d20 Archives - Neitherworld Stories

January 2, 2012

New Year, New (for me) Game: Discovering Pathfinder

I’m late to the party, but I recently discovered that Pathfinder is pretty cool. Back in November, I picked up a few of the core Pathfinder books. I hadn’t really looked at the game since the early days of the open playtesting/beta/whatever. I was impressed. Pathfinder isn’t D&D 3.5. I think I assumed it would be D&D with the numbers...

March 9, 2010

Destined: What is it?

I’m just about done with the first full draft of the game I’ve been writing. At this point, it is over 100 pages, although nearly half of that is devoted to things like spells and feats – long lists of things with write-ups. So, what sort of game have I written? Originally, I set out to create a fantasy version...

September 10, 2009

It all comes together

I’ve mentioned that I’ve been mulling the idea of a FATE/d20 hybrid. Today, I had a breakthrough. It was one of those things that seems obvious in retrospect… In FATE combat, you can use a maneuver during an attack. Instead of inflicting stress (damage), a successful maneuver allows you to place a temporary aspect upon your target… or generate an...

June 18, 2009

D&D 3.5: All About The Future?

A friend of mine who I game with regularly recently made an observation about why he prefers 4e to 3.5. Third edition, he noted, was all about the next level. When people build 3.5 PCs, it is often with an eye toward a particular prestige class or feat combination that the PC won’t have for some time. Some people, when...

June 4, 2009

FATE 20?

I love Fate. I think that it is one of the better RPGs out there. Why? Because of the interplay between Aspects and Fate Points. They give you a tremendous ability to define your character and play the character that you want to play. The rest of the system, though? It’s OK. I don’t love the skill system or the...

March 19, 2009

Reskinning d20 Monk Weapons

I recently started playing a monk in a 3.5 game. The setting is fairly well-defined, and there weren’t any asian-analogue cultures to draw from. Monks didn’t exist in the setting until I wanted to play them. Then they became a martial order within the church of the sun god that had its origins in a clan of Eagle Totem barbarian-types...

December 31, 2008

Transformative Character Classes

A post contributed to the Transitions and Transformations Blog Carnival. I was introduced to transformative character classes by 3rd edition D&D. You know what I mean here – a 20th level monk becomes an Outsider… a 10th level Dragon Disciple becomes a Half-Dragon… that sort of thing. Transformative classes might have existed before then. I suppose you could say that...

October 20, 2008

d20 Patch: 4e-style monsters

It has been pointed out that players prefer 3.5 and GMs prefer 4e. Whether this is true or not, it has enough of an element of truth to gain some traction. Why? GMs really like the ease of preparation in 4e. In 3.5, statting up a monster for a combat that might last a couple of rounds was a headache....

October 14, 2008

d20 Patch: Caps

One of the big complaints about 3.x was how unbalanced the game could become given the ability and propensity of some players to create mechanically optimized builds. It is pretty clear that this was a major consideration in the creation of 4e. What, though, if you want to play a 3.x game and are still concerned about this? One solution...

February 25, 2008

Favored Weapons

One of those things I remember fondly from my early days of playing D&D was that PCs would sometimes end up using strange weapons (often tridents, for some reason) because they’d find some really good magical ones. Making (or commissioning) your own magical weapons to spec was prohibitively expensive, and most GMs I played with (including myself) didn’t make magic...

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