Forbidden Lands: Dice Pools

I was reading through Forbidden Lands' character creation and noticed a few things:

• Young characters get the most attribute points
• Attributes can't ever be increased
• XP (from what I can tell) has no upper limit

So if you want the best base attributes, start as a young character instead of adult or old. The benefits for adult or old are extra skill and talent points, so your initial survivability is higher, but your attributes will always be lower than those who started at a young age and earned their way to the higher levels of power.

Unless, of course, you allow attribute increases at 20 XP multiplied by the new level (since that is like increasing four skills a 5 XP times the new level rate). So going from 3 to 4 in strength would cost a whopping 80 XP. For 80 XP you could do a lot, taking a STR 3 + 0-1-2-3 rack of skills to STR 3 + 2-2-4-4, while the character who raised STR would be STR 4 + 0-1-2-3. You come out better spending on skills (by 2 dice) in this case, so I can live with this house-rule.

Plus if you are banking your XP that much you are likely falling behind others in the group who are spending on skills and improving at a steady rate. Still, if I keep an XP bank of a few points here and there, and let that save up to that 80, why not allow it? Better yet, create a party XP pool that players can throw extra points into and take from when they need a big boost like this. As long as one is left alive, the pool stays intact. And now I want party talents for some reason...

I suppose story wise in this world, the less attribute points thing makes sense. The world has just opened up, and the older characters were the ones sitting around in settlements waiting for the red-mist to go away, so they are more skilled and less physically adept.

But I am house-ruling my way around a rule I find strange, and one that may push players to prefer the younger heroes instead of older ones because of the no attribute increases rule.

And I sat back with my copy of ACKS and wondered if I needed to consider any of that. To be fair, any flavor of B/X is not a dice-pool system, so there isn't all this gaming the system going on where you are trading off this for that. You roll up your character and the story is the most important thing, and not the pool of the dice, how much you are trading off for this and that, and I am not focused on mechanics.

While I like the mechanics of dice pool systems, part of the reason I like B/X is that it mechanically it stays mostly out of the way. You create a character, you have your combat bonus and a few other interesting things in your class, and it melts away and the story takes center stage.

I like B/X because I am not worrying exclusively about mechanics. My experience with Starfinder was the game was mostly all about mechanics, and what I saw in Pathfinder 2 was that they doubled and tripled down on the same thing. Those are d20 games, but the feats and class abilities stack up. I watch Youtube playthroughs of some of these games with heavy mechanics and you get this repetition of rules and modifiers that seems like a chant of prayers in a ancient monastery.

"Difficulty is going to reduce this by 2 dice, and I roll and this result means this, that die means another thing, add one to this and take some damage to that. Make sure to keep tracking..."

I have done this too. It gets better as you learn the dice pool system, but I just find it funny the chant of X means Y, and A means B is so familiar by now.

The ultimate end of dice pool games is of course the Genesys system, which has all sorts of positive and negative success levels, story results, advantage and disadvantage, and other things to manipulate and combine on a single roll like some mad alchemy. I like Genesys for the story-system parts and dice that can cover a wide swath of action instead of being stuck in the micro, turn-to-turn reality all the time.

In a way, yes, Forbidden Lands and Genesys are related in their dice-pool ways, with different dice for different things, and pools you build off skills and attributes. Forbidden Lands plays closer to the B/X metal and tries to keep that "turn by turn" fantasy feeling. Genesys lives in the abstract and revels in rolling around like a cat in pounds of special dice like catnip, handle a few months of action or an entire combat with one roll? Fiiiine....

In a gonzo dice pool game goes crazy way I like it.

Part of me likes B/X for doing mostly the same thing with less, no special dice, no special meanings to rolls, no symbols to decipher, and leaving more up to the players and referee.

There is a difference here between less mechanics and more.

To be fair, the dice in Forbidden Lands of a lot of work. They handle equipment damage, ammo, food, water, and torches. The system is highly tuned for the survival-exploration experience, and the dice make that game better. They take a load of bookkeeping off your shoulders. They help in solo play a lot.

I like Forbidden Lands and the dice, it appeals to me in all of the results and surprises the dice hold. I grew up on B/X and there is always that part of my mind that fights me and says, "You don't need it. Just play. Make it up yourself. No special dice or charts needed. Your imagination is better." But with B/X comes the tracking and work that more modern games do away with and use mechanics to simplify.

Forbidden Lands, along with a lot of Free League's games, get the appeal of mechanics and dice pools and work hard to make them simplify play and ease the burden on players and the referee. They are some of the best games on the market these days and very innovative.

There are times though I can see the B/X perspective and how some would say none of that is needed.

One approach is not better than the other, but they are very interesting to compare and think about from a design perspective.