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seekingferretI saw a slashvertisement for the Legend rpg system being offered as a pay what you want download with all proceeds going to Child's Play, so I grabbed a copy and kicked in a few dollars. I'd never heard of it before, but having read through much of the book in the past few days, I'm impressed.
Legend is a D20 mod that takes some of what I think are the good innovations of 4E and works them into something that is mostly 3.5ish. The class progression system is a really elegant compromise between customizability and simplicity- you pretty much have to multiclass to do anything interesting, but multiclassing is always designed to be close to balanced and it's always designed to be incredibly easy to apply. If I wanted to run Dorfin Maltby, my mercenary fighter-mage that took me a couple hours of tweaking to design in 4E because of the annoyance that is the hybrid rules, I'd just say "I'm playing a barbarian with the rage track swapped out for the tactician spellcasting track" and I'd just about instantly have a character close to my character concept.
Legend is... I'm not sure I'd say it's purely gamist, I think it's a hybrid of gamist/narrativist (there's a lot of things that would make a simulationist cringe, like increasing melee range with level), but the writing is purely gamist. It's written in the voice of game designers who have spent a lot of time thinking about the trade-offs of rpg design and are trying to justify their design decisions to the reader. A lot of the rulebook is spent discussing game philosophy. This is not a sourcebook for newbie gamers, though I think the game itself probably is. But I really enjoyed it because if you discuss your first principles you make it easier for someone with different preferences to deviate from the rules without breaking the game. If I'm more narrativist in my impulses, I can see where I can fudge the magic rules safely because I understand what motivated their design decisions.
I'm not as convinced by their gimmicky social interaction rules, but it's a gimmick that's worth a try at least once, and it's not essential to the system that you use their social interaction system.
In any case, if I end up at Eve's for New Year's I'm going to try to run a crawl using the system. It looks like it's fun and lightweight in the right places despite taking advantage of the D20 system's ample capacity for complexity and customization.
Legend is a D20 mod that takes some of what I think are the good innovations of 4E and works them into something that is mostly 3.5ish. The class progression system is a really elegant compromise between customizability and simplicity- you pretty much have to multiclass to do anything interesting, but multiclassing is always designed to be close to balanced and it's always designed to be incredibly easy to apply. If I wanted to run Dorfin Maltby, my mercenary fighter-mage that took me a couple hours of tweaking to design in 4E because of the annoyance that is the hybrid rules, I'd just say "I'm playing a barbarian with the rage track swapped out for the tactician spellcasting track" and I'd just about instantly have a character close to my character concept.
Legend is... I'm not sure I'd say it's purely gamist, I think it's a hybrid of gamist/narrativist (there's a lot of things that would make a simulationist cringe, like increasing melee range with level), but the writing is purely gamist. It's written in the voice of game designers who have spent a lot of time thinking about the trade-offs of rpg design and are trying to justify their design decisions to the reader. A lot of the rulebook is spent discussing game philosophy. This is not a sourcebook for newbie gamers, though I think the game itself probably is. But I really enjoyed it because if you discuss your first principles you make it easier for someone with different preferences to deviate from the rules without breaking the game. If I'm more narrativist in my impulses, I can see where I can fudge the magic rules safely because I understand what motivated their design decisions.
I'm not as convinced by their gimmicky social interaction rules, but it's a gimmick that's worth a try at least once, and it's not essential to the system that you use their social interaction system.
In any case, if I end up at Eve's for New Year's I'm going to try to run a crawl using the system. It looks like it's fun and lightweight in the right places despite taking advantage of the D20 system's ample capacity for complexity and customization.
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Date: 2011-12-02 05:51 am (UTC)It's not the sort of system I would run, or play a campaign in, but if you're planning on running a one-shot, I'd be up for rolling up a char and joining in.