Pondering Inititiative

This post on Inititative got me thinking about how I handle Initiative in Skill20.

Right now, everyone declares actions, each side rolls a d12, and each combatant adds DEX bonus and if casting subtracts the level of the spell. This makes spell-casting a bit dicier and keeps things less predictable at the expense of rolling each round.

What the linked post proposes is that instead of rolling Initiative, use combat bonuses to determine order.

Since Skill20 doesn't use CB, I would have to use skills. In a way, it makes sense, as you would expect a highly skilled fighter to have the edge, and a more experienced spell-caster may well be likely to get his spell off quicker than a novice. The down side is that a halfway decent caster would be safe from lowbie monsters interrupting his spells before they went off.


I would need to keep the random element. Possibly have each side roll a d20 and individuals add their Skill/DEX asset to determine individuals scores (again, reduced by spell level for casters). That way Mr. Wizard wanting to fireball those pesky goblins would still be at risk if the dice were evil. The downside is that it might be too much swing.

A possibility is to make the opposition's Initiative static, effectively a DC to check against to see if you go first. So goblins with 2 ranks of Melee and a +2 DEX bonus would have an Initiative DC of 14 (10 + 2 + 2). If Mr. Wizard has 10 ranks of Magic, a DEX bonus of 1, and is casting Fireball (3rd level spell), he would add 8 to the Initiative die roll, meaning he would get his spell off on a 6 or better.

Hmm.

*Update*

I opened my combat rules document to type out new Initiative rules. My current rules for Initiative is one paragraph, two sentences. I decided to leave well enough alone.

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Skill20: Margin and Damage Spikes

I recently started a new sandbox campaign for my alpha testers and saw in practice how much damage can spike due to my Margin of Success rules. An opponent that has a 50% chance to hit can spike up to an extra 10 points of damage and average about 5 extra points of damage. This led to some ugliness when a handful of goblins with d4 damage weapons got a couple of lucky hits.

Characters with 14 or 16 hit points figured on being able to take a few d4 jabs over the course of the fight, none of us realizing the average damage going to be 7-8 and possibly as high as 14.


While I managed not to kill off any characters (though one player got to try out the dying rules), I realize I might need to mitigate damage a bit, even though the spikiness is, IMO, more realistic. And I need to do it in a way that won't overly complicate things.

Ideas:
Go On The Defense
My players had asked if there was a way to go all out defensive when they realized they were in trouble. Using a defensive maneuver that gives +4 Melee Defense reduces the odds of being hit and the margin. Assuming a 50% opponent, an opponent that hits now would have an average margin of 3 and a max of 6. I am debating halving the margin damage done to a character using this maneuver, though I may make that a feat.

Improve Armor
Right now, armor is pretty straightforward. It gives DR, ranging from 1 to 6 DR. While upping the DR would be easy, I don't want plate mail tanks clanking about the battlefield immune to harm. I'm considering adding a bonus to Melee Defense, as that would reduce the margins. But I don't want it to get too high... see aforementioned tanks.

Cap Margin Damage
Another idea would be to limit margin damage to the maximum of the weapon. That would cap a d4 weapon to +4 damage, and a d8 to +8. So far I like this idea the least.

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Skill20: Initiative

A post by Greywulf got me thinking about the old-school method of determining initiative every round and how I could integrate that into Skill20.

It meant that instead of Initiative being a resource, like focus and hit points, it would just be determined every round. I had to balance how that would impact spell casters, as before initiative was pretty predictable once the fight got under way. With initiative changing every round, casting spells, especially higher level ones, became dicier. I decided this is a good thing.

I debated old-fashioned weapon speeds for about 30 seconds, then dismissed the idea. Faster weapons almost always had less reach, and I decided the two balanced each other out enough for my purposes.

Different versions of D&D have used different dice for determining initiative. In my opinion, the d20 provided too much of a swing, while a d6 would seriously hamper spell casters and make any initiative bonus a major one. I split the difference and went with a d12. I'm still debating whether to add the Alertness bonus to initiative in addition to Dexterity or in place of it. (In Skill20 Alertness is an ability score, not a feat).

After the jump is my updated combat round breakdown and sections on declarations and initiative.


Combat Round (6 seconds)
1) Declarations
2) Roll Initiative
3) Start-of-round effects applied
4) Turns by Initiative order
5) End-of-round effects applied

Declarations
The players declare their actions and the GM decides on the opponents’ actions before initiative is rolled.
If an intended target is dropped, an attacker may attempt a DC 15 Skill/ALE check to switch targets. If successful, the attacker is at a -2 penalty vs. the new target, if not the action is wasted (but no focus is spent). The Skill is the one being used in the intended attack (Magic, Melee or Ranged). If a character has 10 or more ranks in the skill, a check is not required, but the penalty still applies.

Initiative
At the beginning of a round each side rolls 1d12, and then each character and monsters adds their Initiative Bonus and any penalties. This is their initiative score for the round.
Any initiative below zero counts as zero. A combatant with a zero initiative may only fight defensive, gain initiative, or second wind.

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Skill20: Margin of Success

Skill20 design is a constant battle between simplification and detail. Sometimes my brain will pop out some arcane design idea, only for me to chew it over a day or so and dismissing it as needlessly complicated.

A recent idea I had was to eliminate damage bonuses. As it stands, characters get a damage bonus with weapons equal half their skill rank, plus the appropriate stat bonus. Whether you hit dead even or by 10, the damage is the same. Then it occurred to me that in some other systems I use, the more you hit by, the more damage you do and I pondered how to incorporate that into Skill20.


Effectively a bonus to hit would be a bonus to damage. Likewise, even if a defensive action didn't keep you from getting hit, it would reduce the damage. Separate critical rules wouldn't be needed, as the damage of such an accurate hit would be reflected in the margin damage.

This would mean that fights against evenly matched opponents could take longer, as the margin on both sides would likely be small, while fights against goons (cannon fodder opponents) would probably be skewed more in favor of the PCs. The danger would be big-bads, like dragons and giants, I'll have to monitor their damage output carefully in playtest.

I'll also have to tweak some damage dealing spells. Instead of scaling dice of damage, I'm thinking a flat die amount for the spell plus margin. So instead of a fireball doing 1d6 per rank, up to 10d6, it would do 5d6 plus margin. Each +3.5 of margin is equivalent to a d6. Some more crunch to chew on during playtesting. It might slightly nerf magic damage output, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but a wizard-type could still clear a room of 15 hp goblins.

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Skill20 101

In most incarnations of MicroLite, three stats (attributes) are used - Strength, Dexterity, and Mind. The trouble I ran into using the three stat system was that it put too much on Mind. While specifics were driven by skills, it still put everything from Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma into one stat.

My solution was to add Alertness. It was the one area that wasn't well defined by a skill and that I was struggling with in game play. So my simple 3x9 skill chart had to expand to 4x9.

That's right, 9 skills. At least for Fantasy Skill20. Different settings could require different skills around subjects such as magic and technology.

Skills replace numbers such as Base Attack Bonus (use Melee or Ranged skill) as well as defenses. Without numbers derived from levels, there's no need for levels. Advancement is handled through advancing skills and stats. Advancing skills is fairly easy, growing more difficult with higher skill ranks, while advancing attributes are expensive and require a lot of work (xp).

The third part of the character building blocks is the selection of feats. Class abilities from other d20 incarnations are part of feats, as well as some familiar feats. The initial number of feats hinge on stat scores and are gained by improving stats and getting skills to certain break points (11 ranks of a given skill). Feat gain is fairly slow, though the initial helping may look generous. However, given that the player uses feats to emulate class abilities, they can get used up quickly.

The player can decide whether to focus their character and make it more versatile based on feat selection with the obvious trade off. The same holds true for skills. If a player dumps all xp into advancing their melee skill and load up on combat feats they will shine in toe-to-toe fights. The counter to this min-maxing is to have a well-rounded campaign with plenty of skill checks and challenges other than combat.

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Game Name Game

Back when 4E was looming on the horizon, I started working on what I called Project 39, my attempt to combine the best of what I had seen in the 4E mechanics with what I wanted to keep from 3.5.

4E hit, I blew up my campaign world to accommodate the huge shift it represented, and we converted our ongoing campaign to 4E. That last a few sessions until I hit on a way to do more granular advancement (something I frequently tinkered with in d20) and hit on the idea of 4lacarte, an a la carte advancement system where players bought powers, feats, skills and what not piecemeal, rather than a surge of power once in a while when they leveled.

Cruising the InterBlogs, I stumbled across Robin Stacey's Microlite system. The idea behind Microlite was to boil down D&D to its barest bones, with the basic rules taking up a couple pages. A small community developed around the idea, all doing their own takes on it. I realized it would be easy for me to distill down what I was doing into a simplified system, basically just expanding slightly on the Microlite idea but keeping my idea of advancement divorced from level. I called it MicroZ.

Microlite was bought by Seth Drebitko of Kobold Enterprise. Microlite20 or M20 continues to have its community and Mr. Drebitko is continuing to develop the system. However as thing progressed I could see his path and my development path were diverging enough that I felt that my system was not quite Micro and many of the mechanic introduced to M20 were not ones that met my needs.

I flirted with the name z20, a play off d20 and the z in Oz. But it isn't very descriptive, then I hit on an idea for a name that sums up the core of my iteration of d20. Skill20.

Advancement in Skill20 mostly hinges on Skills. While there is Stat (Ability or Attribute such as Strength) advancement, Stats don't change much over time. Skills are the driving force in this game. Hence the name.

I'll go into more details on Skill20 in a future post.

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MicroZ First Beta

A lot of this probably won't make complete sense as I've been a slacker about posting my MicroZ stuff online.

First off, MicroZ is a condensed d20 system, inspired by Microlite. The biggest difference is that I do away with the class/level system, making it skill based and using feats to define what would be class abilities. I keep some of the best aspects of the 4th Edition of the World's Most Popular RPG (4E for short) in the mechanics, namely having defenses instead of saves.

In Microlite and MicroZ, the Vancian system of magic is replaced with point fueled spell casting. In Microlite hit points are used, in MicroZ there is a separate pool of points called Focus. One of the big reasons for this was the healing loop... if someone can heal more hp than they spend to cast the healing spell, they can go on indefinitely.

Last night was my first beta test of the system and a scenario I want to run at GenCon in 2011. The group was composed of one of my alpha test players, several experienced gamers, and two players who had never played an RPG.


The good part was that the newbies were able to play the most complicated characters, both spell casters, fairly easily. The character sheets were easy to follow and the session didn't bog down for mechanics.

Overall the story of the scenario was well received. In a nutshell an undead mayor decided he was going to take a new wife, a farmer's daughter from the adjacent kingdom. It was the players' task to track her down and save her from the her wedding day.

The biggest flaw in the scenario was that the fights were too easy. The characters never felt like they were really in any danger and still had plenty of resources left at the end of the final fight.

The biggest system issue is that spell-casters need to be nerfed. They were able to blaze away with spells and didn't come close to running out of Focus. Right now I'm mulling on whether to reduce the amount of Focus characters get or raise the cost of casting. As usual interesting ideas flit through my mind that I discard to keep from complicating and bogging down the system.

The rogue feat was pretty under-powered. In the session, it gave the character +3 damage when flanking, on crits, and on surprise attacks. It never came into play, and compared to lightning bolts and searing rays, and extra +3 seemed pretty puny.

I was also concerned about the fighter feat, which adds the character's Strength bonus to the DR (damage reduction) of armor was over-powered, but the "tank" never got hit. Still, I need to revisit it, as most of the monsters would have needed a critical hit to hurt the tank.

All in all, I got a lot of good notes. I'm glad I'm doing this a year in advance rather than a week.

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More MicroZ Magic Musings

First let me say I hate retyping spell lists.

While I was working on MicroZ Supers, I came up with a mechanic to reflect the exertions of using more strenuous powers without taking them directly from hit points a la Microlite and MicroZ. Characters would have a Stamina score, equal to their Hit Points, akin to the Endurance stat used in Hero Games. More taxing powers and putting in extra effort would cause fatigue, as would taking damage, which would be applied to Stamina. Once Stamina hit zero, nighty-night.

There are a few more details, but that gives the jist. It would be possible for characters to run out of steam without being in danger of dying from it. I've begun to chew on whether I can apply this mechanic to MicroZ Fantasy.


(At this point my play-testers/guinea pigs MB and Weasel are probably going "here we go again".)

The trick is that the whole point of distilling D&D to a Micro game is to simplify it. Would this add to much complexity? Because now we'd have to track Stamina and Hit Points separately, with different rules for recovering Stamina.

My other worry is that spell-casting is more restrained than 4E and 3.x. And I like that, I've often sought a less videogamey approach to magic for my games.

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Feats For MicroZ

Note to self - I really need to update lordoz.com so I can actually post the rules for perusal.

Note to reader(s) - MicroZ is inspired by and based on Microlite d20.

Note to blog - don't worry blog, I won't leave you for microblogging like Twitter. I need more than 140 characters.

Any ways, feats. I decided that I still needed some crunch and customization options to differentiate characters a bit more. What I had seen in my a la carte experiments was that players loaded up on feats, both because they provided useful abilities and they had a flat rather than escalating cost.

I had two design decisions to make. How to handle and reign in the gaining of feats, and what kind of mechanics did I want to use for the feats themselves?


The first was simple when I hit on it. Break feats down by Stat association and tie the accumulation of feats directly to the Stat. Want another STR (Strength) feat? Buy up your STR. This limited the number of feats a character could have, meaning I could also keep my feat list small without characters ending up with most of them. But assigning gaining of feats to odd numbers greater than 11, I made to odd Stats actually useful rather than a stepping stone.

As for the feats themselves, in the case of skill-affecting feats I borrowed a page from Star Wars Saga d20 and used feats that gave a reroll under certain conditions or uses of skills. It's also possibly to expend an additional feat to upgrade it to rolling twice and keep the best roll. I just had to make sure not to let it be available for combat (including magic) skills.

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MicroZ - Testing Starting

So I got some positive feedback from my players when I sprung on them converting from 4e a la carte to MicroZ. The downside is that we haven't tested combat yet, they were too busy role-playing, investigating, and rescuing innocents from burning farmhouses to get in a fight. I expect the combat system to get a workout next game session when they catch up to the nefarious brigands that set said farmhouse fire.


At some point I need to clean up my LordOz website and post the MicroZ rules there, but I'm partly waiting to see how things shake out with the recent sale of Microlite d20.

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Micro-ing Weapons

I'm continuing on my adaption of Microlite for my own evil purposes.

Originally I thought that weapons would be a matter of copy and paste, but as I looked at the weapon tables, a couple of things struck me.


The first was that even in Micro form, D&D clung to an esoteric assortment of weapons for what I could best attribute to nostalgia. The original D&D was derived from war-gaming, and that pedigree shows in the variety of weapons. But when was the last time someone used a pick? How about those various flavors of polearm? In the interest of keeping MicroZ micro, I started dropping weapons.

The other thing I noticed was that simplification made certain weapons in each category more desirable than others. Why use a scimitar for d6 when you can use a bastard sword for d10? Why use a dagger for d4 when you can use a shortsword for d6? So I began looking at the weapons in the various categories and tried to balance them. It meant adding a little more detail, but hopefully I'll do so without encumbering the system.

In some cases it meant tweaking damage values... the scimitar, longsword and bastard sword in one hand all do d8. A flail only does d6 but is +2 vs. shields, a shortspear does d6 but can be thrown and a rapier does d6 but subtracts 2 from the DR of armor.

DR of armor? That's another post.

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Starting on MicroZ

First to give credit where credit is due, and in case you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, Microlite is a super-condensed form of D&D. Intrigued by the possibilities I've started tinkering with the system.

Two of the big considerations are adopting Microlite for my level-free experiment, and adopting it for my campaign world.


Stats was easy. I'm keeping the three used in the original Microlite design, Strength, Dexterity, and Mind. While I debated on the idea of combining Intelligence, Wisdom/Willpower, and Charisma into the Mind stat or not, I finally squashed my mechanics-hydra by rationalizing that specific aspects of mental abilities are also reflected in skills.

Speaking of skills, level-free construction and the voices in my head required me to beef up the 4 (or 5 for expert) skills used in Microlite. My skill list consists of Athletics, Discipline, Influence, Knowledge, Magic, Melee, Missile, Subterfuge, and Survival. While this may seem to be a bit much for a "micro" system, these skills also replace attack bonuses, caster levels, and armor class (more on that in a later post).

Each class has three class skills, which they start with 2 ranks each. Class skills are less expensive to advance than other skills, but there's no rule to keep a fighter from buying up ranks of Magic. It will be more expensive and he won't have a mage's special abilities for casting, but effectively multi-classing is a matter of investing skill points.

Advancement is easy now (compared to my 4E a la carte). You have class skills, other skills and stats.

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Microlite Musings

First I suppose I should explain what Microlite 20 is. It's pre-4 D&D distilled down to its basic essence. Its beauty is in its simplicity and just reading the system makes me yearn for the "old days" of D&D.

Of course, what happens when I read a game system? My brain starts thinking of ways to muck around with it.


Oz, have you ever ran a game you didn't tamper with? - actual player quote.

If it's so simplistically perfect, why mess with it? Because I need some meat with my potatoes. The Expert addition actually takes a big step in the right direction. But I've gotten attached to the granularity I've gained with my a la carte rules-mods for 4e and Star Wars. The questions running through my mind -

Can I mod the rules to capture the flexibility and flavor of my current game?
Can I do so without creating something so complex that I might as well have stuck with what I have?
Can I balance it? (The biggest challenge of a la carte)
Can I use it easily with existing source materials?
Can I actually finish it before another shiny object distracts me?

Why couldn't I have stumbled across this before my vacation?

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Guest Post About d20 A La Carte

After I made a comment on Bard of Valiant, a gaming blog, mentioning my a la carte home-brew, the author of the blog asked if I would be willing to do a guest post regarding how I went about making the a la carte system.

The resulting article is here. Sure, I could just repost it here, but I thought since she was nice enough to ask me to guest-blog I could at least send all five of you to look at her site.

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Project 39: It's a kind of magic

So for my Sundered Veil campaign setting I'm thinking there will be three kinds of magic.

Arcane Magic is classic energy manipulation, making things move or burn. While there won't be any room clearing fireballs, this is the most useful magic for combat.

Spirit Magic is derived from faith, and in fact many users won't even think of it as "magic". It will be healing and protection magic. Always useful to have when combing otherbeast infested ruins.

Druidic Magic (working title) taps into the primal magic that flows between the Otherworld and our world. Most useful for "tweening" between the worlds, affecting otherbeasts/otherkin and affecting nature.


The approach I'm looking at has some resemblance to the Force users in Star Wars Saga. The hero has a feat to qualify, a la Channel Magic, has a specific skill to use a given kind of magic, then uses additional feats to pick up "spells". More powerful spells would likely have lesser spells as prerequisites, such as having Ignite (a minor spell used to light fires) as a prereq for Combust (a combat fire spell useful for setting bandits and ogres on fire).

The hero has their "suite" of spells, each of which may be used once per encounter. Some might take multiples of the same spell to get multiple uses, others might have feats that let them get certain spells returned to their suite under certain conditions during the fight.

The other mechanic I'll be using I call Axiom. It represents the mundane worlds "resistance" to magic. When a spell is generated, a number of Axiom dice are rolled, and the result is subtracted from the skill check. So Ignite might have an Axiom of 1 (roll 1d6) while Combust might have an Axiom of 3 (roll 3d6). Of course there will be feats that modify this mechanic.

The idea is to keep more skilled casters from automatically toasting everything every time and to reflect the difficulty inherent in more advanced spells. Say Willy the Wizard has an Arcane asset of +10 (that is his skill plus all modifiers come to 10). With an average d20 roll of 10 (I know, it's really 10.5), that generates an average of 20. The odds of a target not getting hit by Combust is pretty abysmal given an average Reflex Defense of 10 to 12. Willy has to autofail to miss anyone with a Reflex lower than 14.

Throw in Axiom, and now it becomes more challenging for Willy. Using Combust becomes much dicier, as the average Axiom generated will offset his asset.

I'm still chewing on the terms Druidic and Axiom. I'm staying away from the term Primal Magic because of the Primal Power Source in 4e, but I haven't thought of a better name.

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Project 39 - Defenses

Project 39 is the nickname I've used for my various attempts to make an Ozzified d20 that falls between 3.5 and 4e. Rather than make a new tag for my a la carte home-brew, I've been using the Project 39 tag, so I might as well call the class-less version by that name.

To the matter on hand, I've been chewing on defenses. I've decided to do away with Armor Class or Defense Bonus (the mechanic used in Modern d20). Star Wars Saga does a similar thing, though their system with armor can get kind of messy. I also have to consider my use of Combat Skills.


Just using Reflex as a defense has some problems. Say Phil Farmer, who has a total of +3 with swords, is fighting Bill Badass, who has +10 with swords. Let's assume their Reflex Defense is the same. Their target numbers are the same. Bill's superior skill doesn't help keep him from getting hit.

What I'm considering is a set of feats that allow the character to use an appropriate skill as defense. This means with that feat and wielding a sword, Bill would have a Defense of 20 (10 base + 10 for swords) against a melee attacker instead of his Reflex Defense. But this doesn't help is Oscar the Ogre decides to lob a cinder block at Bill.

As for calculating the base Reflex, Fortitude and Will Defenses in the absence of class bonuses I came up with a simple idea. Instead of a given Defense being 10 + stat bonus + class bonus + level bonus + feat bonuses it would be Stat plus feat bonus. If you have a Dex of 13 (and no applicable feats) your Reflex Defense would be 13.

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More class-less musings

Why do I get my best ideas at work or when I'm driving?

Anyways, I've been chewing on character creation for my latest a la carte iteration of d20. The one advantage of classes was they made character construction easy and relatively balanced. Giving the players free reign opens things up to balance issues, both intentional and unintentional.


Novice players I figured out an easy fix in designing beginning packages themed around different kinds of characters like Woad Warrior, Hedge Druid, Faith Healer and Ley Raveller. I'm thinking there won't be any mechanical benefits, players building characters from scratch can get the exact same results, but it will make it easier for someone who wants to play a "healer" type and not spend two hours crunching mechanics to pick the Faith Healer template, plug in a couple of things and go.

Think on this led to a chain of ideas. I was considering how to handle Weapon Proficiencies, trying to decide how detailed I wanted to get and how to balance how many feats a starting character should have when I had the heretical thought "get rid of them."

Huh?

In most systems not having a proficiency inflicted a penalty. But since I was replacing Attack Bonus with Combat Skills, did I really need a penalty. If Phil Farmer picked up a sword, what would the difference be between him and Bill Badass? Well Bill would have skill ranks and Phil wouldn't. If Phil later got a little training or practice with the sword, he wouldn't leap from -4 to 0 by buying proficiency, he'd go from 0 to +1 by buying a skill rank.

Eliminating weapon proficiencies meant not having to worry about giving starting characters enough feats to be adequately diverse in weapon choices without finding an artificial means to prevent a min-maxer from loading up on a narrow focus.

I'll also be handling skills the same way. Instead of a penalty for not having a skill, it will just be a lack of bonus. This get rids of the rank zero skills I've used in other iterations of a la carte.

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d20 with no class?

Yes, my headline does lend itself to many obvious slams, but this isn't another e-skirmish in the Edition Wars.

I've been thinking about my campaign idea I call "The Sundered Veil" or Sundered for short. In a nutshell a science experiment run amok punches a hole between this world and the one that the beings of myth and lore retreated to after the Milesian Accords. This breaks the accords, allowing these beings and magic to enter the world. For some reason when they enter a large chunk of mankind vanishes. Oh, and did I mention there was a global EMP when the rupture occurred? Bye bye digital age.


A quick comparison would be a cross between the various urban fantasy novels of Charles de Lint and Ariel - A Book of the Change. My mental vision for this is a nomadic druid on an antiquated Harley with a sword and a shotgun riding through a foggy countryside.

With my recent experimentation (and so far success) with my a la carte adaptations of 4e and Star Wars Saga, I've been mulling a Modern d20 adaptation, taking good math from 4e and the basics of Md20 and combining them. As I contemplated this, it occurred to me the system might be ideal for Sundered.

When I tackle a game system, I tend to think about character generation first. Even though I liked the Md20 classes, each based on a Characteristic, I realized I could entirely eliminate classes and just keep the Characteristic associated talent trees. By maintaining prerequisites in the talent trees I could mitigate cherry-picking. The hardest part of an a la carte system versus the level framework is balance. I saw that when my players converted their Star Wars characters and heavily invested where they could get the most bang for the buck. A good GM rule is that if players really want something you've ruled against, odds are you did the right thing.

In my other a la carte conversions I still kept classes for character creation purposes. Players built a first level character, using the changes I had put in like having separate skill ranks instead of universal skill progression and having weapon skills instead of attack bonuses. Then they advanced the characters in the new a la carte advancement until they ran out of xp to spend.

In Sundered, I can just give the players the numbers for starting stats, skills, feats and talents and go from there. Seeing as the characters are the "new heroes" of the new age, or at least will be eventually, I can be as generous as 4e in attributes and make sure they have enough hit points that the first goblin with a pointy stick doesn't end their heroic careers. The trickiest part will be magic, which I'm thinking I will do as a self-contained module so that the new core system is easily ported to different settings.

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+1 is weaksauce

In the process of blowing up 4e and Star Wars d20 into a la carte character character advancement I realized that sinking a whole feat into getting a +1 bonus was pretty lame. Does being +1 to hit or damage with a given weapon really make enough difference to reflect specialized training or talent with said weapon?


Seeing as I did away with a flat AB or level based bonus and replaced them with weapon skills, it seemed logical to apply the Skill Focus feat to combat skills as well as non-combat (though skill focus gives a +3 bonus in both my games).

In the Star Wars conversion, losing levels meant no +1/2 level bonus to damage. However, hit points went down as I instituted a maximum hit point rule of 5x Constitution (Hit points are gained by repeatedly taking the Toughness Feat). So far I'm leaving damage alone, as the bad guys have less as well as the players.

In 4e, it's a little different. From what I read on the web, a lot of GMs, including WotC's developers, have issues with how long fights last and take measures such as nerfing monster hit points. I had been having players add their 1/2 level bonus to damage, but no more levels means no more bonuses.

Weapon Focus gives +1 damage with a weapon group, going to +2 at Paragon and a whopping +3 at Epic. A Level 1 Kobold Skirmisher has 27hp, while a Level 4 Slyblade has 42hp. How impactful will that +1 damage be, let alone how feeble that +2 at Paragon looks against a Level 11 Firelasher with 108hp or +3 versus the 255hp that a Death Giant has?

Actually, I think writing this has led me to an idea. Have the feat Weapon Focus add 1/2 the skill rank as a damage bonus to that weapon. So a fighter with 8 ranks in Heavy Blades and the Weapon Focus feat would add +4 damage. As he buys up his Heavy Blade skill, the damage will scale.

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4laCarte - alpha

What follows is my first draft for my piecemeal advancement system for 4e. Obviously, the two big pitfalls of such a system is munchkinism and gauging the power level of the characters, as now not all 4th level characters are the same.

The system will lead to higher to-hit scores at low levels. I thought this over a decided I don't have a big problem with it. Hopefully items that refer to my specific campaign rules such as hobby skills won't be too confusing.

Obviously this will need some tinkering. I am still editing the rules while I type this blog entry as things occur to me.

Okay, draft after the jump.


4lacarte

Character generation:

Build your first level character according to the existing rules except as follows:

SKILLS

Skills are bought on a rank by rank basis. First level characters receive an allocation of skill ranks to distribute among their class skills. This is equal to the number of starting skills under the regular system x5. So a Ranger, which starts with 5 skills under regular 4e, would have 25 skill ranks.

Characters receive a number of bonus skill ranks equal to INT-10 (minimum 0). These may be allocated to any skill.

If Hobbies (Secondary Skills) are used, a first level character receives a number of ranks equal to their INT.

No skill or hobby may have more than 6 levels allocated at first level.

NEW SKILLS

Initiative (DEX) - used in place of the Initiative modifier. Class skill for Fighter, Monk, Ranger, and Rogue.

Ride (STR) - used to control a mount in difficult situations (such as combat). Class skill for Fighter, Paladin, and Warlord.

WEAPON/IMPLEMENT SKILLS
Weapons and Implements have skills that are used instead of attack bonuses. Each implement is its own skill, each weapon group is its own skill.

First level characters receive a number of ranks to allocate to weapon and/or implement skills.

Characters start with 2 ranks plus the higher of their STR or DEX bonus. Martial characters receive an additional 2 ranks.

Characters that use an implement start with 2 ranks plus the higher of their INT or WIS bonuses. Casting Freehand (without an implement) is a separate implement skill and may be purchased with starting ranks.

No character may start with more than 3 ranks in a given implement or weapon.

ADVANCEMENT

Instead of gaining levels, players spend xp to buy and improve components of their characters. It is up to the GM if a character may purchase something and how soon. Don’t expect the GM to let you buy Evasion for your paladin just because you find it mechanically useful. Also, non-level specific prerequisites still apply.

Ability Scores - new score x100
Defense Bonus - new score x100 (AC, Reflex, Fortitude and Willpower are all bought separate)
Feats, Heroic - 300
Feats, Paragon - 600 (must have at least 3 heroic feats and 1 paragon class feature)
Feats, Epic - 900 (must have at least 2 paragon feats and 1 epic class feature)
Powers - level x100 for main class, level +1 x100 for multiclass, level +3 for non-class but same power source, level +5 for non-class and different power source
Skills - Buying a new skill costs 100xp for a class skill, 150xp for a multi-class skill, and 300xp for a non-class skill. Increasing a skill costs new rank x10 for class, new rank +1 x10 for multiclass, new rank +3 x10 for non-class.
Hobbies - Buying a new hobby (rank 1) costs 50 xp. Increasing it costs new rank -1 x10.
Feature, Paragon - 200x the class level of the feature.
Feature, Epic - 300x the class level of the feature.

HIT POINTS
Hit points are gained by purchasing the Toughness Feat. The first time you purchase this feat you also receive additional hit points equal to CON bonus.

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