What's the best d100-based fantasy game?
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What's the best d100-based fantasy game?
What's the best d100-based fantasy game out there right now? Mythras is certainly the cheapest in print (and that comes with a PDF), but is it the most robust/well-crafted? Lyonesse (the new Jack Vance RPG) looks very, very, sexy (also from The Design Mechanism). And I've already bought the new English edition of Aquelarre. Help!
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Re: What's the best d100-based fantasy game?
I don't think there's a lot of support for d100 based systems here. First off, roll under tends to be bad, especially if you're talking degrees of success. Adding your skill rank to your roll against a TN of 100 is mathematically the same, but makes degrees of success much easier. Roll low is seen as deliberately confusing.jdrakeh wrote:What's the best d100-based fantasy game out there right now? Mythras is certainly the cheapest in print (and that comes with a PDF), but is it the most robust/well-crafted? Lyonesse (the new Jack Vance RPG) looks very, very, sexy (also from The Design Mechanism). And I've already bought the new English edition of Aquelarre. Help!
Secondly, the degree of difference between a +32% and a +33% is so minute it may never come up in play. You'd expect the difference to come up once in 100 rolls. Monkey brains are bad with probabilities generally; trying to divide them up so finely that a difference is hard to see doesn't really make sense.
Thirdly, they tend to encourage a 'fail parade'. I'm playing one game of Warhammer 40k which uses roll under; Space Marines are the 'best of the best', and a really good ability is 85%. That means under normal circumstances, I miss a 'normal shot' 1/6 times. If circumstances are less than ideal, I could miss more often than I hit. The system tends not to reinforce the fluff.
Specific systems may have additional problems based on their implementation, attribute costing, etc.
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- angelfromanotherpin
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d100-based fantasy games are almost entirely represented by: BRP (and its derivatives including Runequest/Mythras/Lyonesse), Rolemaster (and its derivatives), and Warhammer Fantasy (and it's derivatives). None of these are good and asking which one is the best is like asking what kind of gravel is best in your sandwich - there might be a kind that's least bad, but the effort spent figuring out the fine distinctions is absolutely not worth it.
The den hates d100 games, because everyone here faps to big numbers. And by big numbers, I mean they can only imagine a task resolution system in which challenges must be scaled from "brushing your teeth" to "hitting a god in the face with an explosive". It's incredibly tedious, considering the efforts made by these members to design systems and settings that fit inside their preferred rng, but you'll get use to it unless you came here to troll or schill.
Lyonesse is a beautiful looking production, and Mythras has done wonders to fix the parts of RuneQuest/d100 that the denners here would have actually appreciated and exploit if they could shut the fuck up about dice pools long enough to appreciate it.
That said, I am a huge fan of HarnWorld myself.
Lyonesse is a beautiful looking production, and Mythras has done wonders to fix the parts of RuneQuest/d100 that the denners here would have actually appreciated and exploit if they could shut the fuck up about dice pools long enough to appreciate it.
That said, I am a huge fan of HarnWorld myself.
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I actually looked at Mythras before mentioning it by name as a thing that was bad. I did not see any meaningful improvements. I am genuinely curious what fixes you're referring to.Harshax wrote:Lyonesse is a beautiful looking production, and Mythras has done wonders to fix the parts of RuneQuest/d100 that the denners here would have actually appreciated and exploit if they could shut the fuck up about dice pools long enough to appreciate it.
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I mean, you're not wrong.Harshax wrote:The den hates d100 games, because everyone here faps to big numbers. And by big numbers, I mean they can only imagine a task resolution system in which challenges must be scaled from "brushing your teeth" to "hitting a god in the face with an explosive". It's incredibly tedious, considering the efforts made by these members to design systems and settings that fit inside their preferred rng, but you'll get use to it unless you came here to troll or schill.
Lyonesse is a beautiful looking production, and Mythras has done wonders to fix the parts of RuneQuest/d100 that the denners here would have actually appreciated and exploit if they could shut the fuck up about dice pools long enough to appreciate it.
That said, I am a huge fan of HarnWorld myself.
The Den does a lot of armchair game design, griping about how bad all the systems are.
But when a game comes along, we tend to go with what's on offer, albeit usually with some more rigorous houseruling than other tables.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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To be fair, how often do people get the luxury of turning down game offers? No games are better than bad games, but it's hard to realize that a game's going to be bad until you play it. I would have to really hate a system to just not play it at all. Even with games I don't like, I can still fuck around and have fun.
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I thought this same thing - TGD shat all over DungeonWorld, but when a game came my way (rare) that I could play and not GM (rarer), I said "why not?". I had all of the den's feedback but didn't have any first-hand knowledge. Well...there's a reason TGD doesn't like PbTA games. Sure I had a good time role-playing and all that, but the game itself sucks - there was just no game there. I had to experience it for myself.The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:To be fair, how often do people get the luxury of turning down game offers? No games are better than bad games, but it's hard to realize that a game's going to be bad until you play it. I would have to really hate a system to just not play it at all. Even with games I don't like, I can still fuck around and have fun.
Last edited by phlapjackage on Wed May 06, 2020 8:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
Koumei: and if I wanted that, I'd take some mescaline and run into the park after watching a documentary about wasps.
PhoneLobster: DM : Mr Monkey doesn't like it. Eldritch : Mr Monkey can do what he is god damn told.
MGuy: The point is to normalize 'my' point of view. How the fuck do you think civil rights occurred? You think things got this way because people sat down and fucking waited for public opinion to change?
PhoneLobster: DM : Mr Monkey doesn't like it. Eldritch : Mr Monkey can do what he is god damn told.
MGuy: The point is to normalize 'my' point of view. How the fuck do you think civil rights occurred? You think things got this way because people sat down and fucking waited for public opinion to change?
I took a look at the Mythras free rules, and there were some obvious headaches. No ToC or index. Multipliers applied to your skills whenever you're not doing something at the base difficulty mean you really need a spreadsheet to figure those in advance, and that all goes out the window if you ever fight someone with 102% skill (which seems quite possible if not at character creation.) Roll under where the tiebreaker will often be the highest successful roll (and a critical success is really low) is counterintuitive. Since difficulty modifiers don't interact (just take the worst) you'll get some silly situations.
That said, I've seen worse systems including my last brush with Runequest many years ago.
That said, I've seen worse systems including my last brush with Runequest many years ago.
For starters ...angelfromanotherpin wrote:I actually looked at Mythras before mentioning it by name as a thing that was bad. I did not see any meaningful improvements. I am genuinely curious what fixes you're referring to.Harshax wrote:Lyonesse is a beautiful looking production, and Mythras has done wonders to fix the parts of RuneQuest/d100 that the denners here would have actually appreciated and exploit if they could shut the fuck up about dice pools long enough to appreciate it.
If you played a lot of RuneQuest, you knew that the POW economy; the fuel for all magic and effects in the game; had no mortal limit. People who understood the limitations of the game exploited the inherent flaws in the game mechanics to reach triple digits and could cast spells that lasted thousands of years and gave you bonuses that quickly fell off the rng.
Mythras made the use of POW/Magic Points fit inside the rng of other attributes. Spells cost 1 - 3 points, which is a lot if the average human has 11.
Back when PbtA was the new hotness, there was precisely one person I'd trust to run it and not drape a giant GM cock all over our faces. The number has increased these days, but I feel like that has a lot to do with the number of female-identifying and afab gamers I know these days. GM Dick Waving seems to, primarily, be a symptom of toxic masculinity.phlapjackage wrote:I thought this same thing - TGD shat all over DungeonWorld, but when a game came my way (rare) that I could play and not GM (rarer), I said "why not?". I had all of the den's feedback but didn't have any first-hand knowledge. Well...there's a reason TGD doesn't like PbTA games. Sure I had a good time role-playing and all that, but the game itself sucks - there was just no game there. I had to experience it for myself.The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:To be fair, how often do people get the luxury of turning down game offers? No games are better than bad games, but it's hard to realize that a game's going to be bad until you play it. I would have to really hate a system to just not play it at all. Even with games I don't like, I can still fuck around and have fun.
Oh, definitely. Towards the end of the time I played Runequest, I was getting True Tap Power* on every character I could.Harshax wrote:For starters ...angelfromanotherpin wrote:I actually looked at Mythras before mentioning it by name as a thing that was bad. I did not see any meaningful improvements. I am genuinely curious what fixes you're referring to.Harshax wrote:Lyonesse is a beautiful looking production, and Mythras has done wonders to fix the parts of RuneQuest/d100 that the denners here would have actually appreciated and exploit if they could shut the fuck up about dice pools long enough to appreciate it.
If you played a lot of RuneQuest, you knew that the POW economy; the fuel for all magic and effects in the game; had no mortal limit. People who understood the limitations of the game exploited the inherent flaws in the game mechanics to reach triple digits and could cast spells that lasted thousands of years and gave you bonuses that quickly fell off the rng.
Mythras made the use of POW/Magic Points fit inside the rng of other attributes. Spells cost 1 - 3 points, which is a lot if the average human has 11.
*Runequest has the spell Tap (Attribute), it lets you drain points from a target and add them to yourself. Because Power is such an incredibly, well, powerful, and important stat for magic users, when you use it to tap Power, you get magic points, instead, at least with the GM that ran for me. But there was a version that gave you points of power, and the "cost" was pretty much entirely narrative/conflict based. It was an "EVIL" power, so if you were caught using it, it would create problems for you. I had one character, an artificer, who bought a ton of chickens to drain for Power and use to enchant items (which required investing points of Power)
Last edited by Prak on Wed May 06, 2020 12:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Runequest and it's derivatives
Are beloved classics of the genre, but that is mostly a triumph of interesting settings+a rules set that facilitates rules light play.
Rolemaster
It is a lot of work to make characters. These characters are very fragile and incompetent at low levels and when they do become good at stuff they tend to become very powerful in a way that doesn't mimic anything I have ever seen outside of Rolemaster. Meanwhile they are still very fragile and incompetent outside of their area's of expertise.
Warhammer Fantasy
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd edition actually has rules that fit the Warhammer setting assumptions rather well. So yes assuming you want to play in the Warhammer world, or a similar setting like Aventuria. I think that is a good rules set. I think 1st and 4th have bigger problems. And I have never played Zweihander or 3rd edition.
Are beloved classics of the genre, but that is mostly a triumph of interesting settings+a rules set that facilitates rules light play.
Rolemaster
It is a lot of work to make characters. These characters are very fragile and incompetent at low levels and when they do become good at stuff they tend to become very powerful in a way that doesn't mimic anything I have ever seen outside of Rolemaster. Meanwhile they are still very fragile and incompetent outside of their area's of expertise.
Warhammer Fantasy
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd edition actually has rules that fit the Warhammer setting assumptions rather well. So yes assuming you want to play in the Warhammer world, or a similar setting like Aventuria. I think that is a good rules set. I think 1st and 4th have bigger problems. And I have never played Zweihander or 3rd edition.
Last edited by Daniel on Thu May 07, 2020 8:48 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Warhammer gets a lot of love, but it is a horrible system, because you have to have some understanding of how the rules were actually used in 1E. For example, Warhammer never explicitly explains how characters can do anything with skills that start at 20%. If you listen the 1E grognards who were actively part of the community and ran published adventures, you would know that modules often stated that if you had a 20% competency is catching a rat, you didn't have to roll to catch a rat.
I've owned 1E for a long time. It was just fun to look at and I enjoyed have this silly system, unplayed, on my bookshelf for a long time. But how character competencies and difficulties were described led me to post a screed on the Black Industry forums in the 2E days, where I insisted that DCs should be described and rates as Trivial (+70%) to Very Hard, which is really just terrible task resolution design.
I've owned 1E for a long time. It was just fun to look at and I enjoyed have this silly system, unplayed, on my bookshelf for a long time. But how character competencies and difficulties were described led me to post a screed on the Black Industry forums in the 2E days, where I insisted that DCs should be described and rates as Trivial (+70%) to Very Hard, which is really just terrible task resolution design.
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I've only encountered and heard about it happening with male gms. Plural of anecdote is not data and all that.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.