[OSSR]Earthdawn (1st Edition)

[deaddmwalking]

I'm going to disagree with Frank on a pure technicality.

If you have a 'points of light' setting, you don't have to neceessarily have undifferentiated darkness outside of those settings. If, for instance, there are a half-dozen settlements (points of light) with dangerous roads between them (darkness) with the REAL DANGERS (deeper darkness) being off the roads, you have a grim-dark setting where there are real choices - or at least, could be.

I guess it depends on what the 'darkness' represents and what variations it has.

I honestly am not familiar enough with 4E's setting(s) to know how they did it - but whatever they did, it certainly isn't the only way.

Further - it is very possible to have a world that is more than points of light, but have the PCs only experience it in that manner. If you were playing a game in a world like the Kevin Costner Postman or what have you, there is LIKELY civilization beyond the 'play area', but if the PCs don't have a real chance of traveling to it, the 'initial setting' will have a strong 'points of light' feel to it.

[darkmaster]

Frank is fucking wrong and by way of proof I will present the Metro 2033 and Last Light video games as well as the book. The games and book present a world after the atomic bombs dropped and focus on the survivors living in the Moscow metro stations. You have the stations and everywhere else. The stations are safe unless there are Reds or Nazis controlling them in which case be prepared to shoot your way through and everywhere else is crawling with monsters, not like, the raiders of fallout monsters either or the campy giant ants, this is a mole. Every station struggles to survive more or less constant attacks by the monsters and nobody can leave the metro because anywhere you could get out the air is poisonous or full of deadly levels of radiation or both and your filters will run out before you could find a place you could maybe survive on the surface.

But the world is really fleshed out and feels alive you, find people continuing to send transmissions out to other cities, and talk about how the submariners or a tank squad survived for a while and their transmissions after the apocalypse came. And there is a world out there, you visit it a couple times but you can't stay because you'll suffocate if your filters run out.

Sure it is a video game and you are basically walking down cramped subway tunnels most of the time, but in a Metro 2033 TTRPG there's nothing saying the player couldn't say fuck Black Station, and fuck the survival of humanity, I'm going to go to another Metro station. Fact is if you don't think out your world your world won't be thought out. It is possible to have a word which is made up of small pockets of civilization and everywhere else is full of monsters and death and have it be a more thought out and fully realized world than a world with clear political boundaries that but right up to one another and some places of wilderness.

Another good setting I can think of for points of light would be the dawn of civilization, you're a couple generations after the nomads have discovered and accepted agriculture and settled down, there are small villages and the and the impenetrable wilderness between which now represents the supernatural and unknown anyone who goes out has to be a bad enough dude to face down the monsters that lurk just beyond the light of the village's torches and every day is a struggle to prevent the wilderness from taking the settlement back.

[deaddmwalking]

M Night Shamyla's The Village had that kind of vibe before the twist. Not that there wasn't other civilization - it's just that you had to face down the monsters to get there.

[Nath]

Back in 1997, French companies Multisim and Kalisto made the Dark Earth RPG, novels and video game, whose post-apocalyptic setting revolved around literal points of light: the remains of humanity gathered in the few small places sun was still shining on.

But the difference between Dark Earth and D&D4 was that most plots were about events that took place inside these cities, and the outside was a vague general threat, with an occasional old-world relic hunt. Long time, but I'm not sure the video game took you outside even once. The only campaign they published for the RPG, "La Croisade de la Ville Mouvement" [The Crusade of the Movement City] where the PC would travel across the darkland with a military expedition, using a giant vehicle with its own source of light, and most of the events would still be about what's going on inside rather than the outside threats.

D&D, on the other hand, assumes nothing even remotely interesting ought to happen in town. You shop, you leave.

[Lokathor]

So, given that Earthdawn was basically a setting that started with the idea "Explain all the D&D tropes", what are the problems with simply using 3e to run it? Seems like you could keep all the ED fluff and it wouldn't change much at all.

AH is right when he says that the whole point is to have the mechanics tightly integrated with the setting. What you could do however is "port" the system away from its current core mechanic of having the step chart. You could move it to a d20-style mechanic rather than the step system, but you'd have to keep result levels, so maybe instead of 1d20 you'd wanna have 2d10 or 3d6 so you could have dice exploding and all that. A change like that would let you eliminate some of the dice swapping stuff without needing to adjust too much of the game.

Frank had an idea about a more radical core mechanic change, where you'd have "dice pools" (sorta) and each die would result in 0, 1, or 2 hits instead of just 0 or 1 hits. Then your potential variance would go up with more dice, but you could still get some predictable averages and curves as well instead of the weirdness of the action step curves.

Either way, you could adjust a lot of the specific mechanics the same as during an edition change while keeping the general concept of "these thread items will advance as you do", and "you're an adept that powers up by doing stuff worth talking about", and you can even keep particulars like "you can improve your powers faster than those chumps who train skills nonmagically".

[kzt]

Frank had an idea about a more radical core mechanic change, where you'd have "dice pools" (sorta) and each die would result in 0, 1, or 2 hits instead of just 0 or 1 hits. Then your potential variance would go up with more dice, but you could still get some predictable averages and curves as well instead of the weirdness of the action step curves.

Like body damage in HERO normal damage?

[Username17]

Sure it is a video game and you are basically walking down cramped subway tunnels most of the time, but in a Metro 2033 TTRPG there's nothing saying the player couldn't say fuck Black Station, and fuck the survival of humanity, I'm going to go to another Metro station. Fact is if you don't think out your world your world won't be thought out. It is possible to have a word which is made up of small pockets of civilization and everywhere else is full of monsters and death and have it be a more thought out and fully realized world than a world with clear political boundaries that but right up to one another and some places of wilderness.

It's a fucking video game and doesn't include any possibility of walking outside the narrow boundaries. In a table top game, you could decide to go to Prague or something, but there would be no more support for that than if you were playing a Diablo tabletop and decided to go to the northern coast of Scosglen.

Points of Light can actually make a cool videogame, because you have to program all the content, so having a tiny tiny world is probably necessary. But for a TTRPG, where content can be created at a moment's notice and is limited only by your imaginations - it is fucking terrible.

I had a lot of fun with Diablo 2. But by TTRPG standards, that's lazy and shitty world design. Metro 2033 relies on using the actual Earth and gets thousands of place names for free, and it's still lazy and shitty world design by TTRPG standards.

You tried to prove me wrong, but you actually just proved me right.

-Username17

[Voss]

D&D, on the other hand, assumes nothing even remotely interesting ought to happen in town. You shop, you leave.

That isn't vaguely true, and hasn't been for decades (disregarding 4e's 'nothing moves if the player's don't witness it'). Even Gygax had shit going on in towns in his modules. In temple of elemental evil there were more plots, dangers and even fucking treasure in town than there were in the moathouse (the first mini-dungeon)

[Ancient History]

There's a distinction to be made here, and fuck, I'll make it. One of the (many and valid) complaints against D&D4 is that it was too much like a video game brought to the table top - actions were mechanical, abilities focused solely on combat, setting and interaction based on set encounters rather than any sort of organic interaction with the game world. Now of course this doesn't mean that in every D&D4 game you couldn't pick up the swords the goblins dropped, or couldn't light a torch with your wizard ability, or never faced any sort of enemy action within a town - but this is all stuff that people brought to the game, rather than anything that grew from the game itself; it's like playing Monopoly and ranting about the damn liberals whose laws have you landing in jail for the sixth time and now you're going to raise the rent on your shanty-town in retaliation - fun, but not really something the game either acknowledges or encourages.

Because there are three big parts of game design - the concept (or the sell), the setting, and the system. The sell is the very top-down distillation of the game: in Earthdawn, you are adventurers in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, game on. In Shadowrun, you are professional criminals doing the dirty jobs the megacorps cannot acknowledge in a cyberpunk dystopia where the magic has returned, game on.

In D&D, you're an adventurer, go have an adventure. Have fun.

So Earthdawn and Shadowrun are both a bit more high-concept than D&D, because they're focused on the setting, and on getting players to understand how their characters interact with the setting. No-one takes for granted was an adept or shadowrunner is, it needs to be explained and sold to them. D&D by dint of its long existence takes that bit as granted - you're an adventurer, you're going to go on an adventure. That might mean dungeon-delving, that might mean you're part of a professional "adventuring party," or maybe you're a Fellowship of the Ring deal. They don't specify, because D&D has no default setting. Yes, they like to use some gods from Greyhawk to illustrate how things work, but when you get down to it D&D is a system and a concept, with the settings pretty much interchangeable. That means that not only do you generally have weak system-setting interaction, but you often have weak setting-concept interaction as well...and in D&D4, this approached schizophrenia, because established settings like Forgotten Realms were hamfistedly broken to try and fit the new game concept.

Alright, I've got more to this rant, but it goes into how well-thought-out settings are more forgiving for certain system imbalances and how D&D4 was shit for another critical aspect of game design, namely the ability of Mister Caverns to generate their own material. But I'll save that for another time.

[Nath]

D&D, on the other hand, assumes nothing even remotely interesting ought to happen in town. You shop, you leave.

That isn't vaguely true, and hasn't been for decades (disregarding 4e's 'nothing moves if the player's don't witness it'). Even Gygax had shit going on in towns in his modules. In temple of elemental evil there were more plots, dangers and even fucking treasure in town than there were in the moathouse (the first mini-dungeon)

In the context of the ongoing discussion, I wrote "D&D" as the short for "D&D 4th edition and its setting."

[tussock]

But 4th edition isn't "D&D", Pathfinder is. Pathfinder also has lots of shit going on in town, at least at low to mid levels.

[SubversionArts]

Apparently the kickstarter for Earthdawn 4th edition has finally released a pre-release pdf of the player book. I'm not a backer, so I don't have access to it.

Their August 2014 release date went wooshing by with no word on their KS until October that the layout and text was finalized and only waiting on some remaining pieces of art. (Which is pretty much the same thing they said around August prior to GenCon). Same reason for the delay was given again in December, along with some personal issues that contributed, I guess. But apparently with the new year, someone got shamed enough into giving the backers something significant, so it's out there now.

Despite very low expectations, I'm looking forward to this anyway, and am curious about what other Den members think.

[Longes]

Still better than Exalted kickstarter.

[ckafrica]

So which Earthdawn splats are worth getting your hands on and which were a bucket of poop?

[Concise Locket]

The Nations of Barsaive books and "Namegivers of Barsaive" from 3rd edition are pretty well done. I would also add "The Blood Wood from" 1st edition and, perhaps, "The Theran Empire" if you want a feel for how the rest of 4th World Earth functions.