The Gaming Den

In short, I run an Eberron game that I like but I just can't make the DnD 4E system work. I get bogged down in book keeping during encounters and generally I find that the system encompasses too many books for me to afford. Having read a number of threads on this forum, I feel that my views are fairly well represented by the frequent posters and thus I ask your advice.

The main things I'd like the new system to support is

1) The Eberron pulp adventure style of play
2) Fun (not necessarily realistic) Tactical combat

Right now my main two contenders are going back to 3.5E (which I own) or trying Savage Worlds (which I also own), but I wouldn't mind looking at other options. What say you?

well, those two are actually what I was going to suggest. There was a pulp style book for d20, put out just before d20 modern. Savage Worlds, while I haven't seen it, much less played it, has been said to be great for pulp games.

Another option would be Mutants and Masterminds, it would require a good bit of defining the races, but you'd have to do that for Savage Worlds too.

Spirit of the Century... maybe.

Fantasycraft

I flipped through Savage worlds while I was in a bookstore in India. It really didn't impress me. Although having an rp book in an Indian bookstore did definitely impress me.

3.x D&D with an enforced or acknowledged level cap would be the obvious way to go. Because it's what the Eberon Setting was actually written to do. Levels 1-8 of 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons. It works OK.

Spirit of the Century works very for pulp adventures. You don't even really have to change the chargen question "What were you doing, during the war?"

-Username17

Thanks for the advice, my follow up question then would be what version of the 3.5 rules you favour, WotC, Pathfinder or something else?

Caid wrote:Thanks for the advice, my follow up question then would be what version of the 3.5 rules you favour, WotC, Pathfinder or something else?

Given the choice, WotC. Not only are more people familiar with it, but it actually works a bit better.

Pathfinder rules are rather unfortunate. There are little changes all over the place, as literally hundreds of minor, pointless alterations were made to skills, combat maneuvers, spells, monster stats, and feats. But the final analysis is that magicians get slightly more powerful relative to warriors. Which is basically exactly the opposite of what 3.x D&D wants done to it for purposes of balance.

-Username17

I highly recommend Arcana Evolved over 3.x core. It's not that great of a system in that it suffers the usual 3.x balance issues but not quite as severely.

The great part about it though is that it feels more fun and all you need from the core to fill all the archetypes are the rogue and barbarian.

Basically it suffers from most of the 3.x faults but some not as large of a degree.

That said 3.x isn't my favorite system anymore.

Thymos wrote:I highly recommend Arcana Evolved over 3.x core. It's not that great of a system in that it suffers the usual 3.x balance issues but not quite as severely.

The great part about it though is that it feels more fun and all you need from the core to fill all the archetypes are the rogue and barbarian.

Basically it suffers from most of the 3.x faults but some not as large of a degree.

That said 3.x isn't my favorite system anymore.

Interesting. How would you rate the comparative benefits between

a - having (what you say) a slightly better system and

b - using the default system assumed by the Eberron supplements?

I mean, everytime you crack open something like the Player's Guide to or Magic of Eberron books, you'd have to do some conversion work. It's like the hassle of going Pathfinder. As Frank mentions, there's a bazillion of miniscule rules all over, and it's a bit hard to evaluate how much of that you can handwaive, given that d20 is so much of a system where everything interlocks with everything else... so if you say, 'no prob, we use the Pathfinder version of Spell x' you then end up screwing yourself (as a DM) or your players when monster y turns up etc etc.

My question to you is meant genuinely. I'm really interested to hear how you cope with this. I'm personally too hesitant to run 3.x supplements under other d20 variants. (If, otoh, you're only running a campaign using AE supplements and the Eberron core book, but nothing else from the Eberron splats, then I guess my worry doesn't apply.)

Pardon my ignorance, but what are "pulp" adventures?

RobbyPants wrote:Pardon my ignorance, but what are "pulp" adventures?

Pulp novels are short books that were made for mass market and sold in dime stores in the early part of the 20th century. They were made cheaply, and written very quickly. The word "pulp" refers to the recycled paper that they were printed on.

When we talk about "pulp" we are generally referring to the pulp adventure stories, rather than the pulp horror (like H. P. Lovecraft), or pulp romance (which were like the mass market romances of today but shorter because people are stronger readers in the 21st century). That gives us stuff like Doc Savage, The Shadow, Zorro, Tarzan, and Conan. There was a fair amount of overlap with that material and the horror material, but whatever.

The pulp writers used to crank out a book a month, which was basically like what Robert Jordan used to do except that they were paid by the book (with a minimum length) instead of being paid by the word (with a set number of books). The net result - of course - was that the pulp writers would crank out small books as fast as they could. This meant that the stories tended to be fairly formulaic and very "action" oriented.

If you can't think of what to write next: have someone walk in the door with a gun (or spear, depending upon the area and time your adventure is set in).

-Username17

The conversion work for Arcana Evolved, depending on how much you care, is nonexistant. Unlike pathfinder it can work with with 3.x. I actually recommend using the 3.x rogue class with it at the very least. To my knowledge people have run games with both Arcana Evolved classes and 3.x classes together.

Seems going back to WotC3.5 is the option most likely to happen for me, though the AE suggestion piqued my interest. I think one of my main gripes about 3.5 is that I've played it extensively and felt that I was maybe ready for something else. 4E wasn't the answer. Anyhow, my thanks to the posters who gave their suggestions.

If I may, I have a question to Frank:

What system(s) do you use for fantasy campaigns? You seem to be a very hard to please and discerning person, it would be interesting to hear you name some system you really like.

Caid wrote:Seems going back to WotC3.5 is the option most likely to happen for me, though the AE suggestion piqued my interest. I think one of my main gripes about 3.5 is that I've played it extensively and felt that I was maybe ready for something else. 4E wasn't the answer. Anyhow, my thanks to the posters who gave their suggestions.

If I may, I have a question to Frank:

What system(s) do you use for fantasy campaigns? You seem to be a very hard to please and discerning person, it would be interesting to hear you name some system you really like.

There is a iterative replacement of the 3.5e rules that Frank and K worked on, and which now has accumulated a decent amount of material written for it by others.

It started as the Tome of Necromancy (as an addendum to the Handbook of Necromancy, because the options in 3e were considered insufficient). It was then quickly followed by the Tome of Fiends, Dungeonomicon, and Races of War. The two books most useful for most D&D games are Races of War and the Dungeonomicon, thanks to some extensive core class rewrites and world-building material. You can find all of the above in this thread, and almost all of the accumulated material nicely formatted in this PDF, called the "Tome". Unfortunately there aren't any nice pictures, but the writing style is entertaining to say the least.

I only write this because you seem to be new here, and it's possible that you haven't seen of the "Tome" series yet. By the way, welcome to the Den.

Caid wrote:Right now my main two contenders are going back to 3.5E (which I own) or trying Savage Worlds (which I also own), but I wouldn't mind looking at other options. What say you?

I think you hit the two main options: something familiar (plain 3.5 D&D, as opposed to Pathfinder or something) or something more streamlined (presumably Savage Worlds fits the bill; I don't know).

If you're really looking for something rules-light, you might try a stripped-down system like Castles & Crusades or Microlite d20.

I actually make a point to play a great number of games. Many of them only once.

The needs of a campaign are vastly different from the needs of a game. A one-off or two-parter is generally better going with something more "cinematic" such as Feng Shui or even Münchhausen. A more campaign oriented game needs a concrete set of numbers holding it down so that players can have concrete advancement goals to work towards and attain over the course of the campaign. This means that in longer games, Feng Shui and Münchhausen both fall flat.

3rd edition D&D has the advantage that people know it. It also works pretty solidly at low levels. At 2nd level a player can contribute well as a member of any class. There are a lot of trap options and such, but by and large a character can blow away several enemies a couple of times a day with color spray or they can swing a sword and cut a fool in half as many times as they like. It works. At higher levels this breaks down. It breaks down severely because Wizards stop running out of game winners in a day of adventuring and fighters stop being able to take enemies down with a sword swing. It's a problem. And the solution is to shove house rule after house rule. The higher level you go, the more house rules you need to keep Aragorn from sitting there touching himself while super mages fly around on their personal clouds have dragon ball Z adventures. How far it can go and still be manageable varies from group to group.

Many games that are good don't actually work for Fantasy very well. Champions is a great game, but "Fantasy Hero" is a weird and cruel hoax. The game pretty much has way too little granularity at the "human level" to make fantasy roleplaying of much use. I like Shadowrun a lot. So much that I wrote for it. But it doesn't have an acceptable melee combat minigame. That's fine for a game about shooting people in the face for money, but again it's not a good start for a Fantasy game.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:I like Shadowrun a lot. So much that I wrote for it. But it doesn't have an acceptable melee combat minigame. That's fine for a game about shooting people in the face for money, but again it's not a good start for a Fantasy game.

-Username17

After discovering that SR4 was only $15 as PDF, I went ahead and got a copy. It is an interesting read for somebody who's been entrenched in the DnD-tradition for many years. I'm familiar with the setting, but this is the first rulebook I've read since 1st edition.

The attraction for me in SR4 is the number of subsystems that one can use to create a character, while still not being a class-based system. I'm looking forward to running a couple of sessions to get a feel for the mechanics.