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Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Epic conundrum

I had a wonderful session last night with the "Monday Night Miserable Bastards".  Lots of roleplaying, a lil exploration, a bit o' accounting.  I'll write up a play report tomorrow hopefully.

What I wanted to discuss today, is the fact that I didn't sleep last night.  I stayed up awhile thinking about running a game on roll20.  As you all well know I'm a big fan of Advanced Fighting Fantasy (as it was the first game I ever ran).  What I was thinking about was spending the time to work on the Blacksand adventure in roll20.  There's lots of little nice maps in the book that could be scanned or recreated for parts of the adventure (the battle ones could be done with pyromancers). 

The adventure (and most of the aff releases) were a bit of a railroad but fun nonetheless.  While I like all of the implementations that were done in Version 2 of AFF, I personally feel that the original rules would be perfect for a roll20 game.  It's just a bit more rules light.  The only real issue is the leveling up. 

In the newer version, during combat you roll to see who hits, and then how much damage and or reduction of damage happens.  This is a lot of rolls per person.  In the original I believe that all damage was 2, but if you tested your luck you could do 3.  Which is fine.  The combat is still quite deadly. 

Basically AFF2.0 is a bit fiddly, although not that bad.  I just think it might be a bit too fiddly for online play.  Speaking from having played Basic D&D, anything more than that might be quite time consuming. 

As well having the rules readily available for the players.  I do have a copy of the basics of AFF version 1 that I could kinda modify for the campaign, and I may just do that.

Of course I'm thinking far too ahead, but I do like the idea of slow prep.  Even if its just for giggles in front of a computer.

I suppose time will tell.  I do have some other more pressing work to get on before this.  Oh and I realized exactly how the next Isle of Dread session is going to go.

Finally figured out what I'm going to do when the PCs show up in Tanora. Originally I was going to have the natives on the beach with home made spears looking all concerned (but not outright aggressive) But I figured that would just start a fight. That said They haven't actually had a fight yet. So I think what I'll do is as the boat is coming ashore, they will notice the village is over run by giant lizards. This will hopefully create a bond with the villagers.

Well that was rambly wasn't it!


5 comments:

  1. That doesn’t seem intractable to me. Maybe it will come down to which rule set is easier for players to get?

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    1. It really doesn't does it. I think its typical gamer A.D.D. honestly. I think the easiest rule set is the original version (i have a text document with the basics that's shareable). I will just need to keep in mind that when leveling not to hand out to much awesome. One issue was skill checks were based on roll under. The basic stats are Skill/Stamina/Luck. And then there were special skills. A typical skill check would be roll under your skill stat. If you had a special skill you could add that number. So lets say you wanted to climb a wall. All players could do this by rolling under their skill stat. However players who had a climbing skill (say 1) would have a slight advantage. ex Robin hood has a skill of 10, and a climb skill of 2. He would have to roll under 12 to be successful. Problem was when levelling players could add one point to a specific skill or other stats. At some point everyone would have special skills of 5+ which meant there was really no reason for a check.

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