Is anyone still playing 1e/revised?

[TheEvilDM]

Just curious as I found my books recently and I was going through making characters and was struggling to remember how to make characters, granted its been 25 years or so since I touched these books.

Just curious as to if people play it or 2e?

thanks

[Hell Hound]

We grew up on 1e in the 80's and I plan on running a game soon. If our group takes to it I'll run it for them. I don't mind at all if they go evil or selfish either - nice change from the norm. Palladium Fantasy 2e is not my cup of tea but to each their own.

[TheEvilDM]

We grew up on 1e in the 80's and I plan on running a game soon. If our group takes to it I'll run it for them. I don't mind at all if they go evil or selfish either - nice change from the norm. Palladium Fantasy 2e is not my cup of tea but to each their own.

I enjoyed it a lot back when I was teen, but for some reason looking at the crusty old books from 30 years ago I went cross eyed at first trying to make up characters. Took me a bit to get back into it.

After reading 2e, because I never got into 2e, I decided I wanted to try 1e again.

The only problem I see overall with evil character alignments is that most stories are built for heroes or good aligned characters and evil characters tend be like, "nope not doing that, nope, I'm evil, sorry"

[kiralon]

I play a modified version of first ed, and evil isn't a problem if you work on the adventures a bit before hand. You just have to change the carrot.
Give the characters someone to body guard, so they can get paid to adventure. Or they could be hired by other bad guys to cause trouble and not get caught

[pestigor]

I'm starting a 1e game next month. I still have a 30 year old black cover revised rule book that while the pages have yellowed and the cover is beaten up the spine is still tight. Over the years my friends asked me why I prefer perfect bound to hard back and I point to my large (and old) palladium books collection. I have all the 2e stuff but I never liked PPE in palladium fantasy, I don't have a problem with it, it's just a preference thing. I also run palladium fantasy 1e with little cross over in the rest of the settings. If I was running a megaverse game, I'd run 2e...but 1e is it's own thing for me.

[TheEvilDM]

why is there no character sheets readily found? All the links I find are dead links and the one I found are a blurry mess. I have gone to notebook paper and designing up characters like we did back in the day. still trying to figure out how to make characters with 1e/revised lol

[Hotrod]

In general, I consider 2nd Edition to be a superior game, with the following caveats:
-It made combat take longer due to character S.D.C. being de facto extra hit points whilst failing to adjust effective weapon damage up.
-It made healers worse due to trance times, the removal of resurrection, and other classes having access to the full range of psi-healer powers as major psionics.
-It made druids worse. I didn't like them in 1st edition much, but I prefer them to that... thing that they call druids in 2nd Edition.
-In some cases, the loss of specialized hand-to-hand skills made their classes a little less distinctive and removed some specialized progression. Long Bowman comes to mind.
-I preferred the knight-on-Pegasus-vs-dragon art to 2nd Edition.

I can play in either system, but I prefer 2nd Edition.

[Whiskeyjack]

why is there no character sheets readily found? All the links I find are dead links and the one I found are a blurry mess. I have gone to notebook paper and designing up characters like we did back in the day. still trying to figure out how to make characters with 1e/revised lol

There's an excellent excel character sheet coming soon. I've been using the beta version for a while now. It's pretty slick.

[TheEvilDM]

why is there no character sheets readily found? All the links I find are dead links and the one I found are a blurry mess. I have gone to notebook paper and designing up characters like we did back in the day. still trying to figure out how to make characters with 1e/revised lol

There's an excellent excel character sheet coming soon. I've been using the beta version for a while now. It's pretty slick.

There is?! its for 1e? Can I sign up to help test? My group will be playing 1e, so maybe the author would appreciate another set of eyes on it?

[Prysus]

why is there no character sheets readily found?

There's an excellent excel character sheet coming soon. I've been using the beta version for a while now. It's pretty slick.

There is?! its for 1e? Can I sign up to help test? My group will be playing 1e, so maybe the author would appreciate another set of eyes on it?

Greetings and Salutations. As the author, the Excel sheet I created is 2nd Edition. The version Palladium will be releasing soon is definitely for 2nd Edition. The older version WhiskeyJack is referring to might still work for 1st Edition. Honestly, I've never played 1st so I can't say for sure. There's a spot for S.D.C., P.P.E., and I.S.P., but I don't see much issue with just ignoring those parts.

Not sure how much you can help test at this point, but I'm willing to share, if interested, as I know the one coming out soon won't be much use to you. If you do find something broken or that can be improved, I'd still happily fix it. If you find it workable but would like a few minor modifications to better suit 1st Edition, I can help with that too. I won't do an entirely new sheet or massive reconstruction (I just don't have the time right now), but some mod or changing some formulas should be possible.

Download can be found here: http://www.prysus.com/site_downloads.htm

I may need to remove that link when the official release happens. We'll see. Farewell and safe journeys for now.

[Whiskeyjack]

It can easily be used for 1st edition. I'm even using it for Nightspawn with minor tweaks.

[TheEvilDM]

Greetings and Salutations. As the author, the Excel sheet I created is 2nd Edition. The version Palladium will be releasing soon is definitely for 2nd Edition. The older version WhiskeyJack is referring to might still work for 1st Edition. Honestly, I've never played 1st so I can't say for sure. There's a spot for S.D.C., P.P.E., and I.S.P., but I don't see much issue with just ignoring those parts.

Not sure how much you can help test at this point, but I'm willing to share, if interested, as I know the one coming out soon won't be much use to you. If you do find something broken or that can be improved, I'd still happily fix it. If you find it workable but would like a few minor modifications to better suit 1st Edition, I can help with that too. I won't do an entirely new sheet or massive reconstruction (I just don't have the time right now), but some mod or changing some formulas should be possible.

Download can be found here: http://www.prysus.com/site_downloads.htm

I may need to remove that link when the official release happens. We'll see. Farewell and safe journeys for now.[/justify]

I'll take a look at it and see if I can modify it for 1e needs. thanks for the work you do on your site

[Veknironth]

Well, we used a hybrid. We did 2nd edition for most everything except for the following:

- No SDC. As Hotrod said, it's just extra HP and it makes combat less dangerous and take longer, both in game time and real time.
- We kept the old Hand to Hand skills. I like the differentiation between the classes.

-Vek
"2nd Ed magic is so much better."

[Hotrod]

- We kept the old Hand to Hand skills. I like the differentiation between the classes.

I find this to be a mixed bag. In the case of Long Bowmen, their hand-to-hand is distinctive because their critical strikes are specifically with a bow and arrow. In most other cases, the hand-to-hand differences seem less significant and are generally analogous to Basic, Expert, Martial Arts, and Assassin in 2nd Edition.

It would be nice to see more new OCC abilities and OCC-specific combat moves that come with levels. Although character combat abilities do scale up well with level, in Palladium, the skill and combat-focused characters don't get the kinds of spiffy new abilities as they level like the psychic and magic classes do.

[kiralon]

In my games, non-men at arms classes do not get autoparry automatically with hth non men at arms, as they spent too much time praying/learning magic/talking to rocks to learn it as part of their growing up.
I also give the men at arms classes combination attacks that can give the enemy temporary negatives, be harder to parry, and do more damage, or get bonuses to strike and negatives to damage and that sort of thing. Some of them require more than 1 person, like when fighting giants for example and one person ends up on top of the giant (I didn't make that one up though, one of the players did, it was pretty funny when they failed and one person ended up laying on the ground in front of a semi confused gigantes).
and one day I will figure out a decent armour skill that gives armour bonuses.

[Veknironth]

Well, I forgot to mention one of the more important differences between 1st and 2nd Editions. I believe that in the 1st edition, ONLY man-at-arms characters can have paired weapons. That makes a huge difference in melee combat.

-Vek
"Paired Weapons is the best H2H skill."

[Hotrod]

"Paired Weapons is the best H2H skill."

Sort of? I'll freely acknowledge that Paired Weapons is a great combat multiplier for melee characters. However, there are several skills that can also provide huge advantages in melee combat.

+W.P. Net. A successful throw-over-the-head strike (which can only be dodged, not parried) gives you several rounds that can allow you to run away or beat down your opponent with impunity. Granted, it's generally a one-shot trick that puts you at a temporary weaponless disadvantage if you miss, but the risk is generally worth it against any significant threat.
+Use Poison. This can double your damage with each hit and/or induce a bunch of weakening effects against your opponent. If your alignment or personality doesn't allow poisons, then you can go with toxins to disable opponents even more effectively than the net above.
+Horsemanship. You get a bunch of bonuses to combat, you can get free extra mount attacks (depending on how you interpret horsemanship rules), and you're much faster. If you take a hit-and-run approach to combat (which is a little wonky with the rules as written), you can easily be twice as powerful on horseback as your character's dismounted equivalent.
+Breed Dogs. "Sic 'em!" In addition to the noncombat perks of having your own personal pack of trained hounds (tracking, early warning, et cetera), a few simple commands can unleash them on an enemy. Just one dog can knockdown an enemy, allowing you to get some free hits in. Packs of trained attack dogs doing pounce attacks can kill an enemy without you ever having to drawing a weapon.

All that said, all of these are compatible with a paired weapons character, and there's no intrinsic advantage to any other approach to melee combat over paired weapons. It would be nice to see some sort of trade-offs between choosing paired weapons, 2-handed weapons, shields, or other approaches to melee combat. As it stands, the damage benefit of using a 2-hander amounts to about 1D6 damage over a single one-handed weapon, and shields basically suck in the Palladium combat system.

[Veknironth]

Well, one of the rules we implemented was you can't parry a 2-handed weapon with a 1-handed weapon. It's just too much mass. Now, this is where people will mention that you're just slightly deflecting the attack and you can still do it, but the goal is to make a general rule that helps even things out a bit. You could parry a 2-handed weapon with a shield, or using both of your weapons if you're using paired weapons. you could also have a giant sized 1-handed weapon parry a regular sized 2-handed weapon. Another house rule we used is no parrying weapons of true giants, for normal sized people. Essentially it takes something extra to parry something one size level up. We also had some more specific rules regarding things like trying to parry a sword with a mace and chain.

As for shields, we reasoned that you could use a shield to parry missile weapons but you can't parry an arrow or a sling stone with a sword or ax. For dodging missiles, we used the same thing we go with for all missile weapons. If you wait for someone to loose the shaft, it's too late. If you see someone aiming at you, you can attempt to dodge but you have to declare that before the attacker lets the arrow go. There is none of that letting the attacker roll, looking at the die, and seeing if it will hit and/or penetrate armor before deciding on a course of action.

-Vek
"I definitely kept writing axe."

[kiralon]

Well, one of the rules we implemented was you can't parry a 2-handed weapon with a 1-handed weapon. It's just too much mass. Now, this is where people will mention that you're just slightly deflecting the attack and you can still do it, but the goal is to make a general rule that helps even things out a bit. You could parry a 2-handed weapon with a shield, or using both of your weapons if you're using paired weapons. you could also have a giant sized 1-handed weapon parry a regular sized 2-handed weapon. Another house rule we used is no parrying weapons of true giants, for normal sized people. Essentially it takes something extra to parry something one size level up. We also had some more specific rules regarding things like trying to parry a sword with a mace and chain.

As for shields, we reasoned that you could use a shield to parry missile weapons but you can't parry an arrow or a sling stone with a sword or ax. For dodging missiles, we used the same thing we go with for all missile weapons. If you wait for someone to loose the shaft, it's too late. If you see someone aiming at you, you can attempt to dodge but you have to declare that before the attacker lets the arrow go. There is none of that letting the attacker roll, looking at the die, and seeing if it will hit and/or penetrate armor before deciding on a course of action.

-Vek
"I definitely kept writing axe."

I did something very similar, and yes you could just deflect the blow, but it takes a lot of skill to do that, something that would be beyond most lvl 1-5 characters except with luck (I allow a nat20 one handed weapon to parry a 2handed weapon)
Also axes were harder to parry, and to parry with. Ball and chain are harder to parry with shield and weapon, but once their path is set they don't deviate much so a bit easier to dodge, I also upped the crit failure range of ball and chain (That was reduced by the wp + to strike). I also have stages of giant sized weapon, for example a human longsword is 2d6, a wolfen/ogre longsword is 3d6, a nimro longsword is 4d6 and a jotan is 5d6. (~every 6ft the weapon does and extra 1d6, except its 7-12ft for first giant category). The idea that a wolfen and a jotans weapon does the same damage is a bit laughable. I have also implemented that if a creature is enough size levels below you they get some free dodge rolls per round, depending on size differences.
With ranged weapons I have set negatives and hit numbers depending on what either side are doing.