d20 Archives - Page 5 of 6 - Neitherworld Stories

January 25, 2007

Complete Scoundrel: First Impressions

I’m feeling updatey today. This isn’t really going to be a review. I’ve skimmed through the book, but I haven’t read it in detail. I’ve already talked a bit about skill tricks and luck feats – two of the more notable things included in the Complete Scoundrel. After skimming through it, what do I think? I think this book would...

January 11, 2007

Game Bloat

I’ve become increasingly disenchanted with White Wolf’s Storyteller system and its variants over the last year or so, but I find that I am still most annoyed with my original pet peeve with them – I call it skill bloat. In the Storyteller system, characters have a number of skills that range from 0 to 5 points. At character creation,...

December 26, 2006

House rules for a campaign

For some reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about my Sigil Hardboiled campaign idea lately. Will I run it? Maybe, some day. I haven’t had much luck running games of late. Anyway, I was thinking about the house rules I’d use if I did run it, and thought that the thought-process I went through might be interesting. First, I go...

December 15, 2006

Where did I put that beast…?

Okay, if you attack a Displacer Beast and you hit it, you roll a miss chance. Why is it that if you miss you don’t roll a hit chance?

December 14, 2006

Shareable on-line character sheet

A month ago, I was ruminating about the possibility of using Google Docs & Spreadsheets to keep an updated character sheet on the web in a way that you can share it with your GM. You can look at the sheet I’ve been working on here. Another neat thing about this: there is a discussion feature. I haven’t played with...

December 5, 2006

d20 Class Creation Rule 3

Rule 3: Don’t Delay Gratification This rule is implicit in Rule 1, but it deserves explicit mention. A class shouldn’t be designed such that members of that class are underpowered at low-levels and have to ‘pay their dues’ in order to access the actually-cool abilities later. Delayed gratification isn’t any fun during the delay, and in many games it isn’t...

December 5, 2006

WoAdWriMo: thoughts on adventure design

Over at the WoAdWriMo forum, I alluded to something unusual I was thinking of doing with the adventure I want to write. In short, the point is to make the adventure useful to as many people as possible. I’d considered statting things out in multiple systems, but realistically, the vast majority of people who would run the adventure would do...

November 13, 2006

d20 Class Creation Rule 2

Rule 2: Find the Single/Multi-Class Balance This rule has a number of parts. The first of these is detailed on the Wizards website, so I won’t go into it too much. Briefly, the idea is that when designing a class, it is important to make sure that every level gives a character something. My gloss on this is that a...

November 13, 2006

d20 Class Creation Rules: Rule 1

I’ve been working on my rewrite of the Hexblade that I’ve alluded to here before. I thought it would, perhaps, be worthwhile to comment on my general priorities in terms of class creation – both to solidify them for myself and because there is some small chance that someone might read this and find it interesting. Here is the first...

October 25, 2006

d20 Tweaking: Level Adjustments

Over on EN World, there is a thread about the frustrations of trying to make an effective PC wizard who happens to be a Drow. The problem is the Drow’s Level Adjustment of +2, which means that Drow of a particular number of experience points are always going to be behind several other races when it comes to class level,...

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