The Gaming Den

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!

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!

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.

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.

Well, how do you define "best"? What things is it important (to you) that the game does, and what are important it does not do?

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.

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.

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.

You can convert d20s to d100s by multiplying bonuses and DCs by 5

Add some of the fiddliness of d100 into the game by increasing all of your now-multiplied ability modifiers by 1d4.

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.

I mean, you're not wrong.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:

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.

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.

For starters ...

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.

phlapjackage wrote:

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.

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.

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.

Harshax wrote:

angelfromanotherpin wrote:

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.

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.

For starters ...

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.

Oh, definitely. Towards the end of the time I played Runequest, I was getting True Tap Power* on every character I could.

*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)

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.

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.

Prak wrote:GM Dick Waving seems to, primarily, be a symptom of toxic masculinity.

Oh, if only.

In general, the US and other English speakers have the worst fandom for anything, so maybe it's a toxic part of anglo culture, or particularly US english language parasites, or maybe missionary culture. Not a universal gender thing and broader than just US males

We need to figure out how Finland and Germany fit into this unified theory of People Who Suck before I'm willing to sign off on it.

I've only encountered and heard about it happening with male gms. Plural of anecdote is not data and all that.