rules Archives - Page 8 of 9 - Neitherworld Stories

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...

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,...

October 20, 2006

Character Death

Character death is not something I have dealt with a great deal. In general, I’m opposed to player character death determined by the roll of a die. This is odd, of course, because most of the games I play include this as a possibility and, indeed, as the assumed method of character death. In my mind, player characters are the...

October 13, 2006

d20 Tweaking: Dragons

This thread over at EN World is commenting on a recent article at the Wizard’s web site by David Noonan. The bit that I found interesting about the article – and the thread – was the belief that dragons-as-sorcerers is too complex and doesn’t fit the concept of dragon’s well. While I like the draconic connection to the sorcerer class,...

October 10, 2006

d20 Tweaking: The Hexblade

The Hexblade is a base character class introduced in the Complete Warrior. The basic idea of the class is a primarily martial character with some arcane abilities – most notably the ability to call down a curse on its foes. I like the concept. Unfortunately, I really dislike the execution. His supplementary powers are of very limited use. The curse...

September 29, 2006

Fortune in the Middle

I’ve been thinking a lot about the skill-based spellcasting method for d20 that I discussed in an earlier post – in particular, the manner in which I suggested applying metamagic in the comments. This amounts to a sort of hybrid fortune in the middle mechanic. The idea is that you’d declare the spell, roll the dice, and depending upon the...

July 28, 2006

d20 Magic System Musings…

Spellcasting in d20 bugs me for a number of reasons: Spell knowledge is all-or-nothing. If you know a spell, you can cast it without error. If you don’t know a spell, you just can’t cast it. There is no looking up spells you don’t know in ancient grimoires. Moreover, you can’t be in the process of learning a spell and...

April 28, 2006

Neitherworld Frustrations

The more I work on the multiple-player/one-character model for Neitherworld, the more I become convinced that it isn’t feasible to meet all of my gameplay goals for that model. At this point, I am fairly convinced that I cannot write a game in which all of the players portray the same character unless either (1) the players take competitive roles...

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