Hackmaster General

4th edition, Hackmaster Basic, 'New' Hackmaster (5th edition)
What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? I played 4th edition back when it first came out and liked it but combat was kind of slow. I am reading through the new edition and it looks weird / interesting. Has anyone here played / ran Basic or 5th edition? I'm planning on running a game soon and am curious about other peoples impressions on here.

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kenzerco.com/free_files/hackmaster_basic_free_.pdf
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The writers have a surprising amount of pretentious bullshit for people so bad at the natural sciences or basic math, but the game itself is fun in a goofy way.

I'm still amazed that there are no PDFs of the Zealot's Guides books 5-7 and Hacklopedia II floating around, how the hell has HackMaster managed to stay under the radar of file sharing communities?
Is it just because everyone thinks the game is so shit?

So how fucking insanely complex is the newest edition so far? I quite like the idea of an english version of "Donjon de Naheulbeuk" but im a bit skeptic about it.

It's not so much complex as it is convoluted.
The rules are poorly explained and oftentimes contradictory, and there's a lot of useless fluff between actual rules.
The game is vague about a lot of things and ambiguous about the rest.

It's part of the charm, but it does lend itself to a lot of issues in actual play.
The best way to deal with it is to do it old-school: The GM calls the shots at ambiguous situations, end of story, unless you can explicitly point out in the rulebook why you're right within 30 seconds.

It's got its own way of doing things, but it's not too complicated once you get in the habit of playing it like OSR.

I don't know much about the parody versions, but I have read the 5th ed phb and the monster manual and they're actually pretty great. Combat in particular has remarkable depth and choices without things dragging on and feels lethal, and compared to dnd, magic has actual drawbacks and isn't the catchall problem to fix everything.

I think most people would really like it if they gave it a shot.

Magic is kinda broken as shit though, and the combat isn't really very deep at all. Only when compared to D&D, really.

Magic isn't as overpowered as it is in 3.PF, but that's mostly because you only have 4 spells per level usually, and thus can't just do whatever the fuck you want. The spells themselves are really way too powerful though (though a lot are incredibly shit, it's a bit hit-or-miss)

It's a niche game, and Kenzer's agressive about DMCAing sites.

The parody version is a great AD&D 1.99 Edition. What I imagine 2e would be had Gygax stayed with TSR.

There are some things that are brilliant (such as Honor points). The parts that stayed in 5E pretty much.

Honor points always struck me as really meh

Don't really contribute much apart from being FATE points that hurt to use

>Magic is kinda broken as shit though

In what way? There are no save or die spells, there are no resurrections, no teleportations, none of the really janky shit that you had in all the other dnd versions.

I can confirm that the Hacklopedia of beasts is an amazing book. I love all the detail you have about all the creatures, their habitats, their activity cycle.

It's like they've created actual beings that you can believe exist in this fantasy world instead of just empty statblocks that you place as a speedbump to your heroes.

>There are no save or die spells, there are no resurrections, no teleportations, none of the really janky shit
This is the best part. Now you don't need to have plotholes explaining why wizards don't control every part of the world.

Magic is incredibly balanced. It has flexibility but due to how spellcasting itself and spellfatigue afterwords means you're very vulnerable and you have to be smart about using magic.

Here's the basic version for anyone curious.

kenzerco.com/free_files/hackmaster_basic_free_.pdf

You can find the rest in the pdf general.

>No save or die
Sleep spells are there (though not as reliable)
Frighten
Slippery Surface
Pyrotechnic Display
Enfeeble
etc.
for mages
Clerics get "No save, just suck" instead of save or suck, like Vicious and Petty Cursing. Mages do shitloads of damage in bursts (Magic Projectile of Skewering does an average of 32 damage for a 2 sec casting time at level 4, ignoring DR, and penetrating on to nearby targets)
Some clerics can still buff themselves well beyond fighters' wildest imaginations (though much limited due to the Vancian restriction and the prep-at-morning restriction)


>No resurrections
Granted

>no teleportations
Quantum Leap and higher level spells like Speed of Light or Emergency Teleport at Random

>None of the really janky shit you had in all the other D&D versions
Planar Hole.


That said, it's a lot more balanced than D&D, but D&D is a shitty baseline.

I don't mind too much because if you do only what Hackmaster is designed for, dungeon crawling, mages are balanced because resources actually are fairly scarce. Only being able to memorize one thing is pretty restrictive, and double SP cost just isn't feasible most of the time.

But mages can, if you do fewer combats per in-game day, absolutely blow away all troubles with ease.

>No save or die
Surely you see the difference between save or die and the spells you listed, because none of them will outright kill anything. That's the whole point. There are no shortcuts and you can't just solo everything singlehanded like you could in most dnd/dndclones.

>Quantum Leap and higher level spells like Emergency Teleport at Random
Yeah those are both extremely limited in range or scope or ability, as well as being of pretty high level.

>Speed of Light
What? There's no such spell.

>Planar Hole.
>spell only a 20th level mage can cast. It's too strong. Surely it is the time stop and wish spell of our day.

>Petty Cursing
That hardly seems unbalanced at all to me.

>Vicious Cursing
What? There's no such spell.

>That said, it's a lot more balanced than D&D, but D&D is a shitty baseline.
It is however, the baseline that everyone is familiar with. Perhaps there are more well balanced magic systems like those found in narrative systems like Mage the Ascension or whatnot, but that doesn't matter. Calling it 'kinda broken as shit' as you did before is disingenuous.

>mages are balanced because resources actually are fairly scarce. Only being able to memorize one thing is pretty restrictive, and double SP cost just isn't feasible most of the time.
Exactly. The total amount of spellcasting possible is rather limited, and still rewards preparation and choosing wisely.

Save or die as in actual save or die is complete trash though, save or lose is what makes D&D broken.

You said there was no teleportation, I pointed out there is.

Speed of Light is from the Zealot's Guides.

Righteous Cursing, my bad. The problem with Petty Cursing is mostly that it can be stacked with Righteous Cursing and other Cursing and a bunch of other debuffs like Induce Drunkenness (though that requires a save) to make a unitary encounter a joke

I find it kinda funny you refer to Mage: the Ascension for balanced Magic because while Mage: the Ascension has one of the most fun magic systems in my opinion, it's ridiculously imbalanced in favor of Mind because Mind rarely invokes Paradox, but can reproduce most big effects fairly easily.

Mages are far more powerful than they should be imo in Hackmaster, and I'd argue a different system that does several subsystems leagues upon leagues better than Hackmaster is e.g. Anima: Beyond Fantasy (though Technicians can get out of hand if you allow them to go hog-wild with custom Techniques)

I mean I like Hackmaster's magic just fine to be honest, mostly because Hackmaster to me is a silly game written by the kind of autist who thinks he's smarter than he is, but we can all laugh at (and sometimes with) together because we're of the same roleplaying pedigree.

Balance just doesn't matter too much to me with HackMaster, but I don't think they did a good job with it, even if I don't mind that they did a poor job.

Hell, most of the issues of the Mage is lack of flexibility and longevity, which is solved by just having a party of all-mages and maybe a cleric as a healbot and/or tank

>But mages can, if you do fewer combats per in-game day, absolutely blow away all troubles with ease.

Eventually high level mages can do some pretty amazing things. But so can high level assassins, and high level fighters, and anyone who properly utilizes their abilities and resources.

>ridiculously imbalanced in favor of Mind because Mind rarely invokes Paradox, but can reproduce most big effects fairly easily

That's assuming the narrator will allow that sort of nonsense

>and a bunch of other debuffs like Induce Drunkenness (though that requires a save) to make a unitary encounter a joke

If your sense of balance is that magic shouldn't ever do anything too harmful or useful then I understand why you don't like the balance in this game. That said, I don't believe you've refuted a single point of mine except about teleportation.

>which is solved by just having a party of all-mages and maybe a cleric

This is laughable to be honest. I suspect the problem you have with the game stems from your gamemaster not understanding how to challenge the players, and not the rules themselves.

Like I said, I find the silliness to be part of the charm

Actual problems I have with the game isn't balance, it's that it's written by morons at times. Like how lances aren't technically usable on horseback because you can't use two-handed weapons on horseback. Lances aren't two-handed because they don't have a T superscript, you say? Yeah well too bad that the rules explicitly point out all size L weapons are two-handed for size Medium creatures. Nice Lance, senpai.

Travel times are also retarded. Skill costs are stupidly wacky (seriously? 5 BP for fucking math? That's just encouraging metagaming so you can get the player to do the math instead), combat maneuvers are kinda lacking and don't have too much flexibility encouraged for improvising (though it can be done, that can be said for any system. Hackmaster doesn't help it, is the point)
Inconsistent terminology and poor explanations (Full Parry says the defender's Count is reset for the next attack, cool. Wait, the opponent's next attack occurs at its speed in seconds after the full parry? What? This implies the opponent is the defender, because otherwise someone with say speed 4 could literally perma-lock someone with speed 9, as they could Full Parry on second 4, making Slowpoke attack on 13, but then Speedy attacks on 8 and Full Parries on 12 because he can forgo his attack, setting Slowpoke to 21, letting Speedy attack on 16 and reset on 20, repeat ad infinitum)

Then there's the whole "retreat from combat and re-enter" that they had to address and then pretend like it wasn't just an obvious oversight in the GMG, the ridiculous scaling of enemies if superior quality items are scarce (and even if they aren't, the saving throws are wacky pretty much all the way through), the shitty armor system (can't blame it too much for that, since that's mostly the case for all fantasy RPGs), the really dumb weapons at times (Really? A fucking pike can't dismount a rider? A PIKE? IT'S A FUCKING PIKE, FUCK!)

>Like how lances aren't technically usable on horseback
I played in a game where we had a knight character and he had a horse and a lance and there was no issues.

>Travel times are also retarded
Not sure what you mean.

>5 BP for fucking math?
So? Your character can't do higher math beyond basic arithmetic. So what?

>Then there's the whole "retreat from combat and re-enter"
That was unclear in the base rules. I agree 100%. They clarified it in the GMG which is fine.

>the shitty armor system
What? The armor actually absorbing and mitigating some of the damage is great.

Thanks, I'll check it out.

I've been looking through this, and it's pretty decent. Definitely not as weird and complex as I've heard. No chart upon chart of stuff to check at least.

Yeah, that was the 4th edition one, which created the stigma about hackmaster for all time I guess. Stupid move to keep the name for 5th edition instead of going with something else considering how different the two games are.

>I'm planning on running a game soon
You're planning on running a game you haven't played before?

Not OP, but somebody has to run a new game if it's going to be played. Doesn't seem that weird.

I guess not.

OP here. I've played and ran HM 4e and have been playing role playing games with my group for 15 years, so we tend to learn it together as we play. I've ran 4e before when it first came out.

I'm looking forward to the weird armor and count up system, it seems like fun once you get the hang of it.

Can anyone here who has played / GMed a Hackmaster 5e game give me some insight on what more I can do to prepare for the game? we are running off of the Quick Start guide rules, and all the players have read it and are using one of the pre mades. I was thinking of running one of the free adventures on their website and just figure it out as we go.

Are you running it in person or through roll20/VTT? Using minis and maps, or just theatre of the mind?