Thaevrizhax's Lair

This may be a few months  a year after, but it still feels like riding off of the Mythlands of Erce review of the same... Starting with what little I've read, and off of the general sense I get from the game. ACKSII offers a vision of strength.  Its in the name, not just adventurers, but conquerors and kings are set to rise from the ashes of previous kingdoms.   One of the most memorable aspects of these three books is the setting.  It is omnipresent, which I, for one, do not mind.  My own house rule document, a tenth of the length under the current draft, is bland and flavorless gruel by comparison.  Every inch of the text here paints a clear picture of what the setting is about.  If there was any doubt in reading through ACKS (the first) that it was Rome by a different name, here, the artwork alone conveys that message loud and CLEAR.  Speaking of the artwork, the chapter cover art is the lowest point for me, as I have a personal distaste ...

 Instead of finishing my reviews of ACKSII, I picked up the Stormlight Handbook (part of the Cosmere RPG), hoping to find a Heroic Fantasy RPG but finding instead yet another RPG with a full-blown identity crisis.  First, why was I expecting a heroic game?  Two main reasons, the complex one first: D&D 5e had an identity crisis of its own, it couldn't decide whether it wanted to be an heroic fantasy quest-hopping world-saving game, or a gritty, dungeon-crawling tomb-robbing game. It ended up being neither.  With the advent of OSR games  during  the life of 5e, the people who wanted a gritty game, or a game about dungeon-crawling or tomb-robbing, or about bloody world conquest, had their games.  An innumerable, ever-expanding morass of games. BUT,  after  the life of 5e, there was, and still is, I would argue, a Heroic Fantasy shaped hole left behind.  6e/5.5e is utter trash, and so fails to fill that hole.  Other game blatantly s...

 After ranting and raving for ...the past five posts... I figured it was about time I actually put forward some ideas rather than criticizing others. Starting with an ability score generation method:  I have heard the sentiment of the ideal character being one with low, medium, and high stats, not just one of the three.  I myself, agreeing with this sentiment, have devised the following:    Start with six scores: 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2 Add 1d6 to each, Roll 1d6 to assign: 1: Str, 2: Dex, 3: Con, 4: Int, 5: Wis, 6: Cha Reroll or roll different dice as the ‘open’ stats are filled.  (So, starting with [12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2], you would add 1d6 [14, 11, 14, 8, 8, 3], roll 1d6[1 being Str, 2 being Dex, 3 being Con...] to determine the placement of the first number [I rolled a 4, so Int becomes a 14] rolling 1d5 [1d6-reroll-6] to determine the placement of the second number [with the order now being Str, Dex, Con, Wis, Cha; I rolled a 3 so Con is now a...

There is a certain mindset which I believe I have noticed in a few old-school DMs.  An idea is present within their minds that anything the player characters obtain is just another means to attack the characters. Did you hire a henchman? Well, now he may or may not betray you. Did you build a stronghold? Well, now it might just get attacked. Did you get treasure from the dungeon?  Well, now it might be stolen in the night, or while you're away from your stronghold. Is this a problem? No. But, if you choose to run the game like this, your players will stop going to get treasure, stop hiring henchmen and stop building strongholds. How can you be so sure?  Because that is exactly what happened.  Here is how I think things went: The old-school DMs ran their games, and then in the 90s the players coming into the hobby, with the majority being power-gamers , saw the weaknesses of treasure, strongholds and henchmen for what they were, and simply stopped using them.  Co...

The question being posed is this: At what, if any, point does a character become competent, either in a singular ability, or as a whole, in your RPG/Game/Setting. A list, in order of competency:  CoC: I have never played, but my impression is: The idea of the game is that your characters will never be wholly competent, they may become competent in a skill or two, or many, but they can never beat Cthulhu. OSE: At 4th level I would say the characters become competent in their fields, at 7th they are competent as a whole and at 10th they are hyper-competent in their fields/niches. 5e: The characters start competent, become wholly competent by 5th level and hyper-competent past 9th level, effectively (and sometimes literally) becoming immortal by max level. Lone Wolf Fists: Characters start competent in a few areas and progress exponentially from there, high-level play sees them fighting deities and the idea of reality itself. But I'd like to go into more detail in the area I'm mos...

 I don't like the lore, I don't like the gameplay, I don't like the company who makes it.  My seething fury towards this terrible game was started by three separate incidents, relating directly to the three issues above, but which do not encompass the whole of my distaste for this game.  The three events would be: A frankly off-putting lore video, the first and last I can remember attempting to watch, before being quickly deterred.  The fact that the official rules require actual physical miniatures, all of which are purposely and prohibitively expensive.  And finally, an event which occurred long before I was aware of it: that the company had copyrighted the term "space marine" a horribly generic term which they had the gall to claim.   Now, I do not know the current situation regarding the copyright, but the rest still stands. Furthermore The lore. The video which I found, this was years ago by now, and I believe I have thoroughly forgotten which cha...