Category: Uncategorized

February 4, 2008

Update from Fort Freedom

My grant has been submitted. My life can now return to normalcy. …or some semblance thereof. This weekend was a weekend of rest. Friday was a snow day, so it was a much-needed three-day weekend. I didn’t leave the house until yesterday. I spent most of Friday fighting with my DVD drive. It died. I tried two others we had...

January 28, 2008

Smash!

This is part one of a follow-up to my last post. I’ve been thinking more about size and its effect upon combat in d20. I’ve come to a couple of preliminary conclusions. Primary among these is that the scaling of everything relative to “Medium” size and the 5′ square is a source of many problems. Here’s a simple fix that...

January 25, 2008

Claw/Claw/Bite

One of the things that made me pretty happy about 3.x D&D was that they made monster attacks more on-par with PC attacks. In earlier versions of the game, for ever time my Thief tried to stab a monster, it could attack me multiple times depending upon how many natural weapons it had. Dragons, with their two claws, bite, wing...

January 25, 2008

The Unholy Trifecta

One week and I will be free. I’m seriously considering ZeFRS (or a tweaked version thereof) for running the Thundarr/Exalted game. One unlikely benefit of this? I think it comes pretty darn close to the Retro-Stupid-Pretentious ideal of Jeff’s Threefold Model. Retro: ZeFRS: a game system out of the 1980s Stupid: Thundarr: doesn’t get much stupider Pretentious: Various bits: Exalted,...

January 21, 2008

Fun-Filled-February?

Work is still being atrocious. I have today off for MLK Day… which means I get to sit in front of my computer at home working on this grant rather than sit in front of my computer at work doing it. This does have advantages, don’t get me wrong, but it is hardly a day off. This thing will be...

January 15, 2008

The Elminster Temptation

When I wrote the post on Arcane Texts of the Second Age, I was very tempted to create an NPC in the setting – a wizard who used psychology texts upon human animae in the way that other wizards use tech manuals on techgods. Then I stopped myself. Yeah. Its a cool idea – but it could be a PC...

January 12, 2008

UPS: the big question

Does everything become a power? It could. I could do away with a separate skill list and set of ability scores and instead have a list of universally-available “everyman” powers. Do I want to go that route?

January 11, 2008

Notes toward a Unified Power System

In my spare moments, my mind has been wandering in the direction of my wishes for a 4e d20 system that expands on the Book of Nine Swords. Here’s what I’m thinking so far: Each power would be located in a category (something like a spell school) and assigned a power level. It is conceivable that a single power might...

January 11, 2008

Heroes of the Second Age

So… who are the PCs in a Second Age campaign? PCs are individuals who have learned (consciously or unconsciously) to empower their anima and/or affect the spirit world. These fall, roughly, into three categories: 1. Those who have learned techniques (through study, natural talent, or happenstance) to manipulate the spirit world. Wizards fall into this category. 2. Those who have...

January 9, 2008

Necromancy in the Second Age

Upon death, the spirit of a living thing shatters. Shreds of it stay with the physical remains, becoming the spirit of the corpse (or the spirits of the pieces of it). What happens to the rest varies. In some cases, however, it is known to remain more-or-less intact as a free-floating spirit, or ghost. Other times, the shattering of the...