d20 Under The Hood

It's no secret that I like to tinker with rules. In my Marvel SAGA game, the original blue rulebook is referred to as "the suggestion book". And I've been home-brewing rules for D&D almost since I started playing. A lot of these are rules I've seen elsewhere and adapted, some are ones I come up with on my own.

With 4e coming out, I've been thinking a lot about the d20 system and almost every session of my D&D campaign has some new tweaked rule, either something I've read for 4e or another d20 system, or something that didn't work like I wanted. Fortunately my players are good sports about it.

With d20, I weigh in a couple of factors. One obviously is balance. There are some things out of whack, sometimes because of my tampering but also sometime because of the original design. The other is ease-of-use. It's easy for me to get carried away with "crunch", but I've had players that are put off by excessively complicated rules.

I've found sometimes writing thoughts down helps me look at ideas more objectively. Plus if I share them, maybe I'll get some feedback.


I've found sometimes writing thoughts down helps me look at ideas more objectively. Plus if I share them, maybe I'll get some feedback. Maybe my idea for combining five different bonuses based on situation to get a score isn't so good after all, or maybe I'll suggest something someone will think "cool, I'm going to use that too."

I'll be tagging these with d20 UTH so that they can be filtered from other gaming posts.

(Now let's see if I ever follow through on this...)