Great vid. It is essentially applying The Art of War to the rpg; 1) Try to avoid the fight through diplomacy 2) If you can't avoid it & they are stronger - retreat 3) If you can't avoid it and you are stronger - pick your ground and let them come to you

Great video! You are absolutely right about Bows and Slings! Haha. Players do tend to ignore them entirely! I've even had a few players who never wanted to use shields! (Though, they were swiftly educated on the importance of shields!)

@ArtSio443

2 жыл бұрын

how did you teach them about Shields? One of the very few things I don't like in BFrpg (Hi Chris you did an Amazing job!) is that shields just add +1 to AC. That's why in my games I made a special rule for a homebrew "parry" move where if an enemy makes a succesful attack against you, you can throw a d6 and if the result covers the difference between his To-Hit dice and your AC then the damage is absorbed by the shield (which then makes a saving throw itself). So how do you run your shields and how do you make them essential in gameplay?

Excellent summary! In some games, combat is dangerous.

@ArtSio443

2 жыл бұрын

it has to be, otherwise it just slogs down and become unbearably boring!

Invaluable information. Positioning is about 1/3 the fight in my estimation. I need to find a good way to RP with the rest of the group and agree on some baseline party tactics, it will be a chore. We still get some players rushing the front ranks. I'm 3 sessions into my first campaign and even though I have the best AC I'm retreating while slinging bullets until there is no more room to run. (Or I need to bottleneck at a pinch point.) The enemy is usually down a combatant or 2 before they get to us.

Chris, I couldn't even begin to explain how much your RPG represents to me. I always HATED new editions of DnD and just couldn't pinpoint why exactly. Then I found out about OSR and I discovered "WHAT, there's a game system which is actually free?" and that's how I got myself into OSR. I wouldn't have approach this universe any other way, not so much because other games aren't free - I eventually found out about the OGL versions of Black Hack, Dungeon Worlds, watched a couple videos about 5 Torches Deep etc. and by all means, they're ALL great too! It's that your game strikes a balance, even though it isn't necessarily the simplest system out there, the way the rules are described, I don't know... there's such _an elegance_ to it that led me to appreciate OSR so much. I eventually got interested in game design, that's how far and how "badly" I got into OSR. And by the way that's another thing I appreciate in buckles about your Basic Fantasy RPG. You just hold so much respect for the GM's and their liberty to customize the game, even up to changing and dismissing whole set of rules. That's the opposite of the "jealous" demeanor of WotC and the like, and that's what makes OSR so special and so GREAT. I wish my english was a little more fluent so I could participate to your forum, there are many rules and design choices I'd like to understand better. By the way make more videos like this one, to be totally fair I didn't find this one extremely clear but then luckily there's a user comment which clarified the whole thing for me pretty neatly, but your video still sparked the discussion about "why is so that the only acceptable combination is move and then attack", which is very needed. Everything needs to be as clear as possible so we as GMs and players are able to run the best games we could muster, aligning ourselves to the design decisions which ends up being more informed than it seems initially. So I'd advise to keep them coming, your game system sure deserves more recognition.

This is awesome! We had many of these issues in last night's game. We were playing "The Call of Doom" and that throne room with the zombies nearly caused a TPK. That and the Cleric failing to Turn Undead. We had a blast but they learned fast that without playing tactically... they were dead meat!

I am absolutely making every player at my table watch this video (along with the combat demo). It’s fascinating how pervasive the “plant and whack” mentality is among players, and how rarely they take into account the environment, tactics, strategies, planning, etc. The core of it might lay in the misunderstanding that survival is more important than bashing. I blame video games and the fifth edition of that other game (okay, maybe just a little) c

Wait, players are supposed to survive???? ;) Well done Chris!

This is a great video, thank you for making it! Those are some really helpful tips, should definitely help a lot of groups strategize better, ours included! Basic fantasy is a wonderful system

@ChrisGonnerman

3 жыл бұрын

Glad you liked the video, and the game!

@ArtSio443

2 жыл бұрын

it indeed is, I took a look at pretty much all OSR systems out there, and they're all great, each one having it' peculiar flavor that distinguish it from all the others. But I keep "defaulting" to BFrpg as it's got some kind of elegance to it that I can't really describe, I feel it's the right balance between a simple and minimal system, a nostalgical reprise, and an innovative take on the OSR philosophy which makes it just PERFECT somehow. I got into this game with the original intention of building my own simplified version of DnD, that's how I found out about OSR in general. But this is the first system I discovered and it blew my mind. Parts of it, like the brawling rules, are pretty much exactly how I myself would've written them, so I didn't need to come out with my own system anymore, I could just take BFrpg, strap a couple homebrew rules or already-made supplements to it (&pain is pretty nice but I did my custom version of it, that I feel is more simple and clear to follow) and I'm done. Even those old-ass saving throws, which I thought very hard about how to swap with something else (I don't like the 3.5 ones either) I can't really bring myself to outright hate them. They smell so much of nostalgia I just enjoy the FEEL of them, even though they appear to have no clear sense and have to be interpreted and applied like some kind of in-game tarot at any occasions. They are not perfect, and I always wondered why not just get rid of saving throws altogether and use ability rolls in their lieu (like Black Hack and 5 Torches Deep do). But I like the nostalgic flavor they add to the game so I can't really bring myself to get rid of them.

I like BF, but some of the adventure modules have some dumb things in them that kill characters based on nothing but luck.

A game is not fun if your character dies based on nothing more than luck. A trapped chest with a poison needle which you save vs poison or die. That’s just poor adventure writing. Good games don’t come down to dumb luck.

@ChrisGonnerman

Жыл бұрын

"Save or die" poisons are explained in the Core Rules; they aren't as harsh in BFRPG as in some other old-school games. But that level of lethality is a core feature of those old-school games... you are expected, as a player, to be excessively careful. If you believe that the survival of a character in such a situation rides on the sling of a single die, I'm sorry to say you may be playing the game wrong.