Nostalgia isn't what it used to be

[kingandy]

Hurm. Skimming the ALL NEW ALL DIFFERENT SoS rules, because I'm thinking about going this month, and I've already spotted stuff I'm wary of in just the basics section. Being a LARPer, I shall bitch about this in my personal journal rather than mentioning it to the relevant people.

The One Second Rule: Doesn't that make the Off Hand Use skills next to pointless? It's a great idea in Maelstrom, where skills are few and combat is greatly streamlined, but there you don't pay for basic use and all the modifier skills apply to all your hands. You can be holding as many weapons as you like and still only attack once a second, so making people pay to be able to hold extra weapons seems obtuse. Since the main point of the changes was to reduce the number of skills, it would seem to me that dropping the Off Hand Use skills would be a logical companion to the One Second Rule.

Spell Vocals are now apparently four lines no matter what level of spell you're casting ("Normal casting is where the character recites the appropriate vocals for the spell (typically about 4 lines, each line containing 4/5 Syllables)"), where before it varied with level of spell. I'm not sure if this is an accidental omission or intentional, or even if people will remember (LRPers being notorious for playing the rules as they remember them rather than as they actually are or have ever been). If it's a keeper, I'll miss rattling off those long vocals for the high level spells.

I'm not initially impressed with the layout of the rules themselves, as that "basics" page is overly long and imposing and the skill costs really should be displayed next to the names (having to click into each one to check costs is aggravating), and the tone varies between overly technical and overly simplistic. Also the lack of text style and/or formatting is slightly off-putting, but that could just be my web design sensibilities.

Other gripes:

• There's far too much detail on the reproductive cycle of the new cow people, especially as compared to the other races, which mention it not at all.
• Spell descriptions still contain reference to spells that no longer exist.
• There don't appear to be appreciably fewer spell tables, and WTF, Elemental Summoning, no.
• Things aren't as good as they were in my day
• "Glossary is confusing and incomplete
• These kids today, with their "For Shizzle McFizzley Ding Dong Dizzle" Snoopy Dog language and their general disrespect towards their elders

So, slightly apprehensive, but I'll probably give it a go, sure why not.

Comments

[richc.livejournal.com]

My first thought was divide all damage related stuff by 5.....

[areteus.livejournal.com]

Being the power gaming, old fashioned, spot a loophole in the rules a mile away 'Traditional' LRPer that I am, I would have said that the one second rule should really apply per weapon. So you hit with one weapon and cannot hit with another weapon for one second but you can with the off hand weapon.

This is why I prefer an 'at least one weapon length clearance before each strike' rule to prevent the old bugbear of woodpeckering. This rule means that polearms etc, which generally do more damage, are more difficult to do rpaid attacks with compared to daggers where you can do as many as you like in a very short time. Reasonably realistic. For a given definition of 'realistic' :)

[arwel.livejournal.com]

And those are meant to be simplified rules?

[renniek.livejournal.com]

Not keen on the spell vocal thing. I'll miss the insanely long spell vocals too, it was part of the fun of playing a mage

[happy101.livejournal.com]

its one attack per second per weapon (this is mostly to stop someone doing the girly slap hug kill so effectively used by gustav..)


which means you get to attack twice as fast with two one handed weapon

[kabooomfield.livejournal.com]

Hurrah, after 4 months someone actually bothers to point out thier problems with the basics.

First off, the One Secound rule should be one secound per weapon, but having read it now, I can see how badly worded it is. I shall amend this.

The spell vocal thing is from the old basics. The Spell-Level-length thing hasn't been used in about 2 years.

And yes, the basics page isn't fantastic, but the information is there. Was thinking of breaking it up with some link-page-bookmark-age but I can't remember how...

AS for the incomplete things, it's all simple a work in prgoress. Around september I told people I wouldn't be able to do as much as I had done, and having other people work on it would really help, as I was just going to go at pace that suited my other obligations, and 3 months of no-one offering to help later, here we are.

The skill layouts aren't my baby, you'll need to see the Scouse about that.

[chrisdavitt.livejournal.com]

So how do these changes affect existing characters? The chance of me ever playing Sir Bob again are slim but I'm curious how he'd effected.

And just how big had the gap between high and low characters become?

[si-lloyd.livejournal.com]

I asked the Head of Rules ie Geoff, and he seemed to think the spell vocal thing was not implemented, its still long vocal to cast big spell. he doesn't even know where that came from.

Cow People and Glossary

[maddam.livejournal.com]

The Grondyr cow-folk were my original play for a new PC race but they weren't accepted, however they'd already been mentioned in several parts of plot for a few months leading up to that - since they existed and y'know, I'd done a lot of work, we kept them in as flavour. The redroductive cycle is purely my own bad.
The Glossary is incomplete because generally we're just adding to it as we think of things to go on there, it's not meant to be a definitive list and I'm probably going to retitle it at some point.
Everything else is purely the fault of RulesCom :D

Re-written? Bah!

[gowhonker.livejournal.com]

I skipped to the campaign and background stuff. I'm heartened to see that my Orc write-up remains as-was, with stupid, unused 'spiritual branding' bits and all.
Even my typos...

Which leads me to the basic rules. My eyes glazed over very quickly, but i did notice it was riddled with typos and bad grammer.

Hooray.

Old SOS/New SOS/Same SOS