rules Archives - Page 4 of 9 - Neitherworld Stories

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 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 4, 2008

The Experience Equation

Rate of Character Advancement = 1 / Character Capability Something like this was an assumption of early D&D, but it has been lost. In today’s D&D, as it is meant to be played, you advance a level every 11 balanced encounters or so, and each level is roughly balanced with every other. Who knows what tomorrow’s D&D will bring? Well…...

December 30, 2007

Rules of the Second Age

I can see running this with a variety of rule-sets: d20, heavily-modified D&D, house-ruled Burning Wheel, high artha flow Sorcerer (& Sword) Maybe something else? The first two here are more differentiated by degree than type of rule-set. If we went the heavily-modified route, I’d be tempted to write a modified magic system that looked a bit like the stuff...

December 13, 2007

I don’t know precisely what D&D 4th edition will look like…

…but the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of it looking like the Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords in terms of structure. Ignore the wuxia feel of the book for a moment. What’s the structure of the classes in it? Well, there are different schools of martial maneuvers maneuvers (let’s genericize these a...

November 17, 2007

Spell Synergies

I had a neat (and probably unworkable) idea yesterday about the d20 spell system that would likely require too much work for me to actually write up fully, but I thought I’d share it. Here’s the idea. You cast a primary spell and (assuming you know a spell that has synergy with it) you can cast the secondary spell at...

October 22, 2007

Rules Compendium

Yesterday I bought a present for Angela and I: a copy of the Rules Compendium. The book compiles rules from various sources into an easy to read format that is alphabetized by topic. Intermixed are essays on rules-design and anecdotes about how rules resolved into their current form. I think it will be good for both of us, but in...

September 10, 2007

Character Roles, Part II

So… last night Angela and I were talking a bit about Character Roles. It occurred to me (sometimes I am slow), that the roles presumably designated in 4e (Controller, Defender, Leader, Striker) are primarily combat roles. What about non-combat roles? One of the big reasons why I think that many D&D games move from fight-t0-fight with little in-between is that...