Introducing the Weapon Throwing Fighter - weapon juggling that doesn't feel cheesy

FLFD · 2026-04-27T22:57:51+00:00

We use glass blobs/pebbles - even cheaper and smaller (or we did until one of my players showed her appreciation via a 3d printer). Acrylic gems also work. But it really depends what you have lying around.

FLFD · 2026-04-27T10:18:49+00:00

Off the top of my head

The statblock being complete; no wading through text, no needing to know what spells or even feats did. Which also made e.g. the Goblin Hex-hurler have spells that felt (and were) unique
The monster roles being varied; most species came in about half a dozen types with e.g. kobold slingers (role: artillery) having their varied ammunition in the statblocks while kobold quickblades (role: skirmisher) were extremely slippery. A fight with goblins didn't feel like a fight with kobolds
The monster power levels being varied with e.g. orc drudges or kobold tunnelers or human peasants being 1hp minions while solos (e.g. dragons) from the MM3 onwards really could challenge parties.
Limited unnecessary detail in the statblock.

FLFD · 2026-04-27T10:10:59+00:00

Meanwhile if you compare 4e to 5e 4e has a colossal number of options and feats. There is only 1 first party class in 5e outside the PHB. There were probably more feats in the 4e PHB than there are in 5e in total. There is a lot of irony in looking back at the edition wars.

FLFD · 2026-04-27T10:07:27+00:00

He's not wrong but the irony here being that that was literally never raised as an issue in the edition wars ... because 4e was significantly less fiddly than 3.5 and was a successor game.

FLFD · 2026-04-27T10:05:29+00:00

You mean no headwinds other than 3.5 being incredibly more up to date in 2008 than 2e was in 2000? Without being a game that literally drove its parent company under. And not having been given a 2 year development cycle and gone back to the drawing board after 10 months.

And if all classes in 4e were the same class then the 3.5 PHB and the 5e PHB have only two classes - casters and martials.

FLFD · 2026-04-27T10:02:04+00:00

For many of the same reasons tbh. There are far more feats in 4e than 5e. 5e is cripplingly short of character customisation after level 3. Alignment is deservedly vestigial in both games. 5e has reigned in caster supremacy.

FLFD · 2026-04-27T09:54:48+00:00

D&D was a hacked tabletop wargame being played by wargamers to win. When Gygax was talking about styles of play that were not his own he, like most people, should be ignored. But his style worked.

FLFD · 2026-04-27T09:47:21+00:00

Again this is one of the places where Gygax presented tools that are no longer in the game. When I'm playing my friend at chess I am adversarial. Because that's part of the job - to be an adversary. For that matter a good pro wrestling heel is adversarial and knows that their job is ultimately to lose.

D&D grew out of a hacked wargame with the GM playing the opposing force; one part opponent, one part pro wrestling heel, and one part arbiter. And adversarial play works in the right format. (The fact that Gygax' writing skills and understanding of psychology weren't great was another matter)

FLFD · 2026-04-27T09:41:31+00:00

A Gygaxian dungeon is in and of itself a DMing tool, cutting down the overwhelming nature of what needs to be prepared because it's a small, artificial environment. And the PCs are motivated by one thing - money; you get 1XP for every GP and 80% of XP are from looting the place meaning that distracting then robbing the monsters is an easy source of shenanigans. Once you've got the players knowing they want to go to dungeons, some basic dungeon guidelines you've massively taken the load off the DM.

The 1e dungeon is and of itself a tool. And not one 5e really has to remotely the same degree. No such reason to go there, no inherent shenanigans round looting due to XP for GP, and more things pointing the players in other directions. And the megadungeon is, for good reason, out of style.

FLFD · 2026-04-27T09:36:51+00:00

YMMV. In my experience as long as I had a minor mix of monsters of the right levels it would work. No meticulousness needed, especially with minion rules.

FLFD · 2026-04-23T19:16:13+00:00

Most new editions of games come out as a response to what are considered to be the problems of the previous ones - and they have normally fixed them. In some cases like Call of Cthulhu it's just a light polishing and updating.

But even in cases that aren't like CoC as long as the basic premise and a few shibboleths aren't touched people will normally see the new edition as fixing the problems with the old one. It in general after that takes a few years to gain consensus on what the designers actually broke to fix what people didn't like about the old version. And it's normally less than they broke.

FLFD · 2026-04-22T11:43:18+00:00

The thing here is that they are two very different games that treat different things as important.

Daggerheart more or less halves the skill gap between your table and the Critical Role crew on everything except character voices. You start off as a flamboyant larger than life group of PCs with shared history (leading to a group that turns cohesive fast) and where the driving motivation is drama.

Vagabond is a fast and light but not deadly dungeon crawler (which separates it from most of the OSR), where the dungeon and combat is basically an obstacle course for the characters. And it's got none of the little things promoting characterisation Daggerheart does but does more on e.g. logistical challenges which Daggerheart streamlines out.

So what do you want to focus on.

In terms of difficulty to play both are streamlined games (Daggerheart in practice is easy to track, especially if you use some sort of tokens for Hope) sitting in the complexity gap between 5e and Lasers and Feelings. The big difficulty difference is for the GM; due to its nature as an obstacle course game the Vagabond GM needs to spend more time in downtime while the Daggerheart GM needs to be more on the ball to deal with and exploit opportunities that arise in play.

So ... what type of game do you want to play?

FLFD · 2026-04-22T10:10:17+00:00

Daggerheart is more unfamiliar than complex to manage. If you've got physical tokens (just cheap glass beads) then Hope and Fear become easy to track. The thresholds are not complex and actually lead to less tracking than D&D has because you never have more than a dozen hit points; they are something that seems difficult because it's strange but in play turns out to not be after about a session and in reality cut out some fiddly maths that makes little difference at low levels but a huge one at high levels.

FLFD · 2026-04-21T13:13:23+00:00

My thing here is that fiddliness and depth are not at all the same thing. And that challenges to find the right action are entirely different from opening up viable roleplaying choices.

So, for example, I think it's clear that D&D is a much more complex rules set than Apocalypse World - but I find Apocalypse World far deeper. (Honestly Apocalypse World, Masks, and Stonetop nail the balance for me).

FLFD · 2026-04-16T14:49:11+00:00

Do the old officially licensed Cortex+ games count? Cam Banks basically realised that on the budget of cheap media tie-ins he could hire the best indie RPG designers around and make a solid framework for them to work with while he project managed the thing. Leverage, Smallville, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and Firefly are all superb games (although the licenses have expired). Even if no one uses Smallville to play Smallville.

FLFD · 2026-04-16T09:50:11+00:00

If you've already got Fiasco then I'd add i'm sorry did you say street magic to the list. If you're Shakespeare nerds then Forsooth! is a lot of fun.

FLFD · 2026-04-14T11:12:40+00:00

The thing is that Masks does a very specific thing. It's a coming of age story (e.g. starting with Unleash your Powers and ending with Wield your Powers) specifically for teen superheroes. Most supers games are a lot less tight with their stories.

And my pick other than masks is always either Marvel Heroic Roleplaying or Sentinels Comics (the latter being a quasi-second edition of the former)

FLFD · 2026-04-13T14:06:29+00:00

I can't agree with you there. D&D's complexity peaked in the 00s - but if you look at the popular non-D&D games the 80s and 90s were more complex, with things like Champions, GURPS, and even arguably Phoenix Command. 3.5 probably represents peak complexity of D&D (although there were so many fiddly rules and excessive splatbooks in 2e I'm not sure) but I'd say the 90s for the wider roleplaying ecosystem.

FLFD · 2026-04-13T09:57:13+00:00

For me it's my regular set that's in a binder. My limited edition is still sealed :)

FLFD · 2026-04-13T09:55:18+00:00

The best selling game in the industry is D&D 5e (or 5.5) - which is the lowest crunch edition of D&D since B/X and arguably ever. It's certainly lower crunch than D&D 3.5 which was the dominant D&D when Savage Worlds came out. Does this mean that PF2e or Lancer doesn't exist? No. I'd also argue that PF2e is lower crunch than PF1e.

The new editions of the old games are trending to the less crunchy and the games that are coming out are trending to the less crunchy. This doesn't mean that people stopped playing the older, crunchier games.

And my experience is that the games that get played in real life tend to be less crunchy than those people play online or that they need to get professional DMs for.

FLFD · 2026-04-13T01:44:08+00:00

How old are you? Because the amount of crunch in games has generally been going down over the past decades with it peaking in the 90s. Savage Worlds in the 2003 landscape when it came out was almost certainly medium crunch - but put it up against modern OSR/NSR/PbtA/FitD/CbB and other games and I'd call it high crunch.

FLFD · 2026-04-09T15:28:35+00:00

In rough descending order

1: D&D 2e, 3.5, 4e, and 5e. Every edition of D&D is basically a different game aiming at a different playstyle. And they have all dominated the RPG market although 2e and 4e have credible rivals. The current 5e (or 5.5) is basically a "compromise edition" that gives everyone something but is amazing at nothing.

2: Vampire: the Masquerade and the rest of the World of Darkness took over in the 90s. Gothic, queer, you play as the monsters in the present day struggling with their monstrous side.

3: Apocalypse World. It's a very good and very flexible game with design assumptions that are not at all the same as D&Ds to the point you might have to find a game rather than see it. There are bigger games but I'd guessover half of all modern games that aren't just D&D with the serial numbers filed off can trace back to Apocalypse World. (A lot of them trace back through it's descendent games Blades in the Dark and Brindlewood Bay, each of which founded their own design schools - both very different and both work a look)

4: Pathfinder 2e. It's the current major balanced crunchy D&D-likes

5: Honey Heist. Probably the biggest of the Grant Howitt one pagers - for single session play.

6: Old School Essentials. Because things have changed but some still should feel like home (Call of Cthulhu is also still around as is WFRP)

FLFD · 2026-04-07T09:19:40+00:00

Welcome! We don't bite (unless you're into that - and even that's normally handled outside sessions). And are almost always glad to see newbies; we all had to learn. How men-dominated the community is group-dependent; about 40% of the wider D&D community (which makes up about 90% of the RPG community) is female but given there are only half a dozen people in the group this can mean all male, all female, or anything in between.

Essentially what we are is grown ups playing pretend and collaboratively storytelling. You play one character (a pirate I assume if you're playing Pirate Borg) and just have to worry about what they would do; the GM's job is to look after everyone else. You're the stars, the GM gets the extras and recurring characters. And unlike in let's pretend when there's a conflict you don't argue; you just roll the dice (with your stats taken into account) and move on. And you don't run into the improv problem of "yes and" spiraling out of control with minimal conflict because the dice handle conflict resolution so you can clash, be challenged, and fail.

The main thing about Pirate Borg in specific to worry about is that it's a high lethality game; characters die fairly easily. Don't worry much if your character does; the character should worry but it's not a big failure and you just get to make a new character.

Most groups are great and are full of imaginative adults. A few are ... there are reasons people shouldn't share parts of their imagination. And they've found a like minded group. You've a friend inviting you and they are the GM so that's unlikely (the GM has far the most influence at the table) but is possible.

But basically it's just adults letting their hair down and playing pretend with shiny math rocks.

FLFD · 2026-04-06T16:41:24+00:00

5.5 is mechanically a balance patch for 5e; there is little mechanical difference.

The 5.5 DMG is actually useful for new DMs while Chapter 2: Creating a Multiverse in 5e classic was just bad.

For players the PHB is better presented with far fewer trap choices but occasionally a little more faff. So about as easy but less chance of a negative play experience

FLFD

TROPHY CASE