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Post by thrawn on Feb 18, 2011 6:25:42 GMT -5
Hi there. I guess I'm not the only one unsatisfied with the new Mongoose roleplaying game, as this is fairly simple. On the other hand - and you may correct me if I'm wrong - the old one is very imbalanced. Just compare the psychic battle of the Kai with the battle cries of the Telcho's Warriors, and you will see what I mean.
What I would like to do is to balance the system in a mutual process in order to establish some common standard. Anyone interested?
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Post by Beowuuf on Feb 18, 2011 13:02:36 GMT -5
Maerin tried this task, and seemed to decide to use the true20 system and also just get rid of Kai Lords. So far so good I believe. Hopefully he can come along and give some comments about what he found. He also found the level 6 - 8 was a god sweet spot to generate characters too (I think) in d20.
I think psionics and skills are inherently imbalanced in d20, and you need to figure out a way to tame these.
Welcome to the forums btw!
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Post by wildhare on Feb 19, 2011 13:14:58 GMT -5
As a veteran roleplayer of over 20 years I don't think there is a single gaming system that after a few sessions doesn't begin to show it's warts. And of course there is always that one player (min/maxer) who will spend weeks poring over the books looking for that one fatal flaw that will make him unstopable. Which is why houserules and costumization is the key to any game. I for one am still playing the LWd20 game, but you would be hard pressed to recognize it. At the moment it is a mixture of the Pathfinder Rpg (d20 reboot) and D&D 4th (I love what they have down with the magic system).
I would love to see what you can come up with and maybe offer advice and ideas where I can (I am sure everyone on this forum would be happy to help)
As for a common standard we can all agree on, well I believe Ricky Nelson said it best "You can't please everyone so you got to please yourself"
(Yes I am aware that my Ricky Nelson reference makes me seem old, that's because I am.)
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Post by Al on Feb 21, 2011 15:34:59 GMT -5
The only way to do it is to get rid of Kai Lords, or to tone them done substantially... they are the major weakness in the game.
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Post by wildhare on Feb 24, 2011 10:09:04 GMT -5
What is Lonewolf without the Kai lords? surely a fix can be found to balance the game out or if you prefer to start from scratch (which i did) you just have to be extra careful with the Kai lords. And while you're fixing things the Shadakine Wytch needs work too. Anyone ever try and play one of these girls, useless without hours of precasting work.
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Post by Beowuuf on Feb 24, 2011 16:02:32 GMT -5
I think the 'mistake' of the RPGs currently, given the fact the Kai Lords were front and centre and the heroes, is that the Kai Lords were made too good, and the baseline for many other classes.
It seems liek you want to work backwards, and have the other classes excel at wider niche areas than they are usually allowed, and then have the Kai Lords take the prominent aspects of the combat/ranger style classes and have dialed back versions. Instead, it seems the kai Lords were the base, and then other classes had dialed back versions of those powers, and then were maybe allowed one very niche way to excel as logn as it did't overshadow the Kai Lord class.
A kai Lord should be the happy medium between many things, very capable and flexible, but still able to be beaten by a dedicated practitioner of something.
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Post by Simey on Feb 24, 2011 16:55:56 GMT -5
The problem probably stems back to the gamebooks - not that it actually is a problem in the gamebooks - because playing Lone Wolf you have the ability to do everything at one stage or another. He has ranger-type skills, he has fighter-type skills, he can have rogue-like stealth, he has psychic powers (and even magic powers in the GM series). The only type of thing I can't specifically think of him doing is using a discipline to charm/diplomacy/bluff-type effect, but I expect that does occur somewhere. I suppose seeing as he's the only character you play in the gamebooks, he has to be the ultimate all-rounder. But he's not an all-rounder who's quite good at lots of things - he's brilliant at everything!
I think if there's a mistake in the Kai Lord classes in the role-playing games, it's probably basing the class on Lone Wolf rather than assuming that he was exceptional even for a Kai Lord and setting the bar rather lower for your normal, everyday Kai Lord.
Anyway, I'm wittering, and that's all probably obvious. In case it's of any use, I've found something very simple I did to adjust the Kai Lord class in the d20 system years ago:
I can't really say whether it helps balance the class with the others much, 'cause I've not played the LWRPG much, but at least it's simple and still lets them get new abilities every level. Given all the Discipline abilities they get, the Kai class is pretty generous with skill points - you might think of cutting those back to 4(+Int. Mod.) instead of 5?
But as I say, I'm nothing remotely close to a seasoned LWRPG player, so there're probably far more subtle and effective ways of proceeding.
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Post by Al on Feb 25, 2011 15:24:05 GMT -5
What is Lonewolf without the Kai lords? If you want to play a campaign of only Kai Lords it is not an issue, but mixing them with others means you have super maxed out characters with regular characters. The Kai class in LWD20 is ridiculous. I do not think it is necessary bad to get a new skill at each level, but each skill has about five levels within it, leaving a very sizable number of abilities. An easy way to tone it down would be to limit the skills to the abilities of a first level in the skill. Alternatively, you can use Magnamund as a campaign for another system, and build up the Kai within it - as a ranger/physic of some sorts.
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Post by thrawn on May 30, 2011 10:07:44 GMT -5
Hello again. Sorry it took me so long to respond, but real life has a habit to interfere once in a while. Starting today, I'm going to suggest changes in the system, and I would really appreciate if you could offer some advice.
The goal is simple: Turning the D20 Lone Wolf Roleplaying Game into a balanced roleplaying game by means of simple modifications. Balanced is suppossed to mean that every character class is roughly equally useful in some aspects, whereas simple means that we are aiming for some simple changes and not a book of modifications.
1. Psychic combat: Probably the main problem. Those without psychic gifts are very inferior to those without, so they have to be toned down. My suggestion is as follows - Every character gets a Psychic Armour Class. It can still be broken, but those without special abilities need an hour to recover it. - All psychic effects (damage, duration of stun attacks, what-have-you) are divided by two.
2. Skill points: Let's face it - they are necessary for most classes that are not Kai or mages of some sort in order to be effective in a mundane way. Especially the knights of Sommerlund have a problem there. They get only 2 skill points per level, so they can't even be good at the aspects they are expected to be, like riding and handle animal and knowledge: warfare. - Every character class that is not a Kai gets two more skill points per level.
3. Dwarven gunner: They are cool, but their feats less so. The "secrets of the gun" are really poor. Who would sacrifice one hit point in order to gain +1 to damage in case the attack hits? The sensible thing to do would be to reduce the endurance costs or to increase the effect. Not sure on this one. (Which is also true for the crystal star brother).
Any comments will be appreciated :-)
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Post by Beowuuf on May 30, 2011 10:17:44 GMT -5
D20 was already a little broken with skill poitns at higher levels. I would not advise addign skill poitns to all other classes, simply remove skill points fro mthe Kai Lords, etc and have a small skill focus bonus for Kai disciplines in the applicable rank
Psychic combat is easier to remove all together, and simply make any such disicplines increase damage or attack rolls if your opponent is not immune.
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Post by thrawn on Jun 20, 2011 12:28:51 GMT -5
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the skill system being broken at higher levels. Could you elaborate? Why shouldn't I raise the number of skill points?
Removing the psychic combat by just increasing damage or attack roll is really a nice idea, though.
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Post by Beowuuf on Jun 20, 2011 13:22:13 GMT -5
As an example, under a normal d20 D&D system I am playing, I have a ranger with sub-average stats. Aside from Constitution, he is terrible, and has 8 for intelligence (-1 to skill points). Also under normal d20 system, there are more skills to allocate points to, without any increase in skill points (I think he gets 4 points per level)
As a level 8 character, he has in certain situations a +23 bonus to survival checks (used for tracking as well). To put it another way, he can 1 in 4 times (if he rolls 15 or more) pretty much do the impossible (DC 40 is ledft for near impossible things)
The second problem is that you cna have a character with a large amount of skill points start to have exactly the same bonus as someone who is conventrating their points to a facet of their character'spersonality (so you might have a mage who wants to be the diplomat, and the bucaneer who decides to pour all these spare point in to it for fun).
So that's what I mean, you have a decent intelligence, or a good amount of skill points cause of your class (or both) and you can get some insane skill bonuses by the mid levels, let alone as you increase in rank afterwards. The LW system makes that a little worse by havign the heroic roll option, and having a reduced skill set to choose from. And also that means that those lucky enough can already have a good chance to just be as good as those who RP a trait and concentrate their allotment.
The more you can make skills points rare, the less the divide between the haves and have nots, and the more you can make skill specialisation and higher level challenges matter.
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Post by thrawn on Jun 21, 2011 10:09:54 GMT -5
Oh okay, thank you very much for explaining. So I guess increasing the number of skills points is not the best idea. Still, I think that the buccaneer (7 skill points per level) should keep his points, as this is almost his only merit.
Speaking of classes, I am told that there are several other classes (Al mentioned the Shadakine witch) which were published somewhere else. I would love to find out more about these. Does anyone happen to know where I might find the information?
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Post by Beowuuf on Jun 21, 2011 13:14:00 GMT -5
Yeah, the basis if d20 was that the skills were the non-weapon proficiencies and rogue abilities of older editions. So the rogue got more skill points to select his old abilities. The bucaneer is in many ways a rogue reskinning, which is why he gets so many points.
If you check the Forge forum, there is a sticky at the top mentioning all the downloads we have recovered. If you look at the d20 class list, and also the Rising Sun issues, they have some things.
Also, if you go to the mongoose forums themselves, they have their own magazine called signs and portents. If you can find the old copies, some of them I think had old d20 classes. Obviously, these days they have LWMGB classes instead.
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Post by Sarra on Jun 23, 2011 16:05:04 GMT -5
Oh okay, thank you very much for explaining. So I guess increasing the number of skills points is not the best idea. Still, I think that the buccaneer (7 skill points per level) should keep his points, as this is almost his only merit. Speaking of classes, I am told that there are several other classes (Al mentioned the Shadakine witch) which were published somewhere else. I would love to find out more about these. Does anyone happen to know where I might find the information? The Shadakine Wytch was one of several magic based classes released in the LWd20RPG addition "Magic of Magnamund".
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