Legends & Labyrinths: First Impressions (Chapters 1-5)

Justin Alexander of The Alexandrian has been working on a simplified version of Third Edition rules for years now. After numerous delays, the "Black Book Beta" for the project, now called Legends & Labyrinths, is making its way out to contributors, of which I'm one. You can read more about the project (including a number of previews) at the Alexandrian itself, and if you like, you can contribute as you see fit over at the Legends & Labyrinths 8-Bit Funding page.

I've now taken a cursory skim through the Beta (which is missing a complete detailing of spells, monsters, and magic items for now), and wanted to organize my initial thoughts on it. As I come back to the book in the coming days and weeks, I'll probably have further thoughts, including musings on how I might use material in the book for my Pathfinder game.

General Things
Layout/Graphics: The layout of the book is crisp and clean, and very easy to read. It's currently low on art, but this is isn't necessarily a bad thing all told, since it eases use of the book as a reference text. That will, of course, be changing in the future via the funding project, but judging from the functionality of the layout I've seen so far, the art won't be a detriment to the final product at all. The book as a whole has a minimalist approach to layout that strongly evokes the original AD&D books of my childhood, which I thought was pretty cool.

Sidebar Reference System: There are a lot of neat systems in the book (for stunts, building encounters, and so on), but the one that takes the cake has to be the Sidebar Reference System (SRS). It's so simple and yet so useful that I can't believe we've spent more than a decade with 3rd Edition (in various forms) and not seen something like this become standard. Whenever rules text (such as a class ability) references another mechanical item (such as the entangled condition or saving throws) or any other item that could send you scrambling to another part of the rulebook to fully understand the rules in question, the mechanic is highlighted in the main text and then described in full in the page's sidebar.

This minimizes page-turning, and also keeps rules text succinct and easy to read if you do remember the mechanic in question, so you're not forced to slog through long-winded parenthetical notations. Personally, I think the book's notable for this alone.

Chapter Impressions
1 - Character Creation: This is pretty standard fare, but the deliberate omission of point-buy methods of ability score generation made me smile, but maybe that's just my developing inner-grognard talking. Including the Creature Size table here was also a nice step, as it's much easier to find than on whatever random page it was in the back of the 3rd Edition Monster Manual.

2 - Advancing Characters: One thing I really liked about this chapter was that it puts some DM material front-and-center. Too often, the information necessary to run games is sequestered off near the end of the book (such as in Pathfinder) or in another book entirely (as in almost the entire history of D&D). I've always wondered if this keeps people from exploring these sections more, and thus keeping them from trying to run their own games from time to time. I could be completely wrong on that, though.

One thing of note in a legality sense is that the original advancement table for 3rd Edition was never considered OGC, and the "Fast" experience track does duplicate those numbers as far as I recall. The presented table is different enough (since it includes three experience tracks) that it may not matter for issues of legality, though.

3 - Ability Scores: These two pages are once again pretty standard but necessary for a self-contained system.

4 - Races: Now we're getting to the good stuff. L&L contains six races (Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Half-Elves, Halflings, and Half-Orcs). Anyone familiar with 3rd Edition will recognize the relevant racial abilities. Almost everything's maintained as you would expect to support full compatibility with 3rd Edition itself (to a greater degree than Pathfinder manages).

There two notable changes that I caught my first time through. Humans have lost their racial bonus feat, instead gaining a +2 bonus on Diplomacy and Sense Motive checks, which will reduce their popularity in a L&L game relative to a Third Edition one. However, feats as we know them were axed for L&L, so this isn't exactly surprising. (And in terms of mechanical bits, the bonus feat was quite clearly chosen for humans the same way all the classes now have their feats at every third level chosen for them). The other is that Elves finally got "Elven Trance" as an explicit racial trait. My games never generally used the ability, but I was glad to see it actually codified in the traits section as opposed to buried in descriptive text.

My only negative impression here is that Half-Orcs are still an entirely unattractive race choice. Since one of L&L's principle design goals was complete compatibility with 3E, the book's sort of hamstrung here, but part of me wonders if there isn't a better "brute" race in the Monster Manual that might work better. I haven't really cracked open the old book in a long time, though, so it's entirely possible that such a perusal would come up empty.

On a more humorous note: Gnomes are absent, and though Justin was worried about being considered a "gnome hater," I welcome him into our society with open arms!

5 - Classes: Each of the game's six classes (Barbarian, Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard, Sorcerer) is presented on a two-page spread (which is also one of the few nice things that 4E did). Class abilities in the text are presented in alphabetical order, which is honestly a little strange, as you can no longer really read the class to understand how they progress. This was intended to provide for ease of reference, but I'm not sure the trade-off is really worth it, since two pages isn't really a great deal to scan to find the ability you're looking for.

Each class has the class abilities you'd expect, as well as a new ability every third level (to replace the feat a character would have gained under standard 3E rules). Most of these abilities *are* feats, exactly as we know them, but there are a few new ones here and there.

Barbarians receive Combat Expertise, which feels strange for them thematically. Personally, I'd liked to have seen them get Endurance and Diehard (swapping out another feat to make room for the latter, obviously). One thing I really like, though, is the Sprint ability, gained at 3rd level (which is the thankfully-renamed Run feat from 3E). It's quite thematically appropriate, I think.

Clerics are as powerful as ever here, as we might expect in any revision of 3rd Edition. But that's okay, given that anyone reading this blog or checking out L&L is probably a fan of the different sort of balance achieved in 3E's various forms, as opposed to something like that in 4E. Notably, though, with the removal of feats, Clerics are going to have a harder time out-fighting fighters, and they also don't have any Metamagic to increase the power of their spells. Cleric "feats" are all centered around the two-step 3E turning mechanic. While it may be outside the scope of the project, I wonder if this shouldn't get some kind of a streamlining pass, since it's a larger focus of the class now.

Fighters do what you might expect. I do wish that they didn't receive the Weapon Focus/Specialization line as part of their class features, though. L&L has the opportunity to completely do away with the "specialization" problem of 3E by making it the assumption that warrior characters don't have to stick to the same weapon for life. This would allow them to make use of rare magical weapons that they find. Barbarians and Rogues are actually somewhat more flexible in their weapon choice than Fighters are in L&L because they don't receive any notable specialization abilities. This is somewhat difficult to address, as there are only so many feats to draw from in the SRD, but I think it's worth some thought, at least.

Rogues get my vote as the "best" class at this stage of the game's development. They're solid all around, and though they have high incentive to specialize in melee combat, they gain a couple abilities that don't make them helpless in ranged combat (where it's always been difficult to gain Sneak Attack damage). Chief among these is that they can ready a ranged attack to trigger when one of their allies strikes a target, and that target loses its Dex bonus to AC for the attack, triggering Sneak Attack dice. Rogues also gain the ability to Sneak Attack undead monsters at 9th level, which was always a huge issue for them in 3E.

I have one minor quibble with the Rogue. Due L&L favoring classifications for weapon proficiencies across the board (as opposed to lists), they're no longer proficient with short swords or short bows, since they're restricted to Simple weapons. Rogues have been proficient with these two since they were Thieves in the days of yore, as best as I can recall. Given the game's compatibility with 3E, it's easy to add these back in, of course, but it makes the game feel slightly less "complete" to me.

Sorcrerers are the only spellcasting class with access to Metamagic in L&L, giving them a distinct identity from both the Wizard and the Cleric. This also has the added benefit of meaning that they're on better footing with the Wizard, who, with properly chosen feats, was generally always a bit better than the Sorcerer in standard 3E. There's a minor formatting problem with the Sorcerer Spells per Day table. At a cursory glance, it appears that Sorcerers gain their spell levels another level behind Wizards than was normal in 3E, though if you cross-reference bonus spells based on ability scores and the Spells Known table, you can reasonably infer that nothing's changed here. A footnote or other formatting change would probably be helpful here.

Wizards devote their class features to Item Creation, and gain all the relevant "feats" as they advance in levels. Craft Construct (the Wizard's 20th-level Item Creation ability) wasn't a feat as far as I can recall, though, so it might need to actually be spelled out. Admittedly this isn't an area of the rules I've ever actually used, though.

I've been at this post for awhile, and I'm starting to lose steam, so I think I'll split my Impressions into at least two posts (probably three, though, judging by the rest of the content in the book so far). Overall, I have to say I'm a big fan of L&L so far. It manages to capture a lot of the feel of older editions of the game through the simplicity of its character creation just as advertised, and I think that's pretty great. The Skills, Stunts, Hazards, and Monsters systems from later in the book all look rather functional while maintaining simplicity as well, though I'll look at those in more detail later.