Welcome aboard!
Strega said:
You'll be fine with Legend and the D100 system opens up a huge back catalogue of different options. Not only is all the Legend material available to use but you can use Deus Vult with little effort for a very different world and alse earlier material published by Chaosium and many other companies.
The mix and match options can give you incredible choice is settings and feel for a campaign. The basic, underlying, system goes back more than thirty years and covers everything so fantasy ala D&D. Swords and Sorcery ala Moorcock, Lieber and Ashton Smith, Planetary Romance ala Burroughs and many more are just a net search away.
I would emphasize this. The various d100 games are rules-light in comparison to current versions of D&D / Pathfinder and you should have no trouble combining elements that you like from different versions. Feel free to mix and match the bits that you like from each game!
You might also want to take a look at OpenQuest from D101 games if you want a version that's a bit more streamlined than Legend / RQ 6. Also take a look at the Renaissance system from Cakebread & Walton - both of these are d100 variants released under the Open Gaming License, so you can combine elements from them with Legend to make your own remix if you choose:
D101 Games
Renaissance System
carew said:
We love the world and so we started again with Pathfinder and now I've discovered Legend I can see it being a new and different kind of fun, because we always liked character vulnerability and Legend gives you that with the combat and how hit points NEVER get any higher.
Since you are interested in adapting your Pathfinder setting to Legend, it's worth noting that designing combat encounters for Legend / RQ 6 requires a different approach to Pathfinder. Not only is the combat system more deadly, but also it has some subtle hidden features that reveal themselves during play. For example, in Legend, being outnumbered is a big deal due to the way that Combat Actions are spent. A group of weak opponents can bring down a tough adventurer quickly if they have a numerical advantage. In Pathfinder, a party of four 1st level characters will probably defeat a group of eight goblins. But in Legend, the same adventurers may be slaughtered because they run out of Combat Actions before the goblins do. Even if the adventurers each have three combat actions per round and the goblins each only have two CAs per round, the PCs will have a total of 12 CAs to spend per round and the goblins will have 16. This means that the goblins can make four attacks each round that the characters can't possibly defend against. Even if the goblins have low combat skills compared to the adventurers, if only one of these four attacks gets through the defenses of one of the adventurers there is a good chance that it will temporarily incapacitate that particular character - which causes the odds against the PCs to be even worse on the following round. This is realistic, but is surprising to people coming across from D&D or Pathfinder as they are used to running combats where characters are outnumbered 2:1 or worse. If you still want to do this, consider using the mook rules and handing out a few extra Hero Points. Remember that characters can spend a Hero Point to gain an extra Combat Action and should be encouraged to use this defensively rather than offensively.
On a similar note, climactic battles against a single big bad guy are rarely satisfying in Legend / RQ 6. The reason is exactly the same - the PCs will have more Combat Actions to spend each round than their opponent and will be able to quickly cut him down to size (no matter how tough he is). Stacking more armour on the bad guy can alleviate this issue slightly, but the weight of the additional armour can make this counter-productive. I find the best approach to building a climactic battle is to have a group of opponents who slightly outnumber the adventurers but whose skills are not quite at parity with those of the PCs. Often, I set the combat skills of the bad guys at roughly 2/3 of the PCs and the number of opponents at N+1 or N+2 (where N is the number of PCs).
Personally, I like to design adventures backwards and start with developing the climactic encounter first, while I'm still full of energy and enthusiasm. Satisfying endings are hard to pull off, but they help to provide structure to the adventure so it is always a good idea to nail them down as early as possible. Try working backwards from the climax to the opening scene wherever possible. This approach has the advantage that it is easy to scale the other encounters in the adventure relative to the climactic battle to ensure that they are neither too tough nor too weak. And it becomes trivial to ensure that the various paths through the adventure logically lead to the final confrontation without any need to railroad the characters in a specific direction. The dramatic flow of the adventure will be much tighter from the opening scene to the denouement, even if the adventure is largely freeform in nature. If the adventure flows backwards easily from the ending to the beginning, it's structure will feel natural to players who participate in it. This is just as true of sandbox adventures as it is of tightly-plotted story arcs.
Finally, I'd note that if you adapt a Pathfinder adventures across to Legend you may want to reduce the overall number of combat encounters. Because combat in Legend / RQ 6 can consequences beyond the loss of abstract hit points, it is risky to solve every problem using violence. Even if the adventurers are optimised for combat, the risk is that a random opponent will eventually get lucky and take them out with a major wound. I find that 2-3 combat encounters in a single adventure is enough - there is sufficient danger to keep things interesting, but the risk of an accidental TPK is reduced. I often like to have a simple combat encounter early in the adventure where the PCs face a minor threat in a way that allows them to show off their combat skills a bit with minimal risk - something like a bar-room brawl or back alley mugging can work well.
Also, Legend is a skill-based system rather than a level-based system and advancement is not tied to killing "monsters". Indeed, throughout all of its iterations RQ has emphasized that "monsters" are more than mere sword fodder - monsters are built using exactly the same rules that are used to create adventurers, which makes it harder to maintain the 'us vs. them' mentality common the D&D and related systems (and also means that most monster races are playable if you choose to allow that option). Keep in mind that RQ was one of the first RPGs to attempt a detailed 'realistic' treatment of a nonhuman species with the classic trollpak from 1982. This is a big difference between d100 games and D&D / Pathfinder where NPC races use a different set of rules to PC races.
