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Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Never Scream (The Secret) Fire!

My Gamer's ADD is really strong, as it effects even the way I read The Secret Fire - I'm bouncing like one of those 10 cent power balls you used to get out of gum ball machines when I was a kid.

So, where's the gnomes? 4e turned the gnome into the unwanted stepchild of D&D, dropping them from the core races and their missing from the core here too. Not that it matters all that much to me as I don't recall ever actually playing a gnome in any edition of D&D / AD&D, but I felt it should be mentioned lest one of those gnome lovers get upset at the omission.

Hmm, for that matter, there are no "half races" either - unless I missed them during my power ball bouncing around the PDF. No half-elves or half-orcs (actually, not sure if I saw orcs at all in the monster section - I'll need to double check that.

initiative - Roll a D6, add your Agility modifier and count down from highest to lowest. Pretty standard. Except that PCs can swap initiative score with each other. That certainly isn't standard. It add a certain amount of tactics to combat that isn't there otherwise. It also means that just because you rolled a sucky roll, if your party needs you to react faster, they'll swap your score to get you there. Pretty neat. I don't believe I've seen that before.

Morale - As far as I can recall, this is missing from most OSR style games (James properly pointed out my error here - its there, same system - I'm going to lock myself in the privy for a 15 minute time out ;). It's nice to see, especially as this is a very lethal combat system. Much easier to chase your adversaries away then killing them all.
It's rolled on 2D6.

Notice that they have stayed away from a unified resolution system? 1D6, 2D6, variable D6, D20. Yes, one die size does not fit all rolls. Nice.

K, lunch time is over. Back to work.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the continued review. I tend to have a problem with the "more is better" mentality of gaming. More races, more skills, more weapons have infected my adaptation of Dragonquest. I do think gnomes get slighted in almost every game. No one really gets excited about playing dwarf-lite. Even their fixation with inventions is for more comic use than serious interaction. Sigh ;(

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  2. AD&D, OSRIC, LL & B/X all have morale rules. S&W mentions it, but largely leaves interpretation and tables up to the referee. Not sure about any other games, those are just the ones which have Morale rules I'm familiar with. LL & BX both use 2d6 and every monster entry has a morale score in the stat block.

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  3. See what happens when you post from your iPad, making it difficult to refer directly yo you PDFs? I stand corrected. Hmm, come to think of it, I never used it in AD&D EXCEPT for henchmen... boy, was I an ass ;)

    ReplyDelete

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