The New Flesh

I recently contributed to the Kickstarter projects for two projects that have now delivered their draft PDFs. The Secret Fire and Adventurer Conqueror King  have both ended up delivering projects that seem superficially to deliver yet another Dungeons and Dragons clone. In some cases with some of the OGL 3e improvements but definitely with more retro styling than game design theory behind the system. Since most of the Retro hacks and OSR rules are free I'm not exactly what these projects had to Kickstart for except perhaps artwork costs and physical production fees. It is also not exactly clear to me that these games add a lot more to what was already available and certainly don't capture Redbox, Blue box vibe for me. In all probability, given the number of new and exciting games coming out I'm not sure I'm really going to give either more of a shake than a quick read through.

An unusual situation arose in a game last week. We discovered that the Intimidate skill allows you to make an Intimidate roll to force Bloodied opponents to surrender. This significantly shortened fights and actually made the game more interesting that just stomping over piles of corpses. I'm not sure if it is meant to be so powerful but I do think it works better than the old Red Box morale rules where the GM had to dice to see if the monsters wanted out. This way the morale collapse of the monsters is actually player initiated unless the GM things the encounter is hopeless for the monsters.

One of the interesting features of the new D&D rules is the addition of the goon-like Minion monster class. However one thing that was bugging me was that there are no rules in the DMG for converting a standard monster to a minion. However it seems that it's pretty easy, Minions don't have optional feats and do one point of damage instead of rolling dice.