Yet another heart breaker thread [D20 "Sweet Spot" 11]

[DrPraetor]

The problem with most D20 variants is that they are marginal improvements - if they are improvements at all - over D&D 3rd edition. So, you have a bunch of house rules, maybe people like them (ala Tome), but it just isn't enough of an improvement over D&D 3E to make any fuss about it.

The problem with Exalted is that it sucks. But the pitch is good.

So, a D&D 3rd ed. variant that pushed the Overton window up to at least level 16 (and maybe level 20).

The idea is to rework D&D 3rd edition so that the "Sweet Spot" moves from levels 4-7, to levels 11-16. Then you set up character generation so that players start at level 11 - with 10 levels of basic classes and 1 level of their Exalted Immortal class.

Lessee...
[*] Feat Chains, definitely. (by which I mean the Tome thing in which you get an entire chain as a single feat)
[*] Enough phlebtonium-rich concepts to keep the Fighting Man, Monk, Ranger, Barbarian and Rogue happy and relevant.
[*] Some system to keep the tactics minigame interesting at level 11+ (open to suggestions, but it pretty much has to involve the afforementioned phlebtonium, I think. Maybe martial character concepts all really care about ley lines to power their magic Fu?)
[*] 3rd ed. stealth, diplomacy and misc. thief minigames sort-of work, but you need rules to hold them together at higher levels when they break down.[/s]

[Orion]

3rd Edition stealth and diplomacy are both 100% broken and must be consigned to the flames. The thing where one feat would grant 5 distinct abilities was also a mistake, or at best a kludge you shouldn't need in this scenario. Especially if you're not smooth-scaling from level 1 up. You can go ahead and either let mortal feats just stop mattering, and have people only care about Immortal feats, or straight up not give out mortal feats.

[Prak]

Is there a good way to do a stunting system like original Exalted? I mean, obviously for d20, but also at all?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Exporting a stunting system like Exalted? That's like asking for help on importing the 2E D&D magic item creation system.

The idea is to rework D&D 3rd edition so that the "Sweet Spot" moves from levels 4-7, to levels 11-16. Then you set up character generation so that players start at level 11 - with 10 levels of basic classes and 1 level of their Exalted Immortal class.

Doing this with d20 is a dicey proposition -- at least the part where you pooh-pooh the 'sweet spot'. Because the game setting will still have CR5 ogre barbarians and expert 6 scholars and whatever. Unless you want to recreate the killer housecat problem but on a larger scale, you still have to create a RNG that's functional from level 0 up to level 11 or whatever. Even at level 11, you can still expect to face a dozen trolls or six treants or seven hill giants for encounters -- and some people will seriously want to do something like pit thirty barbarian 3s against the party.

You'd either have to do a 4E D&D-style retcon and declare that PCs just plain don't face lower-than-CR9 creatures without a huge metagame framework like its minions or design the game to scale downwards from level 11 to 1 properly (and conversely, upwards from level 1 to 11 properly) anyway. You just plain don't save any work by declaring that you don't care about what happens in the lower half of the game unless you're willing to do serious violence to WSoD.

[OgreBattle]

Do you envision the monsters being moved up in level ("Ogres are now CR10") or do you mean that the sweet spot of the game will be fighting demons, devils, and elder elementals?

[Username17]

Is there a good way to do a stunting system like original Exalted? I mean, obviously for d20, but also at all?

At its core Exalted's stunting system is that you put a bit of effort into describing your character's actions and you get stuff. That's actually fine in abstract. If you just said that describing what you were doing in terms of the scenery and shit gave you a +2, you'd get a bit more description of each action than "I attack" and everyone would get that +2 all the time and you could bake it into DCs.

Now Exalted fails because there's multiple levels of stunting, the largest bonus is supposed to use up noticeable amounts of table time to describe (and thus slows the game down), it's mother-may-I whether you get the bonus at all (and thus usually quite unfair), and the benefits include recharging a power pool (meaning that there are longterm consequences for not stunting). It's super fucked actually.

But if you just wanted to set the default amount of description of an attack from "I attack" to "I kick over the brazier and stab the ogre through the cloud of cinders" then just giving people a fixed and small bonus for using some descriptive text would be sufficient to do that.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

If what you want is to have it possible to play people who turn into storm clouds, unleash giant rays of fire, or jump 200 feet towards a castle, smashing through the wall to stab wizards in the face, without it being a tiresome pile of fiddly abilities and things that have steadily diverged to nonsense, I've already made an RPG for that. And it lets you pit the heroes against fifty level 3 barbarians, too.

[8d8]

Exporting a stunting system like Exalted? That's like asking for help on importing the 2E D&D magic item creation system.

So handle it the same way. Throw out/ignore the thing that's already made, focus on the concept, and start fresh within a better framework. You don't export, you draw inspiration and re-create.

[TheFlatline]

Is there a good way to do a stunting system like original Exalted? I mean, obviously for d20, but also at all?

At its core Exalted's stunting system is that you put a bit of effort into describing your character's actions and you get stuff. That's actually fine in abstract. If you just said that describing what you were doing in terms of the scenery and shit gave you a +2, you'd get a bit more description of each action than "I attack" and everyone would get that +2 all the time and you could bake it into DCs.

When I was running a swashbuckling game part of the problem I ran into with stunts is that skill checks that you normally would implement to do shit, like swinging from chandeliers, would end up requiring you do something that you hadn't specialized in, and thus it'd be an impediment.

So I said "fuck it" and started saying "yes" more often. The rules we came up with are that during action scenes, anything that you could feasibly take 10 on and do (ie: Jump from the balcony overlooking the ballroom to the chandelier and then jump on the bad guy from the chandelier) you *did* because you were so amped up on the action. Stunts either gave bonus damage, bonus multipliers on confirmed crits, or bonus to hit/make your roll/whatever. Your choice. There might be penalties/consequences if you whiffed the final action/attack but the setup pretty much always just happened.

The unofficial rule was that the more ballsy and entertaining you were, the more you could get away with as part of the setup of the stunt.

It worked pretty well. Sure there was a slight Wile E Coyote aspect to the game at times, but at least PCs were doing shit.

[codeGlaze]

The unofficial rule was that the more ballsy and entertaining you were, the more you could get away with as part of the setup of the stunt.

It worked pretty well. Sure there was a slight Wile E Coyote aspect to the game at times, but at least PCs were doing shit.

This has been the unofficially official rule in several groups I've been in as well.
Maybe one skill check thrown in for things the GM actually doesn't want to happen (successfully pulling a barbed arrow out of one's exposed derriere w/o incurring further damage), but that's about it.

[OgreBattle]

So I said "fuck it" and started saying "yes" more often. The rules we came up with are that during action scenes, anything that you could feasibly take 10 on and do (ie: Jump from the balcony overlooking the ballroom to the chandelier and then jump on the bad guy from the chandelier) you *did* because you were so amped up on the action. Stunts either gave bonus damage, bonus multipliers on confirmed crits, or bonus to hit/make your roll/whatever. Your choice. There might be penalties/consequences if you whiffed the final action/attack but the setup pretty much always just happened.

Being able to take 10 on certain skills in a combat already sounds like a solid 'stunting system' that doesn't need to be called a stunting system.

[DrPraetor]

If what you want is to have it possible to play people who turn into storm clouds, unleash giant rays of fire, or jump 200 feet towards a castle, smashing through the wall to stab wizards in the face, without it being a tiresome pile of fiddly abilities and things that have steadily diverged to nonsense, I've already made an RPG for that. And it lets you pit the heroes against fifty level 3 barbarians, too.

It's a cute rules-light for running tabletop Final Fantasy Tactics, but going straight to the stealth rules:
http://www.gempunks.com/game/Detection

http://www.gempunks.com/game/Invisibility ???

it really doesn't deliver what we want from an Exalted-type game. Also, reading over the rules, it's an engine heavy on simple numerical comparisons with only a D10 of swing.

Looks nice but I do not see how it would meet the criteria at all.

[Foxwarrior]

Hmm, I don't really know what you want in terms of stealth from an exalted-type game. Is sneaking around and trying to make use of hiding spots most of the time, only to pop out and eliminate an opponent, then hide again before being noticed, like Batman or Riddick, not at all what you were imagining?

[Sakuya Izayoi]

http://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Tome_of_Prowes ... rcebook%29 (credit to TarkisFlux) has some examples on how to make d20 skills work kinda like Charms. They might need a bit more "oomph" to create a level 11 sweet spot game, but it's a start with some good ideas, like Stealth granting resistance to tremorsense with enough ranks.

[DrPraetor]

Hmm, I don't really know what you want in terms of stealth from an exalted-type game. Is sneaking around and trying to make use of hiding spots most of the time, only to pop out and eliminate an opponent, then hide again before being noticed, like Batman or Riddick, not at all what you were imagining?

Frank has outlined the system that you want.

You sneak into the castle *as a team*, and sneakier characters are able (and you can include some random elements in this) to do more things (like popping out and assassinating people) on their way in.

The system you have - which is a simple dominance metric on your stealth - doesn't deliver those outputs. It's fine for a game with squads (in which an individual player will simply avoid making mixed-stealth squads), but for a game with one PC / player I think it breaks down.

It's not the only way in which your game - frankly - doesn't deliver what I was thinking of. I'm still reading the other bits for other reasons, but I just don't see it as an answer to the system required by this thread.

[Foxwarrior]

The simple dominance metric does not keep bumbling fools from sneaking around with the help of suave ninjas: the ninjas can leap about as they please without being spotted so long as they don't jump too close and end their turns behind couches, and when they want to help the clumsy oaf sneak by they just have to use their sneakiness to watch for (or create) a time when nobody has line of sight to the path the oaf needs to take.

Admittedly though, character size does pose a problem, thirty foot tall giants can be pretty loud and easy to see, and don't always fit through doorways. It's one of the reasons the game suggests that you might want to swap out characters for more appropriate ones when the campaign goes in a direction your current ones are unsuited for.

[OgreBattle]

Frank has outlined the system that you want.

You sneak into the castle *as a team*, and sneakier characters are able (and you can include some random elements in this) to do more things (like popping out and assassinating people) on their way in.

Is it a conceptual thing or was it written out somewhere

[DrPraetor]

It's a conceptual thing, AFAIK. I think he sent me some draft mechanics at some point for a similar system for Assymetric Threat, but I don't think he liked them and I don't think he posted them to the board?