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Friday, July 22, 2011

Eating My Own Words

A few months ago I posted that I didn't see the need for new games built on the same OGL / OSR inspired rulesets. I guess I was wrong.

Or maybe I was half right. We don't need them, but there is certainly an audience for them, myself included. My most recent OSR - OD&D inspired game that I'm enjoying reading is Adventurer Conqueror King. Not sure how much I like the title, but so far I like the system.

I'm still plowing thru it, but I like the way it makes fighting classes viable and special w/o resorting to the LotFP Weird Fantasy method of doing away with any sort of combat progression with the exception of pure fighters. There are other ways to secure a nitch for them, and ACK found a way. Actually, from my reading so far (and I am far from reading the whole document) I haven't seen much of a desire from myself to house rule the ACK rules. With Weird Fantasy, I loved the concept, liked a lot of the tweaks (specialists particularly), but I was house ruling in my head as I read my way thru.

I think the only ruleset I haven't mentally house ruled was Swords & Wizardry, and I wrote a Bard class for that, which u might say is a huge house rule ;)

It's not that the ACK rules are how I would have run a game back in the 80's. To my eyes so far, the rules read as how I would want to run one of my games from the 80's today, if that makes sense to you.

2 comments:

  1. Titles are a bitch! Acronyms too - we go to a lot of effort to reinforce that it's the Adventurer Conqueror King System, because after we settled on that basic title we then had to find a way not to pronounce it "axe" instead of Bill the Cat expelling a hairball.

    Your comparison to LotFP:WFRP (speaking of acronym problems) confirms my feeling that that was the first of the second-wave retroclones, where tweaking the system for a desired effect trumped the idea of fidelity to an older edition.
    - Tavis

    ReplyDelete
  2. still working my way thru the rulebook... god but i love my iPad ;)

    ReplyDelete

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