Friday, May 2, 2008

What not to do?

Been scribbling lots and lots of notes for RBH over the past week or two. And more than once I've found myself stopping, sitting back, and wondering "Is this what I want to do with this game?"

See, I've got all these wonderful options, a bulging sack of idea-lewt if you will, and they don't all work together. Some of it, most of it, has to get thrown away. And it's hard to make the decision about what goes and what stays. Like, I've got these great ideas for how I want the setting to be presented and how the character classes should interact with that material. And those ideas keep pestering me to change up the classes and their powers pretty significantly. But then I look at all those changes and I start wondering if I'll starting to loose my connection to the simplicity that makes the game cool.

I don't know. I'm still working on it. I'll keep you updated.

5 comments:

thekelvingreen said...

I just wanted to say that I reckon RBH is a brilliant system. It definitely captures that loose, fun feel that original D&D had, while at the same time being quite different, particularly in terms of mechanics.

I'm not sure about the use of the D12 however. I'd imagine you have your reasons for using it, not least because it's nifty and sorely underused, but RBH is such a streamlined and efficient system in general that it seems to be railing against the spirit of the game to use two kinds of dice when one would (probably) do.

It seems to be quite simple to swap a single D10 in for the D12 in most cases; in the case of skill rolls it doesn't really matter if it's D12 vs D12 or D10 vs D10, and the injury/healing roll can be modified easily enough to reflect the spread available on a D10. The Awesome Token table is the only bit of the game that causes trouble; I might have to have a think about how to modify that one.

I don't know. It's not a huge thing, but it seems a bit untidy to use a D12 for some stuff and a D10 for other stuff, and RBH is otherwise such a neat and tidy system.

Oh, and while it can be worked out from the character sheet, or the warrior class description, it might be worth clarifying in the text somewhere just how many hit points characters (and NPCs and monsters) get. Perhaps it is in there, and I wasn't paying attention.

Unknown said...

Hi Eric,

I just wanted to cheer you and to remind you that if you're still unsure about the way to follow, perhaps a good and honest playtester can help :)

Best,
Antoine

Unknown said...

Hi,

We had a RBH game this week-end and this time I got to be a player ! This was my first time not GMing and I enjoyed that so much. I'll make a report as soon as I can on Story Games.
I played a magus with the illusion talent. This power is excellent : it allows you so many descriptions for your Show off and even Assist actions.
And it was a player that only had one RBH game behind him as a player who mastered.

thekelvingreen said...

Another question. Under what circumstances will a monster have better than Light armour? There's Thick Skin and/or a Reach weapon, but that only bumps the AC by a couple of points at most. What if I want to build a heavily armoured monster?

Unknown said...

Hey Kelvin,

Not sure if you're still reading this, but I'll go ahead and anwswer your question here anyhow.

As you know, there are five armor classes: None, Light, Heavy, Very Heavy, and Uber.

If a monster were to have both Thick Skin and a Reach Weapon AND were Hard to See (another monster power), then the monster would have Uber armor, the best the game allows.

Remember: Unlike D&D, each +1 bonus to AC in RBH means a change in the CATEGORY of AC, not just a +1 to the TN to be hit.