Baba

Any theories/inside knowledge about the passions "Devotion" and "Station"?

Seems likely, hope you're right!

I’m excited! This looks good! The changes I spotted, and what I think of them at first glance: Stuff I liked Slightly lower armor ratings? : The armor of the pregenerated knights adds up to 12. I guess what they wear is equivalent to at 14 point partial plate in 5.2? Lower armor rating seems like a good thing, because combat between knights may not just be about waiting for the crit, and because you're not quite as safe ignoring the 3d6 damage footsoldier stabbing at you. Crits give a flat +4d6 instead of doubling your dice: I like this a lot. The footman's crit becomes actually worrisome, while a lance charge crit doesn't automatically kill you. Appeal: Appearance has been such an oddly narrow stat, and it is hardly used for anything. Changing it to Appeal seems to be an attempt to make it more worth the focus it gets as one of five attributes. I appreciate the effort, but I wonder: How does this work with skills like Courtesy, Orate, Intrigue, Play, Sing and so on? It seems like a very appealing character should be good at those skills. Fewer skills: Generally I think 5.2 has too many skills that are seldom tested. The main problem with that is when you feel like your character probably SHOULD be good at something, but you don't feel good about wasting points on skills you are never going to use. 6th edition seems to fix that. Faerie Lore and Folk Lore have been folded together. I've never rolled a Folk Lore test in my life, and the common understanding of the word "folklore" includes lore about faeries. Heraldry and Recognize have been folded together. Neither are used very often at our table, and they seem related. Boating is gone. I don't know what you'll use now if you get into a dramatic situation on a boat, but we have only tested boating once the last five years. Read is now called Literacy. Fair enough. Flirting and Romance are folded together - or perhaps flirting now covers the flirting aspect of romance, while other aspects of romance are covered by Courtesy, Compose, Dancing, Orate, Play and so on. Good - it sometimes seemed difficult to choose whether to test flirting or romance, we mostly ended up ignoring the flirting skill. In theory, if you wanted to be a real charmer, you had to improve both, which seems unreasonably expensive. Swimming is gone. I'm guessing it's a dex test now? Good. My first character had swimming 10, and never made a swimming test in his life. My second character had swimming 5 although he grew up by a river, and almost drowned on the only swimming test he ever made. Tourney is gone. Good, we never really knew what to do with that. Maybe it's covered by Courtesy now? Stuff I am uncertain about or neutral about Normal swords are called arming swords. That's fine. The "Lance" skill is now called "charge". Possibly so that players won't ask to use their lance skill when not charging? Not a rule change, just a name change. Horsemanship is no longer a combat skill. Probably doesn't matter. Your weapon skill is capped by your Horsemanship skill when you are riding. Seems ok? There are more detailed rules for brawling. Probably ok? Haven't missed them, but not negative. On a partial success you can parry with your weapon instead of using a shield, gaining a lower damage reduction than a shield would have given you. The good thing about this, is that it makes a partial success valuable for someone not using a shield. But it also makes the shield less good comparatively, I'm not sure if I like that. Starting knights seem to get more passions. This could make passions less special? I generally don't like making lists longer. A Pendragon character allready has a lot of different stats. Passion rules: Lots of changes, I have to mull a bit more over these. Stuff I didn’t care for at first glance A crit doesn’t automatically beat a normal success anymore - you also have to roll higher: Those poor footmen and bandits are already mostly a roadbump, now they can’t even depend on a crit. Partitioned armor rating (coat of plates, aketon, great helm): I don't see how this will make the game more enjoyable, and so I don’t think it will be worth the extra complexity (even though it's not very complex).

I agree. Still, I am fine with that - it is a simple, unfinicky solution. Fighting with two weapons seems like a less defensive choice than a shield. If the player wanted a more defensive two-weapon style, I guess I would alternatively allow a secondary weapon to give him 6 additional armor reduction on a partial success - but then it would always work like that for him. Without having playtested it, the houserule you propose seems to make fighting with two weapons: * Very good if you have average weapon skill and above average dexterity, much better that existing options. It would make players feel a bit like losing out if they DIDN’T fight with two weapons. Every young knight should do it. * Increasingly worse the better weapon skill you get. You would loose out on high crit chances and no chance of failures/fumbles. So if his weapon skill got very good, the knight would be tempted to drop his signature style because of it’s mechanical shortcomings. I would want the players to make weapon choices based on how they envision their characters, not on what works best mechanically.

My personal taste: I would want this to be purely a stylistic choice for the player, not a mechanical/strategical choice. So I would treat it like I treat all the two-handed weapons: +1d6 damage, but no shield.

We don’t even GIVE most of them stats, unless we actually need to make a roll for them. Exception: We have a standard stat blocks for all wives that improve two times as they age, and some of the wives get an exceptional skill, but it never improves - it’s just good from the start. Two wives have been involved enough to get individual (unchanging) statblocks. Most other people get nothing, unless a particular stat is an important part of their concept. We do like to keep track of the weapon skill and lance skill of important npc’s, though. But not squires - they probably change to much to bother.

I love Pendragon, but I don't love the many subsystems. Glory for standards of living is one of the parts that we have just houseruled away. Not because it doesn't make sense to get glory for standards of living, but because that seems to be covered by other rules. You already get annual glory for your holdings. In addition, your holdings also give you annual £, that you can spend on conspicuous consumption. Those two mechanics together lead to rich knights getting glory for living well - a third mechanic giving another pittance of annual glory seems superfluous to me. We HAVE houseruled greater glory rewards for conspicuous consumption, though, in our case 5 glory/librum, as discussed in another thread. So the glory we miss from dropping this, we get reimbursed through gifts and feasts and luxuries. https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/10315-childbirth-and-child-survival-moriens-recommended-quick-fix/?do=findComment&comment=178962

What we have done: For characters older than 21, we make them as a normal 21 year old, and then for every extra year they get: Annual training Annual glory 50 extra glory You won’t get a sword skill of 25 that way, but we’ve never had a PK with a skill of 25 anyway. They will still feel a bit lackluster compared to PK’s that have actually been played, though. Still, from a story point of view (and also because of the lacluster thing) we like the thought of playing the character from his youth. So for our third generation, everyone switched aproximately at the same time. One father PK was lost through play. One ward/uncle PK, the GM put in an otherwise unreasonably dangerous situation, and he was killed. And the last ward/uncle PK, he withdrew to the woods as a hermit. So for the third generation, everyone started with fresh-faced soon-to-be-knighted squires ready to win their spurs.

I agree. I don’t see it as a problem though. One 21 year old has seen seven years of adventures, the other one has had a more normal squire life. (Also, all of this is theory. In practise, the character in question was junior for most of his life, even after everyone had changed to second generation. In the end, though, he became the most glorious character of our campaign, so far, partly because of the points you raise.)

Yes, all of that. (Well, he didn’t get any annual glory for being a vassal, because he wasn’t, and he didn’t get any income. But he got all of those other perks.) He still played second fidle for his older companions for twenty years, though.

I’ve played a squire from age 15 once, while the others played experienced knights, and I had great fun with it. Some things that made it work for us: * Be the squire of a player knight * the GM should concider the squire a main character, and set scenes/introduce challenges accordingly. If you only focus on stuff that knights do, then it will be boring to play a squire. But the squire can be the knights confidante, messenger, and so on. Let him face his own challenges and choices, where it’s not natural for the knight to step in. * Play through the years quickly, don’t devote several sessions to each game year. If you do, the squire will never reach maturity. I built and later developed my fifteen year old exactly as if he had been 21. It may not be very realistic, and may have given him an edge (he got a longer active period before aging began at 35), but in practice it worked fine and nobody had any problems with it. But he had leather armor, was only the backup in most fights, and got less glory than the rest. The PK he squired for was also his uncle and guardian, who ran (and profited from) his lands. He was knighted at nineteen or twenty, I think.

We used Estate from the start - I think it was new at the time. (I have book of the manor, but we never used it). By all means, it worked fine - we used it for the first 25 years of the campaign and built some thriving economies. But at the end of anarchy we took a hard look at what we wanted our campaign to be about and what we wanted to spend our time on, and estate management wasn’t it. Nothing wrong with it - just not our main interest. Part of it was also that your character can gain some significant advantages if you game it strategicaly, and that did not fit with the vibe we wanted. Now our lands only have the three economy stats Customary Revenue, Discretionary fund and Standard of living, the two later derived from the former as per Book of the Estate, and we never fiddle with those stats. Investments do not change them, damage does not change them, family and servants do not change them, the only thing that may change them is if you gain or lose land. The only significance it has when it comes up in play, is that some player knights are rich and others are not. THAT is important to us - but we don’t feel we need anything more.

Estate - but as you say, we now give no mechanical benefits for investments whatsoever, except rewarding it as CC. (The character still gets the benefit of now having some bees they didn't have before or a nice hall or whatever. But it doesn't generate income or glory or checks.)

Sounds good! Agreed!

I guess I would give a benefit if the character was up on a castle wall defending against an attacking enemy. But so far, that has only happened to us once in 60 years. So close to no mechanical perks. We stopped giving checks/yearly glory/income and so forth for manor improvements after the Anarchy - that system began feeling a bit too fiddly for us.

In our game, we felt that yearly passive glory bonuses were overshadowing active glory, so we reduced them. We liked the concept of them though, thinking that they represented glorious stuff you do during the rest of the year, so we did not want to remove them entirely. What we've used for the last four years or so: * At least one famous trait: 10 glory (but more than one famous traits does not give more glory) * At least one famous passion: 10 (as above) * Vassal/estate holder/baron/king: 10/30/60/100 * Ideals: 50 each We kept the 80 limit for Chivalrous, though. I like that it's achievable for somewhat flawed knights. Knights with 96 in those traits may seem a bit... boring? I don't think the Gawain and Tristan of my mind's eye would qualify, for example, although I would still let them be chivalrous. At least Gawain.

In our game we sort of streamlined glory for spending, giving 5 glory/librum for just about anything, but then not giving any OTHER glory or mechanical perks for stuff like this: * Gifts * fancy clothes * new castle wall * new manor improvement * hosting tournament * hosting feast * etc. The only spending we do not give glory for is "necessary" spending, like horses/weapons/armor for yourself.

We use a simple google site, and we keep track of the npc's in a google sheet that feeds into it. If one npc is updated with a new year, then all the others will get updated age and glory based on the new year. We have been quite happy with it. If we were starting today, however, we may have gone for the OneNote solution instead. I would have kept the npc sheet though, I love that. Our episode write-up solution does not work very well at all - we set it up aiming for extremely short yearly summaries, but then we ended up writing longer texts that didn't fit the format. But that's a problem with our set-up, not with google sites. I think maybe the newer version of google sites have a lot of volume restrictions. We use the older, less strict one, though. It ends up like looking like this (in Norwegian, sadly): https://sites.google.com/site/blodogsed/personer/alle-levende It's all free.

This may be very obvious advice - if so, just ignore it - but I'm guessing the best thing for your campaign will be for you to change anything you want, without feeling constrained by the books. I you like Roger, and you like him as a bishop, just keep him, and ignore Abbot Rhain. The organization of the church has not had any significance in my campaign - it may in yours, but then again, it may not.

Sounds good. The following is just my preferences, not based on the rulebook: I don’t think I would have given check or penalty for doing your duty (invading Bedegraine) - that’s just the expected action. I would have given check and penalty for disobedience, though. For the Hate (Uther) passion, I would let the player decide if it was fitting or not. Normaly when giving new passions, we give them a value of 10+1d6. If they are lower than 10 they will seldom be rolled, and if they’re higher than 16 lose a bit of their dangerous and fun edge. In rare exceptions, if it seems extremely important and positive to the character, we might do 12+1d6 instead. (Sidenote: We have also houseruled that the value of a passion indicates how positive or negative an influence it is, more than how strong it is. So a passion of 11 could be extremely strong ( strong enough to make you tear the fellowship of the round table apart), it’s just more likely to make you cry or mope or go running screaming into the woods instead of inspiring you to be great. That seems more in line with how it works mechanicaly.)

The first one means you get one reroll next year, and a +5 modifier to that reroll. The second one is a reference to a house rule - it means it will be easier to marry a high status wife this winter.

The autotranslate turned out surprisingly well! I accidentaly uploaded an older version, though. This newer one is mostly the same, but the rewards are better (we felt the old one was a bit stingy). 3 Årlig Solo fra 543.docx

Sure! Here it is. Ignore table c, we only used it during the anarchy. Read «check melee» as «check your relevant weapon skill». 3 Årlig Solo.docx

We are three players rotating GM responsibilities. In any given year, we only give a solo to the gm’s character. We are usually a bit short on time, and we like to do all play at the table, so we have made our own list of shorter solos. We roll a d20 and pick one at random. It involves a short descrption, 0-1 choices, 1-3 tests and give some checks and possible story consequences. Ideally going through it and discussing it should take no more than five minutes. I would post it here, but sadly it’s in norwegian.

We made some house rules for weapons and armor 3-4 years ago, but it sounds like we went in an opposite direction from what you're describing. They have worked out great for us, but we may not have the same goals. Our goals were: We are not good at remembering fidly weapon rules, so most weapons should not have special rules What weapon you use should be mostly a stylistic choice, and you should change between them when you want to Normal swords shouldn't get outdated as a primary weapon. Historically that may make sense, but in Malory there are a lot of swords. Combats should be shorter (fewer dice rolls) Losing tests should have consequences, and crits shouldn't be the only way to win combats, so we want to give and take more damage A crit should ALWAYS be dangerous, so we should improve crits from weak opponents Because of this, we: 1) Reduced the number of melee weapon types to four, all of them using the same "melee" skill: One-handed melee (no special rules) Two-handed melee (+1d6 damage, no shield) Daggers and improvised weapons (-1d6 damage) Long spears and halberds (+1d6 damage, no shield, no penalty vs. horses, horses do not get bonus vs. them, not knightly) Making the long spear strictly better wasn't a problem, because the npc's using it would most often be weaker than the player knights. We kept a separate Lance skill, with a +5 lance charge. 2) Changed crits to a flat +15 damage. This way they would always be dangerous, we wouldn’t get any more "plink crits", crits from normal foot soldiers would do damage, and crits from very strong opponents wouldn't be autokill. 3) Reduced armor effectiveness, to make combats shorter. (shield 6, leather 4, chain 9, reinforced chain 10, partial plate 12, full plate 14, Gothic Plate 15) 4) Reduced horse damage, to make up for the reduced armor (courser 5d6, charger 6d6, andalusian charger 7d6 rare/normal from 519/540, destrier 8d6 rare/normal from 535/554), friesian destrier 9d6 rare from 558 )