So the Gygax day one-shot was my first chance to actually play Lejendary Adventures. I’ve had Essentials (sort of a LA Basic Set) for a while, but a couple of weeks ago I scored a bundle of the full rules on eBay.
I needed more pre-gen characters than the four that came with the Quick Start adventure, so I typed up the three from the examples of character creation from the Lejendary Rules for All Players. I really feel that character creation has a lot of fiddly bits that don’t really add much to the game.
I really like the “skill bundle” Abilities as a middle ground between classes and skills.
I found the full rules just as poorly edited and imprecise as Essentials was. You have to be willing to just make your best guess at what things mean and roll with it. Essentials did actually clarify a couple of things versus the full rules, though.
Of course, I’ve only had the full rules for about a week now, so this is an early impression. There’s a lot of pages there. Gary may have considered it “rules light”, but I’d say more “rules medium”.
The abundance of non-standard jargon was annoying in play. “Ilf” and “wylf” also seemed kind of pointless, especially as wylfs are also called “elves”. It also seemed weird that elves were renamed but dwarves weren’t.
Combat seemed to go smooth enough. As usual with a “damage resistance” armor mechanic, I had a tendency to forget it.
It annoyed me to see the mage have a roughly 1 in 3 chance of failing to cast a spell. Having it resisted or something is one thing, but it just doesn’t feel right for professional magic wielders to have that high of a chance of failing to even cast a spell.
I really like that there are six different magic systems. The downside, though, is that I ended up having to try to quickly grasp four of them. The descriptions of how each works I found very opaque too.
I don’t know. So far, there’s some stuff I really like about it, but I really feel like there’s a lot of fiddly bits and complications that I’ll end up ignoring in the long run.
