Best Fantasy Heartbreaker?

[Shadeseraph]

Hey there, new user here (I've been actually lurking here for way longer, but never had the guts to actually come and say something), so it's new user's inane topic time.

I'm in the mood to GM something different than usual, so I'm looking for inspiration. The last weird thing I played was Dungeons: the Dragoning, although I've tried most of the more "popular" game systems (several D&D editions, Storyteller, GURPS, Shadowrun, L5R, Warhammer and Rolemaster, from the top of my head).

So, as the title says: what's the best fantasy heartbreaker you have played, and why?

Cheers

[brized]

After Sundown is probably worth trying, especially if you like Shadowrun. I haven't played it, but I read it over and it seems good.

If you haven't run Call of Cthulhu before, it's pretty different from all those you listed. CoC is terrible as a system, but Masks of Nyarlathotep is the best published campaign I've run, by far. Masks does a really good job of setting up a bunch of hubs and mini-sandboxes so you have some structure, and enough resources that you can improvise relatively easily when the group does crazy stuff. It also comes with handouts (some sets have them separate, others you have to print), so it's easier for players to keep track of what the places and persons of interest are.

Depending on your group, you may want to omit or tweak some of the "red herring" leads, or give your investigators Idea rolls to avoid them. Some of those red herrings are more like red abominations that can wipe most if not all of the party as written.

[JigokuBosatsu]

What have you been GMing that "fantasy heartbreaker" qualifies as something different than usual?

[Shadeseraph]

What have you been GMing that "fantasy heartbreaker" qualifies as something different than usual?

I'm asking for a change of system, not theme. The one I'm gm'ing right now is a planescape ripoff, but I decided to throw a game for a friend of mine who hasn't played in a long time and is having a hard time, so I wanted to run a more or less typical dungeon crawling game, but I was thinking about triying something other than d&d, and pathfinder makes me very tired.

Anyway, in part it was an excuse to hear what FHB you've all tried that you consider good enough to play.

That said, brized here reminded me that I've never gm'd CoC, despite it being my introduction to the hobby...

[OgreBattle]

The Palladium system is fun with filling out character sheets with their massive skill list with vague mechanics as to how skills are actually used

[Emerald]

Arcana Evolved is a pretty fun heartbreaker with a lot of cool and novel (at the time, at least) ideas. As a "fix" to 3e it fails (for every good/elegant idea it introduces, it introduces at least one bad/cringy one, like making Sneak Attack optional for the rogue-replacement), but it makes a nice change of pace from standard D&D.

The races let you play giants/fey/dragons at 1st level and all have the equivalent of racial paragon classes, Magister is more Gandalf-y than the wizard, the Champion is a more thematically-flexible paladin, the Witch is sort of a build-your-own-spellcaster, the spellcasting mechanic is nicely flexible, spell templates are more fluffy than metamagic, dragons aren't color-coded, and so forth.

[Username17]

Some of the fantasy heartbreakers I've had the most fun with are objectively terrible. This is honestly not very surprising because the primary way that fantasy heartbreakers are terrible is that they have a lot of failure points. But failure points aren't generally a continuous miasma of failure, they are points where the failure happens. Unless and until you get to those points, no failure occurs.

Linear Warriors and Quadratic Wizards is only a problem if you play long enough for the warriors to be superseded by the Druid's pet cave bear. Having a broken economic system is only a problem if the players leave the dungeon and try to purchase porcelain. And so on and so on.

A lot of simple and terrible D&D clones are actually a blast to play - provided that everyone is playing for beer and pretzels, no one is upset when their characters die stupid deaths, and you only play the game for a session or two. The inherent bullshit of the system can be a selling point if you aren't trying to tell epic campaigns.

-Username17

[kzt]

I had a lot of fun way back when with Bushido, which kind-of combines the worst aspects of D&D and RuneQuest. Until the GM ran off with one of the other players, abandoning her husband - who was also playing. That got kind of ugly.

It's largely the group you play with that makes a game fun or not fun.

[JigokuBosatsu]

There's that Legend d20 thing, there is a thread on it here if you want to see people's thoughts on it.

[Ancient History]

Probably Earthdawn.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Godbound.

[Whipstitch]

- provided that everyone is playing for beer and pretzels

-Username17

Yeah, my worst rpg experiences were at games people sold as amazeballs but things ended up weird and self-conscious when someone who was a bad fit got added. So while I wouldn't call After Sundown terrible the bit where it was homebrew and people didn't expect a lot going in was a nice bonus compared to the times where I floated a Vampire game and people divided into the True BrujahBeliever and Fuck White Wolf camps or otherwise brought some baggage to the table.

[erik]

I wonder if just dnd 3e or 3.5 with gestalt characters would be a big enough shift? Or go full retro with some BECMI DnD.

[brized]

If you wanted to run CoC as more of a dungeon crawl, I'd make the following changes:

1) Cthulhu Mythos acts as damage reduction vs. Sanity loss

2) Encourage character optimization; let players do point buy based on average roll results

3) Let players find spellbooks and give them time to learn them (Masks does this intentionally)


Also, keep in mind it's the 1920s. There are no cell phones. No internet. Relatively little inter-agency communication. Telephones were only in about 35-40% of households. Today, police response times are 8-15 minutes in most cities and 30-60+ minutes in the country. They should be even longer in the 1920s with inferior communications, transport, procedures, etc. In some neighborhoods, under the right context, people may not call the cops even if they could.


My PCs would carry a tank of gasoline with them to burn down the crime scene and bodies anytime they killed people, be they cultists, bystanders, or each other. It worked well enough given they would skip town or the whole country shortly after. They also fled the scene, fled the scene and let one of the PCs take the fall in a blaze of glory vs. police, and dumped bodies in cars they then dumped into bodies of water.

[Judging__Eagle]

There's the [Tome] D&D content that's been made here on TGD. Basically rewrites to 3.Xe to try and make the game playable past level the early/mid levels.

There should be a few PDFs floating around on the forums. If you can find the one Lokathor made, it's layout hearkens back to 2e D&D splatbooks in its columns & font.

It's good if you want players to be monsters, or non-divine spellcasters, or non-spellcasters, w/o wrecking the game; or their fun.

If you do go the [Tome] route, I recommend using Kaelik's [Tome] Errata, and Red Rob's Magic Items; [Tome] D&D came out around 2005-2006; and some changes and additions have been made in the decade+ that it's been around.

[radthemad4]

I love Tome, but there's a lot of it if you include community stuff.

Long Route, pick and choose what you like from here

Recommended Reads

The Tome of Necromancy
The Tome of Fiends
The Dungeonomicon
Races of War

Kaelik's Tome Errata
Red_Rob's Metamagic feats
'Alpha Metamagic' is a thing where metamagic'd spells don't take up higher slots, but spell level + metamagic level has to be lower than or equal to half your level (round up). Alpha quicken being obligatory by level 9 might not be a good thing, but besides that and in some cases, Strong Spell (e.g. attune sphere to get fireball as a 1st level spell), it works decently. Red Rob made them casters only and Kaelik allowed them to work with SLA users with a caveat.

How these interact with SLA users is complicated, because some SLA users will become bonkers, and some won't. Sort if out yourself, or use different feats for SLA users.

Red Rob's Tome Armor
Red Rob's Tome Magic Items
Kaelik's Alternative Item Bonus Progression
(I like this just being an inherent thing you get based on how many levels you have in PC classes)

Not compatible skill hacks
Kaelik Skill Groups (I like the 'everything is a class skill' variant)
Tome of Prowess

More Scaling feats, if you're using them
- Red Rob
- virgil
- Dominicus
- dnd-wiki.org

(I like to use 'one feat per level, but only your 1, 3, 6, 9, etc. can be scaling or Tome feats', 'Ignore prereqs for things in general besides minimum acquirable level' and 'scaling feat benefits are capped by CR, so a 2 CR monster with 50 billion BAB still only gets the 1 BAB benefits' (If you customize monster feats anyway. You could also just use monsters and/or NPCs unmodified instead) )

If any players want sphere based classes (or have players who want to take Attune Sphere) you can find a lot of spheres here (and some more in the More community material link below).

Moar stuff
Community material repository
More community material
Tome Material on dnd-wiki (also there's other material not specifically designed for Tome that could nonetheless be used with it)

Stuff I'd recommend not using (not comprehensive)
- Tome Fighter
- Firemage
- Combat School
- The Lift maneuver from races of war
- The Soulborn (Or just nerf it. I'd go with no endless smiting, no Cha to saves, no basic bonuses on your chakra things, no parry magic, no pressing assault, make demon summoning an 'astonishing' soulmeld)
- Product of Celestial Dalliance

Short Route
Virgil's Family Tome (Material for upto level 6)
AwesomeTome ('Core Tome' + a collection of community material available at the time, i.e. 2010)
Use 3.5 for Magic items or the Tome Armor/Magic items things linked above

[Dogbert]

If we're talking dnd, I'd say the most decent is Legends of Anglerre.

Also, I'm working on my own shitty game after being "inspired" by PF2, but that one is still far from a testing phase, I don't know if people will like it or not.

[JigokuBosatsu]

How far off the "heartbreaker" definition do you want to stray? If you really want to get wacky with system but stay with fantasy, you could go with something like Torchbearer, Blades Against Darkness, or even Polaris.

[erik]

Use of heartbreaker is kinda vexing terminology in this context since you want something people have found and played but usually for me heartbreaker means something that didn’t get published either due to being a failure to complete or failure to be worth publishing. If published works are allowed then I don’t know where to draw the line between things that are and aren’t heartbreakers. DnD 3e no, 4e yes?

For a dungeon crawl with rules different than DnD that you’re used to my top recommendations are Earthdawn. Or a diff edition of DnD. Or a variant on an edition you’ve tried (if 3/3.5 then Arcana Evolved, DragonMech, Tome, gestalt, etc.)

Wacky stupid but not a total fun-cancer in small doses might be DCC, LotFP, MERPS, palladium. Maybe Desolation (but I have only played their pulp hollow earth game).

Things I’d avoid like AIDS: *world games. One roll engine.

Edit: in retrospect that’s not fair to AIDS. There’s at least treatment to make that livable and I don’t mind associating with people who have the disease, unlike people who play those games.

[kzt]

Today, police response times are 8-15 minutes in most cities and 30-60+ minutes in the country. They should be even longer in the 1920s with inferior communications, transport, procedures, etc. In some neighborhoods, under the right context, people may not call the cops even if they could.

My grandfather was a patrol cop in the 30s. (Morristown, New Jersey IIRC - population ~12,000 so it wasn't a tiny town.) He rode a motorcycle, no radio. At each end of the main street in town there was a fairly well off citizen who had a phone. When the station wanted him to do something they called these two houses, who put up a flag. When he saw that he'd turn around and drive to the police station to find out what they wanted him to do.

[brized]

That's really interesting! It raises an important point too about radios. Just did some digging on the history of police radio use:

In 1928, a Detroit patrolman who was an electronics buff developed the first one-way radio link between police headquarters and police cruisers.
In 1933, a radio engineer and a Bayonne, N.J., police lieutenant improved on that system by building a two-way radio so that patrol cars and police stations could communicate.
In 1940 a two-way FM system was introduced in Connecticut.

More info: http://theinstitute.ieee.org/tech-histo ... lice-radio


So depending on where you're at, police communications would be anywhere from severely limited to jack shit. It has implications for law enforcement communications in other settings. The whole notion of teleporting, omniscient law enforcement I've seen from some GMs is just ridiculous.

[Korwin]

Might not be under the definition of Heartbreaker and it might be hard to find at this Point, but I had some fun with Anima: Beyond Fantasy.

Things I did not like:
clunky Resolution mechanic

Things I somewhat liked:
System mastery is very important

I liked:
Ki, Psi and Magic is very different.

[Shadeseraph]

Use of heartbreaker is kinda vexing terminology in this context since you want something people have found and played but usually for me heartbreaker means something that didn’t get published either due to being a failure to complete or failure to be worth publishing.

TBH, in this case I was actually looking for actual heartbreakers - as in either unpublished stuff or self-published stuff that never actually got off. Stuff you happened to come across by chance, or even stuff you yourselves have written. Legend D20 could fit, for example (I'm running a couple sessions of this one in the end - thanks, JigokuBotatsu, BTW) and the Tome would probably fit too.

Might not be under the definition of Heartbreaker and it might be hard to find at this Point, but I had some fun with Anima: Beyond Fantasy.

Ugh, I've played it. Ridiculously clunky, math-wise not so good, and the worst part is that the main rules and the background are like someone tried to put Exalted characters in a world based on CoC or Aquelarre - except when it's based on FF. It flip-flops between dark and gritty and high fantasy antics senselessly and doesn't make the least effort to make them work together.

Making characters was fun, though.

[JigokuBosatsu]

JigokuBotatsu

This is a lovely misspelling, as it takes the translation of my username from "Hell Buddha" to (very loosely) "In Hell, The Revolution Will Not Be Affordable"

[Trill]

"In Hell, The Revolution Will Not Be Affordable"

I love it