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View Full Version : System-specific coolness points



Quertus
2015-10-19, 03:28 PM
Are there any powers, rules, etc, that were really "cool" in one system, but not so much in other systems? Or characters where converting them to another system would likely make them lose what made them cool, because other systems just don't handle things the same way?

For example, for me, I love what another player called the "tables of doom" - tables with bizarre random effects. The 2e wild surge table, the mutations table in the Tome of Corruption... heck, even the random mutations in Book of Vile Darkness, or the random upgrades in Babylon 5. But, oddly enough, I don't much like D&D's Wand/Rod of Wonder, 2e- Wild Talent tables, or its (various incarnations of) Bag of Beans.

I love what (older) Shadowrun did with initiative - getting to go on 34, then on 24, then on 14, before your foes go on 6, then getting to go again on 4 made the street samurai feel fast. Yeah, WoD has Celerity, and I was in a D&D party that had alpha-strike down to a science (the lowest init was+7, on an elven archer - the monsters rarely got to go), but the implementation (everyone getting to go, then the character with Celerity getting to take extra actions in WoD; random rolls letting you sometimes take your just-as-many-actions-as-everyone-else first in D&D) just doesn't make the characters feel as awesomely fast as the street samurai.

Does anyone else have any abilities that had system- or implementation-specific coolness?