Currently looking at:
WWN (low magic version)
WFRP (No clue what edition yet)
Zweihander (yes the dude who makes it is a homosexual)
Goal is to run a per-thirteenth century monster of the week campaign. Think an /x/ cryptid hunting thread but back before platemail existed. Trying to keep magic mostly out of humanity's hands and make it something they have to deal with rather than something they can control.
Blade of the Iron Throne
Song of Swords got a monster-focused supplement
runequest/mythras, d100 game, superior to WFRP and is easier to divest from its setting
WWN I think works, tell the players not to pick wizard, it's fake OSR with pretty good noncombat rules but very barebones in the actual combat, so you can make straight up fighting a bad option 100% of the time and have it work
>Zweihander
it's not worth playing over WFRP 2e, it's the same game repackaged to meticulously remove copyright
The lack of depth to WWN's combat is my primary issue with running it even though I like the system.
Suck my wiener, homosexual.
Look good. I'll nose through the PDF's soon.
>Listen guys, the party of big muscly men NEEDS to mud wrestle the handsome vampire
Holy sides. No anon, I just want ye olde beast hunting. Replace the grizzly with a taste for human flesh with something that goes bump in the night.
guys, the party of big muscly men NEEDS to mud wrestle the handsome vampire
You joke but that was basically the campaign for like a year
Warhammer fantasy isn't Low fantasy you fricking idiot.
Just use BRP. Or mythras I guess.
>Just use BRP
seconding BRP slot in the insanity rule form CoC and the non magic combat from Runequest and it would work perfectly while also have strange monsters that are already stated out.
which version of runequest/mythras?
Mythras is basically Runequest 6, but with a tidier core book and character sheet. There is only one version.
Is it anything like RQ or is it it's own system?
Grim Tales by Badaxe Games.
i used to play in a game with a DM who had an absolute obsession with gritty dark realism types of tabletop systems
he ran us though SOTDL despite most of the table being new players who wanted babbys first rpg, 5e
he was also a raging homosexual and im pretty sure the low fantasy/high lethality settings held an appeal to him because he had some weird miserywank kink and derived some homosexual sadistic joy from seeing chiseled, muscular men fighting with the odds against them eventually losing to an insurmountable foe. because he would practically beg us to play strength based martials and his bbegs were always handsome vampires.
so when i see people jerk off over low fantasy/high lethality systems i always suspect theyre crypto gay sadists
>SOTDL
not low fantasy or, really, high lethality past like the third level.
low fantasy purity spiralers put nazis to shame on how aggressively and neurotically they try to one up each other
Words mean things, champ.
SotDL IS babbys first RPG levels of complexity
>preventing players from eating shit by playing 5e
sounds like a responsible GM
>gritty dark realism
>SOTDL
There are spells that conjure up feasts and cure diseases by the first few levels
>I don't have the slightest idea of what i'm talking about nor the homosexual gm i played with
Seriously Black person? Fricking SotDL is "gritty dark REALISM"? The system is also less complex than 5e by a fricking lot.
Anyway 2/10 bait, made me reply at least.
I'll recommend Sword of Cepheus (Traveller based low fantasy rules) or Legend/Mythras (Mongoose RuneQuest based rules)
As those two are easily modifiable and have an active community (with Sword of Cepheus you can mix and match from any Cepheus engine game)
How are you defining "low fantasy" and "high lethality"?
If you've ever touched Battlebrothers, its the aesthetic I'm after. The low fantasy I'm after— without devolving into metal subgenres—is almost entirely human focused. None of the bullshit fantasy races, anything analogous to them would be considered a deformity. Magic takes an equally backseated approach to what the players and humanity can do. The traditional concept of a 'mage' should be akin to the first steps of becoming a lich; magic is anti-human. Sort of a tainting effect on the world around it. Monsters are preferably mostly mundane with greater threats ending up in the realms of the paranormal or magical.
High lethality in the sense of what this anon said
though I'll admit it may be an improper use of the word. I'll clarify by saying 'A focus on combat'. I quite like how WWN has a base 'shock damage' for weapons considering that no matter the armor getting smacked by a mace will at least rattle you.
Perhaps in my sense 'high lethality' simply means the scale at which battles are held contextually in the system. You aren't fighting something to the death, you're hoping to only end up mildly wounded.
You've got my attention with this one, I'll snag the PDF's.
I've done a little harnmaster so I may take another peak. GURPS is more or less always the answer but I'd prefer something different.
>You've got my attention with this one, I'll snag the PDF's
Now that I have your attention I'll elaborate further. I have not read through the new BRP edition rules. BRP is the underlying system used for Runequest and Call of Cthulhu. It's a d100 roll under system without classes. CoC and Runequest while sharing the same system are using it a different levels of complexity. For example Melee combat is CoC is a fairly easy straight forward affair. Meanwhile in Runequest the basics are the same but there is a gaint chart matrix to determine how lethal was the hit and to what limb. This gives at least the old editions of BRP an amazingly modular design. You want the hit location high lethality combat of Runequest, but also the Insanity system and investigation from CoC? You can slot them in. Depending on the amount of crunch you want the CoC Dark Ages book another anon posted below my original post could work out of the gate. And could also be tweaked with some Runequest combat rules.
I also want to add that CoC has a bunch of stated Cthulhu monsters, two giant frick off volumes of them at actual. While Runequest has more traditional but also weird ones. Both are build on a similar design foundation but the CoC ones are more "simpler" than Runequests. If you are gonna ignore the games's magic rules then that makes using them more easier since there is less to convert or tweak. Also the RQ monsters don't have listed Instantly damage values since the Insanity isn't present in RQ but can easily added in.
My only issue with that is the d100 roll under. Of all the different dice systems I've tried I found that consistently the least enjoyable of them.
It's literally the simplest possible system.
Tactile feel, Anon. Not complexity. I've always preferred dice-pool. I'm not above trying it, just a preference is all.
I understand the tactile feeling part but in terms of mechanics d100 is possible the most sound system possible. "What my odds of going x"? It's X%. Literal monkey morons can understand it. Granted when you start getting onto Runequest's combat system with it's dodges and parries and hit tables and limb location things become less clear cut. But it's still simple, elegant system.
Yeah, I'll try BRP. I'd love any additional autism you already know from BRP systems. I'll likely go through importing WWN shock damage myself.
Sounds like you want Barbarians of Lemuria.
Just play B/X
Any edition of D&D is markedly high fantasy, and increasingly superheroic the later the edition.
this
Most OSR B/X and AD&D retroclones will work fine.
You might wanna consider ACKS II that is being kickstarted this month, see how that will turn out.
Play B/X, reskin some Monsters, remove the cleric.
>Zweihander (yes the dude who makes it is a homosexual)
Literally just WFRP 2e with some house rules. Play the OG and look for some good house rules online instead, or play it vanilla.
For WFRP, between 2e and 4e, I think 4e is more approachable but 2e is more dungcore.
>Goal is to run a per-thirteenth century monster of the week campaign. Think an /x/ cryptid hunting thread but back before platemail existed. Trying to keep magic mostly out of humanity's hands and make it something they have to deal with rather than something they can control.
Literally pic related
Unironically play CoC
>High Lethality
Never understood this meme. Thematically, I get it. But it doesn't make for a good experience at the table. Killing PCs often does nothing if you let the players quickly roll up a replacement for the party to meet. And if you don't, you have a disengaged player sitting at the table.
The fun of high letality games is in the avoiding of dangerous situations or in planning how to start and finish them fast piling advantages as much as you can (imagine something like back ops / swat teams). Entering a potentially lethal situation is a fail state of the game you have to work against.
Losing a character you put time and effort to always stings, even if you can roll a new one. Also let them roleplay as the NPCs/throw-away villians for a session.
>Losing a character you put time and effort to always stings
It stings the first time. After that, you just grow disaffected towards your replacements. Worse yet, the fellow players won't care about your characters.
I would draw a comparison to vidya.
Cranking up the numbers of the enemies in a game so the player takes more damage adds difficulty, but it's a very tedious sort of difficulty that just forces you to try over and over.
Things like Ironman modes, where the death of a unit is a permanent loss, instead create an actual failure state.
Translating that to tabletop, high lethality usually resembles the former more than the latter. Tabletop games often have permadeath by default, aside from any resurrection magic. But because each character is controlled by a player, it means you're guaranteed to have a suitable replacement.
It isn't a game like Fire Emblem where some unlucky crit can completely doom a run because you needed a very specific unit in order to survive some challenge later in the campaign.
Instead you can just write down Bob the Fighter the 2nd and keep going, because a single character death isn't a fail state for anything but that character. A TPK might be closer to a fail state, but at that point you're basically restarting the whole campaign, much like how you'd restart an Ironman run.
Part of what makes those permadeath runs compelling is a sense of rolling with the punches. To truly get that, you'd need to make it so any replacement characters can't simply be the same as a previous character. The loss needs to be something that actually continues forward, rather than just adding another name to the death tally.
I would expect that games that focus more on lasting injuries and scars rather than high lethality would get closer to the experience people are actually aiming for, where mistakes result in lasting punishments for the person who made them that they now have to deal with.
>My point of reference are SP video games, for I'm terminally never-game homosexual
Like a clock.
Suck my wiener. Anyone who cries about well-done execution of style coming from a videogame needs to go back. It's fiction, moron. Independent of medium.
>Gameplay mechanic is independent of medium, because I lack a point of reference other than vidya, so all has to work the same, ok?
Way to dig yourself deeper, never-game
Call us after you at least play three sessions of any given TTRPG
You can't fricking read moron. The aesthetic was what was from a videogame. Not gameplay mechanics. Frick off.
>terminal brain-rot means he is incapable of taking game design lessons from other sources
Many such cases.
The meme comes from severe mental disabilities that the affected individuals would rather stroke, rather than treat. It also boils down to power trip for the GM.
GURPS
Harnmaster
Frick off, Daniel.
GURPS
Take AD&D or B/X.
Remove the Magic-User and Cleric.
Badabing.
Basic D&D
>HD as HP
>maxlevel capped at 3
>magic-users are villain-only
This is what I play, and feels, good. I've got a few more rules to make it happen but that's the gist of it.
d100 classless and skillbased systems will be better than DnD in every way for what OP is asking.
Why pick a system that you have to heavily tweak and limit for it to fit, when you have lots of alternative systems? Break free from the D&D prison.
I play that kind of games too. But I enjoy D&D in that style, as well.
>Zweihander
Isn't that just WHFRP 2e with the serial numbers filed off?
>low fantasy
>There's enough magical creatures to hunt a new one every week