 Goto [ Index ] |
Legend is a d20-based game, but it is very far removed from any other OGL game that I am familiar with. Aspects remain: you can see Base Attack Bonus, Armor Class, Saving Throws, the same six Ability Scores, etc., but other than that, this game is not Dungeons & Dragons with a new name by any stretch of the imagination. The entire class architecture has been replaced, every feat and spell has been rewritten (or, more frequently, replaced), and the items are all new.
And the game is very, very slick.
The Awesome, an Intro
In particular, I feel that Legend, more than any other system I have played, gets it. Legend has been designed a very simple idea: the rules are there to facilitate a fun game. That rules should be thorough, clear, and unambiguous, so play doesn't have to come to a screeching halt whenever something unexpected comes up. That rules should be simple, consistent, and easy to use, so play doesn't just die the first time someone wants to use an unusual maneuver.Most of all, I think that Legend does the best job of any RPG in the realm of valuing the GM and players' time. Legend is d20-based, which means it was originally derived from a system (Dungeons & Dragons 3.5) that was full of very fiddly aspects and confusing rules that demanded enormous amounts of time for the GM to sort out, and player time to create a character. Legend has been designed from the ground up, really, with the notion that no one wants to waste time making decisions about factors that are ultimately unimportant.
Decisions, Decisions
Decisions are meant to be important. Legend seems to take the avoidance of wasting player or GM time as it's absolute #1 priority, and I for one was appreciative. Custom-building a character or monster from the ground up is fast — but still highly customizable. There are no fiddly little details to worry about: only big, important, and most of all, cool decisions to be made.Every class feature is a big deal. Every feat gives your character new and important powers. You don't get many items (no long checklist of +'s you need to make sure you've gotten), but the items you do get are powerful and important.
Consistency
A lot of games talk about balance, and it's always a kind of... I don't really like it when games talk about it, because it seems to me that games that try to hard for balance suck the life out of the system and bind you tightly to the rails.Legend has a nice blurb in the intro about consistency (I think that was the word they used), and I have to say: I couldn't help but nod my head. And from our test, it works. If you get something at level 10, that's because it's power that a level 10 character should expect to have. No wasting time on "dead levels" or "feat taxes". No "sacrifice power now for more power later".
It really made for a much more satisfying system, because the choices were all there — and all important — but you didn't have to agonize over them. You could go with what sounded cool, and it would be.
Careful Rules
The rules are intended to be simple to learn, simple to run, and fast in play.In my playtest group, even the most rules-averse player was getting it, and doing cool and interesting things with his character. A guy who had never wanted to do anything more complicated than a Fighter in Dungeons & Dragons, came to the table with a multiclassed character (a Paladin/Rogue) that used a neat trick I hadn't even thought of when I read the rules (Fortune's Friend made him very difficult to pin down, on a character who was already handing out some serious pain with his Smites).
And the best part was, he hadn't stumbled on some exploit: it worked, and it worked well, but it wasn't broken. It was an interaction that wasn't obvious, but he overshadowed no one and was overshadowed by no one. I don't know if the designers intended it or not, but I was personally thrilled that this player was doing something different with his character. He'd seriously never done that before.
And it's because Legend is very careful about what it does and does not have rules about. The rules are designed to make things possible, and give you answers to conflicts — not tie you to some arbitrary ruling or dictate how you should play.
Specifics
OK, so I've spent a lot of text gushing about the general system and things I like about it. Here's some of the details that are really well done.
Classes
Legend has eight classes: Barbarian, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sage, Shaman, and Tactician. They all roughly match what you'd expect them to be, more or less.The kind of new ones are the Shaman and Tactician are the spellcasters (as in the actual Spellcasting mechanics), with Sage being magical without using spells (Spell-like Abilities, mostly). Legend felt (and I tend to agree) that general spellcasters (e.g. Dungeon & Dragons 3.5's Wizard) have a tendency to become "I do everything", so they have more specific spellcasters. The Fighter is apparently gone for much the same reason, though 3.5's Fighter suffered for being able to do nothing well rather than for doing everything well. Multiclassing makes it really possible to do whatever you want, though.
Anyway, each class has three Tracks, each of which has seven abilities. The Tracks cycle so that you get one new class feature each level, except at 1st where you get a class feature from two Tracks.
The abilities are excellent. Every level really feels meaningful: there is no filler here, at all. You can do new and powerful things at every level. I was really pleased with the progression of the classes.
Multiclassing works by swapping one of your Tracks for another class's Tracks. There are a few limitations (the Paladin and the Rogue both have Tracks you can't get while multiclassing), but mostly, you're free to mix and match as you like. And it works really well. It's easy, and there's neither shooting yourself in the foot nor exploiting some unexpected combination. They have really thought through this stuff a lot.
There's also a bunch of extra Tracks at the end of the chapter for doing different things; they're pretty cool. Necromancy, a pure brute force track, even things like being a Dragon, there's a ton of options here.
Overall, the classes and the Track system used by Legend is without a doubt it's biggest selling point. It is a simple, robust, and powerful system, without the need of the headaches generated by the multiclassing seen in other d20 games.
Feats
Feats are probably the thing in Legend that are closest to its d20 roots, but not a single feat looks like anything from anything from the OGL. They are all very big deals. There are no feat taxes, no completely useless feats that just add a few numbers onto something you already do.Almost every feat gives you some new type of thing you can do. A new way to bash someone's face with a hammer, a new magic trick you can pull. There are a few that are just numbers, but they're pretty meaningful numbers and they're wholly optional. Some of my players liked them, since they allowed specialization into something; most preferred the "cool new feature" feats.
Overall, I was plenty pleased with them. Big improvement over other d20 games that I've seen.
Skills
Skills are kind of weird in Legend; they're simplified and streamlined, but they remain important. This is definitely, to my mind, the weakest part of the system.That said, I do like several things. One thing I liked was that it removed a lot of the "fiddly" from skills — 3.5's skills never really worked well for me, but I'd always spend a lot of time trying to assign them. It was a hassle, and they've ditched that. There are fewer skills, and they're either trained or they're not, and that's it.
One of my players didn't like that at all, though. He always plays a skill monkey, and didn't like being able to fiddle with skill ranks. During character creation he felt like he couldn't "focus" on skills because it was just a matter of picking eight and being done with it. I liked that, he didn't. Skills are more important to him.
In game, though, I think there was improvement. I think he'd agree too; skills might have been easier to pick out, but they ended up being more influential than in 3.5 (this, to my mind, isn't saying much; a lot of my complaint about 3.5's skills was that I'd spend a lot of time on them and they just weren't important).
Skills saw a lot of use in and out of combat, and the results of the rolls was important. I liked that that everyone seemed to be on the same page, too: 3.5 tended to have a lot of cases where bonuses to skills would be wildly different depending on what you focused on, and so opposed rolls became no contest.
I liked that the skillmonkey could have a substantial advantage, but not be absolutely sure of success every time. Legend does a lot to keep the d20 important in these things, and I liked that.
Legend's social combat rules are really interesting, but sadly we didn't get a chance to really use them. From reading it, though, I really like the idea: it seems like a social encounter is almost like poker, with bidding of tokens that you earn based on your stats. And they made sure everyone could participate, not just the party face. They looked good, but I can't say how they work in practice.
Items
The Christmas Tree is gone! Huzzah!Handing out treasure is a little awkward, though, since items are really tied into the character's level (Dungeons & Dragons's Wealth by Level taken to an extreme). It was a little unclear to me how and when I was supposed to be giving items, even knowing that it was considered important by the system that characters of a given level should have certain items.
That said, Legend was the first game I've used to not use a wealth system (i.e. gold), and I don't think I can ever go back. It was so nice not having to do accounting on the characters. And no making sure you had all the appropriate +'s, just pick items that sound cool and fitting and go from there. I did really like that.
The items themselves are really cool, too. There are some things that are "just" pluses (but meaningful pluses without being mandatory as in other d20 games), but most of them are really cool new features and abilities. Some of them were quite unique. My favorite was a pipe that created a literally solid fog: not like the D&D spell, but an actual bank of cloud you could climb. I thought that was awesome.
Another thing: Legend supports, in a fundamentally effective way, the concept of an item-less character. Anyone who's spent time reading a 3.5 message board has seen arguments over the Vow of Poverty; the system just did not support an item-less character.
Legend does. First, there's the "Full Buy-In", which lets you trade most of your items for a fourth Track (see the Classes section, above). This is really sweet, but in a mix of characters with and without Full Buy-In, I didn't notice any obvious issues in terms of keeping everyone competitive. Track abilities are good, items are good; it's a tough call.
Furthermore, Legend treats "Magical Locations" as items, and I think this is brilliant. Instead of carrying around magical item, you can have visited this magical location and attuned to it, giving you an ability very much like a magical item would. I thought these were really cool.
Ultimately, Legend is pretty "gamist" about how it handles items; that's not for everyone. But if it is for you, Legend does it really well. If it's not, I encourage checking it out anyway: if nothing else, it's a great example of why some people do prefer a gamist approach.
GMing for Legend
Being a GM for Legend is a very positive experience overall. The rules work neatly and consistently; I had no headaches worrying if things worked the way I thought they did. I had no trouble figuring out what "appropriate" meant for my players.That said, I also had the opportunity to ask the designers about a few things; I think the book could use a few more pointers about how to handle "appropriate", though it does have a fair bit. I'm confident that only a very little trial and error would easily replace the questions I had answered.
Most of all, though, once you get it, it just works very smoothly. When I wanted an encounter that was going to send the players running — or to their graves, if they were too stubborn — I could create one easily (too often, in other systems, supposedly challenging encounters end up being cakewalks). When I wanted an encounter to be nothing more than a speedbump, I never found my players suddenly fighting for their lives against what should have been easy. It just worked very neatly.
Antagonists
Legend doesn't have a monster manual yet, which can be somewhat limiting, but it's not the same as saying that everything has to be humanoid. Between the ability to create item-less characters (see above), and the various "racial tracks" that allow for things like dragons, elementals, golems, and the undead, you could field a pretty wide variety of creatures — especially if you didn't tell the player's that the rampaging gorilla-monster was built around a track labeled "Dragon".The other really cool thing about GMing for Legend is that monsters don't come at a set level. If I want my 4th-level players to fight a Vampire, then I just stat out a 5th-level Vampire for them to fight, and it works great. It works well and it works fast. I don't ever have those awkward situations where the plot calls for a monster that is statted at a wildly different level than the game would call for. That, I thought, was really cool and well done.
Conclusion
Legend is a game that knows its business, and does it very well. The game is streamlined without being a straitjacket. It's by-far the least headache-inducing game I've played. Playing Legend is a ton of fun, and it works really, really well.Seriously, this game is a top-notch, grade-A product — and everything's going to charity. I think everyone really should give this one a look.
legendpublicityinfo@gmail.com sends out information and promotional material on request, get in touch with them if you're interested.
