Reviews

[Galloglaich]

Positive mention of the Codex / Baltic here

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?611 ... info/page2

and a very short but more or less positive review by one of the staff reviewers at DriveThruRpg

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_r ... s_id=86214

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[Galloglaich]

New review of Codex Baltic here

http://diehardgamefan.com/2012/04/05/ta ... al-baltic/

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[Galloglaich]

New review in Polish, 8.5 out of 10

here is an automated English translation

http://translate.google.com/translate?h ... CGoQ7gEwAg

this is the actual review in Polish

http://dnd.polter.pl/Codex-Martialis-c24555

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[Arkon]

Quite nice review. Still, I wonder if she actually played it or just wrote it after reading.

[Galloglaich]

You are probably right, almost all of the reviews have been like that. I've had very little detailed feedback from people who have actually played using the codex system. I think this is one of the reasons few of the reviews emphasize the speed of the system.

The main reason for that is, I think, that it's just a combat system and not a complete game. I'm hoping to finish the character generation and magic systems this year so that it will be easier for more people to try the whole thing out without having to integrate it with their own house rules.

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[drkguy3107]

While I love the codex and used it for my own game, I don't find it to be that fast, we usually have a hard time remembering the bind rules and just forget them Also the amount of choices cause some players to spend forever planning their moves.

In what ways do you think it is faster? Personally I find the whole (I attack, done) to be faster, albeit less fun/entertaining.

[Galloglaich]

I don't know if you have actually done a campaign using codex rules or just a few one-off games? But I have found once the players get used to their characters, so they know their options better, it goes very fast. You don't have to think about full round actions, move equivalent actions, all the other weird little rules of 3.xe, and the tons of arithmetic. To me, that is what slows me down. If you have a medium or high-level character, you have different bonuses for each attack (+12/+7/+2 etc.), penalties for multi-weapon use, bonuses for every applicable feat, and so on. If you move you can only attack once of course. The math really adds up, especially but not limited to when you start to use a lot of magic.

In the Codex, all this is replaced by the dice pool, basically, and because the setting is typically low-magic, there is a lot less circumstantial math. You just roll the dice and go.

Now personally, I only ran 2 multi-week campaigns and 3 one-off game nights myself, so I don't have a gigantic sample of players. Maybe a total of 12 or 15 players in total? But this was a pretty wide variety ranging from people like my wife, who isn't a gamer at all and could care less about any rules, to some hard core "mainstream" gamers who are total min-maxer types. They were all able to "get it" pretty quickly.

I think there is a certain paradigm shift to really 'get it', it's pretty different from most other RPG combat rules, but the speed was really one of the main purposes of the system. I've had a lot of good reviews from dozens of people around the world, in something like 10 languages, for how realistic codex is, but there aren't that many people among that group who have actually played the game, and fewer still who played more than a few times. I think that is because it's fairly hard to integrate and there aren't that many people who really do homebrew systems any more, seemingly, and without character generation rules & magic rules, or an adventure module with pr-rolled characters, it's hard to just jump into it.

As I said before, I'm trying to finish all three of the above, though since I have a day job and my fencing hobby and other writing projects, progress is slow.

I'm also planning to do a really comprehensive play-demo video combined with combat sequences acted out by some fencers from my club, hopefully that will get across the flow of the system.

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[drkguy3107]

I have been doing campaigns with the codex for about 2 years now. However our campaigns tend to be 3 night long affairs (mostly because we like to run different kinds of characters and get often want to play something different). My main problem with the speed isn't how long it takes to do something, my turn (if I am playing) usually takes about 20sec. but some players want to analyze all their options, and this takes a lot longer than 3.0 since their are more options available. 1 player often takes up to 5 min. While sometimes I reign him in, I still find that a fight between 5 characters and just as many npcs often takes almost an hour.

[Galloglaich]

Well the problem seems to be with that particular player not with the rules.... try putting an egg timer on him.

In our campaigns it's more like the 20 seconds you described. And like I said, I found that the players tend to figure out what their characters are good at over time, and settle on a handful of optimal strategies for different situations. It helps a lot if they have the opportunity to develop the character a little. Probably it's due to the compressed nature of your campaigns that some of your players never quite got used to all the options.

We would go through combats about that size in maybe five or ten minutes typically, though that may include one or the other side running away when the tables begin to turn against them.

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[drkguy3107]

I like the egg timer idea, I think I will have to try that, but some of our players are just worse than others at remembering rules, so I have to pause to re-explain rules. Some people just do not understand how AoO works. That's like 90% of the problem. But me and 2 others can play extremely fast, and could have a 5 on 5 in around 10-15, I don't see how we could do 5 min. How long do your combats usually last, ours usually last about 4 or 5 rounds.