Low Fantasy Gaming from Pickpocket Press

[Punkrabbitt]

So, is there any love here for Low Fantasy Gaming from Pickpocket Press? Too d20, not OSR enough? I like their take on saving throws using the Luck mechanic.

[hamurai]

We tried it once or twice when it came out, but some mechanics just wouldn't work properly and/or make sense to us*, so we ditched it again. There are some interesting ideas in it (like the combat exploits and the random tables at the end), but in the end it was nothing we kept for our group.

The long story:
My main problem with the game was recovery:
For the Short Rest rule, you must succeed on a Will check to gain anything from the short rest. That makes Willpower one of the (if not the) most important attributes in the game, because if you fail your check, you rest but don't get anything from it. You have only 3 Short rests per day so it may happen (as it did for us) that some characters are unable to regain HP at all. In our test game a thief character ended up with 2 HP after the first fight and failing his Will checks during short rests he stayed at 2 HP while the rest of the group could recover.

A long rest lasts 1d6 days, which wasn't an option because the group didn't have the time. Also, I think it's weird that you won't know how much time you need to recover. From a gaming standpoint this makes long rests very unreliable and it raised the question in our group "So we rolled a 5 for 5 days needed, but the adventure needs us to get going after 3 days so we can still have a chance to catch the bad guys, what happens if we abort the long rest after 3 days? Do we heal 3/5 of our resources? Do we heal at all?"

And then you only recover half of your lost HP + 1d4 + CON bonus. We played at low level, but that'd mean that, say, a 6th-level a barbarian (1d6+6 HP per level, 12 HP at 1st level) with a +2 CON bonus has a maximum of, say 74 HP (rolling only 4s for HP increase). If he gets beaten down to 10 HP and takes a long rest, he'll be at 48 HP at best after 1d6 days. After another 1d6 days he'll be at 67 HP if he rolls a 4 again.

Sure, if you have a MU in the group who concentrates on healing you get 2 Cure Light Wounds for 2d4+INT mod per long rest, but that's not a lot for an entire group.

In our first attempte we played 1st-level characters going out to hunts some giant rats and then get the weird shaman who attracted them. After the first battle (1 rat per PC) we were so beaten that we had used up almost all of our will checks in 3 short rests and were debating if it even made sense to go after the next rat nest.

So, in the end we started with coming up with house rules for recovery and then decided we could more easily house-rule any other edition to fit a low-magic setting, so we didn't need LFG.

[Punkrabbitt]

hamurai, that's an interesting take on it. In my head, anything that allows faster healing than one hit point every other day of complete rest, starting on the second day, seems like it's too fast. Having the chance to gain HP at short rests? Inconceivable!

I haven't played it, but I'm always tinkering with rules. My first two thoughts on this particukar gane were "ditch the skill system" and "what's up with all these level-specific abilities?" The healing system wasn't a real breaker for me, but I think it is a little generous.

I appreciate you engaging in dialogue about it. I need the mental excercise.

[hamurai]

Well, we've never played healing that slow, even in the old days. Since we were told in the rulebooks that HP represented luck, stamina and bruises and so on, we didn't feel like 1 HP healing per day would make sense. The characters we wanted to play were not taken out of action for a week by a single blow, so we used to speed up healing in all of our old D&D games. iirc, we started with 1 HD after each encounter (if HP were lost in that encounter), representing catching your breath. We were annoyed that some delves on 1st level would have been over after the first fight because we only had 1 or 2 HP left.

Another thing I remember earning LFG criticism in our group was that, for example, the barbarian gets some sort of "ability" every 3 or so levels, but the game says "work it out in your group". I don't have a problem with filling gaps in a game - but that seemed kinda lazy because in other places the rules were very explicit.

LFG felt to me as if it tried to get the "brutal old school" feel back in 5E, because it took a lot from 5E and then tried to make the game harder again in some places, for example with the healing rules, which were unnecessarily complicated.