The Campaign Builder's Guild

Quote from: the_takenI myself prefer little deviation from D&D. For a while I thought I was being snobbish, but someone who actualy thought making up new rules was the only way to go actualy proved me wrong. He made a game sytem based on a relatively popular manga/anime series, very flavourful and poured his blood and soul into it. Unfortunetly the result is a mess that I've totaly given up on trying to play. Not only does every character suffer from such aweful MAD that the 36 point buy is insufficient (he actualy declares a 40 point buy is normal for PCs), his crunch can't aproximate the characters he's based his sytem on properly. The system also suffers from extreme limitations of character creation, and he was openly hostile to input when I tried pointing out some of his errors (although my opening statement in his forumns was essentialy a "go back to D&D" message, so I guess I deserved it).

There are some gems hidding in that pile of trash he calls a game, but it's not worth getting my hands dirty trying to dig them out.

It gets worse. I can't play a game as a tribute the anime I like because most of the players that would play it are playing his game, blindly living with his crap because it's the only one left with the name that they like. I showed up too late to save them...

Totally your right not to want to play with any other systems than D&D, but there's nothing magical about the D&D system. Personally I think D&D's pretty poor at really capturing the feel of most fantasy books (ie, low magic) and on the other extreme of anime isn't really fluid enough to capture the essence of the thing. There's also no reason to complain about whatever point-buy you're using -- I'm currently playing in a campaign based on George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire (notoriously gritty low magic setting) and most of the NPCs have greater than 42pt point buy values. It really doesn't matter as long as there is parity and people are having fun.

Quote from: Epic MeepoOf course, if you don't like the so-called "heroic" RPG genre, where characters are expected to encounter progressively more difficult challenges as their careers progress, then I understand your objections to standard D&D.  However, the entire d20 System is specifically designed for the heroic style of play.  If you want the difficulty of challenges to remain static, or to be realistically distributed, you're not going to want to use the d20 System at all.

Yeah - Extremely significant changes to say, skills & classes & levels probably puts things out of the scope of d20, although presumably I'd like to salvage as much as possible from it. C'est la vie.

Thanks for the feedback guys, to respond to a few things:

"That seems a bit extreme, considering the fact that there are lots of weapons that have only 5 hp. And why does armor take damage on an attack roll of 1?"

Defense roll of 1, was a typo. And yeah, some weapon HPs may need to be adjusted -- I'm fine with weapons needing constant maintenance though (otherwise breaking).


"That doesn't sound like it would work very well. Why should a higher-level character have a harder time accomplishing the same task as a low-level character?"

I'm not saying they would. I'm referring to the way standard D&D usually tries to match DCs for skill tasks against the guy with the most skill ranks -- If you've got a challenging trap it's going to be a challenge that only your Rogue can really handle 'cause he's got all the search ranks, etc. Not that there are generic dungeons to be crawled through or pointless trap encounters in my setting, but basically this is to relieve the incredulousness of situations where only the Rogue can see the pressure plate / tripwire / pit covered with leaves.

"Are natural 20's still an auto hit and in this case an auto block? How do you handle someone rolling a 20 on attack and the other person rolling a 20 on defense?"

Presumably the highest of the two wins, and a match results in a clash. 20 on a defense roll ought to be an auto-dodge, though, yes.

"I hope you are giving your PC's a lot of extra money. Do magic weapons break as well? You may end up with some angry PC's."

Actually one of my setting goals is to reduce the inflation of the typical D&D economy. I want gold pieces to be valued currency rather than the basic unit of wealth. My PCs will likely never have magic items. Kind of the point is to emphasize the gritty aspect that you're using a regular weapon and it needs to be maintained regularly or it will break. (Unlike normal D&D where you can use the same weapon from level 1 to 20 unless someone sunders it.)

"It's ok, but it adds a lot more rolling at the table. Could slow down combat a little."

Yeah, that is one concern I have. I think it's worthwhile to increase the complexity of basic combat actions in a situation in which there's no magic -- Basically taking a note from Iron Heroes. I'd probably try to retrofit the Iron Heroes classes, except I'm hoping to eventually move to a classless and levelless system, heh.

Some variant rules I've been considering for awhile now. I'd like some feedback and suggestions if possible.


Crunchy Stuff:

-Hit Points. I'm considering changing to a VP/WP system. However, I'm not sure how this ought to work with...
-Armor as DR. Using the Iron Heroes variant of variable (ie, 1d4, 1d6, etc) damage reduction.

With WP/VP I'm not sure Armor as DR makes sense. From my understanding VP represent some sort of "Fatigue" like concept of effort required to get out of the way of attacks -- I suppose one could presumably justify that when you're wearing armor you don't need to spend some of the effort that you normally would expend to get out of way because you can rely upon armor to absorb the damage.




-Opposed rolls. Basically I want to have, as a design principle, actions which affect another person to be opposed. This leads to...

-Defense Rolls. When someone makes an attack, you roll defense. Since characters can expect to have an attack bonus, we introduce the similar concept of the defense bonus.
-Shield Combat. Taken from the A Game of Thrones d20 system, using a Shield grants you a really significant bonus to your defense bonus. If your shield allows you to block the attack, the damage is applied to the shield.

-Clash Rules. When Attack and Defense are tied, a clash occurs. Basically this is an auto-grapple with all the grappling possibilities in play, except that the clash can be "won" by succeeding on a Str or Dex opposed roll with the opponent, giving you a free AoO.
-Wear and Tear. Weapons all take 1 point of damage on attack rolls of 1. Armor takes damage on attack rolls of 1. Furthermore, every encounter results in at least 1 point of damage to weapons and armor used.

-Attacks of Opportunity. All AoOs are made at -5. Any action except an Attack provokes AoOs (taken from Iron Heroes). Basically I want to de-emphasize the power of AoOs, simplify the rules that trigger them, but still keep the tactical effect.

-Bull Rush. Continued successes allow you to keep pushing the opponent up to your movement maximum.


Other stuff:

-Willpower. Basically, instead of using Action Points & Sanity rules I think I'm going to take the "Willpower" feature from White Wolf's Mage game. Willpower is gained by fulfilling your archetype (essentially, by RPing). Willpower can be spent to increase your chance of success. Certain monsters and crazy stuff might lower your Willpower, though.


-Skill System. I want to completely overhaul the skill system. To be honest, I don't see the need for most of the skills on the list (Use Rope -- Useless as a skill. Spot and Listen really make no sense except to oppose Hide/MoveSilent.) Basically I reduce almost all skills to stat-based checks -- Climb is a Strength check. Ride is a Dexterity check. Spot is a Wisdom check. The main skills that remain are based on Knowledge and Diplomacy. (Keep in mind I'm trying to run a low/no magic campaign with a heavy emphasis on intrigue - Not for everyone.)

One of the benefits to this is that I can come up with a generally unified way to judge the difficulty of a task -- One of the problems I have with standard D&D is how challenges are scaled to the level/expert. If you're level 1 then it'll take you DC 10 to climb a cliff. If you're level 10 it'll be DC 20. The point here is generally to reduce the importance of skill ranks on things that generally aren't terribly important to the story. Everyone has about the same level of expertise. Having the right tools is often more important than being level 20. That's not to say if you wanted to play a Thiefly character you couldn't get something that would give "+1 to Dexterity checks involving stealth," but ultimately you're not going to be able to get a crazy levels of proficiency you can when there's an explicit skill for Hide/MoveSilent.

It depends on what you want to do with your campaign. Personally, I love (love, love love) linguistic touches like that. As long as the rest of your setting is as immersive then it's all good. One thing to keep in mind though is that people in your fantasy world are lazy too. If a place name is too hard to pronounce make up a truncation or colloquial name. Just try not to throw too much linguistics at people at once -- Takes awhile to internalize everything.

Understandably having everyone and their brother with house ruled stuff can be kind of confusing and overwhelming (yet another Magic-system replacement / variant caster class?). At the same time the point of the rules is to support your playstyle. Personally, I would never want to run a game that D&D's standard ruleset wants you to run -- A game where good guys face off against bad guys, and one of the parties wins and takes the other one's stuff.

There's nothing wrong with that game, it's just not the one I want to run as a DM. I'm a stickler for consistency and realism of the setting, so the wacky economy and power structure of your average D&D world doesn't appeal to me. I don't care for PCs foolishly risking their lives to run some stupid errand either. In my games ideally the winners are the ones who play the political game and only rarely resort to combat -- As such I think it's important to simplify and increase the deadliness of combat and to give a finer system of handling diplomatic relations than the core rules define.

One of my many gripes about d20 settings is that they don't do enough changes to the rules. Look at Eberron -- I fail to see how this setting is any different from any other D&D setting. Talk about noir moral ambiguity and pulp-action is just talk, the setting is exactly the same as standard D&D, the only change is that you've got action points and that's so insignificant -- I've yet to see them used in a way that actually changes the play experience. I'm not saying that Eberron is no different from standard D&D -- It's got some interesting things going on, it's just that the play it supposedly favors isn't meaningfully handled via the mechanics. More games need to sit down and say, "Look, Using Rope is not going to be a significant part of any game in this setting, so we don't need to have a skill to govern it."