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Friday, September 1, 2017

More on DF-to-DFRPG Armor - why not the best of both worlds?

Yesterday I wrote about some armor options for our DF-to-DFRPG switchover.

Option 4 is probably the one SM -2 PCs would choose. But it's off the list. That probably seems like a fairly adversarial, anti-player stance - no you can't have the best of both worlds, because, to heck with you and your paper man!

That's not really the whole of it, although it could be part of it. That's not why I would not choose option 4.

Mostly, it's a combination of laziness and ease.

Laziness because putting in Option 4 (cost/weight from DFRPG, scaling from DF1 and DF3) will take a fair amount of work. It's not completely trivial - I'll need GDF files for GCA for the DFRPG armor and ones for the DF1 / DF3 scaling, and ensure they work together. I'd also need to revise all existing SM-1 and SM-2 PCs, NPCs, and armored monsters with new costs and weights.

Ease because I would then need to tell people to look in two places on paper - Adventurers, from the DFRPG boxed set, and DF 1 for oversized and DF 3 for undersized armor. I'd have to adjudicate between two sets of rules. Part of the reason to change is because I can just say, "Just use Adventurers for all of your gear."

In other words, it takes the work of a changeover with the disadvantage of needing to maintain two different systems. I can get results we've lived with this whole time - 90+ sessions - without any work. So for something to be worth doing, I have to feel like it either makes things so much better that it's worth the work, or it's a one-time cost that comes with greatly easing work for everyone going forward.

The option I'm most likely to choose is the one where we simply add Oversized. The math is easy, the GCA coding is easy, and the results are easy. It's not as easy as "just use DFRPG" but we'd need them because of existing SM +1 characters.

The "best of both worlds" option doesn't have any of that ease.

So it's laziness and ease. I'm looking for the least work now, for the most ease going forward.

3 comments:

  1. I must be a masochist for using Low-Tech armor and scaling as per Low-Tech Companion 2. Kill me now.

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    1. I've been doing that the whole campaign. It kept the power level down at the start, though I would have done that otherwise, as the DF3 armor scaling is ludicrous.

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    2. @Ben: No, I wouldn't say that. Changing over is where the work is, not leaving things as they are.

      @Charles: The mundane or the magical scaling?

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