Official D&D cRPG thread

DoctorNarrative said:
RPGs are so eclectic that a lot of people like different aspects of them. My priorities are choice and consequence, that is an RPG for me. To others it is tactical combat based on character creation decisions. To others it is exploration in a fantasy world. It all depends really.
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My priorities are on character development (and I don't mean stats-wise), choice and consequence and perhaps some exciting combat for p&p games, while with cRPGs my focus is clearly on exploration and/or storytelling.

Rolling dice? The less it's needed, especially for character creation, the better. I fondly remember the WEG Star Wars RPG. Character creation was so simple, you could easily memorize the procedure and the very few rules that were absolutely necessary for playing, yet you were still able to create a vast assortment of differently-typed characters. So if you felt like it and had no rule books with you (like, for example, on a sunny day out in the park), you could make up your chars just like this and start to play right away, provided somebody made up an adventure on the fly :). That's what I call quick fix.

What finally turned me off AD&D was all the XP hunting going on.

I think I played Hillsfar on an Amiga IIRC. It's been a while.
 
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So will we ever see another hardcore d&d crpg again. Something with toee's combat but with a great game surrounding that combat system? Or has that time passed?
 
I doubt we'll see another hardcore d&d rpg from the AAAs, but there is always KOTC 2. The OGL is close enough to D&D that I hardly notice a difference.
 
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Thats why in 3rd Ed D&D they got away with rolling dice for character creation and have point buy system. Where you have set pool of points and distribute them as you wish.

Problem is that you create this min-maxed characters.

Rolling dice in OD&D was more of a roleplay definition of your character than anything else. Stats didnt mater so much.
 
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Twotricks said:
Thats why in 3rd Ed D&D they got away with rolling dice for character creation and have point buy system. Where you have set pool of points and distribute them as you wish.

Problem is that you create this min-maxed characters.

Rolling dice in OD&D was more of a roleplay definition of your character than anything else. Stats didnt mater so much.
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You must mean 4E, as in 3E it was still 4d6 drop lowest. Or just 3d6. IIRC Unearthed Arcana may have had a point buy system, and certainly a DM could go with their own, but the core game was still rolling the bones, for stats as well as in-game.

http://www.bukisa.com/articles/7454...agons-part-ii-rolling-up-character-attributes

In the 3.5E version of D&D, in order to generate the values for a character (coloquially known as "rolling up a character"), one would take four six-sided dice (4d6) and roll them, then add up the three highest scores, disregarding the lowest roll. This would be redone five times, leaving the player with six scores for his/her attributes. Depending on the type of character the player wanted, they would assign the scores to suit the player.
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Note that this was also an option in AD&D 2e books, IIRC. Though I got the impression that TSR deemed that method as "overpowering". :p I always preferred 4d6 drop lowest, and the assign to whatever stat you wished. That way, I wasn't stuck with one type of character when I wanted another.

For the record, I much prefer rolling vs point buy for my cRPGs. Instead of min-maxing everyone, I've got to use what I've got. The only caveat I prefer is that I like being able to swap stats around, so I can take a good roll and swap for the character I need/want, rather than keep rolling hoping for a good one that matched. Older Might and Magic games (3-5 at least) were like this.

skavenhorde said:
I doubt we'll see another hardcore d&d rpg from the AAAs, but there is always KOTC 2. The OGL is close enough to D&D that I hardly notice a difference.
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KOTC wasn't quite pure OGL, it was heavily altered. It seemed a solid, hardcore d20-based cRPG though, so you might try it. I decided against buying it myself, as the changes were too jarring to me, and I wanted a 3.x based game that I hadn't played. I'm still looking too. I haven't looked into KOTC2.

Since 4E is now WotCs garbage rule-set of choice, there's no hope for a good D&D cRPG (unless 5E is a major step back). Pathfinder or Trailblazer, both d20 SRD-based systems, may offer some hope, but I'm not familiar with the licensing enough to know if they can market a video game based on it. Then again, they are competing (very well, in Pathfinder's case) against 4E D&D in the PnP market. So maybe there is hope.
 
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Twotricks said:
It does

Dont make me open my holy DMG of wrath ! (actually its in PHB) :lol:
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In my books (3.0e) there nothing in the PHB and the DMG have a small write up on point buy (along with 6 other systems)...
 
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The last half-dozen posts make me feel like I'm sitting around a dimly-lit table in a slightly musty basement.

Thanks.
 
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SirJames said:
I think i'll say a word on NWN2 and a recent discussion I had about it.

NWN1, while fantastic in multiplayer, still with the best combat animations of any game, was a pretty weak DND game, really. 1 character? Ok, so thats the fighter sorted. Now what?

NWN2, vastly inferior in multiplayer, lost all the cool animations (where their weapons would actually make contact and spark on a miss, etc), ran a lot worse… To be honest I was so bored playing the NWN2 I hardly made it past neverwinter.

I recently played Mask of the Betrayer and found it to be overly verbose. Quit out when I had to rent souls to plug into a door. Right after spending 30 minutes playing Hells with some bard and another 30 going thru a damn contract with a fledgling wizard.

So, I told this, about mask of the betrayer, to my friend, Tim. His reply was that I actually don't like RPGs; I like tactical action games. When I made mention that my all time favourite RPG was "Deathknights of Krynn" he said that THAT was a tactical action game and not an RPG.
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I sort of agree with your friend. I loved the gold box games (but I prefer Champions among the Krynn games), but they are tactical games more than anything. There is very little room for playing a role there compared to even Mass Effect 2, and there isnt even much character building (lacking character building goes for any game using the second edition ruleset, including Baldurs Gate). Your only choice is in which order to visit areas. They remind me of Icewind Dale in that sense. Still I'd might call them tactical dungeon crawlers more than anything, and unlike your friend I'd say that is a subset of RPGs.
 
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DoctorNarrative said:
RPGs are so eclectic that a lot of people like different aspects of them. My priorities are choice and consequence, that is an RPG for me. To others it is tactical combat based on character creation decisions. To others it is exploration in a fantasy world. It all depends really.
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Agree. For me, I just want to be told good story that I feel my choices have some meaning in. Not necessarily that my choices completely dominate the story line, but that they add a flavor so to speak. I'm not that much into tactics. I do enjoy building my character (both in terms of leveling as well as reputation and such and how the world interacts with him).
 
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Short note about rolling diice from my side :

I regarded pen & paper RPGs early as some kinds of rather "bord games" with he boards left off.

And in board games, dice are often used - and yes, especially the "luck factor" is what I find challenging in them ! ;)

So - for me, rolling dice in pn & paper RPGs was not a too wide step. And since then, I stuck with that choice. I just love the "öuck factor" in RPGs ... - even in character generation ! ;)
 
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Two-handed sword fighters suck in Neverwinter Nights. Just sayin'.
 
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Are you kidding? I kicked major ass with my fighter in the NWN 1 OC. His favorite weapon = Two-Handed Sword.

Or did you mean dual-wielding? Damn semantics, always getting in the way. ;)
 
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Thrasher said:
Are you kidding? I kicked major ass with my fighter in the NWN 1 OC. His favorite weapon = Two-Handed Sword.

Or did you mean dual-wielding? Damn semantics, always getting in the way. ;)
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I was using sword and shield and breezing through the game but then I switched to a two-handed sword and got my ass handed to me for a while. Switched back and started kicking ass again.

Maybe with some AC boosting stuff it would be alright, but right at the start I don't really have access to that.
 
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