Earthdawn -- Best edition, MC advice?

[Orion]

Hey folks,

So I was setting up an After Sundown game full of hott chix, and then one of them acquired a boyfriend. Apparently he was psyching up to run a game of Earthdawn Classic (the 2005 red brick series), but not sure he was actually ready to be Mr. Cavern. The compromise proposal is that I run an Earthdawn game for everyone.

Is this a good ruleset, or is it worth pushing for another edition? Are there any mandatory house rule fixes? Any non-obvious pitfalls? I'm gonna read the player's book in a moment, but right now my only knowledge of Earthdawn mechanics is reverse-engineered from character writeups in Inquest magazine.

[Orion]

Holy shit, these dice. So obnoxious. But since almost every "step" seems to increase the average result by 1, it looks like it would be trivial to convert it to d20. Maybe not literally d20, because d20 gives a much wider spread than most Earthdawn ranks do. But (fixed die roll)+(variable bonus).

[Pixels]

Actually, the standard deviation of a plain jane d20 isn't that different from the standard deviation of step 10 (stdev of 1d20 is 5.76628, stdev of 2d8 exploding is 5.36705). The exploding increases the variance by a lot. Any step above 11 has a larger standard deviation than 1d20.

But yeah, step dice are a bit of a headache to get used to. They aren't nearly as intuitive as counting successes in a dice pool or rolling a fixed die + modifiers.

[erik]

Do you like exploding dice? If so then you can use d6's.

Step	Die
2	1d6-4
3	1d6-2
4	1d6
5	1d6+1
6	1d6+2
7	2d6
8	2d6+1
9	2d6+2
10	3d6
11	3d6+1
12	3d6+2
Et	cetera

But yeah, I've been playing a bi-weekly Earthdawn (2nd ed) campaign for about a year. We just began a hiatus from it to give our MC a break, and I gotta say the steps are a pain the ass and never stop being a pain in the ass. I think I'm on top of things for a month or two and then I get wound penalties and fuck it up.

Another thing, warn potential spellcasters about their multistep process for casting spells, swapping spells and so forth. And especially about how shitty it is to spend 2+ rounds weaving threads to cast a single spell.

Durability strongly rewards people starting as a tough class first before multiclassing. And eventually everybody is gonna multiclass thanks to higher level talents being so expensive it's cheaper to go do something like multiclass into another Discipline all the way up to 4 or so circles just to buy the same rank 8 talent for your first Discipline as a rank <5 in another.
A 9 Thief requires more Legend Points than a 9 Thief/4 Swordmaster and they diverge more and more as levels go up. At a certain point it makes more sense to multiclass an entire Discipline just for the savings on a single Talent, and everything else you get is gravy.

Skill ranks tend to rub everyone the wrong way, including myself. It's insulting that they're worse and cost more to do the same things.

Spending XP for immediate gain vs. future long term gain is a crappy model. Consider giving X karma points per session or adventure based upon their Karma Ritual skill.

The point buy generation rules are bizarre with odd sweet spots for well-rounded and pointy characters. Maybe there's wisdom there, but it mostly irritates me when I would otherwise wish to have the middling-good values on the anti-sweet spot. Or like an Obsidiman that I didn't feel like maxing strength out on.

[Orion]

I was thinking more like 2d6+x, and increase all DCs by 8.

[Lokathor]

Earthdawn is my favorite fantasy game by a big margin. It might even be my favorite TTRPG.

It's funny to me that you bring up the dice.

Nearly every edition of Earthdawn is entirely compatible with the next. Two players could build characters using different PHBs and (as long as the GM was resolving all the minor differences behind the curtain) they'd basically never know the difference just by looking at each other's sheets. 1e/2e/EDC are arguably closer to each other than ADnD and ADnD 2e.

Except for that damn step chart. There are 5 editions of Earthdawn, and 4 of them have a different step chart from each other: 1e, 2e/EDC, 3e, 4e.

The biggest thing to know is that if you get a temporary modifier, it's a billion times better to just roll the same dice as normal and apply the bonus or penalty to your dice total instead of trying to figure new dice. That way, next to each stat/skill/talent on your sheet you put the step and you put the dice. eg: "Melee Weapons 10/ 2d8", then when you aggressive attack you just roll 2d8+3 instead of trying to figure that you should roll d12+d10 instead. This rule goes regardless of edition, but it wasn't really suggested as a rule until 3e or so.

In terms of Edition: 1e/2e/EDC are all basically the same ruleset, and they're just at slightly different points in the timeline (2e tried to move forward, but people didn't seem to like it so EDC moved back to where 1e was). 3e changed up things about how disciplines work a bit by introducing a system called "Talent Options" to make different characters of the same Discipline less samey. 4e was seriously done via Kickstarter, and the PDFs have slightly lower production values because of it, but the rules are (for Earthdawn) totally tops. They did a lot of small things that all make life better for players and for GMs, lots of which don't even make sense for me to try to explain to someone who doesn't already know Earthdawn, but here's stuff off the top of my head: Durability and Karma Ritual fixed, Success Levels fixed, Duplicate talents got merged, there's an actual "Awareness" skill now, Spells can get extra threads to boost them so lower circle spells are useful for longer, Karma doesn't burn up your LP any more, the stat charts have easier to follow formulas, etc.

As a person who really likes Earthdawn, there's no reason in the world to play non-4e Earthdawn unless you're a grognard. It's only 22 bucks on their website.

My own history with the editions is that I played 1e with some friends down the street for about a year using their books, later I got myself a set of the core 3e books and played that with another group for a while, and just within the past two weeks I've begun a 4e PBP game. Every time I move to a newer edition of Earthdawn I'm happy with the changes. Which isn't to say that everything has been fixed, but that what does get updated is usually a step forward and not a step back.

If your group has a bunch of EDC books already, it's fine to play that. If everyone is new to Earthdawn except for that one guy I'd really suggest to get 4e and use that as your base. Expansion material from older editions can be brought forward as you go.

[Pixels]

Do you like exploding dice? If so then you can use d6's.

Step	Die	Mean	Beats Equal
2	1d6-4	0.2	16.6667%
3	1d6-2	1.2	33.3333%
4	1d6	4.2	50%
5	1d6+1	5.2	50%
6	1d6+2	6.2	50%
7	2d6	8.4	58.3894%
8	2d6+1	9.4	58.3894%
9	2d6+2	10.4	58.3894%
10	3d6	12.6	66.4856%
11	3d6+1	13.6	66.4856%
12	3d6+2	14.6	66.4856%
Et	cetera

Not so sure about that table. I've added the means and chances of beating an equal difficulty, and you'll notice that the low values are very unlikely to hit an equal target number, and the high numbers gain a progressively larger advantage. Step 20 beats difficulty 20 79.5% of the time. Step 40 does it 91.82% of the time.

Here's a more balanced exploding d6 progression:

Step	Die	Mean	Beats Equal
2	1d6-2	2.2	50%
3	1d6-1	3.2	50%
4	1d6	4.2	50%
5	1d6+1	5.2	50%
6	1d6+2	6.2	50%
7	1d6+3	7.2	50%
8	2d6	8.4	47.1938%
9	2d6+1	9.4	47.1938%
10	2d6+2	10.4	47.1938%
11	2d6+3	11.4	47.1938%
12	3d6	12.6	49.0656%
...	...	...	...

Even that drifts off, but more slowly. You can correct it by subtracting -1 at steps 20, 40, etc. However, even without correction it doesn't diverge terribly quickly. Step 40 has a 55.5555% chance of beating a difficulty 40 test, which isn't enough of a bias for me to mess around with it.

[erik]

I'll cop to it.
I was overgenerous by stepping up from a +2 to a relative +4 (ish).
Including another +1 before adding the next die would space it out better.

[Blade]

I've played a few games of 1st Ed, and one game of 3rd Ed. Both were with lvl 1 characters.

- Combat was boring.
Fighters have one roll to hit (with quite often a 50% change to hit), followed by one roll to wound, with a non negligible chance of not making any significant damage (especially if the to-hit roll wasn't very good). So many of our combat was "failed to hit", "failed to wound" until we finally did decent damage.
Mages spend a long time preparing their spells, with a chance to fail, and even when the spell is working it seemed like many low-level spells were quite useless.

- Windlings seemed overpowered (at least in 1st ed). They had one attack ability that could get a high chance to hit and that made a whole lot of damage. In many combats, while the rest of the party had a hard time damaging enemies, the Windling just killed them one after the other.

- In 1st Ed (less so in 3rd), skills were too costly to consider getting secondary skills (fluff skills or skills that add depth to the character but aren't necessary for his archetype)

That's it, on the top of my head.

[Fucks]

I recommend 3e, but pay attention to not grab 3e Revised.

[Lokathor]

- Combat was boring.
Fighters have one roll to hit (with quite often a 50% change to hit), followed by one roll to wound, with a non negligible chance of not making any significant damage (especially if the to-hit roll wasn't very good). So many of our combat was "failed to hit", "failed to wound" until we finally did decent damage.

I wonder how you feel about 1st level DnD combat? You roll to hit, you roll some damage.

You don't always inflict a wound in Earthdawn, but that doesn't really matter because damage is what kills, not wounds. Wounds are just gravy when you roll well.

[Blade]

I wonder how you feel about 1st level DnD combat? You roll to hit, you roll some damage.

I'm not a big fan of DnD, but last time I've played, 1st level DnD combat didn't take forever. It didn't last long enough to get boring.

In ED I particularly recall a fight against assassins inside an inn (in on of the official adventures for circle 1 characters) which took forever with no other options than to roll to attack/roll to wound until we got lucky enough to deal enough damage.

[OgreBattle]

There any Earthdawn to Shadowrun 4e conversions out there? I imagine most of the work would be in figuring out spell matrixes and circles.

[Red_Rob]

The main issue with a straight translation is that magic in Earthdawn is calibrated against standard medieval technology, whereas in Shadowrun it is balanced around super future tech. Shadowrun starting mages can do things that would make an Earthdawn master wizard crap himself.