Other Systems

[Diongham]

I may be blacklisted for this but a couple of systems have caught my eye lately and was wondering if anyone had thoughts our opinions on either one of these.

The first is The Riddle of Steel. I LOVE! the combat system so much, conversions may take some time but I think the style could translate to a grittier, more realistic depiction of what Birthright could be. It wouldn't be an exact version, but give it a darker undertone.

The second is Pendragon. That already has a lot of style of Birthright, with multi-generational adventures, land holdings. Plus it adds a bit of realism.

All in all I prefer The Riddle of Steel for the shear brutality of it all. What are some of your thoughts? Other systems that would make a good Birthright conversion, and what do you think of my suggestions?

I realize I don't have any clout but this topic interests me. Rule heavy topics just get to clogged up with rule lawyers arguing over this mechanic and that.

[kgauck]

Pendragon turns up from time to time in the posts of several of the frequent posters here, either as inspiration, or alternate rules set.

I haven't heard of Riddle of Steel, so I'll google around and see what people are saying.

The idea of Birthright under a different rules system is probably as old as Birthright itself, and certainly gained steam with the introduction of a new edition with 3.0. The general consensus is that what makes BR is either the setting (Cerilia, its backstory, &c) or the domain level of play and its implications.

We welcome discussions of BR in other systems, just be prepared for folks to suggest still other alternative systems.

[Birthright-L]

At 01:48 AM 5/3/2009, Diongham wrote:

>I may be blacklisted for this but a couple of systems have caught my
>eye lately and was wondering if anyone had thoughts our opinions on
>either one of these.

Maybe it`s because BR has been out of print for so long, or maybe
it`s because the setting itself sometimes has concepts that don`t
particularly manifest well in any particular version of D&D, but
nobody minds discussions of using other systems for the setting, and
there`s no particular mandate not to raise such an issue. Lots of
other systems have been suggested in the past.

>All in all I prefer The Riddle of Steel for the shear brutality of
>it all. What are some of your thoughts? Other systems that would
>make a good Birthright conversion, and what do you think of my suggestions?

As a general rule, I am leaning more and more away from any system
that advances characters up the way D&D does, particular for
something like BR. That is, using a level advancement system that
scales as quickly as D&D. This isn`t really a criticism, it`s just a
personal esthetic. I`ve used D&D before and had fun with it. But
the way characters advance in D&D seems to run counter to many of the
ideas of BR, and is simply more apt for other types of setting
material. Personally, I`ve tweaked D&D enough times that I don`t
think a lot of folks would really recognize it as any edition of the
rules, and I`ve done that in order to portray things that, as often
as not, come from Birthright. Ironically, I find some Birthright
issues to be extensions of old D&D ideas that were, back in the day,
the kinds of things I found most interesting about RPGs--but the D&D
rules have gone further and further away from those ideas, so I`m
less interested in playing those rules.

Lately, I like rules that have simple skill and task resolution
systems, and ones that use the dice themselves as measures of skill,
power, etc. A d6 weapon or a d8 weapon. Characters have "d10" in
Negotiation. Stuff like that. There are several sets of rules that
do things like that and they work perfectly well, have an epic feel
and don`t scale up as D&D does.

Gary

[Diongham]

Pendragon turns up from time to time in the posts of several of the frequent posters here, either as inspiration, or alternate rules set.

I haven't heard of Riddle of Steel, so I'll google around and see what people are saying.

The idea of Birthright under a different rules system is probably as old as Birthright itself, and certainly gained steam with the introduction of a new edition with 3.0. The general consensus is that what makes BR is either the setting (Cerilia, its backstory, &c) or the domain level of play and its implications.

We welcome discussions of BR in other systems, just be prepared for folks to suggest still other alternative systems.

First things first. Riddle of Steel is a pretty hardcore rules system supported by ARMA (Association for Renaissance Martial Arts). Very detailed oriented and fairly complex, that drew me in first, but the Spiritual Attributes hooked me. Similar to Pendragon's virtues and passions but less restrictive. i.e. You either have a conscious or not.

The setting would be a pretty hard undertaking, having to covert characters to a new system would be fairly difficult. I'd think the domain play wouldn't be as hard just to make a home brew stuff that deals with all the aspects of Birthright's system to the new one.

And finally. That's why I started the thread :D. I even have a few more suggestions. FATE and Fudge. FATE is based on fudge and is just as rules-lite as Fudge is. Fudge even has a semi-similar, if not less detailed Interactive History that one is setting undetermined and the other is Amber based I believe. Oh yeah, btw Fudge is free and FATE is free if you get 2nd or 3rd edition. FATE has a very involved community and a Yahoo group. Fudge seems to have been lost to the ether for some reason. They both use custom 6 sided dice of two "+" two "-" and two "0". Though you could just as easily use d6.

[Diongham]

At 01:48 AM 5/3/2009, Diongham wrote:

>I may be blacklisted for this but a couple of systems have caught my
>eye lately and was wondering if anyone had thoughts our opinions on
>either one of these.

Maybe it`s because BR has been out of print for so long, or maybe
it`s because the setting itself sometimes has concepts that don`t
particularly manifest well in any particular version of D&D, but
nobody minds discussions of using other systems for the setting, and
there`s no particular mandate not to raise such an issue. Lots of
other systems have been suggested in the past.



Just didn't want to earn any ire from a long standing community to a total noob. :)

[Elton Robb]

The second is Pendragon. That already has a lot of style of Birthright, with multi-generational adventures, land holdings. Plus it adds a bit of realism.



There are certain parts of Pendragon that I can shoehorn into AD&D 2nd Edition that would work for Birthright. The Traits and Passions system for one. I'd throw out alignment and put in the Traits and Passions system into AD&D. Incidentally, I'd also throw out the AD&D combat system and replace it with Arms Law and Spell Law.

I'd have a better game, all around. No more Lawful Stupid paladins. :D

[dundjinnmasta]

Green Ronin's new Song of Ice and Fire RPG had me thinking about a Birthright adaption. I also half-heartedly worked on a Birthright adaption of the L5R rules system. And of course I am activate in bringing Birthright to 4E.

[Lee]

Green Ronin's new Song of Ice and Fire RPG had me thinking about a Birthright adaption.

I will echo this, I just received it this weekend. The Noble House chapter certainly seems adaptable to BR. It allows one to make up a House (minor, or possibly major) and then describe its assets and history, mostly with random dice. {I am a fan of lots of randomness in generating things.} There's a nice bit on heraldry there, too.

The rules are simple enough, using d6 only, roll some and keep most, a bit like old (d10) 7th Sea.

Of course, there is hardly any magic at all, so one would need to plug in some other system.

If my likely-next game of BR didn't include a half-elf sorceror and a paladin as key PCs, I would like to try using these rules for it.

[Diongham]

Green Ronin's new Song of Ice and Fire RPG had me thinking about a Birthright adaption. I also half-heartedly worked on a Birthright adaption of the L5R rules system. And of course I am activate in bringing Birthright to 4E.

Never heard of the former. Though the latter I have heard OF. I'll have to check them out. The idea of a Oriental Birthright sounds intriguing.

[dundjinnmasta]

I am not going to have an oriental birthright. I am just going to use the mechanics for a Birthright setting.

[Diongham]

I am not going to have an oriental birthright. I am just going to use the mechanics for a Birthright setting.

Oh, then I know even less. lol I have a pretty good understanding of the setting. I have the 3rd Edition of the Oriental Handbook but as far as it's mechanics I'm not too sure.

I just heard of a book for 3.5 Edition by Alderac Entertainment titled Empire. Plain and simply it deals with ruling and running an Empire for Dungeons and Dragons. Anyone have this and can give some ideas what it has in it that could either; be used in Birthright, or be used to run Birthright?

There is also Heroes of Battle by Wizard of the Coast that deals with War Campaigns from the PCs perspective. It doesn't deal with ruling kingdoms just what the PCs would do in a major battle. Dealing with them like they were a big Dungeon Crawl. Pretty nifty stuff though don't know how it would be adapted to Birthright but it might make the Adventure portion a little bit more exciting.

[Vicente]

I just heard of a book for 3.5 Edition by Alderac Entertainment titled Empire. Plain and simply it deals with ruling and running an Empire for Dungeons and Dragons. Anyone have this and can give some ideas what it has in it that could either; be used in Birthright, or be used to run Birthright?


Empire is a simple translation of Civilization rules (the computer game) to pen and paper. The rules related to empire building are pretty short and have their good share of weird things (like automatic actions, what a strange way to perform maintenance and things like that).

I don't think I would use that system as is, but it's a nice inspiration for some ideas. Could be nice for a simple campaign where the PCs get to rule something but in general ruling takes a very very very small part of the play time and you don't want the complex politic interactions that you have in BR.

[kgauck]

There is also Heroes of Battle by Wizard of the Coast that deals with War Campaigns from the PCs perspective. It doesn't deal with ruling kingdoms just what the PCs would do in a major battle. Dealing with them like they were a big Dungeon Crawl. Pretty nifty stuff though don't know how it would be adapted to Birthright but it might make the Adventure portion a little bit more exciting.

Heroes of Battle is a good book, but its ideas about how to make a battle a dungeon crawl aren't the reason. Battles between domains is the most common combat opportunity I have in my games, and battles are liable to be critical to the success or failure of any given domain. Running a good battle is therefore a big deal.

[Rey]

Did anyone try to make complete custom rules for large scale BR battles, both field battle and siege?
I remember that a member of our group once made rules about gaining experience for troops in combat and groups in training, how long it took them to gain more hp and HD, what bonus would they receive if they had a commander fighting alongside, then bonuses from spells, when did they roll morale checks with what penalties. Combat was made fairly simple and quick. All of the actions for a unit and the results were actually decided on the spot and partly in agreement between DM and the players.
I had those somewhere on the papers. Personally, I disliked the easiness of making combat by those rules so I've decided to make my own. Once we tried them out, but it felt hard to follow for the first time so I got disappointed and got back to the previous version.

[Green Knight]

Diceless roleplaying works extremely well with Birthright; be it the adventure, politics, or war-fighting part.

[cyrano24100]

Did anyone try to make complete custom rules for large scale BR battles, both field battle and siege?
(...) Personally, I disliked the easiness of making combat by those rules so I've decided to make my own. Once we tried them out, but it felt hard to follow for the first time so I got disappointed and got back to the previous version.

I've never been happy with my mass combat rules; The ones I keep coming back to are here; http://www.rjurikwinds.com/rw_battle_rules.html
With players I awarded something like 5,000xps for any enemy units destroyed (hard), and 1,000xp for simple victory.
Gio Garzzeli (gazza666 I think) and many others from this forum helped devise an extensive battle system -- we even started to code it: Gio might have it on his site.

[Vicente]

Did anyone try to make complete custom rules for large scale BR battles, both field battle and siege?
I remember that a member of our group once made rules about gaining experience for troops in combat and groups in training, how long it took them to gain more hp and HD, what bonus would they receive if they had a commander fighting alongside, then bonuses from spells, when did they roll morale checks with what penalties. Combat was made fairly simple and quick. All of the actions for a unit and the results were actually decided on the spot and partly in agreement between DM and the players.
I had those somewhere on the papers. Personally, I disliked the easiness of making combat by those rules so I've decided to make my own. Once we tried them out, but it felt hard to follow for the first time so I got disappointed and got back to the previous version.

Cry Havoc has pretty nice rules for mass combat, although it takes a while to resolve battles using that system.

[dundjinnmasta]

Savage Birthright, anyone? (For the unintiated that would be Birthright using Savage Worlds ruleset!)

[marcum uth mather]

my friends and I have used the Hero system. building a bloodline has been a little difficult, but we made it work. pluse Heros way of large scale battles works well.

[Green Knight]

EON

A Swedish fantasy RPG system.

http://www.neogames.se/eon.htm

It's a fairly gritty system that focuses on skills; there is no level development and no super-human characters.

It lends itself well to BR.

[Rowan]

Is there an English translation for EON?

[Green Knight]

Is there an English translation for EON?

Not that I know of unfortunately. Many Swedish games have been printed in English over the years, but I don't think that includes EON.

Too bad, since the game has existed for many years and has an extensive product line. It even has a workable skill-based magic system.

Anyway, you really should learn a Scandinavian language...can't see how you people manage without :p

[Thelandrin]

When ABBA and Lordi became more famous singing in English rather than Swedish or Finnish, who needs Scandinavian words? :)

[Arjan]

when abba and lordi became more famous singing in english rather than swedish or finnish, who needs scandinavian words? :)

我講中文了。我為什麼要學習如何說話瑞典或做？;)

[Thelandrin]

Why did your quote convert my post into all lower-case?

[Rowan]

Sorry, you'll need quite a bit more promotion to earn your Scandinavian languages a higher rank on my language list. When I can afford Rosetta Stone (and the time), my list looks more like:

1. Brush up on my Spanish, then take the easy route and learn Italian.
2. The Classical and Biblical languages: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, maybe Aramaic
3. My ancestral languages: German, Serbian, maybe Gaelic (small part of my heritage, but a beautiful language)
4. I just might bring myself to learn French, because at this point it may be easy.
5. The populous languages: Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Indian. My brother and sister know the first two, respectively.
6. Arabic, because I suppose it would pay to know the language of people we are unfortunately often in conflict with.
7. March through the list of other European languages, maybe Korean as well.

Of course, I most likely will never get past 2. I don't expect to become fluent in anything more than Spanish, but I'd like to know enough of a smattering of the other languages to struggle through reading a few things in them. But there are so many on that list I don't expect to get far--and Swedish didn't make it until 7...how similar are the Scandinavian languages? Are they related like Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese?

[Arjan]

Why did your quote convert my post into all lower-case?

hmm actually have no idea...

[Birthright-L]

At 04:50 AM 7/20/2009, Thelandrin wrote:

>When ABBA and Lordi became more famous singing in English rather
>than Swedish or Finnish, who needs Scandinavian words? :)

It does make it more difficult to use their lyrics to find nice,
Brecht or Rjurik sounding words for names of places, characters and
creatures. After all, nobody wants an awnshegh called The Dancing
Queen, do they? (Admittedly, I kind of like it as a theme, though....)

Gary

[Arjan]

At 04:50 AM 7/20/2009, Thelandrin wrote:

>When ABBA and Lordi became more famous singing in English rather
>than Swedish or Finnish, who needs Scandinavian words? :)

It does make it more difficult to use their lyrics to find nice,
Brecht or Rjurik sounding words for names of places, characters and
creatures. After all, nobody wants an awnshegh called The Dancing
Queen, do they? (Admittedly, I kind of like it as a theme, though....)

Gary

ill bet you will yell "mama mia" when you see it :)

[Sorontar]

Hey, we did make MC Hammer into an awnshegh (The Hammer) and I have been making the Beatles into lieutenants for an Awnie. So anything is possible.....

Hmmm... Lordi as a group of LG orog and goblinoid fighters, battling against the Walrus's Beadles. Interesting.....

Sorontar, who thinks we have suddenly gone off topic, but in a very fun way.

ps. You can get some translations from http://www.systran.co.uk/ (including Eng<>Swedish), the world's leading machine translation company. They may not be perfect but they have been doing longer than any other group. You should at least be able to get a feel for the game.

[Thelandrin]

You could probably make some ehrsheghlien out of Angeleyes, Nina Ballerina, Chiquitita and Elaine though :)

[Birthright-L]

At 07:03 PM 7/21/2009, Thelandrin wrote:

>You could probably make some ehrsheghlien out of Angeleyes, Nina
>Ballerina, Chiquitita and Elaine though :)

I`ve actually had an idea mulling around for a character called The
Dun Angel. I can`t quite get a hook into the character,
though.... Maybe I should try some musical inspiration and see if
that does the trick.

Gary

[Green Knight]

Back to topic:

BR also lends itself very well to diceless role-playing. Especially games which are mostly concerned with character development, interaction with NPC, politics, intrigue etc.

The only real catch here is that it demands a lot of knowledge about a multitude of things AND that the DM and players have more or less the same understanding of the world and how it works. So it is best suited for players/DMs who know each other well and have played BR before.

Not having to roll the dice can be very liberating, allowing you to create new and exiting experiences for all.

[Mirviriam]

The first is The Riddle of Steel. I LOVE! the combat system so much, conversions may take some time but I think the style could translate to a grittier, more realistic depiction of what Birthright could be. It wouldn't be an exact version, but give it a darker undertone.


Would gritter mean more realistic & less "lawful good is the only alignment of play that works for rulers" type of play?

I agree with you on the rules lawyers thing, some guy posted about population not being inline with x thousands of years - as if europe grew at a constant rate & the bubonic plague never existed :)

[Green Knight]

Grittier would mean that you could, for example, get injured in combat and actually have to spend time healing afterward and be penalized until you've recovered. Real gritty would be if there's a chance of complications, infections or permanent disabilities.

IMO BR lends itself well to a more gritty style, but DnD works well enough I suppose. I use v.3.5, albeit somewhat 'grittified' - low-level play, very little magic, WP/VP, DR from armor, that sort of thing.

...and don't get me started on population growth :)

[Rowan]

The current population discussion is over here:
http://www.birthright.net/forums/showthread.php?t=5054&page=3

Of course, there have been many previous :)

Mirviriam, if you're interested in _why_ such statements about population were made, go there, or do a search for the older population threads.

[dreyrugr2]

I'm doing a BR game for the family and didn't have time to teach them 2ndE or read completely through the 3rd conversion. So I'm using MicroliteD20 and converting only as I need.

I may have to expand to the full 6 stats for more flavor soon though.