Legend: some dude's d20 clone

[Blicero]

How about this: what sounds like a cooler description of your character's capabilities?

"My dude does 20 DPR, and my buddy only does 19 DPR"

"I cast Fabricate and used the profits to enlist a thousand-strong army."

Please show me where I have said that Legend's lack of creativity-friendly abilities is a good thing. As far as I know, I haven't.

[OgreBattle]

Do we have any threads on there that focuses on how to make an RPG economy or how much 'society' should be in a rulesbook?

Honestly though in the few games I've played in, the most I've done with money is get a few hirelings at low level, never got into running armies, and even then it's largely handwaved as a backdrop. So the goodguy army and badguy army clashes but it's still the PC's looking for the artifact in the castle that advances the story.

[Mistborn]

The second one screams abusive fucking trainwreck that should have been obviously disallowed. A player who says or does something like that is basically saying "I'm bored" or "I'm Moving" or "I hate you people" and "I am making this game end"

Wow that is some 4rry BS. You should know better, especially since this is the forum that fucking invented the wish economy.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

How about this: what sounds like a cooler description of your character's capabilities?

"My dude does 20 DPR, and my buddy only does 19 DPR"

"I cast Fabricate and used the profits to enlist a thousand-strong army."

Please show me where I have said that Legend's lack of creativity-friendly abilities is a good thing. As far as I know, I haven't.

I guess what I meant to do was way, you can make two characters and one is highly probably to have higher DPR than the other unless you made clones. So that making characters that are demonstrably superior doesn't require an example.

But it's also highly probable that both characters will require the exact same amount of GM fellatio for out of combat efficacy, unless you dumpster dive for magic items that they accidentally made interesting (my favorite 4e character was a monk who had Bracers of Brachiation, and thus an always-on ability to scale sheer surfaces. I didn't even care that he could have been a better character as a Ranger, because really, those bracers became his identity - they let me say "I do this thing" rather than "Can I do this thing?")

[Blicero]

I guess what I meant to do was way, you can make two characters and one is highly probably to have higher DPR than the other unless you made clones. So that making characters that are demonstrably superior doesn't require an example.

Okay, if that is what Frank meant by "You can make things which are demonstrably better or worse than others", then I accept his claim that you can make things which are demonstrably better or worse than others.

[fectin]

Do we have any threads on there that focuses on how to make an RPG economy or how much 'society' should be in a rulesbook?

Honestly though in the few games I've played in, the most I've done with money is get a few hirelings at low level, never got into running armies, and even then it's largely handwaved as a backdrop. So the goodguy army and badguy army clashes but it's still the PC's looking for the artifact in the castle that advances the story.

The water purification thread et al. talk about it some.

Otherwise, try the Tomes, or one of the Wish Economy threads.

[8d8]

[*] The biggest thing the game needs right now is a campaign setting.

This baffles me. Why do game rules need a campaign setting at all? To me that sounds like saying the game rules need characters you can play. There are dozens of good settings out there and many more that are less good, and hey, just make one. Legend "has" a campaign setting in much the same way D&D "has" one - you don't have to stick to any particular rule system to play a campaign in the Forgotten Realms, or Hiborea, or Golarion, or Glorantha, etc. I could see Legend working for any of these.

[Mistborn]

There are dozens of good settings out there and many more that are less good, and hey, just make one. Legend "has" a campaign setting in much the same way D&D "has" one - you don't have to stick to any particular rule system to play a campaign in the Forgotten Realms, or Hiborea, or Golarion, or Glorantha, etc. I could see Legend working for any of these.

You can't have a fantasy game without a magic system, and what sort of society your fantasy setting has is inherently tied to what that magic system does. Or at least it damn well better be otherwise nothing makes sense.

In Hiborea the fact you are mighty but mundane swordsman from genetically pure aryan stock is something people actually care about, and being a successful enough barbarian hero makes you a king. That doesn't fucking work if your system has wizards and monsters that can personally lay waste to civilization. Forgotten Realms on the other hand is built on D&D, in so far in anything in that clusterfuck makes sense it's that the various GM penis NPCs can personally impact the globe with the force of their magic. You can't have that if your magic caps out at snake arrows. Glorantha is also a stupid setting but it's setting details are intimately tied to the fact that it's magic system replaces rather than supplements physics.

Fuck go read a Brandon Sanderson book, none of the societies he creates make any sense if you plug in a different magic system.

[Lago PARANOIA]

What do you mean by that? Arguably Legend's most impressive accomplishment is the fact that the slice-n-dice multiclass system doesn't fail in the vast majority of cases.

The problem with slice-and-dice multiclassing is the problem you always get with combinatorials. Right now, the system is impressive in the same way that getting a 20 on a d20 5 times in a row sans cheating is impressive. But it's still a stupid idea because each new track will exponentially increase the number of combinations and make balance intractable. Balance by exhaustion only works if the number of combinations is small.

You're underselling the scope of the game by a few levels. Legend characters can eventually get shit like long-distance teleportation, legend lore, wind walking, etc.

You can make things which are demonstrably better or worse than others (especially if you consider specific levels, because things don't come in evenly), but it's all 4rry bullshit and no one cares.

I honestly don't care what kind of damage or healing engine your character has. The game doesn't have a society, an economy, or a monster manual. Nothing you could do is capable of mattering.

Look, if you don't have a campaign setting, even a generic implied one like 3E and 4E D&D, your abilities don't mean shit. Teleportation and Legend Lore could mean something, but right now it only means what your DM wants it to mean and it has to be special-pleaded for each campaign. Even potentially gonzo shit like personal, on-demand dimensional travel and FTL travel only means anything in the context of a campaign setting. If you're playing Outlaw of Gor, those things are completely campaign defining. If you're playing Star Trek, those abilities aren't even worth putting on your character sheet.

I don't see that at all.

That's because you haven't looked very fucking hard.

[8d8]

You can't have a fantasy game without a magic system, and what sort of society your fantasy setting has is inherently tied to what that magic system does. Or at least it damn well better be otherwise nothing makes sense.

I agree with you insofar as plugging some rules into a setting with no work done whatsoever causes a few problems. But if you're saying a rules system without a setting is worthless because using a setting you made up or found somewhere else involves a little bit of work, then you're making a mountain out of a molehill.

Besides, does the cosmology or political and socioeconomic makeup of your fictional world actually come up in the game? I've seen that happen just twice in the games I've played, and those were at high levels when players might interact with things of that scale. If that's happening in your game then so much has to be hashed out regardless of what setting you use (because none of them are complete enough for this sort of thing) that you're fabricating and justifying so much that goes beyond any rules system that any rules system is going to work. I.e. if you interact with the things that need to make sense in a setting + rules then you have to do the work of making them make sense, no matter what setting + rules combination you use. And most of the time no one could or should care less.

Tell me you aren't capable of converting the Conan RPG to Legend without stripping out the stuff that makes Conan RPG work for the Hyboria setting. The majority of the people who use this message board are capable of that.

[Omegonthesane]

Besides, does the cosmology or political and socioeconomic makeup of your fictional world actually come up in the game? I've seen that happen just twice in the games I've played, and those were at high levels when players might interact with things of that scale.

I find this hard to believe. Every time a summoner casts Summon Elemental Badger, they are interacting with the cosmology of the setting directly. Every time a "legitimate" trade such as "give me your weapons for this pile of gold" is attempted it is interacting with the laws and economic structure of the surrounding area. You can't do missions for the king of Derpistan if Derpistan is in fact a democratic republic with no King. You can't trivially buy kebabs if kebabs have been banned from the local village, or if no one there knows how to cook kebabs, or if the only kebab chef isn't interested in selling.

In the case of D&D, if Person A is able to defeat hundreds of Person B without help, as is the case for a mid level D&D character against an army of HD 1 orcs, then the thing where society has monopoly of force is out of the window. If armies are no good against the real threats, then it is ridiculous for anyone to have a "proper" army, because their wars are fought by the small number of champions who happen to be high enough level to do jack about the soup du jour. If wizards can Fabricate piles of iron from a reasonably low level, the entire iron mining industry is no longer a thing unless you explain why the wizards don't (e.g. they're too busy snorting white powder from the erogenous zones of extraplanar beings). Most DMs cannot be expected to fill in this sort of gap - either have too much other stuff to do, lack the required knowledge, or both. That's the game designer's job - or it would be, if the industry rewarded "vague competence".

[...You Lost Me]

But people can totally have a diplomacy skill or a summon monster spell and just not use it for those things. Just like how D&D has a diplomacy skill and yet there is no mention of the governmental bodies in its default campaign setting.

What is actually important to know is how a character's abilities match up to their challenges, and since challenges are literally defined as other DM-built characters, that's what the abilities should be judged by.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Questions can easily crop up at level 1. If adventures start at level 1, and city guards start at level 4, the fat guys who walk around with chests pumped out, taking bribes, and unable to actually catch a running thief, then adventures aren't actually qualified to go on adventures, as common NPCs make a better resource.

If the answer is, go walk in circles around the city walls and hit slimes with your sword until you're higher level than the city watch, it immediately begs the question, why doesn't the city watch do that? Or the thieves guild? Even Taloon the fat merchant will kill slimes if it provides tangible rewards.

Magic is one way of answering these questions. If you have access to spells that the everyman doesn't, utility beyond "more DPR", you can cross the line from wolf grinder to actual problem solver.

[nockermensch]

You can't have a fantasy game without a magic system, and what sort of society your fantasy setting has is inherently tied to what that magic system does. Or at least it damn well better be otherwise nothing makes sense.

I agree with you insofar as plugging some rules into a setting with no work done whatsoever causes a few problems. But if you're saying a rules system without a setting is worthless because using a setting you made up or found somewhere else involves a little bit of work, then you're making a mountain out of a molehill.

Besides, does the cosmology or political and socioeconomic makeup of your fictional world actually come up in the game? I've seen that happen just twice in the games I've played, and those were at high levels when players might interact with things of that scale. If that's happening in your game then so much has to be hashed out regardless of what setting you use (because none of them are complete enough for this sort of thing) that you're fabricating and justifying so much that goes beyond any rules system that any rules system is going to work. I.e. if you interact with the things that need to make sense in a setting + rules then you have to do the work of making them make sense, no matter what setting + rules combination you use. And most of the time no one could or should care less.

Tell me you aren't capable of converting the Conan RPG to Legend without stripping out the stuff that makes Conan RPG work for the Hyboria setting. The majority of the people who use this message board are capable of that.

Bruce Cordell, seemingly inspired by this kind of thinking you show here wrote a 4e Dark Sun module so horrible that it basically sunk that line as far as 4e was involved.

Despite the way people rave here about rules, the soul of any RPG system is still the world(s) each system allows you to play in. The rules job is to produce results that match the world's expectations. Ideally, the way the world works in fluff should match the emergent elements of the rules being applied. When this doesn't happen, we have fluff/crunch dissonance.

[Blicero]

The problem with slice-and-dice multiclassing is the problem you always get with combinatorials. Right now, the system is impressive in the same way that getting a 20 on a d20 5 times in a row sans cheating is impressive. But it's still a stupid idea because each new track will exponentially increase the number of combinations and make balance intractable. Balance by exhaustion only works if the number of combinations is small.

Yes Lago, we all know how combinatorials work. Legend maintains its balance in the face of the whole combinatorial explosion thing because
1. The playspace for Legend classes is very small relative to, say, D&D 3.
2. The designers are very careful about testing new tracks before releasing them.

Now, neither of those things are totally positive. (They're probably not even mostly positive.) The first means that Legend is basically tabletop Final Fantasy Tactics, which is sad. And the second is why there still is no monster manual, which is terrible. But they still suffice to make Legend's slice-n-dice multiclass system viable and balanced.

Look, if you don't have a campaign setting, even a generic implied one like 3E and 4E D&D, your abilities don't mean shit. Teleportation and Legend Lore could mean something, but right now it only means what your DM wants it to mean and it has to be special-pleaded for each campaign. Even potentially gonzo shit like personal, on-demand dimensional travel and FTL travel only means anything in the context of a campaign setting. If you're playing Outlaw of Gor, those things are completely campaign defining. If you're playing Star Trek, those abilities aren't even worth putting on your character sheet.

You sort of have a point here. If the Legend devs released The Official Legend Setting, and that setting was Star Trek or something, then yeah, nothing a Legend character could do would be worth anything outside of combat. But you can look at campaigns people have run, implied fluff in the text, and that Hallow campaign brief thing. And you can conclude that Legend is basically just "Superhero World". Heroes have no need to interact with the main economy because they make whatever they need out of arbitrarium/DM-fiat, combat can be as lethal or nonlethal as you want, and the challenges characters face have everything to do with their level and nothing to do with the verisimilitude of the world.

A definite campaign setting would (tautologically) make things more definite. But, because everyone in Legend is built either as a mook or with the character rules, and those character rules are tightly restricted, any campaign setting you run in Legend is sufficiently defined for it to be apparent that the abilities of high-level Legend characters matter.

That's because you haven't looked very fucking hard.

Okay, let's look at the Legend-tier Legendary abilities.

1. A Bit of Gravitas: You keep people from flying and slow down people on the ground. Flight is really common in high-level Legend, so you would actually use this.
2. Maniacal Laughter: Your AoEs are bigger.
3. Practicing Nihilist: You overcome DR and immunities. Both of which are common in Legend.
4. Arrangements: This ability is super MC fiat-y, but its actual effect (automatically win one encounter per quest) is not unreasonable.
5. Seeker: You have super perception and can use discern location, a level 7 spell, at will.
6. Protean: This would be a bookkeeping nightmare to play, but there's nothing particularly unbalanced or NPC-only about it.
7. Technologist: You have access to every spell. This has the same problem in theory that 3.5 wildshape does, but, because Legend has so few spells, it's not as big an issue.
8. A Place to Stand: Bookkeeping nightmare as usual, but not unusable.
9. Titan: Immunity to damage. Next.
10. Tap Leyline: A sort of ambiguously written form of permanency.
11. Old Hero: Immunity to damage.
12. Old Mage: Permanent buff.
13. Hero Rising: Incrementing buff.

Obviously, not all of those are going to be equally useful in every possible campaign. And most of them require nontrivial bookkeeping, just like everything else in Legend. But which ones of them are "clearly unsuited for PCs"? And which ones are "wildly unbalanced"?

Also:

Tell me you aren't capable of converting the Conan RPG to Legend without stripping out the stuff that makes Conan RPG work for the Hyboria setting. The majority of the people who use this message board are capable of that.

You probably could not do that. Even if you stripped Legend down to the first 5 or 6 levels, you're still dealing with the fact that Legend characters are superheroes, and Conan characters are not.

edit: fucking tags, how do they work

[Lago PARANOIA]

And the second is why there still is no monster manual, which is terrible. But they still suffice to make Legend's slice-n-dice multiclass system viable and balanced.

1.) Does that fucking sound balanced to you? 'We can't release one of our most important books in a decent amount of time because our base class creation mechanic has to be special pleaded for each monster we make' points to a pretty fundamental balance problem. I'm sure that even full-sourcebook access 15th level 3.5E clerics can be 'balanced' if there are a team of DMs line-item vetoing every cleric player's character sheet and adjusting their abilities on the fly.

2.) Even if Legend throws in the towel and goes 4E Exception-Based Designed (which is pretty much has to), it's still not extensible for PC-content. This not only makes homebrew devillishly difficult but also puts a soft cap on the amount of expansion material the game can support.

But you can look at campaigns people have run, implied fluff in the text, and that Hallow campaign brief thing. And you can conclude that Legend is basically just "Superhero World". Heroes have no need to interact with the main economy because they make whatever they need out of arbitrarium/DM-fiat, combat can be as lethal or nonlethal as you want, and the challenges characters face have everything to do with their level and nothing to do with the verisimilitude of the world.

A definite campaign setting would (tautologically) make things more definite. But, because everyone in Legend is built either as a mook or with the character rules, and those character rules are tightly restricted, any campaign setting you run in Legend is sufficiently defined for it to be apparent that the abilities of high-level Legend characters matter.

Wonderful. It's fucking Ninter Vale again. That sounds like an awesome game to play, doesn't it? By that feeble-ass ad-hoc recontextualization, 30th 4E D&D characters are legitimate high-level characters.

But which ones of them are "clearly unsuited for PCs"? And which ones are "wildly unbalanced"?

Origin Story - Extremely overpowered for this tier compared to the rest of the options, especially when used with tracks that have scene-long or even quest-long abilities, like a lot of Shaman spells or Rune Master, or can be recycled into other options, like a Spell-Storing weapon.

Woldhewn/Indestructible/etc. - You tried to gloss it over by going 'what's the big deal about damage immunity?' but it IS a big deal in this rulesset. Save or dies don't really exist in Legend. What's more, this game is really big on handing out lots of resistances. Being able to soak 80 damage in a round from 3 attacks is not a big deal. You may as well ask 'what's wrong with unerrata'd Battlerager Fighters?'

Summoner - Ridiculously overpowered for this ruleset.

Inhume - Because we don't know what kind of campaign setting Legend d20 has in mind (for example, the frequency of Legendary NPCs and the social structure of this world), we can't be certain about this ability's utility. But in most of the famous campaign settings across various different rules sets, fantasy or no, this would be a total game-changer.

Minions - Stupid overpowered.

Debts Reckoned - Stupid overpowered assuming you employ some creativity. Ironically, this ability isn't that bad at lower levels but it becomes a shit-sucker at higher ones.

Lionhearted - Stupid overpowered.

Arrangements - Campaign Breaking.

Protean - Makes the game intractable, see complaints with Origin Story.

Hero Rising - Stupid 4Erry shit that only remains slightly balanced if the DM is using rule negative two to define what an encounter is.

[OgreBattle]

Legend strikes me as a system that would really benefit from having only a handful of classes/tracks. If I recall correctly they had things like Ranger and Barbarian as separate classes and Paladin as its own class, all with a bunch of tracks.

I could see the game with just 4 classes (Fighter*, Rogue, Priest, Wizard) that have 3 tracks each. So if you wanted to be a Paladin you're a Fighter with a Priest track.

*And then Fighter tracks cover things like totemic berserking and superhuman athleticism

[8d8]

Besides, does the cosmology or political and socioeconomic makeup of your fictional world actually come up in the game? I've seen that happen just twice in the games I've played, and those were at high levels when players might interact with things of that scale.

I find this hard to believe. Every time a summoner casts Summon Elemental Badger, they are interacting with the cosmology of the setting directly.

This example, just like the others you brought up, does not point to players interacting with the cosmology or setting in a way that requires them to analyze anything. Even if they decide to analyze what it means to summon a thing, it's not necessary for them to have any answers in order to play the game. Sure, if your setting says summon elemental badger is the act of pulling a badger from an elemental plane then that's what happens, but I haven't seen a rule system yet that doesn't have the flexibility to say that the same spell could have the serial numbers filed off and still work just fine. So maybe you don't have planes and it becomes fabricate temporary flaming badger - but nothing has actually changed from the player's perspective. Similarly, if Joe Wizard buys some garlic and buttassin vine seeds with gold he might technically be interacting with the economy, but it's not even effort to reskin that as bartering, buying with other currency, or anything else that fits the setting. D&D's rules really do not require you to use the cp-pp system of currency in the rules for the rest of the game to make sense; same with the list of gods, the planes, the names of the classes or races, the names of the spells, the weapons, the armor, the rules for overland travel, et cetera ad nauseam.

Having a setting tied to a rules system saves you time. That's what it's good for. And that is objectively good so I do like it when a setting is written for a rules system, but I think a rules system without a setting is absolutely not useless.

[OgreBattle]

On summoning, if a DM said "No the angel doesn't want to work for you and refuses to summon more angels for you because this pisses him off" would you consider that a setting element that the PC has to deal with or 'DM powertrip fucking player in the ass'?

'Cause I've seen stories on one side of Angel Summoners talking about how optimized their characters are as they stomp all over a module, and on the other side DM's bragging about how they've put 'dirty munchkin rollplayers' in their place through the power of setting and roleplaying.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Similarly, if Joe Wizard buys some garlic and buttassin vine seeds with gold he might technically be interacting with the economy, but it's not even effort to reskin that as bartering, buying with other currency, or anything else that fits the setting. D&D's rules really do not require you to use the cp-pp system of currency in the rules for the rest of the game to make sense; same with the list of gods, the planes, the names of the classes or races, the names of the spells, the weapons, the armor, the rules for overland travel, et cetera ad nauseam.

Emphasis mine. What the fuck are you even talking about, dude? D&D should be the first fucking counterexample anyone should bring up when someone says that the rules for the economy doesn't matter. Because apart from the fact that D&D does not have a consistent economy between editions, it also does not have a consistent economy between campaign settings within the edition. In Dragonlance, you can't buy magical items in the current canonical age without DM Pity. Greyhawk is more of a grey area, but the rules default to 'yes if in 3E/4E D&D'.

[Blicero]

1.) Does that fucking sound balanced to you? 'We can't release one of our most important books in a decent amount of time because our base class creation mechanic has to be special pleaded for each monster we make' points to a pretty fundamental balance problem. I'm sure that even full-sourcebook access 15th level 3.5E clerics can be 'balanced' if there are a team of DMs line-item vetoing every cleric player's character sheet and adjusting their abilities on the fly.

The last time I checked, "balance" was not the same thing as "extensibility". If every thing in every official Legend book plays nicely with every other thing in every official Legend book, then Legend is probably balanced. Making sure that every thing in every official Legend book plays nicely with every other thing in every official Legend book is an extremely nontrivial job, as you noted. But the fact that balancing Legend was hard doesn't magically make Legend's multiclassing system broken.

Wonderful. It's fucking Ninter Vale again. That sounds like an awesome game to play, doesn't it? By that feeble-ass ad-hoc recontextualization, 30th 4E D&D characters are legitimate high-level characters.

Please show me where I said that Legend was a fun game to play and I intend to play only Legend from now on. I ran Legend for a year. Honestly, I wouldn't want to again. But that doesn't change the fact that high-level Legend characters have some degree of power over their setting. High level Legend caps out around level 10 or 11 in 3E terms, not level 8. Which is what you were originally arguing before you started strawmanning and shit.

Origin Story - Extremely overpowered for this tier compared to the rest of the options, especially when used with tracks that have scene-long or even quest-long abilities, like a lot of Shaman spells or Rune Master, or can be recycled into other options, like a Spell-Storing weapon.

Origin Story is probably one of the better Champion-tier traits. I'm not convinced that it's significantly better than Woldhewn or Indestructible. And Mr. Atlas is very good for certain builds.

Woldhewn/Indestructible/etc. - You tried to gloss it over by going 'what's the big deal about damage immunity?' but it IS a big deal in this rulesset. Save or dies don't really exist in Legend. What's more, this game is really big on handing out lots of resistances. Being able to soak 80 damage in a round from 3 attacks is not a big deal. You may as well ask 'what's wrong with unerrata'd Battlerager Fighters?'

I can't totally parse what you are saying here. Woldhewn and Indestructible are both very good traits. They're as good as Champion-tier gets, probably. Do you not agree with this?

Summoner - Ridiculously overpowered for this ruleset.

Have you read the Mook rules?

Inhume - Because we don't know what kind of campaign setting Legend d20 has in mind (for example, the frequency of Legendary NPCs and the social structure of this world), we can't be certain about this ability's utility. But in most of the famous campaign settings across various different rules sets, fantasy or no, this would be a total game-changer.

It would be a game-changer, but that doesn't mean it's broken.

Debts Reckoned - Stupid overpowered assuming you employ some creativity. Ironically, this ability isn't that bad at lower levels but it becomes a shit-sucker at higher ones.

I really don't see Debts Reckoned as being omgwtfbbq. It's probably on par with Inhume or Lionhearted. Maybe better than Scourge or Emplaced.

Arrangements - Campaign Breaking.

If your campaign can be broken by the PCs winning a single encounter, it probably deserves to be broken.

Protean - Makes the game intractable, see complaints with Origin Story.

It's horrific in terms of bookkeeping, but not actually unplayable.

[Aryxbez]

Far as as a "setting" goes, I would just use Frank/K's [Tome] take on the Planes. You have these infinite worlds, economies is an unwritten rule of "don't worry about it", and there you have all this content you can muck around in. Though I'm guessing Legend doesn't have "Scry & Die" tactics, so the fact it gets countered by Dungeons anyway would be one hand-wave from the "setting" I'd guess, but would be fine far as I'm aware.

In fact, I'd say more and more DM's should just use the Manual of the Planes as their setting, as whatever world they can come up with is probably just generic and not as interesting. Plus, since they didn't make it personally, doesn't need to come with that attachment baggage, so PC's can muck up with the setting however they please within their abilities (albeit for Legend, not much, since apparently it's like a GoW or FFTactics).

[...You Lost Me]

The Legendary ability I find truly stupid is Puppetmaster. I skimmed the other ones, and while they don't really seem balanced to teach other (e.g. per-campaign flexibility v. per-battle power in the same category) they don't seem atrocious.

[Blicero]

So Legend is basically dead at this point: http://www.ruleofcool.com/smf/index.php ... 44b061a177

For those of you still holding out hope, let me lay down a bit of information for you. I may put this up in a new topic later.

There are two things you need to know:

• Legend is not dead
  Of the few dev team members who are still operational, VertigoCharades continues to lead a determined effort to completely nail down the core rules and keep Legend on life support. Dedicated fans still play the game and hope to keep it alive and kicking.
• Legend is dead
  The collapse of the dev team due to a huge flood of Real Life, coupled with the greatly diminished influx of fan activity and the difficulty in marketing the game due to the nonexistent Monster Guide and fluff-null core book (not to mention a stack of promises by the former head of Legend), have basically brought development and support of Legend to a standstill. Sadly, everything that I warned the former head about has basically come to pass, and while the core rules might eventually be (re-)completed, I can't say reasonably that any other Legend product will be forthcoming.

That said, what I'd like to organize this summer is a cleanup and release of planned Monster Guide material; essentially taking what should already be available to our fans and moving it out there. I can't make guarantees, since that would involve speaking for other people, but we're still here and the IRC channel is still active.

This is not that surprising; the forums have been really sparse for like a year now. It's kind of a shame. For all of its issues and flaws, Legend is a game where Alice can show up having spent thirty minutes making her character, Bob can show up having spent three hours making his character, and Carol can show up having spent six hours making her character, and all three characters are reasonably likely to be playable with each other without anyone feeling small in the pants. That is a reasonably impressive feat to pull off.