Since it is not really a D&D RPG, is this an accepted forum to discuss this game? If not, could someone please point me to the correct forum?
Thanks!
Havard
Originally posted by vader42xx
I don't remember much about it accept that I wasn't really fond of it, but I'd say this is the right place to talk about it. Saga was a D&D product of sorts and it's certainly out of print so I say go for it.
Okay then!
SAGA remains one of my favorite game systems. It was never very popular due to the unorthodox use of cards rather than dice and the fact that it was introduced with Dragonlance whose fans wanted to use AD&D.
It was in many ways a very simple game, combat was quick and fast paced, but its greatest strength IMO was the magic system, which is the best I have yet to see for a fantasy rpg. It had no spells, but you could instead make up spells on the fly, and very quickly determine spell point cost and casting difficulty. I have considered using those rules with D&D3e, but havent made any serious attempts for conversion so far.
Did anyone else here have any experience with SAGA (DL or MSH)?
Havard
I agree with havard that the magic system was the best part of Dragonlance SAGA. Unfortunately, DL SAGA was not the same as the later Marvel SAGA. Marvel showed many new innovations to the SAGA system.
Originally posted by RobertFisher
I've never encountered the Saga system. Could you give a overview of it or post a link to such?
This site might be useful:
http://www.dl3e.com/taladas/
In the DL SAGA RPG you used cards instead of dice. To perform an action you would select a card from your hand, and add the number on the card to the relevant stat. If the total was greater than the difficulty set by the GM, you succeeded. Also, for opposed actions the GM simply added a difficulty to the stats of the monster/npc, so he never had to worry about cards. Each player would have a number of cards on his hand, depending on how experienced the character was.
The whole card mechanic was interesting because you would have to consider whether you wanted to spend a good card at a current situation or save it for later. Once you spent a card you got to draw another one. The problem was that eventually youd have to play a low card, just to avoid being stuck with a bunch of them in a really critical situation.
Then there was the trump mechanic. Each suit was associated with a stat, and when used in combination with that stat, you were allowed to flip a second card from the deck and add its number to the total. This was also a good way to get rid of low cards, as well as allowing some more randomness into the game.
The Marvel variant also had a mechanic called Edge which allowed you to spend several low cards at the same time. Your edge determined how high cards could be added together. I assume this was introduced to lower the chance of people being stuck with a bunch of low ones. I never had a chance to play MSH Saga though.
In any case, I was sad to see the game fail. Me and my group had lots of fun with it, but the strategy of trying to sell it to a bunch of hard core AD&D fans was a mistake. And since Marvel-based RPGs never last long, apparently, the story of Saga was a short one...
Havard
(obligatory negative comment for the thread
)Originally posted by Torpedo
I am extremely fond of the Marvel SAGA system. Best supers RPG ever!
I agree with havard that the magic system was the best part of Dragonlance SAGA. Unfortunately, DL SAGA was not the same as the later Marvel SAGA. Marvel showed many new innovations to the SAGA system.
I never got a chance to play MSH Saga, I found the game extremely hard to get ahold of in this part of the world. Which rules from MSH do you think should have been incorporated into the DL version?
Havard
Originally posted by havard
Which rules from MSH do you think should have been incorporated into the DL version?
The Doom Bank! If I recall correctly, the Dragonlance SAGA had a Dragon Suit. Marvel SAGA had a similar Doom suit (with a picture of Dr. Doom in the upper right hand corner). I believe that whenever a player played a Dragon suit card in DL SAGA something bad happened or the action failed.
In Marvel SAGA, the Doom suited cards would act like any other card in order to determince success (but Doom cards were never trump). However, the gamemaster would not discard the Doom cards as they were played. Instead, he would collect them in a special pile called the Doom Bank. As the adventure went on, the Doom Bank would grow. The gamemaster could use the cards in the Doom Bank to make heroes actions more difficult, or make the villains more successful at any time. The gamemaster had to use the Doom Bank up before the adventure was over. So usually there was a large Doom Bank by the time the heroes encountered the main villain. Then the players were in for one heck of a fight! It made relatively low-powered villains like the Vulture and Kraven the Hunter really challenging without resorting to giving them exagerrated stats.
You already mentioned Edge above, but that was another great innovation in Marvel SAGA. I didn't play DL SAGA more than once or twice. Did it have rules for Pushing, Stunts, and Aura durations / recovery? I felt those were appropriate to the comic book setting.
My game group played a weekly Marvel SAGA campaign for nearly 2 years, and we still play it maybe two or three times a year. I can't recommend it highly enough if you're a comic book fan.
Saga Game System = New Coke
Originally posted by Torpedo
Steve Kenson (of Mutants and Masterminds fame) did work on Marvel SAGA. He has a great website of information and resources for Marvel SAGA for anyone who's interested. Check out The Marvel-Phile
Thanks for the link! I think I may have visited this site in the past, but I forgot how much stuff that is actuall there! Very useful.
Btw, thanks for the info on Marvel Saga in your previous post. I am not sure what pushing, stunts or aura are. Dragon Lance Saga did have various combat actions you could use, like Great Blow which allowed you to double strength for attacks and damage, but that would leave you open for a blow etc. Im not sure if stunts is anything like that?
The Doom bank sounds interesting. It would especially be useful for establishing major badguys, which I feel is DL Saga's weak point. The way the Dragon Suit works now is that if an action used with a Dragon card results in a failure, that failure becomes a fumble, usually resulting against the oponent gaining a free attack on you. That option is not so bad, but it would be easy to turn that into a Dragon Bank aswell...
I'm looking for more ways to improve the DL Saga variant. Didn't Marvel Saga have a skill system aswell? DL Saga had one too, that was introduced in the Companion Rules, but it wasn't all that great IMO.
Ideas?
Havard
things I liked about SAGA:
The magic system. As in, I honestly think that it's the best magic system I have ever encountered in a game. It works like I think magic SHOULD work. (However, the only narrator I knew insisted that we write up spells, and we were only allowed 3 spells to cast, because he mangled the rule that you could only have 3 long term magic effects going at once.)
The ease of which I could write adventures. I could write adventures relatively quickly, and that's a good thing, in my opinion. (I like 3E, but I'd be lying if I said that I liked spending 3 times as much time writing the blasted adventure as I did in 2E, and SAGA took about half of 2E's time, if that.)
Things I disliked:
Anything that was capable of hitting you killed you in one hit. anything that you were capable of hitting, you killed in one hit. I hated that.
No scaling of powers. A rabble with 1 card wasn't that much better than a legend with a hand of 10 cards.
Too easy to have unbalanced characters. I played a campaign where I had a grand total of 4 9A's in my stats, and where another player who had a highest of 6b, and the rest were c's and d's. I stomped everything in the dirt. He was struggling to keep up. Neither of us had that much fun. (And don't go off on me about that, because I remember a few years ago I said that about SAGA, and someone made a multi-paragraph rant about how I had no self control, how I was a munchkin, how I should quite roleplaying and play Diablo, etc. If you're thinking anything like that, I've heard it before. Yell it at the screen, because posting it won't bother me anyway.)
That's about it. Although, to be honest, I never used it in Dragonlance campaign setting, I wrote a homebrew SAGA campaign. However, I don't think that would matter, as we didn't have many house rules. (Well, the other narrator did, but that was because he had trouble understanding them. But that's not germane to the discussion.)
I see how the fact that if you are strong enough to hit an opponent, you will also most likely cause enough damage to kill him in one blow, since his "Hit Points" are equal to his Physical/Endurance, same as the number added to the Difficulty to figure out how hard he is to hit. However, armor subtracts points from damage, so that might help a bit. I can see benefits of having some way of giving critters more HP though.
For Heroes (ie PCs), they do have extra HP in the form of cards, so I don't see them having this problem. A PC witn En=6 who suffers 6 points of damage simply has to pay for that damage in cards, which shouldn't be much of a problem. Ofcourse, since that means he also loses that/those card(s), it will reduce the heroes effectiveness in combat untill he is healed.
I agree that the character creation system is flawed. We came up with a way of distributing points rather than flip cards for character generation. I have never liked randomness in character generation anyways, and since Abilities are so important in SAGA having them determined randomly is worse than rolling for stats in D&D.
Things that could be improved:
* Alternative Character Generation system.
* Ways to make more powerful NPCs. One Narrator I played with used higher difficulties for fighting against some of the NPCs. I disliked that at the time, but now I think there should be some sort of system to illustrate more powerful Characters(NPCs), in the way Heroes have cards. Perhaps raising the difficulties is the way to do it. I don't know. Perhaps villains could get a status level same as Heroes do with a Difficulty increase added to it? If we use the Doom Bank idea from Marvel, cards from a Dragon Bank could be limited to use with major villains...
* Generic magic system. For settings other than SAGA, (Red Steel among others) we used the Spheres/Schools presented in some issue of Dragon or other, which for Sorcerers basically was the AD&D Schools, though somewhat different for Clerics.
* Roles. I always found that both roles and races were imbalanced. I'd rather have a more generic system to figure out who'd have automatic trumps, how many, and what penalties would come with one.
* Skill system. Didnt like the Skill System from Companion. I also felt that it should have incorporated how to get automatic trumps, weapon skills etc.
* Edge. Of all the things for Marvel, this might be the one thing that would be most useful for SAGA. Getting rid of small cards is a problem, and although it can give interesting results, it can sometimes be tiring aswell.
* More magic rules: Id like to see more rules for enchantments, making magical items, casting more powerful spells etc.
What do you think?
Havard
Did it have expansions or adventures? Was it at all compatible with D&D? Could you run a D&D module using the system?
Originally posted by Elendur
I'd like to hear more about SAGA, esp. the fantasy version. I remember being intriqued when it came out, but I wasn't gaming at the time.
Did it have expansions or adventures? Was it at all compatible with D&D? Could you run a D&D module using the system?
There was lots of material for Dragonlance SAGA. Quite a few boxed sets plus one Beastiary and the Palantas Book. Also there were IIRC two adventure modules presented with both AD&D2 and SAGA rules. the boxed sets all had setting info, rules, Roles (similar to classes, though less restricting) and scenarios.
The boxed sets I recall were:
Heroes of Steel (Fighters
Heroes of Deceptions (Rogues)
Heroes of Hope (Mystics, ie Cleric eqivalents)
Heroes of Sorcery (Sorcerers)
Towers of High Sorcery
Converting the material to D&D wouldn't be too hard. IIRC there were conversion rules in the main boxed set. OTOH, Dragonlance: Age of Mortals probably has all the info you are looking for for 3e.
Actually, I really liked how the 5th Age was presented in the game, before the War of Souls trilogy came out. With the assumption that the Gods had really left (including Thakhisis) and that the Dragons would be the new gods on Krynn, it really turned Krynn into a different kind of fantasy setting with lots of gaming potential. War of Souls, although an interesting read, pretty much ruined that setting for rpg purposes though, and IMO the setting after WoS is far less interesting and more generic.
Havard
Originally posted by Amaron Blackthorn
Quick question, why is this on a d&d board?
Saga->Dragonlance->D&D
Saga->TSR<-D&D
Saga->OOP game with ties to D&D->OOP D&D Board
Besides, it's not like traffic's so heavy around here that the occasional Saga or MSH or Star Frontier or whatever thread is a problem.
Originally posted by RobertFisher
Saga->Dragonlance->D&D
Saga->TSR<-D&D
Saga->OOP game with ties to D&D->OOP D&D Board
Besides, it's not like traffic's so heavy around here that the occasional Saga or MSH or Star Frontier or whatever thread is a problem.
This is interesting. The basic mechanic of SAGA and D&D3e really arent that different. Maybe a good marketing idea for Wizards would be to launch a D&D Saga, using the 3e mechanic with the Saga cards?
This would certainly be in line with Wizard's other releases like Chainmail and the upcoming D&D Basic.....
Håvard
Originally posted by Amaron Blackthorn
Is the basic set still going to be 3.5? Or is it just an introduction to the game?
Not sure. It might be just an introduction, though I am sort of hoping for a D&D3.5 Lite. All I know about it though is that it will have an introduction by Vin Diesel.
Havard
Originally posted by Amaron Blackthorn
By Vin Diesal? Why? That sounds so iggnunt.
He is a big D&D fan, apparently.
Tying this back up with SAGA, my point was that Wizards seem to keep bringing previous concepts back under the 3e banner such as Chainmail and Basic D&D, so why not a D&D Saga aswell?
Håvard
Originally posted by Amaron Blackthorn
They just might do that! However they might not do so in the foreseeable future.
You never know what these guys are up to...
How hard would it be to convert the SAGA mechanic into the DD3 system? Difficulties in SAGA are:
Easy: 4
Average 8
Challenging 12
Whereas DD3 have:
Easy: 5
Average: 10
Hard: 15
Very Hard: 20
In general, DCs in DD3 are a little higher than the SAGA ones, but this balances out by SAGA having these DCs added to an opponents ability score for opposed checks, rather than having him roll a die.
It would perhaps be interesting to include the D&D skil system (possibly more or less as is) with SAGA and allowing skill points to be added to the Ability Score for checks.
Whatcha think?`
Havard