The Gaming Den

It seems like it would be far less work to just use Tome rules with a level 6 cap, than to try to cook up a new system to accommodate the precepts of the setting. Having a party is already messing with genre, but the setting is well known and more likely to engage the players. Armies, while they exist, are certainly more of a narrative backdrop than something PCs should bother tracking specifics on. The lack of treasure is a little concerning, but I'm sure something could be imagined.

Using the same logic for Aragorn being a 5th level character, have the overwhelming majority of characters in the setting be level 0 commoners and warriors. Following the theme of magic/power returning to the world with the hatching of the dragons, the PCs start being potent forces (Tome abilities) above and beyond what levels in Warrior gives.

The D&D spell list isn't really geared for settings that aren't D&D. Also, no real room to mechanically represent Tyrion's signature abilities, which seems essential in a Thrones RPG.

Also, Green Ronin already owns the official RPG for the setting. Its core engine is roll & keep and thus a bit of a tire fire on first principles, but it's a starting point.

EDIT: The tiny men system doesn't scale, and would be kind of shit even if it did - it does the "army = giant person" thing and then fucks around with initiative to make things more complicated when they didn't really need to be.

Omegonthesane wrote:The D&D spell list isn't really geared for settings that aren't D&D. Also, no real room to mechanically represent Tyrion's signature abilities, which seems essential in a Thrones RPG.

Players wouldn't be Tyrion, because he doesn't have signature abilities, what with him essentially being a level 1 expert with flaws. Yes, the spell list could stand to be messed with, but using something like the beguiler rather than a wizard is a good thing; and still less effort than trying to do a hack of whatever Green Ronin did.

I think if you declare that Tyrion isn't PC material, you've already lost your audience.

At level 6, you're an Undying One, Qyburn w/the little birds and the Mountain as his minions, Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun, mobile Bran Stark after getting better at warging humans, Melisandre (shadowbinding, resurrection, etc), or something equally awesome.


This character concept ends after level 1.

I really want to know when you saw Game of Thrones characters casting Glitterdust.

Spoiler Alert, if you do e6, 90% of your players are going to want to be casters. In game of thrones, somewhere between 0 and .00000000001% are casters. There isn't room in Game of Thrones for 3 casters to team up.

Meanwhile, D&D has terrible mass combat and terrible social interaction rules, which are... the two things you actually want if you play Game of Thrones RPG.

Meanwhile, everything casters do do in ASoIAF is both less impressive than casting a spell in 3 seconds, and also much less direct than 99.9% of D&D spells. Shadowbinding requires a King's Blood, sex with said King, then also several months, and then giving birth, and in return, you get to kill someone a mile away that you never saw and that never saw you, and that you aren't even sure exactly where they are.

That is both more and less impressive than D&D. Likewise, you can cast "This person will die" the spell, when you are hundreds of miles away, but it only works at all if someone else kills the guy thus rendering your spell of questionable efficacy.

virgil wrote:At level 6, you're an Undying One, Qyburn w/the little birds and the Mountain as his minions, Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun, mobile Bran Stark after getting better at warging humans, Melisandre (shadowbinding, resurrection, etc), or something equally awesome.


This character concept ends after level 1.

He's probably going to get a dragon, eventually.

I think that was sort of his point, the characters in game of thrones are seriously 3rd or 4th level characters max, and anyone who does magic doesn't do it in a way that resembles the D&D spell list. People in game of thrones just straight up die if you stab them right. Occasionally there are high CR threats in the form of a dragon or a giant or an undead, and they usually kill anyone they encounter because everyone is lower CR than them.

I don't think Tome, or really any form of D&D, is very viable for representing GoT.

If you really wanted to try and play GoT with some form of d20, you would probably want to have the d20 aspect be a sort of minigame you get into during crucial moments in the framework of a larger game that looks more like "Manage Your Noble House: The Board Game". You could make a bunch of very short classes, maybe even just 3 levels long, and give them the appropriate abilities, the option of a feat for customization, and equipment. You would station them around parts of the map you had influence in, and when someone played the "Form Alliance: Wedding" card in a region, you could select whatever characters and assets that could reach the designated part of the map before the card expires to go and personally fuck shit up. At which point you pull out a premade map and all players involved place their assets on it.

None of that was actually a suggestion for something you might do short term to prepare a GoT game, just idle musing on what a GoT rpg might look like, it would be a lot of work for relatively little payoff.

The thing about E6 is that it is still high magic high fantasy. E6 is useful to bend the power curve and produce something that actually resembles what people think a D&D world should look like and to some extent emulates the kind of thing that appears in certain D&D novels, but it absolutely won't emulate a low fantasy world like ASOIAF.

Personally, I think trying to play something Game of Thrones-esque is best suited to a rules-lite system, simply because Game of Thrones switches from wilderness adventuring, to complex court intrigue, to mass combat, to weird mystic arts, and back again and at that point mechanical rigor isn't really all that helpful.

What about FATE for GoT?

I could see Tome working for Game of Thrones only if you're playing as Arya batman ninjas with tremendous plot armor, but not much else.

FATE seems a better fit with how the cast might be guys with no athleticism and info networks working alongside shadow ninjas and the vagueness of the magic in the setting.

Kaelik wrote:I really want to know when you saw Game of Thrones characters casting Glitterdust.

Spoiler Alert, if you do e6, 90% of your players are going to want to be casters. In game of thrones, somewhere between 0 and .00000000001% are casters. There isn't room in Game of Thrones for 3 casters to team up.

I call bullshit on those numbers. Four of the fourteen main POV characters have at least one level of a caster class -- and at least one has multiple different caster classes.

In Game of Thrones, the magic classes held by major characters are Warg/Skinchanger, Faceless Man, and Dragoneer.

I guess the most prominent Red Priest/ess is technically a minor character, but that's definitely also a caster class in the GoT world.

Blood Magic is also totally a thing - but it's unclear if that's class based or just a set of rituals anyone can do.

Green Sight seems to just be part of the Warg / Skinchanger progression.

It's also highly likely that Pyromancer (Westerosi Alchemists Guild ), Warlock ( Undying of Qarth ) and Healer/Necromancer ( Maester Qyburn ) are caster classes in the world.

It remains to be seen when Samwisewell and Tyrion will earn their first levels in caster classes, but I have zero doubts that it will happen.

Josh_Kablack wrote:

Kaelik wrote:I really want to know when you saw Game of Thrones characters casting Glitterdust.

Spoiler Alert, if you do e6, 90% of your players are going to want to be casters. In game of thrones, somewhere between 0 and .00000000001% are casters. There isn't room in Game of Thrones for 3 casters to team up.

I call bullshit on those numbers. Four of the fourteen main POV characters have at least one level of a caster class -- and at least one has multiple different caster classes.

In Game of Thrones, the magic classes held by major characters are Warg/Skinchanger, Faceless Man, and Dragoneer.

I guess the most prominent Red Priest/ess is technically a minor character, but that's definitely also a caster class in the GoT world.

Blood Magic is also totally a thing - but it's unclear if that's class based or just a set of rituals anyone can do.

Green Sight seems to just be part of the Warg / Skinchanger progression.

It's also highly likely that Pyromancer (Westerosi Alchemists Guild ), Warlock ( Undying of Qarth ) and Healer/Necromancer ( Maester Qyburn ) are caster classes in the world.

It remains to be seen when Samwisewell and Tyrion will earn their first levels in caster classes, but I have zero doubts that it will happen.

I call bullshit on every one of those examples. I mean aside from the class where you get to have a CR 12 Dragon or three as a pet (which isn't casting at all), and possessing animals (which isn't casting at all) none of those things ever do anything that is "level 6" in any casting class.

Faceless men (of which we meat one, and Arya theoretically will be a second) can totally cast DISGUISE SELF!

Red Witch, as I said...... whatever, some things that are way more powerful, combined with crippling limits. And only maybe two of those are even real anywhere in the books. That is the blood magic.

Pyromancers do some alchemy that anyone can learn in a cell and make a compound, that ain't a class, that's one rank in Craft Alchemy.

The Warlocks don't actually do any magic anywhere.

And Maester Qyburn is a Maester of the Citadel who saved one guy from poison probably.

There just aren't casters.

The show warlocks totally have actual magic; although their only on-screen spell was creating illusory duplicates which are real enough to hold murder-shivs, they're clearly able to create illusions in their House of the Undying.

Pretty sure Melisandre's shadow babies come out much faster than real pregnancies.

Both of those are nitpicking compared to the core point that D&D and GOT do not go well together, however.

Well, one of the core conceits of GoT is that Magic just woke back up after a very long nap.

So if you are trying to shoehorn the world of Westeros into a d20 engine, you might want to set your casters up more along the lines of d20 Modern - where none of the base classes gets spells and all the caster classes are PrCs.

While it wouldn't really do Westeros, you could probably get a similar power level to GoT by the much-simpler-than-writing-all-new classes expedient of flat banning all the full caster classes -- which in an e6 game means that nobody ever gets beyond 2nd level spells without some form of plot device or cheating UMD. Even 2nd level spells are pretty much limited to top of the line Bards and Adepts - which removes a lot of power and flexibility.

OgreBattle wrote:FATE seems a better fit with how the cast might be guys with no athleticism and info networks working alongside shadow ninjas and the vagueness of the magic in the setting.

This. No point in trying to hit hammers with the butt of a screwdriver when the market is full of hammers.

There was also an d20 Thrones Game.
(Which I own, but I dont remember much)

Edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of ... ying_game)