Jason Kingsley has another good video on the weapons that medieval knights actually used on the battlefield. Top billing goes to the horseman’s pick, used from the saddle to hole the skulls of infantry. He also covers the pollaxe (note the spelling, from “poll” meaning the top of the head), which was for fighting other knights while dismounted.
Swords get only a brief mention — for all their symbolic value, they’re just not much use against serious plate armour.
Over on Monsters & Manuals, noisms dug some optional per-class xp rules out of the AD&D 2e DMG:
Fighters get XP for “defeating” enemies
Priests get XP for successfully using their powers, casting spells to further their ethos, and making stuff
Wizards get XP for casting spells to overcome “foes or problems”, researching things and making stuff
Rogues get XP for using their special abilities and, er, treasure
This sounds similar to (and was probably a direct ancestor of) “Keys” in the Shadow of Yesterday. There’s a pdf of that at http://downloads.darkon.info/pdf/tsoy.pdf — the list of standard Keys starts on p27.
I’ve had good times with Keys, but I’ve only used them in the kind of games (like tSoY) where we leap from scene to scene, resolving big conflicts in a single roll, and so forth. In a turns-and-rooms D&D game it would be harder to make them sing.
There are lots of ways that rules, not just written rules, can change your game. I wrote a big list of ways they can do this.
But rules only work if you enact them. No rule can make you do anything, make your group do anything — you have to make rules work by following them.
This sounds obvious, when you say it like that, but looking at arguments online it’s clearly not obvious to everybody. I’m not sure it was always obvious to me.
No. People routinely ignore and customise rpg rules. Often for good reasons, but also often because they don’t notice, or don’t realise what they’re losing by doing so.
No. Of course not. Personalities, relationships, playing environment, skill and experience all matter.
(There was a trend at one time to make hierarchies — “people, environment, snacks, system, in that order”. Those are silly — you can’t pull a complex system apart like that. A good starting point is to think about bottlenecks or weakest points — a serious problem with any one of rules, personalities or play environment can make a mess of things.)
Yes. Rules can change your game, in interesting and desirable ways, but many rules don’t do that. Justin Alexander gave us good wording for this — “most RPG systems don’t actually carry a lot of weight, and are largely indistinguishable from each other in terms of the type of weight they carry”. Most trad rpgs have the same very lightweight framework around major game events and “plot”-significant elements; to a large extent, they say “the GM decides”. They also have huge fine-detail subsystems, but those don’t fundamentally change how the game plays out — they don’t change the kind of larger scale narratives that it produces.
Once you step outside the trad-rpg circle, though, there are a host of games that can radically change the way you play.
Saying “system matters” is almost never useful, at least in a public forum where you don’t know everybody in your audience and what jargon they understand.
If the reader doesn’t speak Forge, they’re likely to read it as “rules matter”. And that’s true, and worth saying … but there are enough Forge-speakers still in circulation that one might crop up and read it in a different way. Or, worse, derail your thread by starting a fight about what it means.
Such Forge-fluent readers are likely to read it as something like “there are a wide variety of factors that shape your play experience, including, but not limited to, explicit rules, and this can be investigated, described, and deliberately changed”.
But they might also read it as “the most important thing in gaming is that the whole group is on board with how you play — explicit rules, implicit norms, habits, and assumptions”.
Or as “rather than try to force your game concept into those rules you always used, you’d be better off trying a ruleset built for that kind of concept”.
(If you go to the Forge Provisional Glossary or the Big Model Wiki, you can find out the Forge definition of system, but slotting that into the phrase doesn’t help get to (1). You end up with ““The means by which imaginary events are established during play, including character creation, resolution of imaginary events, reward procedures, and more, matters”, which is pretty opaque)
So, if you want people to reliably understand what you say:
As ever, if in doubt, be concrete and specific.
Just don’t say “system matters”. You’ll just obscure your own message.
I don’t like the presentation of D&D 5e. I particularly don’t like the art. If you’ve read There is an aesthetic that I want and a way I want to feel, this may not surprise you. But I can see its properties support the aims and desires of the creators and their audiences.
The key challenge for 5e is appealling to a very wide audience. It’s going for the broadest possible market share, and has a wide range of player groups who consider it “their game”. It’s not a niche-niche game, at least not compared to LotFP or Vampire or Burning Wheel.
And of course its owners want to get money out of it, or at least to maintain brand value that they can use elsewhere. And the fan base has diverse interests and values
First, some simple good things that are compatible with the aesthetic I’m describing:
Then, some things incompatible with my aesthetic, but that have other benefits:
[1] Exception is a certain class of bigot. But I think most of us can live with that.
[2] Though may be a problem for people with limited vision? Though a comment on Stack Exchange suggests probably not.
Conjecture — A good handy guide to GM prep moves needs to have, for each move:
For example:
The Wrong Kind of Wax 