Stef said:
Just how close/far from a regular D&D are your games getting?
All the major archetypes are present. Some areas of Hyboria are pretty technologically advanced. We got monsters, magic, etc...
I'm curious how the GM/players out there who have played Conan compare it with their regular d&d/ad&d/insert popular medieval fantasy rpg system?
I'm currently preparing my new Campaign and am going through the Conan 2e rulebook. I got the mechanics part covered, but I was wondering about the all important non-mechanical aspect.
I was playing a D&D campaign concurrently with my Conan campaign.
Nonmechanically, there were big differences in flavor or logic. D&D tends to be kitchen sink. Today we fight dragons, tomorrow it's demons, then there are the unpronouncable monsters, the vampire wizard, etc. Let me summon an elemental because I otherwise suck at fighting. Wait, let me put an undeadbane on your sword. Whatever.
D&D taught me to hate elves. I can't stand the goofy every race stuff that D&D and ripoffs foist upon us. I can live with about one other PC race. Conan's tribal world, OTOH, is the sort of thing that interests me - plausible diversity.
While our D&D campaign strived for low magic and less of the fantastical and seemed to have similar bad guys across sessions, the world has (we switched systems) everything it it. And, the party makes little sense. We have a couple of gnomes - druid and artificer, a paladin, a noble fighter, and other random stuff. The latter two ended up multiclassing into dragon shaman (forced multiclassing rules) as part of the story.
Our Conan campaign may have fantasy elements, but it's down to earth. People, which are far more important than monsters in Conan, behave with recognizable motivations and the monsters are plausible and less free form. Magic isn't reliable and necessary in Conan like in D&D.
While it borders on mechanics, skills in our Conan game are terribly important. The greatest threat to our party has been climb and swim checks. But, we use things like diplomacy all of the time, as well. D&D tends to be about firepower (which is why we sucked all of the time). Conan has been about overcoming a variety of obstacles in whatever way we could and not just killing everything.
In part due to the necessity of equipment in D&D but also to what seems to be a basic drive - getting more powerful, D&D is often about fighting to the death. Conan for us has often been about avoiding something that we couldn't deal with.
Contrary to what a couple of people said in another thread, D&D is not remotely high fantasy. D&D is hack and slash fantasy, video game fantasy, or whatever you feel like calling it - it created its own genre. In this regard, it doesn't do a good job simulating any sort of recognizable literary fantasy I'm familiar with prior to its existence. You could of course play it or modify it to try to conform to some other genre. Which is precisely what Conan tries to do and I think does a fairly good job. Conan is recognizably sword and sorcery.
So, if I went with the most basic difference nonmechanically, I would reiterate "down to earth".
