Undead bonus feat with Floating Feat? Do you lose access to all type-specific track abilities?

- Should be KOM. Design artifact from before we had key modifiers.
- Ghoul and Mummy DR are identical and the only other non-Legendary source of actual damage reduction is a consumable item. Explain?
- Good call.
- Floating Feat is going to have to be locked out of racial feats, I think. This has also come up with Dragon.

"Cowering" indicates that a creature loses its Dex bonus. Should this read KDM?
"On Fire" is not a [fire] effect and does not deal [fire] damage. Is this intentional (so that an [acid] ability that sets you [on fire] deals acid damage)? If so, shouldn't the condition be called "Burning" or something else less evocative of flames?
Could fear-causing abilities just add a number to your fear ladder rather than inflicting a specific condition? It seems more clear that way.
"Weapon effects create a new weapon or transmute an existing one; obviously, no two weapon effects can coexist on the same weapon because the second one will replace or override the first one." -- So what happens when I create a weapon with a weapon effect and then transmute it with a weapon effect? Does it just go *poof*?
Does Resistance of the same type from multiple sources stack?

- I could go either way on On Fire - intent was for it to deal fire damage and someone forgot to put that in, but the extra utility might be nice.
- I'll talk to people about the fear ladder. It's actually an interesting idea.
- I would probably rule that you fail to activate the transmuting ability and don't put it on cooldown. Shouldn't require me to rule one way or the other, so we'll decide one way or another and fix it.
- It shouldn't. Needs to be made explicit.

Defensive fighting is mutually exclusive with charging and power attack.
According to the Charge description, you can power attack while charging.
According to the Defensive Fighting description, you can't charge while fighting defensively.
According to the Power Attack description, you can't fight defensively while power attacking.
This all makes sense, but why are the limitations spread out haphazardly over all three descriptions?

We've had a number of instances where a rule was at the top of a set of descriptions, but not in the descriptions, and consequently missed by a bunch of people. So we try to put rules like that in the specific ability descriptions even if it looks "haphazard".

Darkvision sees through magic darkness of 4th circle or lower. Darkness is 2nd circle but the spell description indicates that it foils darkvision.

Yeah, we screwed up.

I'm looking at section XII right now, Legendary Characters. They're not quite balanced within time frames and encounters. Chameleon is ridiculously awesome, and Woldhewn/Indestructible are awesome. But Suave isn't at all useful outside of social encounters and makes you a total boss during social encounters--sacrificing your awesome in combat so as to steal the spotlight during social combat.

Something like Debts Reckoned will dominate in any fight (three outcomes a free action on either player's turn? Yes please.) while puppetmaster is probably only meant for the BBEG, and could literally be the result of a smart guy.

The point of Legendary is to give characters the ability to do things that dramatically alter storylines, not necessarily to alter the parts of storylines that are determined by combat. It's fairly reasonable to load up on tanking or support abilities and go Suave in a Legendary campaign, because doing so means the party has someone who's dedicated to making sure social encounters go the "right" way.

I can't support the idea that a BBEG would always "save up" Debts Reckoned and dump them all at the part of the "quest" involving the fight with the PCs. In my opinion, GMs should strategize for bad guys as if they actually are on a quest of their own, pursuing whatever agenda they're interested in; that's how you create an interesting campaign where it feels like the bad guys actually want something. We're talking about limiting Debts Reckoned uses to 1/encounter while keeping the 3/quest limitation, though. What do you think of that?

Puppet Master is probably better than you're giving it credit for. Intelligence gathering has always been a huge element of D&D-type games, and effectively turning it off means you can manipulate fights in a very serious way.

The more I read this, the more intrigued I get. However, I also get increasingly convinced that Legend really needs a supplementary PDF introducing D&D 3.x players to all the easily-missable ways this differs from SRD stuff.

We should probably do that.

I downloaded this awhile ago. Do they still employ the 'chips' system to add an interesting element to social interactions? I thought that was a good idea but it didn't actually go far enough. I modified it for my own system. Is there still a mention of using tokens or something and playing poker for social situations? That was probably my favorite idea from my read-through months ago.

Edit: Found it, Tokens, that was what it was called. pp.128-130

We're actually set to release an expanded set of rules for token expenditures that should add quite a bit more depth to the system. It'll make it into the final pay-what-you-want PDF, if nothing else.

That being said, the game is an order of magnitude more complex than 3.x and two or three orders of magnitude more complex than 4e. I can't imagine life is very easy for DMs creating monsters and for most players they are going to need some kind of chart to keep track of the various passive abilities, free actions, swift actions, immediate actions, non-action actions, move actions converted to other actions, and finally their standard actions. Most things are encounter abilities, but there are enough non-encounter ones that you need to list these separately.

I haven't spent enough time on 4e to talk intelligently about relative complexity, but I entirely disagree that Legend is relatively more complex than 3.5 (let alone by an order of magnitude). Legend characters, on average, get three abilities (of some kind or other) every two levels, if you count ability score increases and items as "abilities". That's not terribly different from 3.5, as long as you entirely ignore prepared full casters. 3.5 had every action type that Legend does except for the partial move action, as well as full round actions and 1-round actions. 3.5 had multiple sets of rules for recovering spells, depending on your class; more types of durations for spells; many types of ability cooldowns/use limitations.

But all of that is superficial. Once you learn what kinds of actions you have and learn what kinds of abilities you have (not hard unless you're a brand new player starting at level 10 or above), you're actually playing the game, choosing what abilities to use and then using them. And when it comes to gameplay, 3.5 is massively more complex than Legend is. Legend doesn't force you to use opposed rolls, bean-counter durations, pound-for-pound encumbrance rules, or square roots.

(For the record, character creation and leveling is also vastly less complex in Legend. It looks complex because characters have more options, but track choice and skill training only happen once for most characters. Compare to 3.5, where you have to worry about cross-class skills, PrC requirements, and a host of other chargen traps every single time your character levels.)

Combat rounds seem like they are going to take forever as people try to remember everything they can do and whether they have some immunity to damage reduction/negation ability at work or other immediate or non-action ability.

An increase in the options available to the vast majority of Legend characters compared to their 3.5 counterparts is not a bad thing. Being a 3.5 fighter was not fun. But in practice, we've never had a single playtester come back and tell us that combat took forever. When playtesters talk to us about speed of play, the typical response is that combat goes much more quickly than in 3.5 because of simplified/abstracted mechanics and fewer d20 rolls per turn.

That being said, a lot of the abilities feel very much like 4e abilities where everything looks a lot like other things. I can't tell you how many 7th Circle abilities are just "avoid some damage" or "don't be dead." This means it gets the same old 4e criticism of "it seems like a decent combat simulator, but I wouldn't want to tell stories with it."

Track features tend to be combat-oriented because a) most people playing a D&D-type game spend the vast majority of their time killing and looting and b) since that's the case, most characters will want to focus on being good at that. Additionally, just training skills in Legend gets you a lot farther than training skills and getting class features that make the skills better will in 3.5.

Describe a story you would like to tell with 3.5 and I'll tell you how Legend can model it. Some kinds of monsters won't be available yet because the monster book isn't out yet (although you can do a hell of a lot more with Legend than you can with just the PHB), but other than content simply not being public yet I think you'll have a hard time finding stories that Legend doesn't provide a framework for telling.

As for high-level abilities being biased toward survivability (and you're right, almost every core class has a top-tier track feature that provides survivability in some way), this is very intentional. High-level characters in Legend are the closest thing we have to gods, so relatively few stories naturally fit in the level 16+ bracket (although unlike 3.5, you can still tell stories that don't unexpectedly stop at "And the dragon cast Time Stop, the end"). And the one thing that defines near-deific characters is the simple fact that they're very hard to get rid of.

I'm also unsure why so many immunities get handed out when there are few status effect abilities. I mean, even a blanket immunity like Immunity to Mind-Affecting abilities seems like it may never come up.

I wouldn't agree that the game lacks status effects as is; there are a whole lot of them in some tracks, and those tracks are much more widely distributed than in 3.5. I'll give you that some immunities don't see a ton of play time right now (MA effects is a good example), but that's largely because characters built around mind magic are typically bad guys and so some of this content has been held back for the Monster Guide.

Feats are more powerful in general, but you are still placed in the position of choosing flavor options vs. combat options. Some of the feats are also wildly powerful compared to others.

They also neutered the 3.x spell list. Some things were turned into tracks for various classes or just feats, but most were just removed entirely. (Oddly, a few illusion spells were left in with no additional rules to fix that mess.) The tension between encounter-use people who get easy fast healing and spellcasters who are on scene-uses just seems ill-conceived.

The only bona fide "flavor feat" I'm aware of is By Will Sustained, which probably does need to be fixed. I've already argued that "power" is relative because some "powerful" feats are largely redundant to many characters, who therefore benefit much more from feats that might otherwise have a high opportunity cost.

I'm not actually sure what you mean by the "mess" of illusion spells. If you'll expand on that, I can see about fixing the problem. I don't think "neutering" the 3.5 spell list is a bad thing. Finally, the math is fairly good for spell slots assuming the 3-5 encounters per scene that we explicitly recommend as an appropriate number. Our spellcasting classes also have worthwhile things to do with their actions other than spellcasting, which is a fairly big difference from 3.5.

The thing that annoyed me most was that various multi-classing options just don't work well because of various oversights. For example, I was jazzed by both the Undead and Dragon tracks since they had some authentically flavorful bits and you could get them without DM-approval, but I was disappointed when I realized that various abilities don't work because it's impossible to get claws or a bite if you aren't starting as a monster and those are required to use some of the best abilities.

We did make a pretty serious mistake when writing feat prereqs in terms of modeling humanoid characters that get Dragon or Undead through Guild Initiation. However, if you get Dragon or Undead at chargen, you automatically get claws and/or a bite regardless of how your character is fluffed.

Has anyone figured out why Dragon is a recommended 'multiclass' for rangers? They lose the bonus skill point and any attribute bonuses, and get non-synergistic KMs for what? Is this just an attempt to stealth-nerf the biggest badasses in the game?

Dragon with Iron Mage lets you build up your combo meter for Iron Mage while being really good at tanking so that you can afford to power up for a couple rounds.

Woah woah woah woah man. Hold on there. Chill out for just a second. Elves in my games are dirty no-good commie hippies, obviously, but at least they're styled after American hippies. None of that Europe or Celtic crap in here.

Our elves owe more to Medici-era Italy than the Celtic-era British Isles.

Really though, i'm sad to see that most of the work isn't considered open game content.

This is very likely to change in a later version. We'll probably mention that on the website once the change is made.

Now, on to a more formattingrelated concern: I noticed a distinct lack of indices and summary tables. This is kind of to be expected in a work created essentially for shiggles. But, all the same, I would really appreciate things like tables that list and briefly describe all of the feats and magic items, for example.

This is coming soon.

I'm aware of that, and it's definitely a move in the right direction. I'm just speaking from a simple probabilistic perspective. (And paraphrasing Tome liberally.)

Let's say that you normally have a d20 modifier of +5, and a TN of 16. Without any bonus, you're making 50% of those checks. Now you get a +1 to that roll. This means you now pass 55% of those tests. In other words, out of the next 20 rolls you make, 1 of those rolls would normally be a failure, but now it's a success. One roll. Out of twenty.

Clearly having that +1 is better than not having it. But having it is still barely noticeable. It is entirely likely that anyone who doesn't actually look at the bonused character's attack modifiers would not even realize if a particular modifier were +7 or +8 after any given session. And that's just stupid. For a d20 RNG, you generally want the smallest possible bonus to be +2 or +3. Because those numbers tend to make an actually noticeable difference.

I disagree. A +1 bonus on d20 rolls is basically insulting in 3.5 largely because a) there are tons of stacking bonuses in 3.5 and b) so many of those bonuses are or become higher than +1. This takes the entire focus off the RNG and onto a binary question of whether you did the work to stack tons of bonuses and have a super high number or not; you'll either pass Will saves on a 20 or on a 2 or 3 for a whole lot of characters and you either make attack rolls and expect to auto-hit or attack rolls aren't worth making.

In a system where the designers actually pay attention to the RNG, it's not wise to throw around +2 or +3 bonuses because a character who has two such bonuses is tremendously advantaged compared to a character who doesn't have any of them; this creates chargen traps because your system has to be calibrated to expect either one or the other of those. So in a system where people are largely on the RNG one way or the other, people end up in one of two groups - the group that says "Oh awesome, a +1 bonus to attack!" and the group that knows the +1 doesn't often come into play but also knows the implications for the RNG of handing out +2s and +3s at random.

The full buy-in rules are hard to find, because they are in "chapter 11" and the chapters are un-numbered in the index and the numbers exist only as 12 faint red roman numerals hidden in the text. I haven't even found all of them yet, because the index quite clearly lists (but does not number) 11 chapters, but the last one is numbered XII, so apparently there is a secret one in there somewhere.

The ToC is messed up because the "Extra Tracks" section is given a separate chapter but the ToC shows it as a subchapter. Sorry for the confusion.

And now we get to "Full Buy In". The idea is that you find less magic items and have more personal power. No, I have no idea how that could possibly work. See, it's not that you get less power from magic items, or that you can't use as many magic items at one time. It's not even that the party finds less magic items. It's that you personally, in a party of 2-5 other adventurers, find less magic items. In exchange for that, you get extra personal power. What the fucking fuck?

I'm answering this out of order because it appears to be the key misunderstanding here. The item chart doesn't tell you how many items you find/start out with (although it's a minimum for that), it tells you how many items you're capable of using. This is explained on page 20 in the character generation rules, but obviously should have been duplicated in the economy chapter. I'm sorry for the misunderstanding.

In fact, the wealth-by-level rules are in general quite awful, but the rules and abilities that interact with them exacerbate all their genuinely terrible qualities.

The basic idea is that you still have wealth by level, but these are allocated to you in discrete very large chunks where you get actual level appropriate items every couple of levels rather than getting money and items and upgrades in some sort of continuous way. I can see what they were going for there, the idea is that you have discrete power fall on people rather than handing out gp wondeirng if the player is going to cash everything out to get a ring of blink several levels early or invest in more incremental numeric bullshit or just save it up and have nothing interesting happen at all for the time being. But making it so incredibly chunky really underlines what an incredibly stupid idea wealth by level actually was.

Assuming a system where player characters have a given number of "slots" for magic items, as is the case in Legend, what other options do you recommend to make a better economy system that doesn't depend on WBL?

Nice dig at 4e there, and I approve. But this WBL thing runs counter to that. Because it goes beyond the simple question of killing an enemy archer and having there be an actual bow that the players can pick up - predictability means that powerful characters can do stuff and make money for doing it. If these items exist in the world, players should be able to go get them, and that makes WBL crap fall right apart.

The key for us is that items aren't actually tied to financial wealth, because you can run a bank while not having enough personal mojo to use an artifact effectively. (GMs can totally give players an artifact at 1st level, and a really cool GM will hack out a little bit of the artifact's power equivalent to what you'd get from a Lesser Item and give that to the player who carries the artifact around, but Frodo can't pick up the Ring of Power and start ordering armies around. Yes, rules for this are coming out in the near future.) This also largely solves the problem that you talked about in the Book of Gears, because players have no mechanical incentive for stripping gold and gems off of temples and selling them for a +5 vorpal sword. They might still strip gold and gems off of temples, because most player characters are just that way, but the system doesn't actually encourage them to do so.

So, Weaponised. Does this mean that an attack that would normally be 1d6+KOM becomes KOM, or does it become 2xKOM? For instance, if the MC stats up, to pick a random monster, a dickwolf, as an Utter Brute with Rage, Serpent Style and the third Ranger track (FBI), does its unarmed attack, the bite, become "Con mod" (at level 1 that will be 3) or "Double Con mod" (so 6)?

2xKOM. This feat exists largely for characters that prefer to use crappy weapons or unarmed attacks.

And it looks like the rules for weapons are sort of... it appears there are two different sets of rules, and you use one set or the other, but it doesn't actually say that: [Holdout] weapons are 1d6+KOM, [Special] are... 1d8+KOM or something, unless you use them as two-handers, and two-handed are... I forget.

So a nice, simple "Look, if it's a fucking 1-handed weapon that isn't some easily concealed thing, it's all the same. I don't fucking care about the difference between a guisarme, glaive, carbine-voulge, Swiss Army Polearm or lochaber".

But then it actually goes and lists a whole bunch of weapons, such as the unarmed attack (which is 1d4, apparently without KOM (aside from the Monk changing it from 1d4+KOM to 1d8+KOM), but is also a [Holdout] weapon so should actually be 1d6+KOM), the great axe as 2d6 and so on.

It's actually all the same system, but could be better explained. You have the three weapon categories, then a bunch of weapon descriptions that tell you what a weapon does mechanically in that system. That way if someone isn't bright enough to say "herp derp guess a greataxe is probably a [Main] weapon" you have relevant text for how that actually works. This also gives you range and reloading time for ranged weapons, which is sometimes relevant if you're trying to determine whether you're a gunslinger or sniper.

The thing is, you can take all your swift actions, let your turn end, and then immediately take all of your immediate actions. Which kills all of your swift actions on the next turn, but at that point who cares?

The bad guy's friends, possibly, if they're exercising enough tactical discipline to not all be caught in a Blaze Bolter's AoE. Which is likely when you're talking about a bunch of demigods, at least some of whom likely have an effective range of [Long] or [Extreme] with their weapon of choice.

It's a pretty good build, it's just that relying on a one-turn nova to kill everyone on the opposing team is never really your best bet. I'd hold at least one immediate action just to be safe, myself.

[...You Lost Me]

imperial, my complain against Puppetmaster wasn't that info-gathering was a big deal, but that you can be a puppetmaster by just being smart.

If I'm bright enough to tell other people to do stuff for me, and help from the background, I will get the same benefits as Puppetmaster sans the legendary ability. It's replicatable by a smart guy, which means it's not worth much as an ability. The power to change any roll to what you want as an Immediate Action is definitely not something a character can do of their own volition, and is thus worth more. Hence, an example of the imbalance of Legendary abilities. I can give you more examples if you want.

[Avoraciopoctules]

That being said, a lot of the abilities feel very much like 4e abilities where everything looks a lot like other things. I can't tell you how many 7th Circle abilities are just "avoid some damage" or "don't be dead." This means it gets the same old 4e criticism of "it seems like a decent combat simulator, but I wouldn't want to tell stories with it."

Track features tend to be combat-oriented because a) most people playing a D&D-type game spend the vast majority of their time killing and looting and b) since that's the case, most characters will want to focus on being good at that. Additionally, just training skills in Legend gets you a lot farther than training skills and getting class features that make the skills better will in 3.5.

Describe a story you would like to tell with 3.5 and I'll tell you how Legend can model it. Some kinds of monsters won't be available yet because the monster book isn't out yet (although you can do a hell of a lot more with Legend than you can with just the PHB), but other than content simply not being public yet I think you'll have a hard time finding stories that Legend doesn't provide a framework for telling.

- A party of adventurers delve into the ruins beneath an obsidian ziggurat in a land of perpetual night, eventually finding the dark magic they need to raise an army of the dead, which they then use to conquer the oppressive kingdom responsible for nasty things happening to all their families a decade or so ago.

- After finally putting down a cabal of evil wizards, the Eastern Empire has been plagued with bad weather, leading to famine. This is suspected to be the result of the cabal's death curse. The conditions are bad enough that the Empire is facing growing pressure to invade its neighbors, take their lands, and leave their own cursed territory behind. The neighbors in question recruit agents to find out more about the situation and fix the curse if possible. One group eventually infiltrates the Imperial Security Department far enough to make a harrowing discovery. It turns out that the death curse is mostly a lie, and the Empire's own government is using magic to give itself an excuse for a war of expansion. The party of agents that discovers this must find out a way to turn things around with a minimum of misery on all sides.

- A band of retired soldiers, fallen on hard times, answer a village's request for protection from bandits. Over the course of several weeks, they teach the village to better defend itself, and a number of philosophical lessons are learned on each side. The story culminates in a giant battle when 40 bandits attack the village and the soldiers lead a mostly successful defense, securing the village's future.

[Username17]

I'm answering this out of order because it appears to be the key misunderstanding here. The item chart doesn't tell you how many items you find/start out with (although it's a minimum for that), it tells you how many items you're capable of using. This is explained on page 20 in the character generation rules, but obviously should have been duplicated in the economy chapter. I'm sorry for the misunderstanding.

Uh... OK. I was under the impression that the number of items you were attuned only referred to the items that actually mentioned that you were attuned to them, which is a very small number of the listed items that are not places (and indeed is limited to such "items" as "your fist inexplicably turned to stone which isn't even a fucking object so much as an event"). If it works some other way, you should probably say that anywhere in the document.

Assuming a system where player characters have a given number of "slots" for magic items, as is the case in Legend, what other options do you recommend to make a better economy system that doesn't depend on WBL?

Well, that would depend largely on how the item slots worked, because right now there are no rules for them. How much time does it take to empty a slot? To fill one? To replace one item with another in a slot? These are really fucking important, and the rules don't say at all. Secondly, you have the equally incoherent section on consumables. People "normally" get three consumables at the start of a quest and find a new one for each player once every six encounters or so (so a drop rate of about one per encounter for a six person party). But... what actually happens if you just rob the alchemist guild and make off with 50 healing potions? I mean other than the thing where any opponent who can't dish out more than half your health in a round can't make any progress against you for 50 rounds?

If you use an item that you haven't bound, what the fuck happens? Does a blaze bolter not shoot if it isn't bound, or does it still shoot fire but doesn't give you the to-hit bonus? Legend Lore is available quite late in the game, how to players even decide whether they want to bind nondescript magical belts if they can't try them out without binding them?

Basically, very few items seem to actually have been written under the assumption that items were attuned at all. The map of the master strategist says that it doesn't work at all to someone who hasn't attuned it, but does an earthsmasher pickaxe not cut stone to an unattuned user? Ironmountain Plate only grants "you" +1 hit point per level, if it's unattuned it's still badass armor, right?

And now we get into stuff that lets you choose effects when you attune them. Like Worry Beads. You get a trained skill of your choice. If you need a different trained skill, you can sell it to a party member for a copper piece and buy it back for a silver coin, right? If not, why not? How long would that take?

And now let's talk about how almost none of the items in the section look like they were written with the benefit of having actually read the sections of the rules that they refer to. For example: An Old Thread gives you 4 Ankh Consumables per quest, but you can only use Ankh Consumables twice per quest.

Basically: making a system where people have a fundamentally limited number of magic items that they can use requires you to actually address how the physics of that are supposed to work. And you didn't do that. So your item system is, as printed, not usable. Keep in mind, K and I made a similar system years ago for d20 proper in the Tomes, where we had an "eight item limit". It required a whole bunch of rules about attunement times and deattunement times that you just don't have. And we abandoned the project before we got working rules for consumable items.

Believe me: we really did experiment with something almost exactly like what you have (an assumed rate of consumable acquisition and open floodgates on item use) - it turns out that does not work at all. Because in actual play most people like to save their consumables and then nova them off when they think the campaign is about to end.

-Username17

[K]

That being said, the game is an order of magnitude more complex than 3.x and two or three orders of magnitude more complex than 4e. I can't imagine life is very easy for DMs creating monsters and for most players they are going to need some kind of chart to keep track of the various passive abilities, free actions, swift actions, immediate actions, non-action actions, move actions converted to other actions, and finally their standard actions. Most things are encounter abilities, but there are enough non-encounter ones that you need to list these separately.

I haven't spent enough time on 4e to talk intelligently about relative complexity, but I entirely disagree that Legend is relatively more complex than 3.5 (let alone by an order of magnitude). Legend characters, on average, get three abilities (of some kind or other) every two levels, if you count ability score increases and items as "abilities". That's not terribly different from 3.5, as long as you entirely ignore prepared full casters. 3.5 had every action type that Legend does except for the partial move action, as well as full round actions and 1-round actions. 3.5 had multiple sets of rules for recovering spells, depending on your class; more types of durations for spells; many types of ability cooldowns/use limitations.

Legend commonly gives hands out swifts, free action abilities, non-actions, moves converted to other things, and immediates. Then you've got recharges on per rounds, per encounters, per scenes, per quests, and tokens of various sorts. That's a whole lot of fiddly other stuff on top of what 3.x was already working with and Legend does it far more often than 3.x ever did (I mean, how many characters in 3,x were really using their immediate actions? Correct answer: almost none).

All the bean-counting on durations is now in the tracks and everyone is doing it. It's worse than when it was just the spells.

Now, I could see people not seeing the complexity if they had been avoiding those options, but that makes me wonder if they were unconsciously avoiding them because of the complexity and headache. I think the fact that the Den immediately jumped on the various action-economy abuse should be a hint of what serious optimizers are going to do.

Chargen traps start at 1st level since you need to do a level-by-level analysis to make sure all of your options work properly at all levels and you meet feat prereqs, a situation that makes Legend on par with 3.x on that front.

The fact that equipment has been ignored is also not a strength. It's going to lead the DM to auditing the PCs' character sheets for overequipping instead of the player keeping a tally and the DM is going to have to invent an economy and item list out of whole cloth. Not good.

Combat rounds seem like they are going to take forever as people try to remember everything they can do and whether they have some immunity to damage reduction/negation ability at work or other immediate or non-action ability.

An increase in the options available to the vast majority of Legend characters compared to their 3.5 counterparts is not a bad thing. Being a 3.5 fighter was not fun. But in practice, we've never had a single playtester come back and tell us that combat took forever. When playtesters talk to us about speed of play, the typical response is that combat goes much more quickly than in 3.5 because of simplified/abstracted mechanics and fewer d20 rolls per turn.

Lots of people weren't bored with 3.x fighters. The simplicity was the main selling point for an entire market of people.

That being said, a 10th level basic fighting guy with no spellcasting is going to have between 20-60 individual effects either as actions or passive abilities. Enemies and other PCs are going to have the same and I don't even know what kind of tables I would need to keep track of all the potential options in combat using different recharge mechanics and different action types.

I won't even get into how bad things can get when various spells are used and tracks that have ally-directed effects.

As for high-level abilities being biased toward survivability (and you're right, almost every core class has a top-tier track feature that provides survivability in some way), this is very intentional. High-level characters in Legend are the closest thing we have to gods, so relatively few stories naturally fit in the level 16+ bracket (although unlike 3.5, you can still tell stories that don't unexpectedly stop at "And the dragon cast Time Stop, the end"). And the one thing that defines near-deific characters is the simple fact that they're very hard to get rid of.

You missed the point.

The seventh circle abilities are indistinguishable from each other. If you gave me a test right now, I'd be able to name exactly one correctly (Dragon).

Frankly, a lot of the abilities feel the same since they hand out the same things in slightly different ways and often aren't themed at all. Naked mechanics may be playable, but they are also tedious.

The only bona fide "flavor feat" I'm aware of is By Will Sustained, which probably does need to be fixed. I've already argued that "power" is relative because some "powerful" feats are largely redundant to many characters, who therefore benefit much more from feats that might otherwise have a high opportunity cost.

There are at least six flavor feats in the General Feats section. As an exercise, try to figure out which ones I am talking about. (I won't point out how many other flavor feats are in the other feat sections.)

The thing that annoyed me most was that various multi-classing options just don't work well because of various oversights. For example, I was jazzed by both the Undead and Dragon tracks since they had some authentically flavorful bits and you could get them without DM-approval, but I was disappointed when I realized that various abilities don't work because it's impossible to get claws or a bite if you aren't starting as a monster and those are required to use some of the best abilities.

We did make a pretty serious mistake when writing feat prereqs in terms of modeling humanoid characters that get Dragon or Undead through Guild Initiation. However, if you get Dragon or Undead at chargen, you automatically get claws and/or a bite regardless of how your character is fluffed.

The problem is that being a monster requires "group approval." It also introduces a separate character creation process and other nonsense that DMs are not going to want to deal with.

The multi-classing is the best part of the system, so fixing the issues with it is suggested. I mean, people will do full-buy in to get a racial track and avoid the potential for not getting good magic item because the racial tracks are flavored in a way that the class tracks and item just aren't.

This means that various ways combine tracks needs to be greatly streamlined if you don't want to be constantly fielding questions.

Heck, Shamans are only good because they can potentially get a racial track.

[Username17]

When K and I were working on forcing item slots into 3e we identified several key problem areas. We even gave them names:

The Yeager / Nodwick Problem

Yeager is a mighty warrior. Nodwick is a guy that Yeagar hires to carry his shit. Any item that provides equal benefit (or more benefit) when carried by Nodwick instead of Yeager is essentially slotless. No matter how tyrannical you are with item slots on one character, the fact is that it is impractical to keep people from hiring hangers on to follow them around with golf bags. And so it is that any item that benefits the party when held by the caddy breaks your item system.

Examples: The Map of the Master Strategist and the Earthsmasher Pickaxe are essentially useless in combat and have their utility logistically, and can be attuned apparently by 1st level characters even if they are FBI characters. So why would anyone bind one when they can hire a peasant to follow the party around and use those items on the party's behalf?

The Crystal Ball Problem

The main example of the Crystal Ball Problem is of course, the Crystal Ball itself. It does its main trick from home and during downtime. That makes it essentially slotless if the amount of downtime you have on your hands is sufficient to empty a slot for it and refill it with an adventuring item before going back into the dungeon.

Examples: Crystal Balls of course, but also basically every single thing that gives you a downtime ability, from Legend Lore to bonus skills.

The Intra-Party Exchange

The reality is that players aren't stupid, and they are willing to trade items around if that is in any way advantageous. So an item that heals the wearer will actually get passed around to heal the entire party, an item that gives a bonus or decision on being found will do that constantly as the players transfer ownership between each other. And any item that produces an effect for the user that lasts longer than it takes to bind the item in the first place (for example: by casting a spell on their behalf), will make a slow circuit around the party in order to maximize that benefit.

Now beyond that there's the harsh reality that Legend basically doesn't even have an item system to critique - it's simply at the "random notes on a cocktail napkin" stage. It just has a simple set of guidelines for starting equipment at various levels, which is enough to playtest encounters at higher levels, but not enough to even consider running a real campaign. There are no usable guidelines for how often items are found, what items are found, how items are made, what input different people at the table have on what items go where, who gets items, the degree to which items can be recovered, or who can use what items. It's not even that the rules are unclear or that they are contradictory, it's that they just don't fucking exist.

I mean for fuck's sake: I kill a dude who has a stone fist, can I get that stone fist? I don't know. It's an item somehow, so I think maybe it's transferable somehow, but there isn't even a bit of flavor text to indicate how that might be done or how long it would take.

So really the point you are right now is that you have some brain storming ideas for some items you'd like to have in your game and a rough schedule of how many items you want people to have. But some of the things that you'd like to have items doing are straight up incompatible with the concept of limited item slots, and you don't have even a hint about how you'd like to go about using or enforcing item slots in an actual campaign.

-Username17

[Solo]

(I mean, how many characters in 3,x were really using their immediate actions? Correct answer: almost none).

There were quite a lot of spells and ToB maneuvers that used immediate actions.

[K]

(I mean, how many characters in 3,x were really using their immediate actions? Correct answer: almost none).

There were quite a lot of spells and ToB maneuvers that used immediate actions.

Translation: almost no immediate actions were ever used.

The immediate action spells were gimmicky and weird and not as good as existing spells, so they were never used. Aside from board-builds that were proofs for very action economy abuse, you never even heard about them.

Tome of Battle was much the same: gimmicky and weird and never used. That was actually a sad thing since it offered better fighting for fighting guys than existing options.

I suspect the additional complexity of ToB was what kept it from being used. For some reason, fighting guy players tend to like simple systems.

[Aryxbez]

Tome of Battle was much the same: gimmicky and weird and never used. That was actually a sad thing since it offered better fighting for fighting guys than existing options.

I suspect the additional complexity of ToB was what kept it from being used. For some reason, fighting guy players tend to like simple systems.

Agreed that it was an actually quite interesting set of options, but the complexity I don't think is why the majority were deterred from it. Instead, that most people were "so" used to crap-fighter land, that they found the options overpowered, and its styling otherwise "too anime", as idiotic as it was. Most people don't realize, that the level ranges, are actual power levels, and thus overtime you're supposed to get superpowers that do more and more superhuman things.

That's part of what I like about this RPG, it knows and understands that high level fighters have jump induced Flight (or climbing?). Part of what I heard, is that flight is abstracted to a degree? Yet, with such abstraction, and fact admit to using grids like with Reach, wonder how that actually works out in a combat. Having battles move all around, and wider fields in an encounter I would see as a good thing, but otherwise seems like a odd mix, that one or other needs to be defined more.

[Koumei]

So, for the creators, some things that should probably happen reasonably soon:
[*]Clarifying (in the document itself) the various things we've brought up here (because plenty of other people would presumably get confused as well)
[*]Rules on attuning magic items, how unattuned items function, how often people should be finding various things - maybe even a random item chart.
[*]Making the "Changes from D&D" document

Stuff that I'd like to see:
[*]Some kind of list of basic monsters or animals for the MC to use (though there's the monster manual soon, I suppose) - at the moment, every single foe has to be made with class levels (it doesn't take long for low-level ones, granted, but low level is where you actually want giant rats and similar shit)
[*]Even just one sidebar on making NPCs as "weaker than level 1" (so there can be EL -1 foes for level 1 parties - presumably something like "weaker statline, only 1-2 tracks even with FBI, and does not get the double HP")
[*]Just more options - making the various status effects or non-physical damage types crop up more so the immunities and resistances are more relevant, things that let the tracks/classes feel more different, etc.

[OgreBattle]

I like the idea of picking Class tracks.

It's rather difficult to read at points. The flavor text isn't very engaging for me either. Some of the artwork is quite solid (say the Barbarian and Paladin), but others really need work (the Ranger's boring look made me skip over that section on my initial run through). None of the illustrated classes are characters I'd pick for a game. I figure you're going for an 'alternative' look (plate armored barbarian, paladin looks like a black guard, a tiny monk, etc.) but it's nice to have at least one heroic looking (not deformed) guy with a melee weapon around.

I suggest you add small, thumbnail sized illustrations for the different Circle powers. It helps a lot in selling a class's abilities in a quick to recognize way. The current black and white illustrations you have stuck on the side look, well, stuck on the side last minute. Put them in the same columns as the text. Flavor illustration is Just As Important as the text so treat it so.

There's a lot of tokens and whatever to keep track of. Right now this feels like 3.X with the worse parts of 4e added on (and none of the advantages). It reads like an engrossing videogame, but all those marks and calculations are too clunky for the tabletop.

[Solo]

(I mean, how many characters in 3,x were really using their immediate actions? Correct answer: almost none).

There were quite a lot of spells and ToB maneuvers that used immediate actions.

Translation: almost no immediate actions were ever used.

The immediate action spells were gimmicky and weird and not as good as existing spells, so they were never used. Aside from board-builds that were proofs for very action economy abuse, you never even heard about them.

Never even heard about them.

[K]

There were quite a lot of spells and ToB maneuvers that used immediate actions.

Translation: almost no immediate actions were ever used.

The immediate action spells were gimmicky and weird and not as good as existing spells, so they were never used. Aside from board-builds that were proofs for very action economy abuse, you never even heard about them.

Never even heard about them.

You know, I've played a lot of DnD, and I've never seen anyone use Feather Fall in a game.

I've never even heard of someone using it.

[Dr_Noface]

Man, I found a ring of feather fall in a game once. All I did after that was find any excuse to use it. I'd climb trees just to fall off them. If the airship was taking too long to dock, I'd hop over the side. I didn't give a fuck.

[hogarth]

Man, I found a ring of feather fall in a game once. All I did after that was find any excuse to use it. I'd climb trees just to fall off them. If the airship was taking too long to dock, I'd hop over the side. I didn't give a fuck.

I have a character with 1 level of sorcerer who has Feather Fall as a known spell (it's one of the few level 1 spells that don't have a somatic component). That's pretty much what I use it for -- quick descents.

[Username17]

The old Ring of Featherfall has seen a lot of use. But last I checked, that thing was just continuous and didn't use your actions (Immediate or otherwise) at all.

-Username17

[hogarth]

The old Ring of Featherfall has seen a lot of use. But last I checked, that thing was just continuous and didn't use your actions (Immediate or otherwise) at all.

It's use-activated. But it still doesn't use an action.