Fluffy Bunny Rainbows?
Since the release of 4e there’s been a lot of talk (at least in the circles I follow) that it is very difficult to kill PCs now. Difficult, yes. Impossible? No. At the core of the game is still comes down to dice rolls and when they turn on you in a hard-hitting encounter bad things are likely to happen.
Truth be told, I just wanted to draw one of the Quitessons from Transformers: The Movie (the animated one).
I am currently working on a pet project: My own edition of D&D. I love 4e but there are some things I’d like to strip away from the core chassis and replace with old school goodness (Crit and Fumble charts, I’m looking at you). People will argue that Essentials answers many of the problems but I am talking about a core game that features the fighter, wizard, rogue, and cleric. Everything else (warlock, paladin, bard, monk, etc.) is merely a build of one of the four core classes. I want to make the game super quick and easy to play. I’m doing away with immediate reactions and all rituals (unless they are “story rituals” require only a standard action. I have more on this system of mine but I’ll post it later when the details are clearer.
In the meantime, the Hang In There Baby print is available in the online store along with Flaming d20 t-shirts. I am going to personalize and sign the first 10 print orders taken in the store so if that is something you’d like to have, I’d act fast.
Brian
Guilty . . . or Innocent? . . . Innocent.
Can’t wait to see what you come up with! 🙂
INNOCENT!
Bwah-ha-ha! I love it! Especially the nice touch of the fading DM’s screen. Of course, a real Dm can kill a player…er, character, in any system. 😉
Have you looked at the long list of alternatives? There are some excellent d20 games out there.
Fantasy Craft from Crafty Games might be right down your alley (http://www.crafty-games.com/)
What about Pathfinder? I personally am enjoying Golarion and the excellent work of the Paizo folks.
Then there’s Castle & Crusades, Hackmaster….
Also, the new Arcanis: Shattered Empires game looks to be well done (http://www.paradigmconcepts.com/).
You should check out some alternatives and see if another game inspires you!
This is quite serendipitous as I’ve been watching the old Transformers cartoon with my son and we just reached the movie/season 3 where these guys show up…all the way in the future of 2005! Brilliant!
It’s nonsense. Just ask our Ashes of Athas playtesters. One adventure we sent out had 4 tables playtesting 3 encounters each: all had TPKs in every encounter except one. Yeah, we toned that down. A lot. Recent adventure, two TPKs out of three. And we aren’t trying to kill PCs. Just challenge them. Don’t give PCs a shopping list and hone the craft of how monsters interact with space, movement, and terrain.
But, I totally laughed. Great work as always!
I found it fairly easy to butcher players accidentally in 4th edition when running some of the Goodman adventurers.
“I find that if I wanted to, I could coup de grace a player every adventure and wash my hands of it. I don’t, because that’s not good for gameplay, friendships, or really particularly reasonable in active combat. However, I recently started my third 4e campaign and my party bitched that they nearly died (which they tend to do, but they have fun and bitch at the same time, so it’s cool).”
“At the end, the anti-climax boss nearly died after a nice assassin crit, and some fun RP made a few of the NPCs extremely uncomfortable with the idea of continuing the battle.”
Waitwaitwait… There IS someone who not only played AD&D2 without “death’s door” but was unaware of it? Really? Lolwut.
http://www.ruleofcool.com/ Legend appears to be quite similar in style to what you want. It brings back a little of 3.5’s mechanical style and variety and moddability while maintaining 4e’s balance and DM friendliness. 4
p.s. I was sent here by WEREGEEK a few days ago. You do really good work and I wish I’d found this a long time ago.
impossible!?
one of my players(tiefling rogue) died during their first boss battle(lvl 3 white young dragon)
it was either him or the cleric considering the cleric was out of healing surges.
actually since I started writting my book, I decided to work on a game to go with it. Unfortunantly I said screw the ease of use, to a degree.I am an interesting and complicating type of loving person. If it’s not complicated I lose interest quick, if it’s not unique with lots of choices and ideas, it’s boring. The cool thing about making your own character…is it actually being your own character. My game actually only features 3 STARTING classes, and in order to throw in that idea of natural limits, and reaching full potential many stories are driven to include, the advanced and mastery classes may either be difficult to achieve, or limit the character on what he cam be, effectively limiting the player to either his one base class, two advanced classes and one mastery class, or as high of a level as he can achieve (which by my calculations so far is about level 65.)
also races do not reduce stats, that was just rediculous to me. Instead each race has special starting abilities, which if a player wishes,
he can gain special talents to improve. (something like feats, but not) an example being all orcs can use any none weapon object as if it were a weapon of a similiar type. Dwarves gain special “being drunk” benefits.
I also did away with all half races being half human. Instead I made a half race building system….so If you want to be a half minotaur dwarf….be my friggin guest hahaha.
The recent re-release of 2nd Ed. leads me to believe that the future you’ve envisioned may not come to pass.
Why did my post not get approved? All I was doing was letting you know you spelled quintessons wrong.
Having some site issues that I’m trying to fix. You’re not the only one that was pending that was lost. Sorry about that.