Entry-Level Game: Legends of Adventure

[Vile]

I'm currently bashing together what I call an 'entry-level game' using the OGL Legend books. The aim is to produce a simple set of rules that can be easily picked up and played even by people unfamiliar with RPGs in general, not just percentile systems.

This consists partly of stripping back the Legend core rules, and partly of adding in elements from the other books (particularly Monsters of Legend). It also means a lot more introductory and explanatory text, as the Legend rules specifically say they expect users to be familiar with RPGs, polyhedral dice, and all that stuff.

I'm still in stage 1, stripping back the core rules. Generally speaking, the following has happened so far:

• Skills are considerably simplified and broadened. This means a much shorter list, and each skill covers a wider range of actions.
• No levels of success - your skill either works, or it doesn't.
• Combat styles are now just any combination of 3 weapons and/or shields.
• No hit locations, just total hit points. Once you have less than half remaining, you take penalties on everything.
• Variable armour points to simulate the highly variable armour coverage over the whole target.
• Magic is just one system, with no skill involved - spend the points, cast the spell. I'll probably adapt spells taken from several of the existing systems.
• A cut-down creature chapter containing only fairly common types, and avoiding a proliferation of similar types. I may make this more genre-specific, too, e.g. European mythology only.

I plan to have an introductory adventure in parallel, again with the intention of helping novice referees running a game.

Your thoughts on what is required for a minimal introduction to percentile gaming are appreciated! Even more so if you can persuade me something else can be deleted ...

The garden is complete when there is nothing more you can take away.

 

[MongooseMatt]

This sounds like an excellent approach. I would recommend you be as vicious (!) as you can when stripping down rules, though perhaps retain individual hit locations, as players do like those. If you can strip/streamline other things you may find that extra complication can be retained without the game bogging down.

 

[K Peterson]

It sounds like you're on a good track. A couple of thoughts:

• Skills would be fairly easy to pare down. Though I like many of the Common Skills and consider the list pretty solid, I could see how you could chop off a few. I would definitely remove Advanced Skills altogether, or narrow them down to a single Profession-type skill ("Blacksmith", or "Sailor", for example).
• With HP and combat, I'd just leverage the existing Optional Combat Rules for Non-Player Characters for Player Characters. Also use them for powerful NPCs and the Underling rules for every other enemy combatant. Or tweak them slightly to account for the lack of levels-of-success.
• I'd suggest paring down Previous Experience to something more straightforward. Rather than Culture + Profession + Free Skill Points, make reduce this down to a single selection. Maybe focus your game on a single Culture type and just have Profession give you all the skill allocations.
• Personally, I'd remove or whittle down the Community and ACER (Alllies, Contacts, etc.] rules. By extension, I'd remove Guilds, Factions, and Cults from your game if community-involvement isn't going to a consideration.

 

[Vile]

Thanks for the feedback, gents!

This sounds like an excellent approach. I would recommend you be as vicious (!) as you can when stripping down rules, though perhaps retain individual hit locations, as players do like those. If you can strip/streamline other things you may find that extra complication can be retained without the game bogging down.

I can do vicious (editing)! :lol: I may leave hit locations as an optional thing or even the default if I find people prefer it that way in playtest. Actually there are several choices I'm on the fence about, which I'll probably resolve in the same way.

• With HP and combat, I'd just leverage the existing Optional Combat Rules for Non-Player Characters for Player Characters.
• I'd suggest paring down Previous Experience to something more straightforward.
• Personally, I'd remove or whittle down the Community and ACER (Alllies, Contacts, etc.] rules. By extension, I'd remove Guilds, Factions, and Cults from your game if community-involvement isn't going to a consideration.

I'd agree with all that. I want to stick as closely as possible to the Legend system, as one of the ideas is that new players can have an easy route when they want to try more complexity and/or variety. That means using or tweaking the "mook rules" will be the way to go if I don't end up keeping hit locations. There will be a lot of "new referee advice" in the book so the community elements will be there in the form of guidance, but not part of character creation. Simple professions will be the approach for the latter, and the default culture will probably be "fantasy medieval civilised" as the most commonly-understood trope for people who haven't been exposed to a lot of fantasy or RPGs.

My immediate next step will be a concise creature list, I'm thinking along these lines (leaving out dinosaurs, giant insects, and a few others):

• BASILISK
• BEAR
• CROCODILE
• DRAGON
• DWARF
• ELF
• GIANT
• GOBLIN
• GORGON
• HORSE
• HOUND
• MANTICORE
• SKELETON
• SNAKE, CONSTRICTOR
• SNAKE, POISONOUS
• VAMPIRE
• WEREWOLF
• WOLF
• ZOMBIE

 

[medievaladventures]

For a basic/entry level version, I'd probably pair combat styles down to just three: Melee, Ranged, Unarmed.

 

[Vile]

For a basic/entry level version, I'd probably pare combat styles down to just three: Melee, Ranged, Unarmed.

If I go this route I probably won't even have Unarmed. It hardly ever comes up in my experience, so lumping it with Melee should be fine.

 

[Vile]

As you can see I've hit on a title. I discussed "Legendary Adventures" with Matt, but it turns out that someone on DTRPG already has some Legend OGL books under that title, so I'm going with "Legends of Adventure". The aim is to be relatively generic, but somehow link it to the Legend OGL so that those in the know, know.

I have also switched to making this "classical" rather than medieval European - that is, in a Harryhausenesque but not-at-all-historically-accurate Greco-Roman sort of way. I freely admit this is partially influenced by this piece of cover art I've had sitting unused on my hard drive for years:

 

[Prime_Evil]

Are you planning to publish this variant or develop it as private house rules? How do you plan to differentiate it from lightweight d100 implementations such as GORE and OpenQuest?

For skills, you can consider some Advanced Skills to be specialisations of Common Skills. For example, Oratory and Seduction are specialisations within the Influence skill. Likewise, Acrobatics is a specialisation within the Athletics skill. In my game, I reduce the Difficulty of tasks by one or more levels on the Difficulty and Haste Modifiers (p.39) if they use the correct specialisation. An adventurer can use either Influence or Oratory to sway a crowd - but the task is easier for the character with the Oratory skill. I go further than this and reduce many Advanced skills to mere specialization tags or labels - for example, characters with the Influence skill choose whether they want to concentrate on Persuasion, Intimidation, Seduction, Deception, etc. You might want to rule that Adventurers can only have one specialisation per skill.

 

[Vile]

It's going to be published. GORE is not really a thing now, it never was. OpenQuest is very much a game engine used in various setting-specific games (looking forward to OQ3!). I am writing LoA specifically to be not only an introduction to percentile gaming, but for anyone who doesn't already have experience with tabletop gaming. System-wise it will be much pared down, but there is a lot of explanation of "how to" for players and referees.

I have really trimmed the skills to an absolute minimum now. The game won't benefit from introducing skill specialisation, because the default is to encourage players to think of what they want to do first and then just pick the most appropriate skill to do it with, with the referee imposing circumstance/difficulty modifiers as seen fit. You could certainly rune extended campaigns just with LoA if you wished, but the underlying intent is to get players to look at other D100 (especially Legend) based games if and when they develop a taste for more crunch.

The key to this kind of writing is to be utterly brutally, as suggested by Matt.

 

[Prime_Evil]

How are you going to handle Magic Skills? Are you going to reduce it to a single skill per magic type (e.g. Common Magic, Divine Magic, Sorcery)? Or are you just going to have a single Magic skill?

 

[Vile]

How are you going to handle Magic Skills? Are you going to reduce it to a single skill per magic type (e.g. Common Magic, Divine Magic, Sorcery)? Or are you just going to have a single Magic skill?

There is no magic skill, and only one type of magic*. Characters have to learn individual spells, but after that they just need to spend magic points to cast them. I may or may not have a limit to how many spells a character can learn, or perhaps on the number they can keep in their head, but preferably I'd like the limit to be self-enforcing through available magic points. Again, the goal is to reduce single-use rules as much as possible, make actions as simple as possible, and where I do need rules stick to those already in Legend. Magic point usage is unique to spells, but it is a core mechanic so it should be okay. Magic point usage plus spell acquisition plus skill learning plus skill rolls seems a little too much for too little "gaming fun" gain.

I've been looking through the spell lists for spells to use with the LoA system, but so far none of the individual systems are grabbing me as "the one". On the other hand, I'm quite tempted to import D&D 5E cantrips ... :twisted:

 

[Herne'sSon]

Just wondering if you're still working on this, and if so, how's it going?

 

[Vile]

I'm stuck renovating a 150-year old house at the moment, so everything else is on hold! At least until I get the damp out of the walls, and maybe a heating system installed. This business of 10°C at the end of May is simply no fun at all.

 

[DamonJynx]

For Advanced Skills, I think having them just as Profession is perfectly fine. If you wanted to, you could make each "Profession" a skill in its own right, so players could in effect 'multi-class'. The base stats would obviously be those appropriate for the Profession; STR+DEX for martial types, INT+DEX for sneaky types, INT+POW for magic types and so on. Obviously, you'd need to provide some examples. If you go down this path, you could even use the Profession in lieu of combat styles; Soldiers get 1H melee, shield & bow, Nobles get 1H sword, shield & bow, Thieves get Shortsword & Dagger or Shortsword & Sap plus Light Crossbow or Short bow, Knights get 1H Melee & Shield, Lance and so on...

 

[Herne'sSon]

For Advanced Skills, I think having them just as Profession is perfectly fine. If you wanted to, you could make each "Profession" a skill in its own right, so players could in effect 'multi-class'. The base stats would obviously be those appropriate for the Profession; STR+DEX for martial types, INT+DEX for sneaky types, INT+POW for magic types and so on. Obviously, you'd need to provide some examples. If you go down this path, you could even use the Profession in lieu of combat styles; Soldiers get 1H melee, shield & bow, Nobles get 1H sword, shield & bow, Thieves get Shortsword & Dagger or Shortsword & Sap plus Light Crossbow or Short bow, Knights get 1H Melee & Shield, Lance and so on...

That's not a bad idea at all. Sort of how the HeroQuest/Questworlds game handles professions.

I knew a guy years ago who was working on something similar. A BRP-alike where if you were a Fighter, you had a skill in Fighter. And you rolled that skill to do the sorts of things that Fighters could do.

I think the only trick is you have to either make rules to be explicit about what each skill covers, or assume that the people playing it aren't going to take advantage of the broadness of the skill.

 

[Vile]

The Black Hack and its derivatives do something like this. In my experience it works quite well, because it's remarkably easy to define what you can do within a certain fantasy trope such as a D&D thief or an noir gumshoe. If you step outside popular stereotypes you have to be a bit more explicit, but it's certainly less work than the type of skills list that GURPS 3E ended up with.

Oh, and: 8 months later - I have heating. No desk yet, though, I'm still waiting for the larch I cut down to season.

 

[DamonJynx]

It's kind of also how 13th Age uses Backgrounds. In that system, for those unaware, you get a number of backgrounds and assign points to them. When a skill roll is required, you apply a relevant background to an ability score roll, so in essence you roll 1d20 + Ability Modifier + Background (+Level - can't remember if your level is added in as well). It's up to the player to narrate and sell to the GM how the background and ability apply to the situation. In the instance we're talking about, it's a simple matter to provide 'common' examples of the Profession in action (the Professions Common and Advanced skills). Any usage outside those would require role playing and negotiation between player & GM.