"Buy the numbers" and Conan D20

[Stubacca]

Does anyone of you have the D20 supplement book "Buy the numbers" from S.T. Cooley Publishing? If so, what is your experience with it? How difficult is it to adapt the Conan RPG to this classless and level free system? Have you ever tried to adapt "Buy the numbers" to your Conan game? If so, how did you manage the individual special abilities and feats that are not present in the regular D&D game?

I like the general Conan D20 ruleset, but I see classes and levels as the main flaw of the whole system. So I'm considering to buy "Buy the numbers". Since I would only use it to modify my Conan game I wouldn't have any use for it if it was really just usable for the regular D&D ruleset.

I have searched for more information on this all over the net and couldn't find it. So I hope somebody might help me here.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, take a look at this: http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=18175&it=1

 

[Yogah of Yag]

Welcome to the boards! 8)
First off, no, I haven't heard of it. As a person intimately familiar with the d20 system (and First Edition AD&D, et al.), including both these systems' strengths and weaknesses, I am not sure how one is to run such a game without classes or levels.

I read the info from RPGnow. Could you give a run-down of their system?

 

[Stubacca]

Thanks for the welcome, Yogah.

I haven't really read the book myself, like I've already stated, but I think I can basically tell you how the system works.

Ability Scores. Base Attack Bonus, Hit Points, Saving Throw Bonuses, Defensive Abilities, existing class specific traits, Feats and Skills are bought with Experience. The experience cost for this gets more expensive the higher the stat is that you want to increase. If one rank in a skill might cost 100 experience points, a second one might already cost 200 points and so on (these are only hypothetical values, mind you). In theory this gives more diversity to the characters while still maintaining the balance of the game. I have read reviews of the system working very well and balanced with D&D. The character creation and leveling up process works very similiar to GURPS or the White Wolf gaming systems while still maintaining all the abilities and statistics of a D20 game. In theory you could use your experience in a way that allows you to recreate a given class at any level if you so please or come up with an entirely new combination, if you want to.

I really like how you can just build up any character you imagine with rulesets like GURPS. The only problem is that I usually don't like the rules for checks and combat in the similiar systems I have read about. I really love how D20 checks and combat work out (especially in Conan), so I would like a way to create a system where my players are not restricted to classes while still keeping the general build of the game.

As I've said, I can not go into details, since I've only heard about this supplement from second sources.

 

[Trodax]

Welcome to the boards indeed!

I have Buy the Numbers, although I must say I've never actually used it for anything. It's also been a while since I read it, so I'm not 100% on everything...

Basically, just like you said Stubacca, you have rules for buying *everything* separately; BAB, HD, skills, feats, etc. If I wanted to I could create a mega-offensive character who has only 1d6 hp but a BAB of +10. The balancing thing is that everything becomes more and more expensive the deeper you buy into it, so when I'm spending thousands of XP to raise my BAB from +10 to +11, I'll probably be tempted to pick up a few more HD for just a couple of hundred points.

The problem for using this with Conan (as I see it) is that everything has been balanced based on the D&D rules. One thing is of course that you have abilities in Conan which aren't present (Bite Sword and Versatility, for example), so those you'd have to come up with costs for yourself (or you could just skip them). More of a problem is that the rules aren't exactly the same, which means that different things might be more or less important. For example, you have the Uncanny Dodge ability in both D&D and Conan, but one could argue that it is much more "valuable" under the Conan rules because it there generally sucks much more to be caught flat-footed. Likewise, one could also argue that having a lot of HD isn't as important because you might still get toasted by massive damage. Oh, yes, of course, another big thing is that you'd also have to come up with costs for dodge and parry progressions and integrate that.

I'm not saying that it's undoable, but it's not super-simple either. My advice to you is to get it for yourself (it's dirt cheap!) so you can check it out in detail. If you ever do use it for Conan, I'd be interested in hearing how it goes. Won't ever use it myself, though, cause' I love me them classes and levels.

 

[Stubacca]

Well, I think I would first start to recreate let's say the Barbarian class without the abilities and feats that are unique to Conan up to Level 20. After that I would look how many XP there would be left under the Buy the Numbers System. I would assign an XP value to the missing special abilities, Dodge Bonus and Parry Bonus and make sure that they fill out the exact XP requirements for Level 20 (with lower level abilities being cheaper than the higher ones, of course).

If Dodge and Parry get too cheap that way, I would try to decrease the overall XP for everything by a certain number and make Dodge and Parry more expensive.

I see that it could be a lot of work, though. I would have to come up with something for the magic system myself as well. My group is eager to try out a class-less and level-less system, we are in the middle of a campaign that will still last for a long while. So taking the GURPS ruleset would get pretty complicated and characters might end up without abilities they had before or something similiar. Another point is that I'm very fond of the Conan D20 System myself (massive damage, iconic talents, deadly as hell, dangerous for the players).

I have looked at Mutants & Masterminds for a classless D20 system, but I wasn't very satisfied because attributes could be easily pushed very high without getting more expensive with higher stats and the overall power of the characters was just too huge.

I've been lurking here for quite a while, by the way. I just now decided to register, though. The community here seems like a nice enough bunch. But now that I'm registered I'm probably going to risk a post every once in a while.

 

[Vortigern]

I'd consider the purchase of a conan specific version of such a work.

 

[slaughterj]

If you want to do a point-buy, you may want to consider using something like Mutants and Masterminds instead.

 

[Stubacca]

If you want to do a point-buy, you may want to consider using something like Mutants and Masterminds instead.

I'm not such a big fan of the system since costs don't scale. Raising an ability always costs the same amount of points no matter what for example. I would like a system where it's actually more expensive to raise an ability depending on how high it is currently.

It's cool system for a superhero game, though.

 

[slaughterj]

If you want to do a point-buy, you may want to consider using something like Mutants and Masterminds instead.

I'm not such a big fan of the system since costs don't scale. Raising an ability always costs the same amount of points no matter what for example. I would like a system where it's actually more expensive to raise an ability depending on how high it is currently.

It's cool system for a superhero game, though.

It can be used more generically than supers though. Similarly, I have used Hero system for a variety of gaming, and quite like using it for when I have run Lankhmar, so I'm sure Hero and other generic point-buys like MnM could be used for Conan just fine. These don't have scaled increases in costs, but I'm not big on those because that usually means having to remember or look up a lot more when making/adjusting characters than if things have a flat cost.