GM Tools

Encounters in Legend follow a fairly straightforward set of rules to help everyone at the gaming table have an interesting and enjoyable experience. If you're planning to be a Game Master for a Legend game, this chapter is your best friend. The rules here are a tool to help you build challenging encounters that won't overwhelm your players or leave them with nothing to do. If you are new to role-playing games or just want to get familiar with how to play a character in Legend, feel free to pass over this chapter and go back to it at some point in the future.

These rules are designed to help you run a Legend game that reflects our understanding of balance and game design. Sometimes, your group will prefer a somewhat different game, and it's okay to tweak and modify these rules to fit your group's preferences. However, we can't always predict the results of house rules, and significant changes in encounter difficulty can break a campaign very quickly, so we urge you to cooperate with players in doing whatever is best for your gaming group as a whole.

While on the general topic of rules and our advice to GMs, it’s important to mention that not everything in the book is meant as a hard-and-fast rule. When evaluating the suitability of tracks and feats for your group, consider that sometimes the default descriptions of abilities are not the only way to describe abilities. We tend to think of the mechanical rules with clear effects to be a sort of "crunch:" hard and difficult to change without altering the balance of the gameplay elements they govern. The descriptive elements of those rules are a sort of "fluff:" soft and more easily altered since what they affect is your own perception of the gameplay elements "in-character." For this reason we tend to encourage "refluffing" or changing what these descriptive elements look like to your group as you see fit. For example, the I Am Ten Ninjas track, as written, is themed as a somewhat lighthearted and irreverent take on what a ninja-themed character would need to sneak around. On the other hand, in a game focusing on wizardry and intrigue, the mechanics of that track could easily model the art of shadow magic.

It is also possible that you might view this book as the law as far as you’re concerned, with the mechanical rules being unchangeable and the standard fluff immutable. If your group prefers to play with such strict adherence we don’t object to that either. However, regardless of what the book may say we encourage you to do whatever you think best for your group’s enjoyment of the game.