Time to Upset the new Kids

I was recently asked WHY I don't like the new Hackmaster. Hackmaster Basic (and thereby the new Advanced Hackmaster 5e) is too different from the 4th Edition for me to enjoy it.

I know the changes were made for a reason (because of WotC) - but they are too many and ant they are a little too dramatic for my liking compared to 4e Hackmaster.

I quite like the “Building Points” - you can offset bad character generation rolls (and there are a LOT of rolls when generating a Hackmaster Basic Character) and you can even use them to play a class against “type” for your race (something I am not a fan of normally, but HMB does this quite well) - so there are a couple of things at least.

But there is quite a list of what I DON’T like -

The fractional scores on the attributes.

Quirks and Flaws – IMHO such things should be part of the characterization of a character, not a points driven way of min/maxing during character generation (which is what the munchkins will use it for).

Skills, Talents, AND Proficiences WTF! Why all three, as a DM of some experience I find it more freeing to let the Characters develop things as they go along.

The Honour system, to me its quite simply a heavy-handed way to enforce "proper" roleplaying - surely an Alignment system should be enough.

Combat (which is time-consuming and overly complex) has too many sub-rules, special cases, and exceptions etc, etc . . . .

I’ve never liked Spell Points either, I much prefer the way Mr Gygax did it.

They’ve done something I’ve done in the past, making starting hit points equal to their Constitution + Hit Dice. So that’s kinda cool – BUT with Hit Dice only gained every other level, with "dead" levels granting a re-roll of current hit points in order to improve the score – its to fiddly, too much faffing about for me (and my group tbh).

I ran it once, I wasn’t keen – my group REALLY didn’t enjoy it tbh. It’s a bad sigh when your group starts “noticing the time”.

BUT when I ran Castles and Crusades for the first time, we finished in the wee-small hours – and everyone complained because we had to stop . . . . . .