The Gaming Den

Which brings me back to my original question... would a modified aWoD be the best way to RP the Band of the Hawk portion, and the dark fantasy genre in general? Or is there a system that does it better?

You could try Midian Dark Fantasy Roleplaying Game

http://lost-souls.hk.st/

I don't know how well it works though.

DnD is really the best fit, in terms of both power progression, characters being heavily dependent on magical bling, easy healing, etc. Anyone who thinks that Guts can fit into a scale anywhere close to mortal only watched the anime.

That said, the big problem with the verse is that either only a very few people can ever have power to fight the main baddies, or only a very few had, until the apocalypse practically started. One can learn magic, but it is of limited use in combat. Magical weapons are theoretically available, but most of them do not give enough of a power boost. The only real canonical way to get enough power for challenging apostles seems to be surviving the fucking Ecliplse, which happens only once per many generations. There is also the problem of somehow escaping an army of demons, of course. Apparently only Skull Knight somehow managed to do this and saved Guts and Cacsa later. And that's all for the entire verse.

God dammit he is asking for what would fit dark fantasy. Yes he did use Berserk as an example (albeit a bad one), but the main thing is that he wanted dark low/no magic fantasy.

The system doesn't matter. You can reflavor or change anything to fit the theme you're looking for. Just use whatever you and your gaming group are most comfortable with.

D&D, levels 1-5. Feats should be handed out every level. Griffith and Guts at the beging of the series are 4th-5th level characters.

Characters can only go past level 5 if they burn a feat. Things like "Apostle Amulet" or "Wield Dragon-Slaying Sword" or "Death Knight" are the sort of things that allow people to go past level 5.

Most of the "real" crazy that Guts does in the Manga, vis-a-vis the Berzerker Armour is because that thing does a bunch of things; including 1) Give a scaling Str bonus, equal to character level (which is why Berzerk'ed Guts can jump from giant sea serpent to sea serpent) and 2) Put the character in a Frenzy (as per the Frenzied Berserker from ComWar).

Most of the other charcters are no larger than CR 3, and crossbows, cannons and pikes can seriously waste them.

Again, because of the way skills, health, attacks, rounds, tactics, damage, and more work in D&D, I just don't see it being a good system for dark fantasy.

For high fantasy? Sure, I think it works pretty damn well. For dark fantasy though, not so much.

You could also use Shadowrun's system, but it will need some modification.

I've never played Shadowrun, but from what I understood, isn't aWoD something like the perfect combination of Shadowrun and WoD as far as the base system goes? Or did I misunderstand something there?

Ghostwheel wrote:I've never played Shadowrun, but from what I understood, isn't aWoD something like the perfect combination of Shadowrun and WoD as far as the base system goes? Or did I misunderstand something there?

Nothing is a perfect anything. aWoD is quite playable and blends a lot of positive aspects of nWoD and SR4 and SR3, it's still a work in progress and the partially completed After Sunset rules are basically a new edition of it. And it has an intentionally vague and simplistic melee system that mostly comes down to "slashers cut you up bad".

It would need a heavy overhaul to do fantasy, because the game system kind of breaks down if everyone wants to run around a swirling melee with swords. As most modern and futuristic game systems do.

-Username17

I'd probably suggest D&D 3.5 just because it's so, well, modular, it's pretty easy to hammer it or pervert it into whatever you want it to be. (The same goes for using D&D to model ASoIaF.)

Schwarzkopf wrote:I'd probably suggest D&D 3.5 just because it's so, well, modular, it's pretty easy to hammer it or pervert it into whatever you want it to be. (The same goes for using D&D to model ASoIaF.)

E-6

GURPS can do it pretty easily. Guts would be a pretty high point character (400 minimum and probably higher) but it's fairly easy to mimic the witch with magery, the fencer would just be a high DX character with the fencing skill, some special techniques and some magic equipment. You could probably run a group of 250 pt characters reasonably well in the setting.

Is anyone familiar with Don't Rest Your Head? Another player mentioned that, with the stats slightly changed, as a decent way to run darker games, so that's been added into the potential systems pool.

Ghostwheel wrote:Is anyone familiar with Don't Rest Your Head? Another player mentioned that, with the stats slightly changed, as a decent way to run darker games, so that's been added into the potential systems pool.

I've read the book. The setting is sort of interesting, although not as fleshed out as I would like. The mechanics, on the other hand, are Forge-style nonsense with piles of multicolored dice that add up to not much more than Magic Tea Party.