Day 27: Game You’d like to see a new / improved edition of…
Oh, wow, let me see.
My first instinct is to say AD&D, because while the 2nd edition ruleset is reasonable, the organisation is distinctly sub-par (try finding info on how you use holy water sometime) and some things could really do with being made more consistent. But there's a myriad of retroclones out there and I'm sure one of them does the job, it's just we use the real thing.
Um, I think I'm going to go with either Deathwatch or, bizarrely, Hellcats and Hockeysticks. While it's not necessarily what Fantasy Flight want to do, I personally feel Deathwatch would benefit from an overhaul to bring it in line with more recent games; with cutting out some of the generic 40K RPG stuff and transferring it to an appendix on cross-product gaming; and with a very serious look at balance, specifically all bolt weapons and reconsidering the somewhat all-or-nothing way the psychic phenomena rules work.
Hellcats seemed like a promising game, but felt like it was trying to do too much with one product, covering a wide range of possible genres while simultaneously not feeling very focused. I would like to see a new edition that took a narrower subset of Girls Behaving Badly as its basis and concentrated on doing that effectively, while also refining and improving the skill system, which was counterintuitive.
As far as improved AD&Ds go, I'd honestly say that 5E is a good stab at such a thing. It isn't pure AD&D because it's adopted some 3Eisms and 4Eisms, but not in such a way that the bits of AD&D I personally like are interfered with.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds very promising. I have to say, I don't think there are any specific rules I don't like in AD&D, but I'm not feeling precious about it either, so it does come down to how things are arranged and how some of them sync (or don't). It has the feeling of being a fairly simple journey where I'd like there to be fewer speed bumps.
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