Hacker News Reader

Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

HM was absolutely playable (I only know the original 4th edition), but it was created by a company making RPG comics (specifically, it was the, until then, imaginary system the characters in Kights of the Dinner Table played), so it does not take itself super serious.

The super-detailed tables mostly don’t matter. It’s not as if you’d know the shorter ones by heart, so you either look them up anyway, or you (what we did) have a small program on the GMs laptop.

As with most roleplaying games, almost everything lives and dies with the skill of your GM to make it work and to a lesser part with the skill of your players (and by skill I mean ability to get into a flow with everyone else)

Our first session ended in (Chaotic Neutral with a bit of evil) me accidentally killing the party fighter and him re-rolling a Paladin that did not like me. And I got critically hit by his thrown pebble after clapping at a funeral.

View on HN

A very important detail about HackMaster 4e was that their license with WotC for the AD&D 1e things allowed them to publish a parody of AD&D 1e. They absolutely set out to create a fun and playable game (and IMO succeeded), but everything was contractually obligated to have an element of ridiculousness. On top of the generally lighthearted and joking prose, a big part of how they did this was to take the convoluted parts of 1e that later editions simplified away and instead make them over the top. 1e had lots and lots of overly specific lookup tables for things which later editions replaced with more general rules, so HM doubled down on that and made the tables even more gratuitously detailed.

If you set aside the humor aspect, HM is a game that plays very similarly to 1e, but more fleshed out and with a lot of assorted improvements.

>1e had lots and lots of overly specific lookup tables for things

For example the infamous Harlot table where you could roll for the precise form of loose woman you encounter. A different time, for sure.

Thanks for the clarification, 100% any roleplaying game is GM skill dependant.

It seems like the nice thing you get here is that some people went and came up with a whole bunch of stuff that could happen which could be good fodder for "fail forward"[0] style outcomes?

- [0]: https://mythcreants.com/blog/why-mouse-guard-handles-failure...

> 100%

There are games that democratize the power of the GM a bit. Very traditional RPGs are into putting pressure on the GM to be a one-man band for the players' entertainment, but the more "modern" ones share the authority, get the players involved in worldbuilding and/or expect the players to be proactive (rather than just respond to the GM)

My group is currently playing such a system, Irownsworn [0] (Free to play). It allows single player, gm-less and gm play. While we are playing with GM, you still have to make decisions about outcomes that are traditionally done by a GM. It works because a lot of details are abstracted away.

[0]: https://www.ironswornrpg.com/

> And I got critically hit by his thrown pebble after clapping at a funeral.

That sounds epic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com