05-06-2019, 10:33 AM | #11 | |
Join Date: May 2012
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Re: New Xp System: Not a Fan
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IRL, Lex Luthor circles the world three times while Superman is still putting his pants on. |
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05-06-2019, 11:11 AM | #13 | |
Join Date: May 2015
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Re: New Xp System: Not a Fan
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The new system gives an additional effective advantage in character development of 500 XP for every talent or spell a character starts with, since those don't cost XP. In the case of spells which include lower-level versions of the same spell, that can be a savings of 500 XP per spell you might otherwise want to learn using XP (except that would be dumb, because if you start with it, you don't pay anything for it, not even another IQ/talent point). And wizards who learn an earlier version of a spell are effectively going to be 500 XP behind the progress of wizards who wait until they can learn the higher-level version. Overall, there's now a huge incentive for wizard to start out with as high IQ as the GM's style will allow them to survive and earn XP at, greatly penalizing lower-IQ characters in terms of their development. In the early game, this is huge, since 500 XP would otherwise buy multiple attribute points, (even more if you start as a halfling). All of that, it seems to me, is new weird side-effects of a hasty design that was focused on trying to be simple. The result is various gamey XP payoffs, low-level PCs not being able to learn talents or spells without deferring raising several attribute points, and other weird side-effects. |
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05-06-2019, 11:45 AM | #14 |
Join Date: Dec 2017
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Re: New Xp System: Not a Fan
I think this game is freakishly well balanced. Even if you just focus on winning arena fights, it is hard to say whether you are better off being a hero or wizard, there is no clearly ideal stat distribution for either character type (at best you might recognize the inferiorities of some extreme cases), and lots of different combinations of talents and gear feel (and are) similarly valuable. Each of these options provides a different experience in play, yet you can't put your finger on anything close to an ideal 'build'. Multiply this ambiguity by 1000 when you consider the range of things that happen in a roleplaying campaign.
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05-06-2019, 12:10 PM | #15 | ||
Join Date: Nov 2017
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Re: New Xp System: Not a Fan
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05-07-2019, 01:49 AM | #16 | |
Join Date: Nov 2010
Location: Arizona
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Re: New Xp System: Not a Fan
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Regarding attribute bloat, I've played this game for 40 years and it WAS a problem. Just because one person never saw it doesn't mean it wasn't an issue, and Lars actually does a pretty good job of encapsulating the *real* issue -- it was boring. I know that Joe will take me to task for this, but I much prefer the new system in terms of how XP may be spent and new skills and spells learned compared to the old way of doing things -- it's smoother, more intuitive and requires less book-keeping -- all positives in my opinion. Plus, as others have said before, de-coupling the learning process from the rigid IQ limits (and instead using IQ to limit the complexity of the learnable tasks instead of the number of them) is just so much more useful and "accurate" in game terms than the old system was. Plus we get rid of all that nonsense about "forgetting" talents and spells. In short, taking the bad with the good, I see the new system as an overall triple at the very least. And by adding back in the old "kills" way of earning XP (in addition to the new system), I feel like I am fast approaching "home run" territory for my games. |
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05-07-2019, 06:59 AM | #17 |
Join Date: Nov 2017
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Re: New Xp System: Not a Fan
How, exactly? I mean, having a 20 in all your attributes doesn't make you invulnerable. A group of strong orcs with two handed weapons hit you just as easily as they hit a character with 10s in all of theirs. Other than being good at most things (and even in the old days, you were capped by IQ at how much you could be good at), how exactly did the system break down? I see that you would hit all the time in combat, and do a lot of damage with a hit. But that's true for most FRPGs at high level.
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05-07-2019, 08:59 AM | #18 | |
Join Date: Sep 2018
Location: North Texas
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Re: New Xp System: Not a Fan
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That said, I think it is terrific that characters now have the option for horizontal advancement (in the form of talents and spells) as well as vertical (increasing stats). I would just like to go a little higher on the stats.
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“No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.” -Vladimir Taltos Last edited by TippetsTX; 05-07-2019 at 10:29 AM. |
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05-07-2019, 10:59 AM | #19 | |
Join Date: Dec 2017
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Re: New Xp System: Not a Fan
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05-07-2019, 11:15 AM | #20 |
Join Date: Dec 2017
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Re: New Xp System: Not a Fan
I have to say it again: it so easy to 'fix' this if you don't like it. Someone above suggested they liked XP for gold and faster progression. Problem solved! Give people 1 XP per silver and away you go. No one will come to arrest you. I'll bet no one will even give you a hard time on the forums - all you are doing is following the advice in the book that you should sort out your own way of awarding XP. Otherwise, your game can work the same way as everyone else's - you'll just have a lot of pretty advanced characters. I suspect they'll find they prefer adding lots of talents and spells rather than stat points once they've got one or two stats up to 16. But you never know what players will want to do.
Also worth noting that characters who are groomed in the environment of Melee and Wizard advance at a very different rate and will either be dead or 40 point characters quite quickly. Another option I've really been enjoying (as a GM with NPC's at least) is repurposing the Supers rules from the Companion volume. These rules, and obvious extrapolations of them, let you create characters with a few powerful distinctive abilities. They are more fun and interesting than normal PC's who just happen to have a ton of stat points. |
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