Author Topic: Legend: new D&D-variant tabletop game, designed for speed and ease of play  (Read 6740 times)

Anaris

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It's releasing officially this Friday, and there's a bunch of information about it here: http://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/mm6i4/legend_a_new_tabletop_rpg_system_releasing/

I've been peripherally involved in its development, and I'm very pleased with what these people have created.  It looks to be much, much easier for someone like me, who doesn't want to spend hundreds of hours carefully optimizing characters, to play and get lots out of.

It uses a very streamlined class system that is much easier to understand than D&D's, and vastly easier to tinker with if you're of a mind to create your own.

One of the guiding principles in creating Legend was to make sure that any class at level X has an equivalent power level to any other class at level X, within reason.  This means that rather than having spellcasting classes ruling the game by higher levels, many spells have been removed, all those that remain have been reworked, and non-spellcasting classes have been given many more interesting abilities.

Anyway, I don't tell this very well, so go look at that Reddit thread and read about it there. You can also ask questions there, where the official Legend publicity guys can answer them.
Timothy Collett

"The only thing you can't trade for your heart's desire...is your heart." "You are what you do.  Choose again, and change." "One of these days, someone's gonna plug you, and you're going to die saying, 'What did I say? What did I say?'"  ~ Miles Naismith Vorkosigan

Chenier

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4ed tried to make encounters simpler and quicker, giving a kind of MMORPG feel to it. How do your attempts compare to those? Same or different focuses?

Is this based off a general d20 system, or the 4th ed rules, or the 3.5ed rules?

I'm just curious. :P

After years of not playing, I've started playing Pathfinder D&D (a 3.5 spinoff) with my friends. While I did spend time making sure my characters were useful (my current one is a sorcerer), I never really felt that casters were that OP at higher levels, at least when it comes to combat. Many high-CR monsters have crazy saves and SR, and many high-level spells have no or almost no effect when the monster succeeds on the saves. True, many do threaten with OHKs, which can be a bitch for the DM to handle, but I find that enemies resist my spells quite often despite my specializations and feats to counter SR.
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Anaris

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4ed tried to make encounters simpler and quicker, giving a kind of MMORPG feel to it. How do your attempts compare to those? Same or different focuses?

I'm afraid I'm not very familiar with 4ed rules, so I can't speak very authoritatively on this.  However, I don't find that the rules or the classes feel very MMORPG-like, to the extent that I understand what they are like.  One focus here was more on making it easier to create the character you want, without sacrificing utility.  I recommend going to the thread and asking these sorts of questions there.

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Is this based off a general d20 system, or the 4th ed rules, or the 3.5ed rules?

I'm just curious. :P

I wasn't involved in the early stages, so I'm not 100% sure, but I think more or less 3.5ed in spirit, but d20 in practice, due to the legal issues involved (d20 is Open).

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After years of not playing, I've started playing Pathfinder D&D (a 3.5 spinoff) with my friends. While I did spend time making sure my characters were useful (my current one is a sorcerer), I never really felt that casters were that OP at higher levels, at least when it comes to combat. Many high-CR monsters have crazy saves and SR, and many high-level spells have no or almost no effect when the monster succeeds on the saves. True, many do threaten with OHKs, which can be a bitch for the DM to handle, but I find that enemies resist my spells quite often despite my specializations and feats to counter SR.

I only started hearing about Pathfinder when I became connected with the Legend folks, so I can't really speak to this, either.  However, several of them have brought up specific and general issues with balance in Pathfinder that I can neither recall nor scrounge up right now, that Legend fixes.

Again, I recommend asking on the Reddit thread, where people more knowledgeable than I can respond.
Timothy Collett

"The only thing you can't trade for your heart's desire...is your heart." "You are what you do.  Choose again, and change." "One of these days, someone's gonna plug you, and you're going to die saying, 'What did I say? What did I say?'"  ~ Miles Naismith Vorkosigan

Chenier

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3.5 is open source now, I think. Well, maybe not "open source", but under some similar fair use legalese thing. "Open Game License": http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Open_Game_License_v1.0a

From the little info I saw on the reddit, seems like some significant changes were done.

Personally, I have fun regardless of the system, though I favor some over others, and see some as more "balanced" than others. Really, though, DM can adjust things at will, so balance is more the DM's skills than anything.

Maybe we'll try your system when it comes out. ;)
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Silverhawk

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I play 3.5 myself with a group and we had a look at 4.0.

Most of us felt that 3.5 is roleplay with combat and 4.0 is combat with roleplay.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is.

Chenier

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I play 3.5 myself with a group and we had a look at 4.0.

Most of us felt that 3.5 is roleplay with combat and 4.0 is combat with roleplay.

4.0 is definately all about combat, IMO. Feels like an MMORPG, where a name is often as deep as you'll go as far as RP is concerned.

Due to the fact that we mostly played while I was rather young, and due to the people I play with, we never did have really RP-heavy games, regardless of the edition. So I guess for us both of them were combat with roleplay. ;)
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Huntsmaster

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I play 3.5 myself with a group and we had a look at 4.0.

Most of us felt that 3.5 is roleplay with combat and 4.0 is combat with roleplay.

I feel that 3.5 was minmax twinking time (See: spiked chain trippers, cleric archers, hulking hurlers throwing the damn EARTH) with an opportunity for sissies to roleplay. 4.0 is an attempt by WotC to add game mechanics for all the things that creative players did anyway, compete with World of Warcraft for the RPG combat feel and coddle people who don't like minmaxxed death machines (See: Stormwarden and Blood Mage fixes).

Legends sounds fun, though, especially since I don't have time any more to break regular DnD rules.
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Chenier

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I feel that 3.5 was minmax twinking time (See: spiked chain trippers, cleric archers, hulking hurlers throwing the damn EARTH) with an opportunity for sissies to roleplay. 4.0 is an attempt by WotC to add game mechanics for all the things that creative players did anyway, compete with World of Warcraft for the RPG combat feel and coddle people who don't like minmaxxed death machines (See: Stormwarden and Blood Mage fixes).

Legends sounds fun, though, especially since I don't have time any more to break regular DnD rules.

Cleric archers? Why?
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Silverhawk

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4.0 is an attempt by WotC to add game mechanics for all the things that creative players did anyway, compete with World of Warcraft for the RPG combat feel

wait wait, press 1 to win combat? Now I am totally sure it's not my game :P
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is.

Anaris

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wait wait, press 1 to win combat? Now I am totally sure it's not my game :P

To be clear: he's talking about D&D 4th edition, not Legend there.

Legend is designed to have epic combat, not easy-for-the-players combat.

Player characters are, indeed, intended to be extremely powerful. But their opponents are built using the same rules and materials, so they're necessarily going to be comparably powerful.
Timothy Collett

"The only thing you can't trade for your heart's desire...is your heart." "You are what you do.  Choose again, and change." "One of these days, someone's gonna plug you, and you're going to die saying, 'What did I say? What did I say?'"  ~ Miles Naismith Vorkosigan

Silverhawk

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To be clear: he's talking about D&D 4th edition, not Legend there.

True, (and WoW :P).

I might have had a closer look at legend if I hadn't just started a new campaign with my friends :(. Ah well, I think we will have a look at it next round.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is.

Huntsmaster

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To be clear: he's talking about D&D 4th edition, not Legend there.

Yeah, and there's an implied "and" there. One reading of what I wrote would be that "creative players" had always turned DnD into WoW, which wasn't what I was going for. I'm thinking skill challenges, utility skills, and the like. Pretty much every group I ever played with had skill challenges- we just didn't call them that, and we didn't award XP for them.

As far as the 3.5 cleric archer and why you would want to play with one, you would do it because you are the type of person who enjoys breaking games. The cleric archer would drop all his self-buffs and then kill everything in sight once per day. He was really limited only by the duration of his buffs.
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Stabbity

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Yeah, and there's an implied "and" there. One reading of what I wrote would be that "creative players" had always turned DnD into WoW, which wasn't what I was going for. I'm thinking skill challenges, utility skills, and the like. Pretty much every group I ever played with had skill challenges- we just didn't call them that, and we didn't award XP for them.

As far as the 3.5 cleric archer and why you would want to play with one, you would do it because you are the type of person who enjoys breaking games. The cleric archer would drop all his self-buffs and then kill everything in sight once per day. He was really limited only by the duration of his buffs.

Or you could cast a few spells, fall a ridiculous height to incur massive amounts of damage, and then use diplomacy to convince a god to make you a god as well.
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Chenier

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NECROOOOOMANCY! XD
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