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KickStarter Monte Cook is making ANOTHER RPG on Kickstarter - The Strange

Self-Ejected

Excidium

P. banal
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Aug 14, 2009
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13,696
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I don't know, I can appreciate a simple system, specially after playing stuff that gets horribly bogged down by trying to remember what to roll because everything has its own table and specific little rules. Don't think I didn't like this because it's simple (I actually found the base roll really fucking messy), I didn't like how it's designed.

For example, the basic roll is a d20, against a difficulty from 1 to 10 which you actually have to multiply by 3 to get the actual TN. Your stats don't give bonuses or penalties to the roll, instead you spend your stats like a pool, each 3 points you spend give +1 effort to a roll (you can add 1 effort/level and it stacks with skill bonuses which is 1 for trained and 2 for specialized) which in turn reduces the difficulty by 1. Which again, you multiply by 3 to get the TN. Each stat has a sub-stat called Edge, which works as a treshold, so if you have an Edge of 1 on might, when you spend 3 you actualy only need to spend 2 for example. Your stat pools are also your HP and you recover them on rest (the first is only one Action, but it increases for each rest so you need to track how many times you have rested in a day). Also how good you are at something is kinda irrelevant, you only do something specially well if you roll 19 or 20 which is something that pisses me off greatly.

Also skills...The skill system is very lulzy. My character had to pick one skill between jump, swim and...run I think? And another character started with "athletics" which basically encompasses all that and more huehuehuehue

And combat...during combat I tried my best to do creative things instead of just attacking because attacking is the most boring thing, you don't roll damage and it is not modified by anything except crits, and if you crit you deal a fixed bonus amount of damage (1,2,3,4 for 17,18,19,20 to-hit roll respectively). Each weapon deals a fixed amount based on its category (light, medium or heavy) and there's no distinction between weapons beyond which category it belongs to and range** (which is also abstracted in three steps). So firing an arrow and throwing a javelin is a basically the same thing. No you don't use might to throw things. Ranged attacks are all based on speed, don't ask me.

In other words combat rules suck and it's very stacked on the GM to create interesting combat situations because the system alone doesn't really carry it.

Also iirc the only stat NPCs have is their level, which serves as the difficulty for anything related to them.

**Actually, weapons do differ on something else, and it's the type of damage it does, such as piercing or slashing. It's not specified in rules but it's a sort of keyword for some abilities, if glaive progression wasn't already crappy enough their abilities also have limited usage based on which weapons you have available.
 
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Night Goat

The Immovable Autism
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Each weapon deals a fixed amount based on its category (light, medium or heavy) and there's no distinction between weapons beyond which category it belongs to and range** (which is also abstracted in three steps). So firing an arrow and throwing a javelin is a basically the same thing. No you don't use might to throw things. Ranged attacks are all based on speed, don't ask me.
The weapon system really is laughable. I noticed that rapiers and daggers are effectively the same as punches...so why even bother using them?

Also iirc the only stat NPCs have is their level, which serves as the difficulty for anything related to them.
Level, health, damage inflicted, armor and movement (which is abstracted). That's another thing that turns me off of this system. When I ran a D&D 3.5 campaign, I would spend hours designing NPCs...and I liked it, god dammit.
 

Azazel

Arbiter
Joined
Dec 4, 2012
Messages
481
After flipping through Numenera I'm still befuddled as to why Gene Wolfe isn't suing Monty for so blatantly ripping off "The Book of the New Sun". I know dying earth is a small genre and all, but damn.
 

Ninjerk

Arcane
Joined
Jul 10, 2013
Messages
14,323
All the old Planescape players are probably brainy, well educated types with plenty of liquid assets.
 

Alex

Arcane
Joined
Jun 14, 2007
Messages
8,750
Location
São Paulo - Brasil
I don't know, I can appreciate a simple system, specially after playing stuff that gets horribly bogged down by trying to remember what to roll because everything has its own table and specific little rules. Don't think I didn't like this because it's simple (I actually found the base roll really fucking messy), I didn't like how it's designed.

(snip...)

Come on, I admit Shadowrun 3e isn't the best system to memorize, but I think that if we had stuck to it, we would have gotten the hang of it sooner or later...
 

Alchemist

Arcane
Joined
Jun 3, 2013
Messages
1,439
I don't get why this shit is being so hyped in the RPG world.
Monte Cook

Now I'm torn between feeling bad for not knowing who the fucker is and feeling smug about it because his games don't seem to justify knowing him.
He was part of the design team for D&D 3.0 / 3.5 and wrote this little-known title:
f9INNsw.jpg


3.5 went on to be the backbone of such Codex cRPG favorites as Temple of Elemental Evil and Knights of the Chalice. So yeah, I guess it's not worth knowing about him...
 

L'ennui

Magister
Joined
Apr 6, 2009
Messages
3,256
Location
Québec, Amérique du Nord
I have this thing, you see. I can love a band and know each of its albums inside and out, yet never bother to check the bio of the band members. I completely dissociate the individuals and the fruits of their collective toil, which I suppose is a fault on my part.

Anyways, I do the same with games, including PnP RPGs. So yeah, I've been a big fan of done if this guy's work over the years, without knowing him. It sucks that Numenera seems so... well it's not actually horrible, but I guess underwhelming describes it pretty well.

Envoyé de mon HUAWEI MT1-U06 en utilisant Tapatalk
 

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