Writting Castles and Cocks

[Prak]

I would suggest having a basement tier of some sort below the starting character tier, and explicitly stating that the basement tier is for half-trained farmboys slaying giant rats. That way, DMs feel like they are "supposed" to start games at the start of heroic tier where you can actually fight orcs and hell hounds instead of being "supposed" to start at rat-slaying tier. You'd keep the support of that power level for people who actually want it, and for NPCs who should be way less powerful than important people, but most games would start at an actually fun tier.

You still need a sub-basement tier, then, for the commoners who hire those farmboys.

[Strung Nether]

16-18 : you win D&D.

Why are we just giving up? Can't we make levels 16-20 also playable? The aren't in the current game, but that doesn't have to be true.

[CapnTthePirateG]

If someone can actually give a coherent example of what a high level character looks like I'm all ears.

We should probably figure out what kind of world-altering abilities are level appropriate, for example:

Level 1: Has Thumbs
Level 5: Can Fly Short Periods of time
Level 9: Flies around all the time

etc

[Pixels]

What you really want to do is determine what sort of challenges you expect players to face within each tier, and then create classes with abilities that overcome some subset of those challenges. Starting with the abilities and backing into challenges is the kind of mistake that made classes so inbalanced in 3e.

[Mask_De_H]

16-18 : you win D&D.

Why are we just giving up? Can't we make levels 16-20 also playable? The aren't in the current game, but that doesn't have to be true.

Nobody knows what 16+ is supposed to be, especially since what constitutes Epic (the default explanation) by any measure in the relevant literature could be covered by the previous five to ten levels.

It's not only insane, it's redundant.

[maglag]

How about you give people more spell slots, but make non-evocation spells weaker?

Well, that's the other option. Instead of bringing Evocation up to rocket tag standards, nerf everything else until dealing 1d6/level damage is a level-appropriate daily power. The thing is, it's been done, it was called 4th Edition D&D, and it doesn't satisfy people who want any sort of power fantasy out of their, well, fantasy.

As Frank pointed out, how good 1d6 damage per level is depends entirely on the enemies you're expecting to face. Before 3e monsters had a lot less HP so fireball was extremely boss, but later editions added extreme HP bloat, while fireball remained the same.

So you first need to ask question if whetever you want monsters to be huge sacks of HP or not.

[Zaranthan]

Ask question if whatever you want monsters to be huge sacks of HP or not.

Well, like I said: if you're nerfing EVERYTHING so that 1d6/level is a good ability, that means nerfing Pounce/Rake/Awesome Blow so that the monsters aren't one-rounding the Fighter.

Now, as 4E taught us, you probably don't want both sides of the DM screen to be dealing 1/10 of each others' HP totals per round, but 1-2 full attacks to kill an equivalent CR monster (assuming it could return the favor but for your screen of defensive buffs) is a good fight. You probably want fireball and polar ray on that level.

[maglag]

Ask question if whatever you want monsters to be huge sacks of HP or not.

Well, like I said: if you're nerfing EVERYTHING so that 1d6/level is a good ability, that means nerfing Pounce/Rake/Awesome Blow so that the monsters aren't one-rounding the Fighter.

Those are hardly the problems in 3e. More like it's really hard to keep your AC up to par if you're not a spelcaster. A low level fighter with plate and shield is actually quite tanky against low level enemies with multiple attacks, but then the enemies keep getting more Bab and bigger Str scores and the fighter has almost zero means to keep increasing their AC. In contrast a buffed up mid/high level spellcaster will not only have a giant AC bonus but also miss chances and probably DR and whatnot.

Plus monsters eventually start getting "have freedom of movement or go fuck yourself" grapple modifiers.

[Lokey]

I really wouldn't want an assumption that a level 90 fighter still only has the same option as the level 1, get in hugging distance and hit with weapon. That's among the not small pile of things that should go into the fire.

There's enough meta-magic crap to keep up with direct damage in the arcane casting (i.e. mailman--one shot poke ball anything after the first few levels), some of it has to go (at least shoehorning the ocular and ray metamagic lines into other types of spell). The conjuration lol at anti-magic or SR or saves DD spells should go. (Aside, 1d6/level being good was when your turn was casting that one spell, not two or three or whatever.)

Other thing: limit the scope. Make a system for dungeons and dicks then go to castles and cocks then to planes and penises. They're different games, but fighter can still use the same stuff in each because he just sucks if you want to keep him as is.

[ETortoise]

You still need a sub-basement tier, then, for the commoners who hire those farmboys.

You could do that with the backgrounds. Backgrounds could give your character some hit points, (added to your HP for size that was suggested earlier) basic saves and skills. Most npcs would just have a background.

Backgrounds supplying a list of skills could also help make sure all characters started out with workhorse thumb-having abilities like getting information or talking to people.

[spongeknight]

Yeah, as Frank has posted about somewhere else, if you want to have rats with one HP you really need to have cats with 3 HP, dogs with 5 HP and humans with a minimum of 10 HP. Housecats and commoners shouldn't have an equal chance of killing each other in a fight. Having a "0 Hit Die" Backround or whatever you want to call it is probably necessary.

[Emerald]

I've used 0-level rules for a game before that were similar to what's being suggested here: you get size-based HP instead of a HD at that level (10 HP for being Medium, ±3 for each size up or down, so rats get 1, cats get 4, halflings get 7, humans get 10, minotaurs get 13, etc.), +1 to good saves for your type, type-based skill points (x3 for being 0th level), and 1 feat. As you don't count as being part of any class yet, you don't get any class features, but that also means your skill points aren't restricted by class so you can spend them however you like.

That created a "subbasement tier," ensured that cats don't kill commoners, and let people diversify their skills a bit, but adding +10 HP to every human and more to larger creatures made less-damaging fighting styles like sword and board fighters or non-TWF rogues complete non-starters where under standard rules they're at least doable for the first few levels, and exacerbated the "blasting spells don't do enough damage" problem and made it take effect much sooner.

Were I to run a game with those rules again, I'd boost damage across the board to compensate (say, making light/one-handed/two-handed weapons deal 1d6/2d6/3d6 base damage and adding +[casting stat] damage to every spell by default, or something like that), but otherwise they worked well.

[Mistborn]

Ok we have both Kaelik and Emerald making motions for a size based bonus to hp. Let's us make low levels less lethal and let big things have a bit more HP without going to crazytown with the HD. Something like Small +5 Medium +10 Large +20 Huge +30 Gargantuan +40 Colossal +60. If there aren't any objections to that it can be our first new rule.

So like Frank said the first and most important thing we need is a set of challenges. So maybe we can get some suggustiong to what Expert Tier challenges would look like?

[Red Archon]

This thread is a total wreck.

[Kaelik]

Ok we have both Kaelik and Emerald making motions for a size based bonus to hp. Let's us make low levels less lethal and let big things have a bit more HP without going to crazytown with the HD. Something like Small +5 Medium +10 Large +20 Huge +30 Gargantuan +40 Colossal +60. If there aren't any objections to that it can be our first new rule.

So like Frank said the first and most important thing we need is a set of challenges. So maybe we can get some suggustiong to what Expert Tier challenges would look like?

Mistborn, stop. People are going to keep making comments in general about the rules, but for the love of god, no one is designing this game for you, make the game yourself or it won't be made.

[spongeknight]

Ok we have both Kaelik and Emerald making motions for a size based bonus to hp. Let's us make low levels less lethal and let big things have a bit more HP without going to crazytown with the HD. Something like Small +5 Medium +10 Large +20 Huge +30 Gargantuan +40 Colossal +60. If there aren't any objections to that it can be our first new rule.

So like Frank said the first and most important thing we need is a set of challenges. So maybe we can get some suggustiong to what Expert Tier challenges would look like?

Mistborn, stop. People are going to keep making comments in general about the rules, but for the love of god, no one is designing this game for you, make the game yourself or it won't be made.

It sounds like he's trying to act as the chair of a committee, which is the point of asking about stuff in the thread instead of him fucking off and designing everything himself. Not that that's a good idea, but it's what he's doing.

[Lokey]

Crowd-sourcing is fine, just needs to be gone about better.

- I don't know how you play DnD.
- I don't know what you consider needs fixing (except some unlinked excerpts from the millions of words Frank's written about it).
- You couldn't have chosen a worse format. Even people trying to help will make this an unreadable mess in a few pages if it isn't already.
- Now is certainly not the time to pick arbitrary numbers for something, unless you want to design the whole system around your size scaling hp bonus.
- I wonder whether there's a reverse ignore list in place, are there only 5 replies to the topic for you?
- I look forward to Cloud-Kill and the Word series of spells being more OP than they already are

[Lokathor]

Before you even pick challenges for what is to be faced, you have to go back and review every past edition of dnd and dnd-like games. You need to mark down what you think worked, and what you think didn't work. You need to state some areas you'd like to keep the design of, areas you want to replace the design of, and areas that you think are broken but that can't be fixed, so you're going to give up on having a design for.

Instead of picking specific challenges, pick what the game even looks like first, then start to fill in what sorts of player characters can be made, and what sorts of things they can face off against and/or hope to accomplish.

[Kaelik]

- I look forward to Cloud-Kill and the Word series of spells being more OP than they already are

Fixing CL is obviously something else you have to do, however Cloudkill isn't OP now and isn't going to be more OP, since it will do less HP damage because of fewer HD, and you can still only cast it as a level 9 character which means you can only "no save" kill monsters and people who are 4 levels lower than you. Also known as "enemies you should be able to fucking destroy without thinking"

[Lokey]

Ah, I thought Cloudkill went up to 10 hd (opening up some bruisers). Blame Bioware for the typo plus lazy coding (defenses listed in spell don't work there).

[Gnorman]

Blame Bioware for the typo plus lazy coding (defenses listed in spell don't work there).

The fuck?

Also: if you're going to do size-based bonuses to HP for the love of god make the bonus the same for both Small and Medium characters. Creates disparate race choice incentives otherwise.