OBAM: First Impressions

[Jake Norwood]

I think I may try to re-do the PDF with clearer damage tables. As I said earlier, they print out just fine, and I wanted to keep the dl size manageble. The beauty about a PDF is that I can re-post it (or sections of it) with no problems.

The print version is over 300dpi and is exceptionally clear.

Jake

[Brian Leybourne]

If you have intelligent natural-weapon-using creatures, the system is seriously lacking.

Hey Darth,

Not getting defensive or anything, but can you explain more clearly what you wanted to see?

Of course I'm biased, so take my opinion with as much salt as you like, but I have to say that IMO the rules set TROS+OBAM will cover just about any beastie using any kinds of weapons. What eactly is lacking? Can you give an example of an "intelligent natural weapon using creature" that cannot be done using the rules? I can't, so I'm having trouble seeing your trouble, if you get me.

Thanks,
Brian.

[Darth Tang]

Not meaning to put anyone on the defensive-I'm not saying OBAM is bad, merely that I had hoped for something else. The quality of existing material is, as I noted, very good.

And an example: in my campaign the PCs have earned the emnity of (among others) a rathi, or blood-clan, of a creature that is essentially a very intelligfent displacer beast of AD&D 1E: a mountain lion sized feline, very intelliigent, with two prehensile tentacle-like limbs growing from behind its shoulders. The PCs suffer from their attacks on regular occasions. The creature attaks with the backs of its 'tentacles', which have bony barbs, plus bite & claw.

They are highly intelligent, so your (very reasonable) animal combat rules do not apply (although your small quad hit chart is good-but couldn't you find a better picture? My wife already named the dog Barney.). Most of the animal maneuvers will not apply, nor will the regular TRoS maneuvers.

I did not expect rules for every creature, of course, but at least some guidelines would be nice. Instead, I've got to design it from the ground up. Which brings up the question of why I'm giving you guys $15 when I have to build up the combat system myself.

I won't say I regret buying OBaM-there's some very useful rules and data, but I will say that I wasted  lot of ink. I would hav been glad to have gotten a no-art, no-story version and cut the page count by about 50 unneeded pages.

The appendix combat tables printed nice and clear. But I'm going to try to find good line drawings to replace the quad target charts. The dog is too cute and the horse looks like it should be on somebody's fridge with a happy face and a star in the corner.

[Jake Norwood]

The horse is kinda cute, isn't it. Not everything you swing at is evil... *g*

I'm glad you like what's in there. Remember also that the game you've assembled isn't TROS--it's your own thing. OBAM was built for TROS, and TROS style play. Therefore it's unlikely that we're going to see the kinds of critters that you need. You could have submitted it and gotten a free copy of the book, though.

As for printing it out...only print what you need! You've got a print copy coming, don't you?

Jake

[Valamir]

Darth, I really don't understand what you're looking for.  What more could you possibly want other than a damage table and vital statistics?

If its intelligent...play it intellegently.  Make intellegent choices about when to divide its dice pool against multiple opponents and when not to.  How many dice to attack with and how many dice to hold for defense.

You don't need a list of special "tentacled panther-thing" moves.  Use the basic moves already in TROS.  Who cares that a "bind and strike" is a move you do with a sword and an off hand weapon.  The effect is to bleed dice out your opponent's CP.  Sounds like a perfect way to model using the tentacles to distract the opponent while the rathi attempte to set up a bite to the jugular.  You don't need a pole-axe to try the Hook maneuver.  If the rathi can trip you with the tentacles use the Hook rules.  Alls they do is call for a Knockdown roll that gets harder to pass the more successful the attempt is.

Are they able to engage multiple opponents easily, meaning that the normal rules for splitting a die pool doesn't apply.  Fine.  Give them a sepeate CP for each attack and treat them like seperate opponents with a single body for damage.  

What precisely were you hoping to find that you didn't?  I'm having trouble imagining anything that would take more than 5 seconds to figure out how to do just using the regular TROS rules.

[Brian Leybourne]

I just wanted to chime in and say that although I obviously didn't say it implicitly enough, I was trying to suggest in OBAM exactly what Ralph says above - all (well, most) of the maneuvers in the main book should be available to animals and men and whatever else - the cost/effect is what's most important, the description is up to the individual circumstance (tentacles tripping a foe instead of a poleaxe et al).

I should have said it more clearly in OBAM I guess, but I guess I just assumed that it was all a bit obvious - that's how we have played TROS right from the start. The maneuvers I added were those that I felt were not already depicted, as they are mostly the ones that animals and probably not men/intelligent beasts would use - pack swarming and take downs and suchlike.

As for the cute dog and horse... well, you should have seen the very pathetic sketches of horses and dogs I submitted in the manuscript. Just be glad Jake used what he did instead of what *I* drew... :-)

Brian.

[deltadave]

I say 'yeee ha!' You guys have hit one out of the park.  

The players thought they could threaten me with pitchforks and torches, I showed them most unpleaseantly, what pitchforks and torches are _really_ for.  he he he....

Between the dragon that they have been hearing about for a couple of years finally making an appearance, and a Gorem they had a nasty shock with 2 separate unpleasant ends.  Lets just say that the warlords are _happy_ to sacrifice some tribute in various forms to keep  D'r-uden comfortable.

[Sneaky Git]

Well, damn.  Nice work Brian.  I 've just finished leafing through OBaM for the first time and I'm impressed.  It is, apparently, what I was hoping it would be.  I'll get back with a more detailed thank you once I've had time to read through it more carefully.

Can't wait for the print copy to wing its way to me!

Sneaky Git

[Brassel]

The beauty about a PDF is that I can re-post it (or sections of it) with no problems.

I personally think this really is a great advantage. Because in any product of this size, you are bound to make some minor mistakes and by reposting the pdf this small portions of the book in the authorized Forge-Bookshelf  could be given to us players/buyers in a corrected version.
I do not mean to say that OBAM is full of errors, in contrast I like the book very much on first glance and will give a more detailed opinion upon having time to read and - more important - test it.
I just want to say that this way a product like OBAM can get even better with the cooperation of us all. Take the core rule book of TROS for an example: As great as the book is, there are many threads in this forum which show up some small mistakes in examples, ambiguous formulations etc. and there is a longish list of errata on the homepage. But the errata are not regularly updated as far as I know and the forge-threads are not meant to be searched for this kind of information.
So why not post corrections of this parts of TROS (without posting the whole thing).
We could all contribute to the corrections and finally achieve an even better game (if this is imaginable).
Just a thought
Bernd

[Darth Tang]

The horse is kinda cute, isn't it. Not everything you swing at is evil... *g*

I'm glad you like what's in there. Remember also that the game you've assembled isn't TROS--it's your own thing. OBAM was built for TROS, and TROS style play. Therefore it's unlikely that we're going to see the kinds of critters that you need. You could have submitted it and gotten a free copy of the book, though.

As for printing it out...only print what you need! You've got a print copy coming, don't you?

Jake

Ah-no, I don't. Since I'm only going to use about 20% of the page count, there's no real need.

Darth, I really don't understand what you're looking for. What more could you possibly want other than a damage table and vital statistics?

If its intelligent...play it intellegently. Make intellegent choices about when to divide its dice pool against multiple opponents and when not to. How many dice to attack with and how many dice to hold for defense.

You don't need a list of special "tentacled panther-thing" moves. Use the basic moves already in TROS. Who cares that a "bind and strike" is a move you do with a sword and an off hand weapon.

Sure, that works. And so a fantasy creature plays out exactly as if playing a humaniod using artifical weapons. D20 uses that 'one combat fits all' system, too. If you're going to bother with the rules of TRoS-style combat, shouldn't there be a greater feel to fighting a creature? Otherwise, why leave 'roll to hit'  'roll for damage'? I did not expect a rules set/ maneuver for every sort of creature, but given the massive space devoted to short stories, certainly there was space for a few maneuvers and combat rules to serve as a guideline.

Again, the work presented was of good quality. I was just hoping for some guidelines so that I would not be building up the third leg (artifical weapons, natural creatures, sentinent creatures) of the combat system from scratch. But, so be it. I got $15 worth of value out of OBAM, so it was not in any way a loss.

[Valamir]

Sure, that works. And so a fantasy creature plays out exactly as if playing a humaniod using artifical weapons. D20 uses that 'one combat fits all' system, too. If you're going to bother with the rules of TRoS-style combat, shouldn't there be a greater feel to fighting a creature? Otherwise, why leave 'roll to hit' 'roll for damage'? I did not expect a rules set/ maneuver for every sort of creature, but given the massive space devoted to short stories, certainly there was space for a few maneuvers and combat rules to serve as a guideline.

Can you give some examples of moves you wanted to see but don't?
I'm thinking that pretty much every conceivable monster based attack (with the exception of truly unique abilities and magic stuff) is easily handled by:

1) one of the current move effects renamed to something more monster colorful (i.e Trip with Tentacles for the Rathi using the effects of the Hook)
2) a combination of current move effects based on monster specific abilities (i.e. Bear Paw Swipe, that does both cutting damage ala cut and forces a Knockdown check ala Hook).
3) a creative application of the Terrain Roll Rules (i.e. a leopard staging an ambush from a Tree Limb.  With a successful terrain roll, remains hidden and unable to be attacked by other opponents).
4) an effect that is only slightly different of a concept that already exists (i.e. getting entangled by a spray of spider webbing which bleeds CP dice like a Block and Strike but whose effects last until broken free from like a Grapple).

Is your point that you wish these had been listed out for you in the creature descriptions?  I haven't seen the book yet so I don't know what is or isn't there.  I'm just trying to figure out what you're seeing as missing.

[Darth Tang]

Valamir check out pages 20-36 and you'll see what I'm talking about.

[Aaron]

Id have to agree with Darth. How about a stomp from an elephant, or giant, or the swish of a dragons tail, a swarm of angry kiiler bees or rats.  What about rules for large animals maneuvering, can an elephant really outmaneuver two men by simply rolling a terrain check.
And I'd go a little further with regard to the rules.
If a person on a horse gets a height bonus against an opponent on foot does a giant or a Gorem get such a bonus becuase they are tall, or is it figured in their CP already in which ase they have a lower CP fighting a mounted opponent(now that they are the same height?).  Does a Destrier's bite really have a DR of 14?
I was really looking forward to seeing some pack animal rules and was very dissapointed.  the idea of challenging a group of 4 animals with a hungry/angry pack of whatever by putting 4 animals agains each and running a potential 16!!! individual combats per round...
I've got a few more but I'm betting no one is really listening anymore..

Can 1 point margin from a kicking Destrier really kill a Dragon???

Sorry, it's not that I hate the book at all but I thought I'd get down o the nitty gritty..  Especially considering the build up( maybe that just something I've percevied) which gave me the impression all will be reveiled in OBAM...For me it wasn't.

aaron

[Darth Tang]

Arron put it very well.

TRoS is, as the combats are named, a system of man-to-man duels. OBaM spent the nearly the same word count of Jousting, perhaps the lamest aspect of fantasty combat imaginable (and yet anoher man-to-man duel), as it did for creatures using natural weapons. And it put more word count into flat fan fiction than it did on combat addendum. Look at the damage tables: cut, pierce, blunt. What about Rip? Not a slice (cut) from an edged weapon, but a row of claws or teeth plowing furrows through flesh. Strangle?  Swarm? How about Bite? Teeth closing in from both sides? How is a dragon's maw anything like a sword's edge?

Frankly, I thought OBaM was going to take a narrow-vision combat system and make it viable. Obviously, like the spell system, that is going to be left up to the GMs.

[Valamir]

You know, here's a thought.
OBAM was a work largely put together by a dedicated fan (who from what I've heard and what I've seen of his other work did a pretty bang up job).

Now OBAM is primarily being distributed in PDF.  The print run is a small mostly for cons hardcopy...not a "carved in stone nothing we can do about it now because we've got 3000 copies sitting a warehouse", print run.

I haven't seen the book yet (looking to get my hardcopy direct at GenCon which I'm leaving for momentarily) but these things you mention sound like they wound indeed be pretty cool.  It would be pretty sweet to have some customized monster on monster action.  Of course the problem is that TROS combat has a good bit of research behind it, and there isn't a whole lot of research on Dragon bites, but perhaps a perusal of Shark attack websites would give some good ideas.

Point being, work something up.  Create a new section to OBAM.  Once formatted like the rest its a trivial matter to add it to the PDF and make that section available for current owners via Clinton's Bookshelf.  

I personally don't really have much desire to turn TROS into a monster bashing game.  Even when I played D&D my favorite monsters were humanoid Orcs and such and pretty much found most "monster collections" to not hold much interest for me.  For that reason I really love the fact that TROS is man on man; because I really don't much care about man on neo-otyugh  (and to be fair the book *is* called "Of Beasts and MEN" after all) so I have no problem with shoe horning man on man concepts into whatever rare monster encounter I might have.

But, it sounds like something that's pretty important to you.  It definitely would be cool and something I'd love to see (if only to admire it from afar).  So lay claim and work it up.

We've got a pair of huge threads where fans are detailing Taverun...another one planned for Xanarium.  We've got scads of fan created downloads.  We've got fans working on the Lure of Gold.  We've got OBAM.  Lay claim to your own little piece of TROS and write up a full bore set of monster stuff.  

Sounds like a plan to me.