Intro to RPG concepts
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What is Tome Roleplaying?
What is an rpg?
what do you need to play?
A giant touchscreen tabletop (specs available online, but should have at least 50“ diagonal), a cast of four to six extras (classically trained Shakespearian actors, Equity prefered), one Tome-Certified Rules Expert (TCRE-cert should be from an accredited institution), a yacht/mansion to play in, and a staff of no less than seven to keep the group supplied with munchies and drinks.
Really, you need this book, some friends to play with, a handful of dice, and some paper and pencils. You'll probably also want the other core rulebooks, some pre-printed character sheets, a table to sit around, and some snacks, but that's not strictly neccesary. If you're feeling really fancy, get an erasable grid of one inch squares and some miniatures to represent your players.
This looks like it's OGL compatible!
That's because it is! Sort of.
The “Open Gaming License” or OGL was developed to accompany the third edition of a certain very popular RPG in 2000. Essentiially, that game took a cue from the software open source movement and released most of their core mechanics for use in other products. It's a truly revolutionary approach to game design, and it ushered in a veritable explosion of related products, while also ensuring the original RPG's market dominance until 2008. Unfortunately, the next edition of that RPG abandoned the OGL concept. OGL remains popular though, and several of the currently best-selling games are built on the OGL foundation.
There shouldn't be anything here incompatible with other OGL products. You do need to be a little careful; Tome Fantasy Roleplaying is balanced around a lightly optimized OGL Wizard, so Tome characters are likely to be a little more powerful than their vanilla OGL counterparts. It's nothing too extreme, but if an adventure is advertised as “for levels 4-6” you can probably run it for levels 3-5 instead. As always, your mileage may vary.
Here are the major differences:
There are many reasons for this, but here's the big one: Players are smart. If you let them, they will find a way to sell everything valuable, everything not valuable, everything not nailed down, nails, everything, walls, floors, foundations, and generally live like hobos to save money. Worse, in a setting where money translates directly into power, that's a rational way for their characters to behave. It's also silly and unheroic. We want characters who build elaborate castles, and give away handfuls of gems, and we want dragon hoards so huge that you can get lost in them, and kingdoms and armies. None of that will happen if your characters can hock their castle for another bonus.
Instead, we use a two tier system called the “Wish Economy”. Anything with a price less than 15,000 gold can be bought normally. Anything more than that must be bartered for. (Why the 'wish' economy? Because the wish spell had some obvious exploits that you could get into as early as 5th level. Wish wasn't the only problem, it was just an obvious early example.)
Consequentially, cheap, slotless magic items are more valuable. We counter that by establishing a hard limit on concurrant boosters (Eight at any one time).
The wish spell has had a limit added to the value of magic items it can make.
Assume that the medium of barter for high enough level characters is souls. Wish can't create them and they're inherently valuable.
Additional classes (obviously)
Moar fun.