The Gamer Dome - Making a Game Out of Game Design

3.old Skills: Subskills

Propagandroid — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:41:57 +0000

Sorry, I forgot to include this in the previous post. I’ll go back and paste it in there, but wanted people following in real time not to miss it.

Subskills: Any time a character takes a Knowledge or Background skill, he can choose a related subskill that he excels at. So, a magic user that’s a Journeyman in Knowledge (arcana) might choose “Demons” as his subskill, and he would be considered a Master on any Knowledge check regarding Demons.

3.old Skills

Propagandroid — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:43:05 +0000

Ok folks, here’s where we get a little wiggidy, so bear with me. Remember, the goal of this project is to create a hybrid between 3.x and old school feel (which is entirely subjective, understood). Skills and feats are two of Mrs. Droids favorite things about 3.x, but skills needed to be changed for two reasons: they contributed to the culture of pluses and they focused players too much on the character sheet. After much discussion between Mrs. Droid and myself, we’ve developed a system that we’re looking forward to playtest. So, here we go.

First, in 3.old all characters get a free background skill at Novice level. That’s any Craft, Perform, or Profession skill. This is just something to help round out the character that might come into play rarely (a good DM will work usage of a background skill if not into each adventure then each “arc”). I think it helps with immersion.

3.old Skill List (and the 3e skills they encompass)

Acrobatics (Balance, Escape Artist, Tumble)
Arcane Lore (Knowledge Arcana, Spellcraft)
Athletics (Climb, Jump, Swim)
Background (any) (Perform, Craft, Profession)
First Aid
Horseman (Ride, Handle Animal)
Knowledge (any)
Mercantile
Perception (Listen, Spot)
Sneak (Hide, Move Silently)
Social [low or high] (Bluff, Diplomacy, Gather Information, Intimidate)
Thievery (Disable Device, Find Device, Open Lock, Sleight of Hand)
Urban Lore (Knowledge, Search, Survival)
Wilderness Lore (Knowledge, Search, Survival)

A few notes about some of the skills:

Background: Uses the subskill system (see below).

First Aid: I think we just liked this name better, but it’s essentially Heal. I’m sure we’ll rework some of the rules for it, though.

Horseman: No druid really means no crazy animals to ride. You could change this if your campaign used camels by default or something. Since horses are by far the default animal, I thought it simplified things to just make it binary…your character is either good with horses or he’s not.

Knowledge: Uses the subskill system (see below).

Mercantile: A creation of Mrs. Droid. It includes the old Appraise skill, as well as haggling, knowledge of trade routes and goods, merchant culture, and contacts within it. This is one of those skills that defines what you think your default game should be about. Mrs. Droid is very story/character-oriented, so I’m surprised she suggested this skill.

Social: As noted, you choose low or high social when you select the skill. I always thought it was kind of dumb that a character was automatically good at Bluffing/Diplomating/Intimidating anybody, maybe not good at the others. A sewer rat might know how to Intimidate a bar wench into sneaking him some food each night, but try that on a butler in a noble’s mansion and he’s not liable to be impressed. The same Diplomacy attempt might impress a local businessman but a nobleman would scoff. I think a clear deliniation between what social classes your character is comfortable interacting with is more important than breaking these skills out individually.

Urban/Wilderness Lore: I never thought Search should go with Spot and Listen, which seemed like more passive skills to me, so we stuck it in the Lore skills, which seem more about how much you’ve been around a certain type of place. Personally, I wanted to split this into inside/outside, or dungeon/wilderness. My thought was that your ability to notice things that are “off” would relate directly to your experience with such things. Thus, someone that was an outdoorsman would more easily notice track signs, oddly decaying plant and animal life, the presence or absence of such, etc. than would someone that spent all their time indoors. Conversely, an experienced dungeoneer will notice those things underground or inside buildings more often because they’re used to walls/floor/ceiling and how they’re composed, how things are built, etc. Mrs. Droid disagreed, so we split it this way and I”ll just build dungeon lore into Urban and hope I don’t get pelted with giant rocks.

Maybe we can convince her otherwise, what are your thoughts on this split?

Ok, so we only have 14 skills…how do they work?

The mechanic is simpler for the DM, and makes more sense in the context of the game without pluses. Instead of having to scale DCs up with average party level, having to figure out what people’s max skill bonus could be and how hard your DC should be, this system just lets the DM set the general skill level necessary to acheive a skill purpose and then set how difficult it should be for a person with that skill. I’m rambling, let’s get to specifics.

Every skill has five proficiency tiers: Untrained, Novice, Journeyman, Master, Legendary.

You gain training in certain skills based on your race/class combo, usually to Novice tier but sometimes to Journeyman. At 2nd, 4th, and 6th level you may either gain a new skill at Novice tier or train one of your existing skills up to the next tier.

In order to use a skill, the DM sets an appropriate tier and target number for the task you want to perform. This would be designated [Tier][TN]. So, if you wanted to disable a simple trap, the DM might tell you to make a Thievery check against Novice 11. This would mean that you’d have to at least have Novice skill level to succeed, and that you need to roll an 11 or higher on a d20 to succeed. (I can see an argument for allowing a trained character to attempt any skill check, but adding 5 to the TN for every tier below the “baseline” he is…will have to playtest this).

For every tier above the minimum necessary, the target number is lowered by 5 (or you gain a +5 to your roll, however you want to think about it). Thus, a Journeyman at Thievery would only need a 6 or better to disarm the trap, while a Master would automatically succeed.

You can’t improve a skill to Legendary until you reach 6th level.
That’s it, easy peasy. The DM sets the difficulty by figuring out what level of expertise or training would be necessary to achieve a skill-based objective, then figures out how often a person of minimum qualification should succeed. You have two levels of customization here. On the one hand you can set the minimum tier too high for most people to succeed, but then make it easy to succeed once you’re there. A Master 4 Knowledge Arcana check means that until you’ve studied “higher level” arcana you just don’t get it, but once you have it comes to you pretty easily.

3.old Classes

Propagandroid — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:53:31 +0000

UPDATE: I left out the cleric’s turn undead, don’t worry it’s still there.

I’m getting pressure to finish this ruleset so it can be laid out in pdf and HTML format for use at our gaming table, so I’m going to throw out another post today.

We’re only using four classes in the base rules for 3.old. With our rules tweaks, you should be able to play most concepts with just the Fighter, Cleric, Thief, and Magic User. At least, that’s what we’re going to test with anyway.

Some general class-related rules before I get to the specifics of each class:

Hit Dice remain the same.

Classes only go up to level 6, because we’re using E6.

There is no BAB…we use a chart.

There are no class skills…each class just starts better in some skills than others and may choose to ride that default level and branch out or to get really good really fast at certain things.

Spell progressions remain the same.

Special abilities are only as noted.

I’m pretty sure the classes aren’t balanced, but I’m not sure it matters either.

Cleric: Cleric Skill Suite (Journeyman Knowledge (religion), Novice First Aid, choose one Novice skill); Turn Undead; At 3rd level gain one domain; At 5th level Intercession 1/week.

The cleric doesn’t get a domain at first level, instead waiting for a blessing from his god at 3rd. Intercession is a DM-defined ability, although guidelines will be provided in the final product. It can work like augury, or a one-time benefit that’s appropriate to the god and his goals.

Fighter: Fighter Skill Suite (Journeyman Acrobatics or Athletics, Novice Horseman, choose one Novice skill); at 1st level gain Fighting the Unskilled; at 3rd level gain +6 hit points; at 5th level weapon damage increases to d10; at 6th level gain 3/2 attacks per round.

Fighting the Unskilled means that when fighting opponents of less than one HD the fighter can make one attack per enemy within range with a melee weapon. At 6th level, this increases to creatures of 1 HD or less.

Magic User: Magic User Skill Suite (Journeyman (arcane lore), Novice Knowledge (any), choose one Novice skill); 3rd level Scribe Scroll; 5th level SIgnature Implement.

Signature Implement means the wizard has a recognizable focus for his magic, whether it’s a staff, wand, or whatever. This allows the wizard to use all cantrips at will, and once per day to cast any spell of a level he can cast, regardless of whether it’s in his spellbook.

Thief: Thief Skill Suite (Journeyman Thievery, Novice Sneak, choose any two Novice skills); at 1st level, backstab for 2x damage; 3rd level, Novice Use Magic Device skill; 5th level, backstab 3x damage.

Right now the thief seems kinda weak compared to the others, so he’s going to have to get something else. I’m also not sure how racial and class skills are going to stack, or if they even will. I’m leaning toward saying that if your race and class have the same skill (a halfling thief, for example) then you can choose one of them and replace the other with another skill choice. This makes halflings better thieves and gives them a broader skill base. That might be an argument for giving elves arcane lore at Novice level.

That’s where we’re at with classes at the moment.

3.old Races

Propagandroid — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:09:24 +0000

UPDATE: I left out the human’s bonus feat.

Some people have complained that my 3.old posts are too filled with design notes that sound like One True Way arguments. Since when did asserting one’s own preferences become an attack on others? I do think it’s fair to say my wires get crossed a bit because I’ve been talking about 4e so much lately, but it’s important for me to talk out loud about why I’m making certain changes. It helps me think about them and identify problems, and helps commenters by giving them a place to start. I’ll try to keep the commentary to the system itself and why I think it will help us play 3.x with an old school feel.

Races

There are five races to choose from: Human, Dwarf, Elf, Half-Elf, and Halfling.

It’s all personal preference, really. Truthfully racial differences rarely come into play in our games unless they are hard-wired into the setting. Sure, it informs our roleplay from time to time, but for the most part I have a hard time remembering who’s playing what sometimes.

I’m going to present the racial abilities as conceived below with little commentary, since they’ll touch on aspects of the game that will be discussed in later posts. All races are as per their descriptions in the 3.5 PHB except as noted. If something is noted below, it replaces the appropriate item.

Human: Gain one new skill at first level, and a bonus skill improvement at 3rd and 6th level. Gain one bonus feat at first level.

Dwarf: 60 ft. infravision; no speed differential in combat; at 1st level gain Dwarf Skill (Journeyman Perception and Novice Survival in underground settings only); stability bonus versus tripping, falling down, slipping and sliding (this is the DM’s call); +2 bonus on Fortitude saves versus poison and Will saves versus magic; no Appraise/Craft bonuses.

Elf: 60 ft. infravision; +2 bonus on Will saves versus enchantments; +1 damage step with swords and bows (max. d8); at 1st level gain Elf Skill (Journeyman Perception).

Half-Elf: 60 ft. infravision; +2 bonus on Will saves versus enchantments; at 1st level gain Half-Elf Skill (Novice Perception and Novice Social (choose low or high)); free skill improvement at 3rd level.

Halflings: No speed differential in combat; at 1st level gain Halfling Skill (Journeyman Sneak); +2 bonus on Will saves versus fear effects; +1 damage step with slings (max. d8); Owl’s Wisdom 1/day as a free action.

I’ll close this thing out with a couple of notes.

As you can see, our skill system is somewhat different. We’ve eschewed ranks for a more general designation of expertise. I’ll be getting to that in the next couple of days.

I’m loving our damage by class more and more, and I think the halfling best illustrates why. Finally there’s a mechanical reason for halflings to use what in most editions were sub-optimal weapon choices. Flavor is freed up by switching to damage by class and getting rid of all the micro-level distinctions between weapons. Players are free to let their imaginations run wild when thinking about their characters in combat. Dual-hand axe wielding dwarves and slinging halflings suffer no penalties for doing what they think would be coolest for their character. “Cool” is no longer defined by combo chains and massive damage output courtesy of stacking bonuses, rather it’s defined by your imagination. Pure roleplaying.

Owl’s Wisdom is not a buff spell anymore. In fact, all the buff spells still exist, but they let you perform amazing feats instead of giving you a bonus to an ability score. More on that when we get to Spells.

3.old: Ability Scores

Propagandroid — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:57:27 +0000

Here I begin a “chapter by chapter” breakdown of the rule changes in 3.old. First up, ability scores.

As I’ve mentioned before, I think the linear bonus curve of the d20 System is problematic. It contributes to the culture of pluses, making differences in ability scores more (not less) acute. Thus, many (if not most) players and DM’s that have played nothing but 3.x tend to gravitate toward point buy as the only “fair” method of selecting ability scores. Get that, selecting ability scores. Blasphemy!

Since ability score modifiers are standardized under a linear curve, you expectedly get metagamey things like magic items and spells that increase ability scores +2 at a time. When the d20 System came out, this was revolutionary. Now you could design magic items and effects with predictable and uniform bonuses no matter who got them or what their base ability score might be at the time (thus, the jump from 12 to 14 was no more or less exciting than the jump from 20 to 22. This turned out to be boring and add to the mathematical imperative in the subgame of character optimization. Worse, it led to the buff problem and an exacerbation of the 15-minute adventuring day, as recently explicated over at Grognardia.

Thus, 3.old returns to the previous paradigm in which most ability scores provide no numeric bonuses.

This is just such a freeing concept to me. No more do players have to worry about point discrepancies here and there, because you can have a character with all 10s and one with all 14s and they’re not going to play that different at all. Nobody is “behind” on pluses in this scenario, and the ones that do get pluses because of their exceptional stats will really feel special. Again, though, your ability scores shouldn’t define your character, they should just be numbers called upon when the DM thinks it’s necessary to apply them to an in-game event.

As a general reference for ability scores and what they mean in 3.old, I refer you to the free OSRIC pdf. Changes to that are outlined below. Ability score generation is left up to the DM, and can accommodate any of the suggested methods from all editions of the game.

Strength

I’m flipping the Bonus To-Hit and Bonus Damage columns, because as I’ve previously stated I believe that hitting more often is superior in play to hitting less often but dealing more damage. You will see lots of changes along these lines. I think hitting should be encouraged.

Encumbrance will work just like in the 3.x PHB. I see no reason to change it.

Bend Bars/Lift Gates and Open Door make a comeback in 3.old, although their utility is up to the DM’s adventures. Still, these things are necessary to remove the universal mechanic and make each ability check unique.

Dexterity

The Surprise bonus is changed to Initiative bonus, a holdover system from 3.x.

AC Adjustment column is plus not minus, as we’re keeping the higher AC the better.

Armor Class in 3.old gets some changes. You start at 0 (zero) and work your way up via the normal channels (armor, Dexterity bonus, mage armor, etc.) That’s because the modified combat system works off a THAC0-like chart for each class: your target number to hit a creature is your Attack Number + the creature’s Armor Class. You roll a d20, add magic and ability modifiers, and compare it to the target number. AC had to start at zero to avoid having Attack Numbers in the negatives right off the bat (and since we’re based on E6, I don’t think they’ll ever get there, even for fighters).

Dexterity also provides a bonus to Reflex saves equivalent to the AC Adjustment column, except expressed in minuses rather than pluses (at the high end, opposite at the low).

Saving Throws in 3.old are Fortitude, Reflex, and Will, but they work off charts like in the old days rather than being a bonus to a d20 roll. Goodbye universal mechanic! Thus, a high ability score subtracts from the target number shown on the chart for your class and level.

Constitution

Constitution also provides a bonus to Fortitude saves equivalent to the Bonus Hit Point column (including the extra bonus for fighters), expressed in minuses rather than pluses (at the high end, opposite for low).

Intelligence

Magic Users still gain bonus spells as in 3.x.

Wisdom

Clerics still gain bonus spells as in 3.x.

The Mental Save column is changed to Will save and is expressed in minuses rather than pluses (at the high end, opposite at the low).

Charisma

Remove the Reaction Bonus column, as that is handled by skills.

Speaking of skills, the skill system in 3.old is modified to be simpler and remove the unified mechanic. That said, there is still rolling, and as of right now ability scores will add to rolls much as they do in 3.x, with the exception that the bonuses to rolls are +1 at 15, +2 at 16, +3 at 17, and +4 at 18 across the board. This may change.

There you have it, a first glimpse at the changes in 3.old, including a preview of some of the subsystems I’ll be discussing in future posts.

3.old: Weapon Damage

Propagandroid — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:42:29 +0000

Blimey, it looks like I covered both the culture of pluses and the universal mechanic in the previous post, so it’s time to get onto something more controversial.

3.old aims to get players into their imaginations and out of their character sheets. There are two main things that distract players from the game: character optimization obsession and the culture of pluses (tactical numeric optimization?…I need a good name for this). Tactical numeric optimization (TNO) occurs when players examine their character sheets for the maximum bonuses to attack and damage possible at any given time. They ask for bless spells, potions, bardic effects, etc. every freakin’ turn rather than just going with the flow.

Some of this goes on before the game as players decide which weapons their characters are going to use. Utility often trumps imagination here, too, because different weapons have different damage factors (not to mention other considerations). In game, this constrains both players and DMs as well. Players must always attack with their optimal weapon, and that choice gets even more narrow if he takes feats and makes other choices to optimize his use of that weapon.

I don’t like the idea of all weapons dealing the same damage, or more appropriately I should say I don’t like the idea of all characters dealing the same damage with weapons. So, in 3.old weapon damage is determined by your class.

Fighters: d8

Clerics and Thieves: d6

Magic Users: d4

If you give a fighter a dagger, he’s going to be able to do a hell of a lot more damage with it than some pencil-necked magic user. Likewise, a magic user should be able to use a longsword but not to really great effect. So, there are no weapon proficiencies in 3.old. If your thief can somehow remain hidden and sneak with a halberd in his hand, you better give a damn good descripton of your backstab! If you conceive your magic user with a longsword, more power to you! Gandalf dual-wielded quarterstaff and longsword and it didn’t break the Lord of the Rings.

Speaking of dual-wielding, go for it! Guess what? You still only get one attack per round. And since we’re based on E6 (or perhaps E8), we don’t even have to worry about iterative attacks (which are going to revert back to “fighters only, 3/2 at 7th level” if we do go to 8th level in the core rules). I might introduce a feat or something giving you the ability to make two attacks in a round if you’re dual-wielding, but it will again be fighters only and probably require you to at least be 6th level. Point is, though, by dialing back damage to a static number based on class, we can more easily create interesting combat scenarios and situations that don’t “break” the game in any meaningful way.

The other thing is, it will probably be very difficult to raise the amount of damage you do with an attack. I believe attack rolls are more deserving of bonuses than damage rolls for several reasons. First, if you control the amount of damage a character can possibly do, then you don’t have to fiddle with enemy hit points as much. As a designer, I can be pretty sure of the range of damages being dealt by a party of a certain level. Things don’t have to spiral out of control like they have in recent years. Second, missing attack rolls sucks, as I talked about previously. I would much rather have characters hit most of the time and worry about describing the coolness and/or providing them with interesting effects of their hits.

That’s enough for this time. I think I’m going to start outlining the game now chapter by chapter. A lot of the work is done, so “getting it down on paper” is the next step. First up, Ability Scores!

3.old: Getting rid of the unified mechanic

Propagandroid — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:56:07 +0000

As I stated in my previous post, one of the main design goals of 3.old was to get rid of the unified mechanic, the d20+modifiers vs. DC mechanic that insidiously diminished the playability of 3.x. Let me review why I believe that the unified mechanic is a fundamental flaw in 3.x design:

1. It provides only the illusion of movement (scalability).

It doesn’t matter if you have +4 vs. DC 15 or +40 vs. DC 51, you still have a 50% chance of success. Therefore, challenges such as monsters and traps must be designed to assume a certain level of competence in order to assign them proper Challenge Ratings. This creates an imperative for players to maximize their characters so that they can keep up with the escalating challenge DCs, which leaves precious little space for anything but combat-oriented advancement of skills, feats, spells, and class abilities.

2. The bonus matters a lot, the bonus matters very little.

There’s a sweet spot for bonuses when everything is based off a d20 roll, which makes sense for some subsystems but doesn’t for others. Combat can be balanced (problematically) to make up for attack rolls, but at the early levels when you’re getting +3 to +5 to your roll, then the d20 variance is generally pretty large, then it starts to come down as attack bonuses start to catch up with AC, and then at CR10+ things get wonky again because AC is designed to be tough versus fighting characters, making it nearly impossible for non-fighters to hit anything at those levels.

Take ability checks, however. The d20 variance on those is always huge, and leads to silly situations like the gnome opening a door the orc barbarian failed at. Of course, the DM can always house rule those things, but if there’s a DC attached to something you can bet every character will give it a shot. And really, why shouldn’t the rules make sense in the first place?

How to Eliminate the Universal Mechanic

It’s actually not as difficult as you think. I’m only speaking generally here because I’ll get into specific design decision discussions for specific subsystems in their own time.

First, you go back to THAC0. THACO is simple, so we’re going to use it, except that we’re keeping the “high AC is good” so it will require a minor tweak. (I’m trying hard not to rant about the apocryphal status THAC0 has achieved…it’s really just a simple equation, folks.)

Next thing to do is go back to the old saving throw charts. We’re keeping the three saving throws of d20, but making a chart and having them descend as you rise in level. This makes things so simple, and dovetails quite nicely with James Maliszewski’s philosophy of saving throws.

Taking attacks and saves out of the universal mechanic does something that frees players…it gets rid of the addiction to pluses. Players became so used to “plus this, plus that, does it stack?” that, as I said before, character optimization became the dominant mode of play in 3.x. People looked right past ideas to the underlying mechanics and whether or not they gave them sufficient pluses to keep up with the game.

Taking out the plus syndrome also frees us up to fix what I consider one of the hidden tragedies of 3.x: the linear ability bonus curve. +1 per 2 over 10 was an insidious invention that created min-maxing players right there at character creation. The first thing you do is assign your ability scores (rolling becomes passe when bonuses matter so much), and of course everybody has the exact same array. If you make bonuses less necessary, and instead differentiate scores in more inventive ways (like the old Bend Bars/Lift Gates percentage, for example) then people worry far less about being “equal” to everyone else. I realize this is a controversial opinion, and I’m not going to elaborate on all the reasons the linear ability curve is problematic. Suffice it to say that it is, and that removing it will improve the play of the actual game (as opposed to the character optimization metagame).

So there you have it. Each of these changes will be elaborated on in the days to come as I talk about the game “chapter by chapter.”

3.old and the games within the games

Propagandroid — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:46:44 +0000

Delta has a great post about Games Within Games in which he talks about the advantages of using subsystems instead of a universal mechanic in roleplaying games. I have a lot of thoughts about this subject, I’m not sure how many will come out in this post. This post is mostly about one of the design goals of 3.old, namely the mitigation of the impact of the universal d20 mechanic on the game.

Character optimization has become the dominant mode of play in Dungeons & Dragons.

All other aspects take a backseat to character optimization, even for Dungeon Masters, who have to precisely balance their scenarios against the power level of the player characters in their game. The universal mechanic is the reason for this. Once the game’s resolution mechanic became about escalating Difficulty Classes versus escalating character abilities, the complexity ratcheted up with no discernible benefit to the actual play of the game itself. In fact, to its great detriment.

The system creates the illusion of movement. “My character has +8 instead of +7 now!” However, in order to maintain balance with the Challenge Rating/Encounter Level system, monster statistics should grow at an equal rate. Thus, a 1st-level character should have a 60% chance to hit (for example) an orc while a 20th level character should have a 60% chance to hit a balrog.

The problem with this system should be apparent: no two characters will advance exactly alike, thus creating a universal disparity. This problem is most obvious with saving throws. It’s well known that in high-level 3e, you either have a very good chance to save against something or a very bad chance. The disparity between good and bad saves became incredible at higher levels, especially when one or more saves were tied to a character’s best stat(s).

One solution to this would have been to design monsters/traps/challenges against the low end of the spectrum. After all, if a fighter’s big thing is Fortitude save, who cares if he almost always makes them? But, 3.x design did not go in that direction. Design goals were to challenge the *best* with any given challenge, leaving non-optimized or otherwise-oriented characters to face almost certain failure at certain tasks or to resist certain attacks and effects. This created an imbalance.

Why go to all this trouble to create the illusion of movement only to have the house of cards come falling down as soon as someone gets “off track” in their character development. From this problematic mechanic, we inherited all sorts of things like the Big Six magic items, game-defined rather than DM-defined treasure allocation, increased prep time (due to tailoring challenge DCs and adhering to the CR/EL system), and many others.

I had two related design goals in 3.old to help mitigate this problem:

Get rid of the unified mechanic, and
Get rid of the culture of pluses

I’ll explore each of these over my next two blog posts.

3.x Made Simple: New Dungeons & Dragons rules

Propagandroid — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:20:58 +0000

As I mentioned on Twitter yesterday, Mrs. Droid and I have created a new way to play 3.x D&D. The genesis of this particular project was my desire to play a retroclone and her desire not to. I convinced her to let me tweak 3.x rules to make them feel more old school, and thus we embarked on a few nights of brainstorming and discussion.

My goals, as it turned out, were several, even though at the beginning of the project I hadn’t realized what some of them were. The first was a “scorched earth” fix for everything I thought was wrong with 3.x. I have deeper opinions on all of the flaws of the system, both in concept as well as in actual play, but this project was not the time to explore those. I wanted to distill the essence of *my* old school experience. Please notice that I’m not attempting to define old school here, or even old school games…I’m trying to recapture what it is that made the games so great *for me* back in the day. Sometimes that turned out to be mechanical, sometimes it turned out to be more of a flavor thing (like putting back in some old spells whose presence I missed).

We didn’t just port over or destroy mechanics, either. In some cases, like with skills, we created a hybrid system. I think the skill system we came up with is quite awesome; it’s more free-form while still giving players a chance to customize their characters.

One important early decision we made was to make E6 the basis for our game, which made things much easier on us. It’s not that high-level play never existed, it’s just that one thing we agree on is that we don’t care for it that much. So, E6 seemed like a natural fit, and it also limited the amount of design work we had to do on spells and class abilities, etc. We can always add things later…after all, the game started out with only three classes! (Don’t worry, we have four. ) Not trying to have every little thing in the first release is also part of the old school charm for me, it lets us have expansion books that really feel like lore. In the old days, every new book I bought was like some secret tome that opened up new and interesting worlds in my campaign. These days they have more of a cold feeling. Maybe it’s because so much is rehashed, or spoiled in previews, that it becomes expected rather than wondrous.

In any case, keep an eye on this blog over the next week or two for a section-by-section outline of the new rules and discussion of what they were trying to accomplish. At the end of it I’ll throw together a PDF, probably incorporating changes from the community discussion.

I hereby dub this version of the system: 3.old

Very old Dungeons & Dragons commercial

Propagandroid — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 01:06:21 +0000

Wow, this is really fun to watch.

After you’ve watched it once, make sure to read the comment by Josh…it will make you want to watch it again!

http://www.retrojunk.com/details_commercial/61/