Pony Tales - 2nd Edition [April Fools]

Dear Princess Celestia,

Hi, this is Dan Felder - also known as Stairc. After nearly a year of Pony Tales development, we’ve decided to get back to the roots of the system. We made this game to let people explore the magical lands of ponies and embrace the elements of friendship and harmony. However, we got sidetracked by including a lot of staples of RPGs - such as convoluted combat systems - while ignoring the things that would best support the messages of the show. We didn’t even include a basic alignment system to enforce the elements of harmony. Thankfully, we’ve spent the last few months reinventing the system to be more in line with the show.

Your royal Dungeonmaster,

Dan


The changes to the system will include the following.

Embracing Love and Tolerance
Our current plan is to remove Pony Tales' combat system entirely. MLP is about love, tolerance and friendship. Pony Tales currently has a lot of support for the Roleplaying and Utility talents, so adding in a detailed combat system really just dilutes the player's experience. If you want to play combat, there's lots of other systems out there. We want to be more unique and embrace what Pony Tales is really about - roleplaying. Having a combat system just encourages DMs to run combat, when really that goes entirely against the core messages of My Little Pony. Friendship is magic, violence is not.

Elemental Alignments
For a system with a subtitle, "Aspirations of Harmony" - the elements of harmony have very little to do with how people play. We used to actively encourage the idea that it was okay to make characters with an element that seemed to run counter to their personality. Instead, we'll be enforcing an Elemental Alignment system. The player's element selection at character creation determines their Elemental Alignment. Thereafter, they will have to adhere to the following Laws of Harmony while in character.

1. A PC must not act in any manner that contradicts its element nor, through inaction, allow another character that the PC considers an ally to act in any manner that would contradict the PC’s element.
2. A PC must obey the orders given to it by Princesses, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A PC must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

If at any time a PC violates one of the Laws of Harmony – the entire group suffers a -5 morale penalty to skill checks and 1d4 negative levels. These negative levels can only be removed by the writing of a friendship letter to Princess Celestia. However, the morale penalty persists until the end of the session that the friendship letter is written in.


New Factions
In order to emphasize each character’s part in the grander world, we’re introducing a mandatory faction system. The ponies of Equestria tend to hold specific alliances to the various rulers of the land. At character creation, each player is randomly assigned one of the following factions.

1) Celestia
2) Luna
3) Cadence
4) Twilight
5) Chrysalis
6) Discord

Due to the Plague of Harmony – an event occurring in the official AOH setting – all these factions are currently at war. Any character that discovers another character is working for a separate faction must attack them – fighting until one is dead. During this combat, characters can make saving throws to attempt to restrain their code of honor enough to allow for attempted brainwashing and interrogation of the subject.

Emphasizing Racial Uniqueness
When Pony Tales was first released, all the races got to feel special because each had access to utility talents that no one else could get. This emphasizes racial diversity and that it's good to be different. It also makes utility talents a lot easier to balance, since we don't need to worry about as many unforeseen combinations being too powerful. The only downside of this is that there are many, many races in Pony Tales - so to be fair each race will have access to less than a tenth of the utility talent options currently available. For example, Griffons will only be able to take certain flight talents - we wouldn't want to have a Griffon character casting spells or a unicorn flying – it diminishes each race’s uniqueness. It also means that people are only going to want to play flying alicorn princesses – if everyone can do everything.

Class System
Utility talents and destinies will now be automatically assigned by your class, provided they do not conflict with your race. Be careful that you pick a class/race combination that’s compatible – some options, like making a baby dragon soothsayer, are so incompatible that *none* of the soothsayer utility talents nor its destiny will be part of the utility talents or destiny options available to baby dragons. While this might seem restrictive, it will do a lot to help add identity to your character – much more than the mishmash of “anyone can take anything” that we had before.


The New Player’s Handbook
Well with all this hype you’re probably hoping for the new handbook. Here it is. Enjoy Pony Tales - 2nd Edition. We know that we will.

Pony Tales - 2nd Edition [The Player's Handbook]

Also they're making me a Developer finally.

You people should at the very least be try to be convincing...

tygerburningbright wrote:You people should at the very least be try to be convincing...

What's the point if people actually believe them? It just gets people upset and angry.

I can only imagine how this would play out...

P1: "Sweet, I rolled Alicorn Twilight for my faction!"

P2: "Aw, lucky... I rolled Luna. Dumb dice..."

DM: "You shouldn't have said that. Now you two have to fight to the death."

P2: "B-but that goes against my Element! I'm Kindness!"

DM: "Then try to give his character a quick, painless death."

P1: "How? This system doesn't even have rules for combat!"

P2: "Eh, forget it. This game system's stupid anyway. I'm gonna go play Pokemon..."

I like it. Approved by science.

Spoiler:

PS: I'm King Sombra faction.

Oh man, you did almost get me. The "no combat, but equestria is at war so everyone fights" was the tipoff.

Doesn't help that I just woke up.

Eh, don't feel bad, it took me until the New Factions bit. Same about just waking up, though.

The Three Laws of Elements were pretty funny, I have to say.

I thought the second edition was where everything branched out into more options? Wasn't that what happened in D&D 2nd Edition?

These...some of the these could...theoretically work.

Spoiler:

Actually, jokes aside a noncombat system isn't the worst idea in the world. Everyone playing normal ponies in normal situations in their normal lives can't be that bad. It'd just be hard to recruit for.

Could just make a campaign labeled as "non-combat."

It would be interesting dealing with opponents via the application of skills, utilities and imagination rather than combat.

That's actually what the very first campaign in the system is focused on.

Stairc -Dan Felder wrote:That's actually what the very first campaign in the system is focused on.

So was it interesting?

Lots of fun. Combat still was present, but it was always a very difficult route to approach - creativity, diplomacy and problem solving was much more effective.

Somebody say non-combat campaign? I'd hit that up.

Doc pseudopolis wrote:

Stairc -Dan Felder wrote:That's actually what the very first campaign in the system is focused on.

So was it interesting?

It was, though we did get into combat quite a bit. The issue was, when you're a party of adventurers with a combat system, you're going to want to use it sometimes.

Edit: Danno tried to deter us from going into combat, but when one of your players has a bucking Iron Stallion outfit, another purposfully made her build and wanted to use it, and in general combat was fun, you're going to want fights.

Indeed. The combat system was too much fun in 1e, hence why we're taking it out for 2nd edition.

We're actually planning on using the pre-built packages for new players as examples. I want to build a whole "Starter set" - complete with pre-built level 1 characters and a level 1 adventure to run for them.

Prebuilt class packages could be a useful extra. A number of RPG systems have these and you're still allowed to make changes afterwards anyways. Perhaps it's something players could be working on and then the developers could choose the ones that look best. One block for the attributes and utility talents and another for combat talents and special moves.

EDIT: Ah, I see they're already planning it.

Actually, I *did* put out a private call for players to submit iconic builds and a lot of people got excited about it... But no one has actually produced anything.

If people want to create level 1 characters for this with the following in mind and submit them, that would be great.

1) The characters should have a strong identity. Don't just grab a bunch of cool talents and combinations - make it feel like all of them fit the specific type of character. For example a dashing rogue or a studious wizard. Pretend there *is* a class system and try to make everything fit together to one iconic concept.

2) Keep things simple. Don't use complicated combinations of combat talents or confusing racial traits. Make sure everything is easy to understand at a glance.

3) Show off the coolness of the system - particularly its flexibility. Feel free to come up with interesting and innovative character identities besides Cleric, Wizard (etc). As long as people can understand why the character has these abilities in a short description of the identity. For example, "Marcus had the power of a fire elemental bound into him as a child and has trained with the fighting monks of the Thundering Mountains to master self-discipline. His combat abilities are martial in nature, but he can also channel and control the spirit of fire to blast his opponents to cinders." With that description you could easily give him monk moves and wizard's fire moves.

Hmm...I was planning on working on some builds for the Mane 6 for a forum campaign I plan on running. Might work on them then do versions with the serial numbers filed off for more general classes. The protagonists already work well as archetype concepts so it's a good base to go off of. Would also help for those players who may have a rough idea of "I want to play a character like Applejack" so they can jump in quickly.