Super Large and Crazy house rule (Advanced Open Legend)

I uhh… Made a thing, its a ruleset based around the Open Legend rules, its supposed to be a sort of add on (basically what any house rule or new rule does anyway) and I decided to give it a name (Advanced Open Legend) or… Overly complicated Open Legend.

Not even sure if this is the correct forum place to put this on.

So the idea was this: What if I made Open Legend way more complicated than it should be but still try to retain it’s simplicity and open…ness…?
It was a stupid thing that I wrote one day on a whim and randomly decided to play using the ruleset and they thought it was fun, but could use a few more tweaking, so I did, and we played again, and the cycle continued to a point where I and they thought it would be a good idea to share this set of rules to the whole world…

So basically what is in here is add new functions but keep the already existing ones without changing them. Actually a few rules actually change some of the existing ones.
So a brief overview the things this ruleset, it adds
-New Feats, Banes, and Boons
-Resource management rules
-New Action rules
-New Item properties
-Turning Wealth Level into Wealth Points
Using Advanced Open Legends doesn’t mean you have to use everything in it, obviously just like how our party and probably yours too don’t use alignments on d&d.

I think a few more examples of the rules in play and more descriptions (and definitely some Special Action examples) would’ve been nice but I sadly just don’t have enough motivation to do so. To be honest I made this ruleset more so for the game aspect rather than the storytelling aspect and never bothered too much with that side.

I’m personally not proud of it because I think it destroys Open Legend and just… Completely changes it but that’s just me.
What do you guys think? Would you ever use at least one of these rules to your games? Do you think it’s good? Are there flaws? Do you have any suggestions for changes? Let me and everyone else know your thoughts about this strange thing I made.

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This seems like an odd fit for this system, which as you say was built around simplicity and open-ness. It might be easier to either find a different system or even build a new one from scratch, but I’ll try and give some feedback anyway

  • Your HP for Speed conversion is a bit excessive. As it stands, a reasonably built character would +50% their speed without feeling any major downsides even without any feats. I’d peg the cost at 5’ per 5HP/
  • I really don’t understand what you mean with the armor and speed section. I think you’re giving options to modify existing armor items by changing their cost, but if so then I don’t see why it belongs in character creation. Also, with the option to reduce WL by increasing Fortitude requirement you make already very tanky characters even tankier by giving them access to much better armor.
  • Your extended attributes are broken. This has been documented before but beyond about 4d10 the statistics just fall apart. Also it was found out way back when making the system originally that 1d12 compares really poorly between 1d10 and 2d6. It was left out of the system for a reason.
  • The PL calculation for boons is way too complex to be doing during play. Anything which requires you to have a table in front of you or a calculator on hand is probably not a good idea to include.
  • I like the suggestions for alternate progression! The idea of spending feat points to gain levels early seems weird though, I’m not sure why you’d include that.
  • The reset, as well as the extended attributes mentioned earlier, is just a bad idea. If your game goes that long then you turn each roll into binary success/failure. Either the character has been dumping all their points since level 10 into that attribute, in which case they’re almost impossible to challenge, or they haven’t in which case they can’t possibly succeed at something meant to challenge someone who has.
  • The item rules seem fine, except for the Dice property which you should be careful with. It is massively more powerful than advantage.
  • Wealth Points might be fine, or they might not be. I think they’d need a lot of playtesting to find out.
  • Durability is a neat idea, might be worth putting that forward as a separate thing because it could be something others are interested in.
  • The new Actions system is an interesting idea, but it feels to me like you just want to be playing D&D (or similar). It makes a lot of assumptions about setting and only adds bookkeeping.
  • I like some of the new banes, boons and feats, though unlike what you say in your post they seem to assume you’re playing with the rest of your supplement in order to work.
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Thank you for the response! I do want to try to maybe make this overly large and strange set of rules to be better so I appreciate any feed back.

First of, I knew most of the things in AOL were broken from the moment I created them (I’m mostly referring about the attributes beyond 10 here), I tried balancing them but it never worked out, heck that’s why they only reach 17 when I originally planned up to 20.
And yes the new boon invocation requirement formula is clunky, it was the most balanced way I could think of to balance boon invocation requirements for the already unbalanced new attribute point system, I’m not a probability expert so I have no idea if there is a better way to do this, the entire attribute system in aol is already broken anyway so I dunno… I’m open (heh) to suggestions.
The system was my way of trying to make beyond level 10 and really really long campaigns if they would even ever happen, hopefully somewhat more interesting…?

The Wealth Point system has been fine on my party so far, some things are kinda overpriced and some underpriced which I’m still figuring out but the idea was that nobody was stopping a player to just buy an infinite amount of WL1 items, so I made this.

one part of your message I don’t understand is the part about the armor part of the ruleset. You said you don’t understand something there but I don’t understand what you don’t understand, please explain.

Again thank you and I welcome any more things to add to the discussion.

EDIT:
AOL has defenitely changed alot over the time between making this post, so upon looking at the addon, some posts might no longer make sense, these changes were thanks to more playtesting, feedback, and other things that might have been possibly a factor. So upon reading this, you are hopefully reading a more fun and balanced set of house rules. Still, you are welcome to discuss and stuff, that’s what this site is for… I think.

I’m afraid there is no better way to do it, as far as I’m aware (and I’ve done quite a lot of statistics over the course of my degrees). Without rewriting the whole attribute system from the ground up there’s no way to keep the increase in averages and deviations similar as you level up; this is why I suggested either finding a different system or making a new one.

There’s some good news though, you can go beyond level 10 in Open Legend already! The attribute cap doesn’t increase, but due to the costs of the higher levels it would still take another thirty seven levels before you run out of non-Extraordinary attributes to level up. If you count the Extraordinary attributes it goes to level eighty seven. I’d say it would probably be around level 25 or so when the characters start to look similar, which at an average of 1xp every 3 sessions (about what I’d aim for in a long campaign) and 1 session every week would keep you going for about 4 years. The PCs will be massively overpowered by this point of course, but much less than if the attributes extended past 9. If you’re not sick of Open Legend after that long playing it week in, week out then you’re a bigger fan than I am :laughing:

I would expect some prices to be wrong to start with under a new economy. Don’t be afraid to keep tweaking it as you go. As for your other point… there absolutely is somebody stopping a player buying an infinite number of WL 1 items: the GM. You control how many of an item is available to buy, and you should also consider that buying in bulk is subject to its own economy if it ever comes up. There’s a reason a sword is WL 2, armor is WL 2, but outfitting a small militia is given as an example of WL 5 (not WL 3 as you seem to be assuming).

This is a point that comes up a lot with people new to the system, and I’m not quite sure why. In D&D the suggested price for a chicken is 2cp, but I’ve not once seen anyone complaining that a player with 3,000gp can buy a thousand chickens without scratching their wealth. The WL system is designed so that if something is cheap enough to be inconsequential, you don’t bother keeping track of it. Like most DMs won’t make their party pay for food and water in a D&D game, unless your party enjoys tracking silver and copper. The WL system just says “Is your supply of money an order of magnitude greater than the cost? Then yes, you can afford it no problem.”

Having gone back and reread it, I think I understand it now. If I’m interpreting it correctly, you want a much wider range of armor to be available and have written up some formulae for calculating how much they cost. What I wasn’t getting the first time was why that wasn’t in the section on items, having it in character creation confused me a little and made me think the change was based on the character rather than the armor they’re wearing.

I still think that allowing the WL reduction is dangerous, because it allows high Fortitude characters to wear ridiculously strong armor. I also think you mean “speed penalty” rather than speed when adding and subtracting from the armor, which causes huge problems in combination with your other rule of swapping HP for speed. Specifically, it allows high Fortitude characters to spend some of their plentiful HP to increase their defences which reduces their need for the HP to begin with as it reduces the damage they take on each and every hit.


Overall, I think there’s some neat ideas in there but a large portion of it just seems to be homebrewing for the sake of increased complexity. Maybe I’m just not seeing the end goal, but some of the things you’ve written up here (especially the action system) don’t seem to add anything to the game except busywork and more things to remember. Complexity is a cost you pay to add what you want, not a goal in itself.

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