Judge Dredd 2nd Edition

[MongooseMatt]

Don't get excited - it is still a ways off yet

However, seeing as people are dropping in, what would _you_ like to see in a second edition Dredd and its supplements? What to keep in from the 1st edition? What to take out? What new stuff should there be?

I have my own ideas but let's hear it from the fans. . .

 

[numanti]

What would I like to see...

An expanded set of driving/riding rules - including a section on 'generate as you go' roads, similar to that in the old GW Judge Dredd Companion, but playable in the way that something like Dark Future was playable in its own right. Maybe this could emcompass flying vehicles, including skysurfing - so that chases and races could be played as a miniatures game or something.

A section on designing your own sector and blocks. Something like Citiblock only in more detail, and with advanced rules for destroying big stuff. I know all of this is covered already to an extent, but how cool wwould t be to play out a block war where anything goes really easily! (yes, rookies guide to block wars sets out mass combat and sructural hit points well enough, but still... big fights and chases should be fun!) - it shoul include guidelines on mapping a sector or part of a sector, and info on how to 'build a block' (i.e., number of levels, where the megaways enter and exit, locations of block parks, schools, armories etc)

Charts to generate details for random citizens. I lose count of the 'innocent civilians' that I have not detailed getting arrested by my players, so I have to make up thier details on the spot... also, a bunch of pre-generated background characters would be nice, just something to refer to when players want to talk to someone (or fight them!) who you only introduced for background colour.

Armour degredation rules, and rules for damage to equipment (beyond loss of hit points until it don't work no more - stuff like 'that bullet smashed your headlamps/damaged the respirator on your helmet'), and hit location rules beyond the called shot rules. I know that some people think this might slow the game down a little, so how about having these as optional advanced rules?

All in all, I would like to see more rules and less background - mainly because I am a regular reader of 2000ad and the Megazine and I already have all the background I need

Toni

 

[redlaco]

All in all, I would like to see more rules and less background - mainly because I am a regular reader of 2000ad and the Megazine and I already have all the background I need

I would say the same if I was in your situation but, alas, I only have a few collected series. They cost a lot since most of them I had to buy directly from England through eBay. That's why I would like that there continue to be background as it helps me to cover the holes in my collection.

 

[Tiberius Bane]

All the rules in the main book? Thats my biggest complaint with D20. That I had to purchase the D&D Player's Handbok. Got no problem with OGL however.

I would like to see a game that is a little more rules lite than the current game. Kinda like Mutants and Masterminds or Unisystem.

Decent vehicular combat rules.

 

[saint]

More rules - blech!
Less rules, and all gathered into one volume. As I've already remarked on another thread, Dredd is about kicking butt and taking names, all executed with a little style and dark humour; do we really need hundreds of pages of rules for that?
A chart to describe what's damaged on a piece of equipment or vehicle - make it up!
The game needs to be streamlined to reflect the cinematic feel of the comic, not bogged down with superfluous tables for trivia.
I'd like to see a version of action points, and you might consider drafting in a couple of feats from other products; Teamwork from Blood and Guts seems ideal for a squad of judges.
Totally against toning down judges to be on a par with citizens. No one who's been raised on a diet of munce and tv could hope to compete with a fella (or woman) with fifteen years of Academy training.
Fifteen years! Even the finest Special Forces in the real world don't receive anything like that amount of training, and do you think that some gangbanger from the East End is really on a par with a member of the SAS or a Navy SEAL?
Judges are probably the hardest people on the planet and their game stats should reflect this.

 

[Anonymous]

I would like to see greater options for character customisiation. One thing that I stressed to my players when they started was that is twas generally a good idea to go for prestige classes, if you have 6 players all being pur street judges it can't take too many levels before they are looking a bit on the similar side. The present selection is fantastic, but by and large they are inaccessible until 6 levels in. Fair play the 'basic training' should stay the same (first 3 levels) but why not allow players to begin their specialisation then? Perhaps even having really small prestige clasees that are only 1-3 levels, few requirements and little gains but at least then you will be more clearly distinguised as a party member. Maybe its not practical but its something to consider.

And it might be a bit old school but given megacity one, a random encounter table might not be an entirely bad idea, as gm tool if a scene is being a bit slow or you want to complicate your players lives just a bit more it might be handy.


Cheerio for now,
Alan

 

[redlaco]

The present selection is fantastic, but by and large they are inaccessible until 6 levels in. Fair play the 'basic training' should stay the same (first 3 levels) but why not allow players to begin their specialisation then?

Well a simple solution would be to start them of at level 5, so they only have a level to wait.

And it might be a bit old school but given megacity one, a random encounter table might not be an entirely bad idea, as gm tool if a scene is being a bit slow or you want to complicate your players lives just a bit more it might be handy.

Good idea.

Less rules, and all gathered into one volume. As I've already remarked on another thread, Dredd is about kicking butt and taking names, all executed with a little style and dark humour; do we really need hundreds of pages of rules for that?

As a Feng Shui player and a "wannabe" Judge Dredd player, I totally agree with this feeling. 8)

 

[Anonymous]

As a Feng Shui player and a "wannabe" Judge Dredd player, I totally agree with this feeling.

lol, I totally agree. Another long time Feng Shui player, and I've gotta say the simplicity of kicking-@$$ has carried over to every one of my games since!

 

[The Warlord]

Uhh..the above was me...

 

[Anonymous]

In a second edition, I'd like to have all the core characters - Dark Judges included.

I think some very basic rules from other OGL type games should be included or at least a primer on how to incorporate them like horror. Especially horror. See Dark Judges. Dredd stories tend to break down into humorous absurdities (FairlyHyperMan!), insane bloodbaths, all out war (with accompanying new Chief Judge after Dredd shoots the previous one) and seriously creepyness. See Dark Judges... when done right.

Armor... I'll be quiet on this as I think what I have in mind would be overly complicated, now that I think about it. I will say that I think the Judge uniform is more for protection from falling off the Lawmaster than against bullets or knives, the helmet excepted.

I'd like something like the epic character stuff. This would mean revamping the hit point stuff as high level characters get rather obnoxious with them. Maybe no more hit points but epic feats or something. Reason I say this is because Hershey is only a level lower than Dredd, though Dredd was legendary when Hershey was new on the streets. Maybe reduce number of levels to 15 before becoming epic or something... (Don't listen to me, I'm just proposing stuff on the fly and doing a bad job of it. But I do think Dredd needs to be distinguished a bit more seeing how he has saved MC1 nearly single handedly several times.)

 

[cptnapalm]

ack this was me... hate not knowing that I'm not logged in...

 

[Samvail1]

I would like to see the armour/defence value sorted out.

Would also like to see connections to the other characters in the 2000ad archive. For example, a Strontium Dog supplement based entirely on the Dredd rules, with extra stuff for mutations, equipment and background.

Rogue Trooper could be handled in a similar fashion, etc.

Sam

 

[numanti]

I know I said more rules, but reading what others have said and thinking about what I really would like to see, I feel the urge to clarify what I was trying to get across.

It's not so much _more_ rules - what I really want is clearer rules, that are easy to follow, and easy to find in the books.

It has taken me ages to sort out where in The Players Handbook / the Judge Dredd rulebook / The Psi Talent book / The Other Books to find a particular rule for any given situation when I need it. I do agree with 'Make it up!', but my players _don't_ - they expect me to kill them according to the rules of the game

What I dislike about D20 is that all the rules are all over the place and it takes ages to find something. If a character is in a high speed chase, I want to be able to turn to a couple of pages all about running high speed chases without having to constantly refer to the skills and feat descriptions - in short, I want simplification of the rules so that the game goes faster. Maybe it's because I am not completely comfortable yet with the D20 system - though I am getting there.

 

[redlaco]

What I dislike about D20 is that all the rules are all over the place and it takes ages to find something. In short, I want simplification of the rules so that the game goes faster. Maybe it's because I am not completely comfortable yet with the D20 system - though I am getting there.

I'm in the same frame of mind about D20. It would help tremendously if the 2nd edition would reorganize the rules on general topics scattered in all the sourcebooks in the core book. Just like they did with the fourth edition of GURPS, where they centralized in two corebooks all the rules spread over about a dozen of sourcebooks.

 

[cptnapalm]

How about Mongoose does a Chaosium and folds all the worthwhile stuff from 1st edition supplements into the main rulebook and the expand that with supplements?

 

[Anonymous]

The thing that I would most like to see is backwards compatability. The new edition must allow me to play the current edition things that I have now or risk losing me as a customer. Even minor changes can create problems (like the alterations from D&D 3.0 to 3.5 or Star Wars to Revised SW). I really have more than I will probably ever run with all the Judge Dredd d20 books as it is, so a new edition that invalidates the existing material will not be attractive to me. A new edition that expands on the existing great material will attract me, especially if it continues the saga of my cadet players from my homebrewed starting adventure, Full Egale Day, the Kazan Gambit, and The Awakening (and Possibly Dark Phoenix Rising) to more epic levels of play through the publication of more adventures (hopefully a Dredd vs. Death adaptation, hopefully!).

Along these lines, I think the idea of a revised core book with all the current supplementary rules material collected could be a good idea. Perhaps a book that just focuses on the rules with a spearate book that focuses on the story. When I run JD d20, I just use the core book, so such a revised core rule book might encourage me to actually use the new options for classes, feats, equipment, etc.

What I don't want to see is an OGL book. A move in that direction is just too much of an invitation to monkey around with the basic rules so as to risk the game becoming too radically different (see above). An OGL imprint will tell me that the game won't be backwards compatible with my JD d20 material and probably won't be worth my while to try to unlearn what I have learned in order to try to learn the new JD OGL stuff. A d20 imprint will tell me that the new edition is backwards compatible and may be worthwhile.

 

[mthomason]

What I don't want to see is an OGL book. A move in that direction is just too much of an invitation to monkey around with the basic rules so as to risk the game becoming too radically different (see above). An OGL imprint will tell me that the game won't be backwards compatible with my JD d20 material and probably won't be worth my while to try to unlearn what I have learned in order to try to learn the new JD OGL stuff. A d20 imprint will tell me that the new edition is backwards compatible and may be worthwhile.

While some OGL material is radically different to d20, the majority is compatible, and usually any changes are made only out of need for that particular game. In the case of Dredd, I would imagine that Mongoose would OGL it simply to get away from the d20 licence restrictions (specifically rules for character creation and experience) in order to make a completely standalone game, and leave the rules relatively untouched (just tweaked here and there to fix problems, and include any updates that have come along).

I'd rather see Mongoose doing more OGL books and scratch d20 altogether. What I'd really love to see is a logo adopted by all the "d20 publishers" across the board that *isn't* d20, in order to completely get away from the ties to D&D. d20 is fine for supplements and scenarios, but as soon as you want to create what is effectively a standalone RPG, you've doubled your starting price tag for any customer who doesn't already own the D&D PHB (and lets face it, the last thing you want to do is send your customers scurrying to WotC and deciding to play D&D instead) - it also gives a feel to a game that I can't precisely describe ... a feeling of "it's not a real RPG, it's just yet another D&D setting"

I can't think of too many backwards compatability issues that could occur. I can run most of my D&D scenario collection with the Conan or Lone Wolf rulebooks if I choose to.

If Mongoose wanted to make a great christmas gift to the RPG industry as a whole, they could even donate the OGL logo..... Of course, commercially speaking this wouldn't get them a thing, in the same way that d20 loses all of its attraction to WotC if the requirement for a D&D rulebook wasn't there, so I really don't expect it to happen. I can dream, though

All of that said, what I don't want to see is a move to the d20 Modern SRD as the source for the game, as that *is* too different for the old supplements to be used. As long as it's OGL based upon the d20 SRD (only borrowing from the d20 Modern SRD for technology rules) I don't see too many problems occuring.

 

[Anonymous]

I'd like to see the 2Ed be totally OGL I've started to get fed up with having all these great titles having to refer to the player's handbook all the time. I say one rule book for Judge Dredd :twisted:


J.T.

 

[mthomason]

I have doubts that Mongoose will be making any more RPGs with a d20 logo on the cover, for that very reason.

 

[ReptileJK]

Alot of folks have made alot of good suggestions. Really like the idea of having all rules in one book and NOT having to go back the THe Player's Handbook for anything.

Would really like stats for Judge Death, etc. Also some stats for ABC Robots. I realize these are not from Dredd comics, but couldn't something similar be created for the game?

How 'bout a source book on the Klegs!!!!