Pigrat said:
I love Jason Mical's work on the old unofficial fallout pnp game. I used to play it a lot back then. Great job he did indeed! However the special system had obvious flaws when played in a group of roleplayers. Combat would take insane ammounts of time and be dificult to do without a hex sheet.
It's called "get with the times". Even 20 years ago, strategy wargamers and role-players were using their own mass-damage resolution tables and even quick-sheets for simple calculations of area-of-effect attacks, if they didn't feel like the attack was worth the complexity of those calculations.
Ever hear of Birthright? This is a D&D setting that often included massive armies. There were special rules for this, as there were supplements for abbreviating combat likely before you had been born.
Even d20 has rules for cover, half-cover, etc., and large-scale battles often have to take placements. Or are has your DM turned you into the player that can cast a fireball in a crowded room and it only fries the opponents?
Please, don't do tabletop a disservice by misrepresenting it with your ignorance; and if the latter sentence about fireballs applies to you, please go back to Final Fantasy, because if area and placement isn't important to you, that sounds more like your cup of tea.
Also, your DM did you another disservice. Hex paper isn't really required when you have a measuring tape and a felt placement table. Don't even bitch about the cost to me, the tape is only $5 and the felt about twice that for a square yard. You could even put it on
cardboard if mommy doesn't have a spare table lying around. Hexes can be converted to inches with ease, since hex overlays almost always have an inch scale on their edge.
This really does sicken me. Instead of being creative towards making your own materials, you're far more creative at making excuses as to why you can't play a game when it really is no more complex than any other with the same considerations. I really doubt you always calculated how much damage your suit of full field plate mail deflected from edged attacks in 2nd edition D&D...
Its annoying to have to stop an exciting firefight because you have to punch in the DT/D? on a calculator to calculate how much damage gets through your gecko skin armor. And to make 30 percentile rolls to figure out how many times you hit with your minigun.
And here's a thought, mass-calculation tables and a programmable calculator make those an irrelevance, since a game generally uses the same calculations. Your DM, if you ever had one, has done you a great disservice through their incompetence and unwillingness to think. They probably also used the (1d20+9, max score of 18 ) rule for shortening stat rolls for character creation, if burst effect is too much of a challenge to calculate, for what...maybe 5 opponents? They have made it so that the basic D&D encounter is FAR too complex for you to handle.
Again, back to my statement about P&P being dumbed down to cater to the stupid
and the creatively lazy. (Forgot that last part, thanks for reminding me, Corky!)
Really, when people have to come up with excuses as to why they're lazy, instead of thinking for themselves, that's a gut-buster for me.
Then the veteran inside me cries as he realizes these people get to vote when mommy kicks them from the house.
I used to modify the hell out of the SPECIAL system to smoothen up combat so it could be more action packed and allow for more roleplaying and adventuring. The SPECIAL system is fine if you have a computer to calculate a ton of rolls and percentile tressholds. It just doesnt work when you want to get through decent night of adventuring, roleplaying and having fun.
Or, if you know how to use a simple algebraic expression in a calculator about the same price as a PC game, it could be done as you simply push in the variables and it spits out the equasion.
A 20
B 15
And it spits out C for you, taking only about 20 seconds to do all five calculations. Or is that STILL too complex?
Or you can use a simplified table for 10+ enemies, as D&D has had for...years.. Again, your DM has done you a great disservice, as their encounters sound as lively as a Punch and Judy show by a multiple amputee.
The d20 conversion of course solves that issue about the system being to complex for any real enjoyment.
...
Symptom alleviated at the cost of the patient, Dr. Quackenstein. Please, tell me you're competent at thinking elsewise in this world. Your arguments are far from persuading me that d20 is anything but BAD for the gameplay.
If the system was too complex, then D&D wouldn't have combat, and Fallout's character system wouldn't have been used because it's "too complex". I really hope Bethesda doesn't read this crap and "refine" it like they did for TES because TES was "too difficult" for the X-Brick crowd. Many spell effects, and their asspciated saving throws, are about on par as a burst attack with armor calculations.
However i hate classes and levels. Classes because there is no point in dividing players in 4-6 boxes that are supposed to boil their profession, heritage and education into in a term like fighter or rogue.
The only thing you've said that really makes sense. Classes are bullshit because they are only a simplification - NOTHING MORE. They obviously aren't for balancing, d20 and D&D have proven that for years, and whatever flavor they could have had is often put into generic sound bites of character stereotypes. Instead of having a PERSON to develop from, it's usually some kind of CLASS that the character is built up from. I have HATED that in both P&P and CRPGs for years, and to purposefully disregard that level of complexity as originally intended for the setting and character system DOES show that the authors aren't really taking the material into good hands. That is - unless they completely change it so that it can operate like a class-less system, but at that point you might as well forget any pretenses of it being called "d20".
Classes only originated from being able to classify abilities at a moment's notice and use quick-charts. Otherwise, the gameplay is very much similar to tabletop warfare games.
Levels because they suck. Things like skills, stats and hit points doesn't follow each other. Getting good at computers doesn't increase the ammount of blood you can loose before dying.
However, in an optimal presentation, you go through multiple events and encounters to increase your experience in dealing with the world, through whatever. Optimally, this includes a variety of events, but as an average it works. This could be from being attacked (OMG, like I know how to dodge better!), climbing around to increase your physical awareness, from fighting, or from witnessing others' body language as they talk. It really does represent how they fight, from twitchy to controlled and eloquent.
If you get an entire level from using a computer, you're either ringing the game or your DM is also a munchkin in addition to being an incompetent idiot. Or, if the PC gained experience during a non-combat section of their adventure, they have had time to think and reflect about what they have been through.
Again, this revolves around making excuses for what aren't problems if applied correctly.
the best would of course be some hybrid between the SPECIAL system and Basic Roleplaying system (call of cuthulu). And for crying out loud; make it simple while easy to expand! Thats the only way to ensure fun for all!
Yeah...make it so that conversions have to be even more convoluted, rather than making a Fallout SPECIAL manual, then a d20 conversion guide and conversion manual for those who really HAVE to have d20, and then do parallel development between both systems. That way, if you need to use d20 material, you can adopt it to the system
without violating the character system or the gameplay. Which is cake if you know how to do your game mechanics. None of that compromises the game's integrity, and respects the material, in a far better way than these people are claiming to.
Again, why do
I have to point out common-sense? Oh, yeah, the room-temp IQ thing...
OS, since he was "taking a lot of care" and didn't see any reason for the gameplay or character design, to the point where F
