Castles and Cocks, the Basics.

[Mistborn]

So writing a full fantasy heartbreaker as sort of a secessor to 3.5e+the Tomes has been something of a holy grail for TGD since before I joined. The second biggest stumbling block to such a project is the sheer amount of content that would have to be written to the point that no one here cares enough to do the whole thing on their own.

Now the easiest way to do that would be to lean heavily on modular design and have as many contributors as possible. Few of us are intrested in writing an entire game but I bet a lot of you guys would be willing to write a class or a small list of feats or spells.

Of course the biggest stumbling block I that we all have profound disagreements about what should be in such a game. Hence this thread. I'm nailing my 95 theses to the door here but nothing is set in stone. If you think an idea is shit or just have a better one please tell me my idea is shit and give a better proposal. The idea here is to try to launch some kind of group project.

That said.

Castles and Cocks should have a "hard scaling" level system. One of the things that's fundamental to D&D is the idea that your PC can a might over the course of his adventures go from stabbing rats in the basement of the village in to stabbing Orcus in the fvcking face. There a plenty of games where you play low fantasy schmucks and fewer that make a serious effort to let PCs be movers and shakers in a fantasy world.

D&D at it's best is a game that lets you play both. You want players to essentially start out as Rand Al'Thor the farmboy and slowly become a world shacking badass through accumulated levels without the players ever having to do a sudden rewrite of their character sheet.

Castles and Cocks should use the Mistborn tier system. That means 4 tiers, Basic/Heroic/Paragon/Epic. Basic is level 1-3 Heroic is 4-9 Paragon is 10-15 and epic is 16-21. There are several reasons for this the most important is that it helps break up the game into more manageable pieces to develop. Like the first goal of this project ought to be to develop a "full game" the only goes up to level 3, because that way we have a solid foundation on which to build everything else.

The second reason is that it helps hide the certain concepts have a shelf life. It's easier to get fighter guy to expand his concept if everyone is getting a class change dumped on them a once. It also makes it easier to have 'powerful races' if you want to be a Drow or Dragonborn or whatever that can slot in place of your Basic levels.

Castles and Cocks Feats should be small in number and high in impact. Basically every official revision of the feat system has given players more feats while making feats be worth less, and that's terrible. It leads to terrible play patterns where people feel like they have to take certain feats just to keep up or have to overspecialize just to remain relevant.

Instead feats should be the second most important thing you chose after classes, if for instance fighting with two weapons is core to your characters you should be able to take "Two Weapon Fighting" at level one and that should be that. Basically we want Tome feats but in smaller numbers. Anything that's not worth a feat ought to be folded into the skill system.

Castles and Cocks should organize all spells by Spheres you know that thing that clerics druids and to a lesser extent Wizard where the prepared spells of a giant list that has everything. That's kind of terrible and it shouldn't be a thing. Instead what PCs should have is their own list one that is build by them choosing several thematic groups of spells to become their list. So Bob of the Uttercold casts from Bone, Void, Shadow, and Cold spheres and doesn't randomly have Glitterdust in his spellbook just because.

Castles and Cocks should have magic items that a few in number but high in impact, and those items should have a "bind system". What ought to be interesting about magic items is that they are character advancement that you didn't specifically chose. The fact that you found the Sword of Ice and Fire instead of the Sword of Light and Shadow should be interesting and meaningful.

The 'bind system' cuts down the christmas trees and also gives stuff like lycanthropy or other weird sideways advancement a place to hand it's hat, like if you got dunked in the river styx or something and now have Damage reduction that occupies an item slot. Major buffs could potentially occupy those slots as well to cut down on cleric archer nonsense.

[Kaelik]

Castles and Cocks should use the Mistborn tier system. That means 4 tiers, Basic/Heroic/Paragon/Epic. Basic is level 1-3 Heroic is 4-9 Paragon is 10-16 and epic is 17-21. There are several reasons for this the most important is that it helps break up the game into more manageable pieces to develop. Like the first goal of this project ought to be to develop a "full game" the only goes up to level 3, because that way we have a solid foundation on which to build everything else.

The second reason is that it helps hide the certain concepts have a shelf life. It's easier to get fighter guy to expand his concept if everyone is getting a class change dumped on them a once. It also makes it easier to have 'powerful races' if you want to be a Drow or Dragonborn or whatever that can slot in place of your Basic levels.

Castles and Cocks Feats should be small in number and high in impact. Basically every official revision of the feat system has given players more feats while making feats be worth less, and that's terrible. It leads to terrible play patterns where people feel like they have to take certain feats just to keep up or have to overspecialize just to remain relevant.

Instead feats should be the second most important thing you chose after classes, if for instance fighting with two weapons is core to your characters you should be able to take "Two Weapon Fighting" at level one and that should be that. Basically we want Tome feats but in smaller numbers. Anything that's not worth a feat ought to be folded into the skill system.

Without being implied as agreement with any other thing you said, all of this is double wrong.

You are choosing the wrong feat system, see all discussions of feats.

Also, your tier system is super mega dumb, and your plans to build the game starting at Tier 1 is even more dumb.

1) IF YOU ARE MAKING A GAME FROM SCRATCH, ALL TIERS SHOULD BE JUST AS MANY LEVELS. There is no fucking reason to have a 3 level long tier, and a 5 level long tier, and 6 level long tier. Or rather, there would be reasons, if you thought a specific Tier needed more graduation than other Tiers, but by that logic, Basic Tier is the tier that needs to the most graduation, because it has to cover everything from rats to trained soldiers, whereas everything else could be compressed into like 2 levels per tier and no one would even care.

2) If you start by building a game that works at Basic Tier, then when you get to Legendary Tier you will find that the systems you designed for movement and interaction are wrong for Legendary Tier, and are a detriment to the game. You need to start by building a game system that has the right interactions for all Tiers, and then build the game around that.

[FatR]

Castles and Cocks should organize all spells by Spheres you know that thing that clerics druids and to a lesser extent Wizard where the prepared spells of a giant list that has everything.

I agree with everything up to this point (except with the idea of writing by comittee, which, even if it can work in general, won't work here specifically). In fact, my own fantasy heartbreaker uses your previous theses if not exactly in their exact shape. But...

That's kind of terrible and it shouldn't be a thing. Instead what PCs should have is their own list one that is build by them choosing several thematic groups of spells to become their list. So Bob of the Uttercold casts from Bone, Void, Shadow, and Cold spheres and doesn't randomly have Glitterdust in his spellbook just because.

To support this, your list of spells should be 3.X-like huge. In fact, if you want themes like "Void" and "Shadow" to be distinct and viable at all levels, it has to be a good deal bigger.

I don't believe this is a good thing. Spells just like feats and magic items should be few in number and big in impact.

Castles and Cocks should have magic items that a few in number but high in impact, and those items should have a "bind system".

What ought to be interesting about magic items is that they are character advancement that you didn't specifically chose. The fact that you found the Sword of Ice and Fire instead of the Sword of Light and Shadow should be interesting and meaningful.

The 'bind system' cuts down the christmas trees and also gives stuff like lycanthropy or other weird sideways advancement a place to hand it's hat, like if you got dunked in the river styx or something and now have Damage reduction that occupies an item slot. Major buffs could potentially occupy those slots as well to cut down on cleric archer nonsense.

They surely should.

[RobbyPants]

I was approaching feats as a bit of a hybrid system for the heartbreaker I've been kicking around.

There'd be feats, that are big and change your character in some way. You'd get these maybe once every three levels. Then there'd be Talents (or whatever) that are basically lesser feats, given out every level. These would be like many of the feats in published books, but with an eye out for bonus proliferation. This goes with Frank's observation that people seem to want lots of fiddly little bonuses to accumulate, and to do so often.

[Mistborn]

1) IF YOU ARE MAKING A GAME FROM SCRATCH, ALL TIERS SHOULD BE JUST AS MANY LEVELS. There is no fucking reason to have a 3 level long tier, and a 5 level long tier, and 6 level long tier. Or rather, there would be reasons, if you thought a specific Tier needed more graduation than other Tiers, but by that logic, Basic Tier is the tier that needs to the most graduation, because it has to cover everything from rats to trained soldiers, whereas everything else could be compressed into like 2 levels per tier and no one would even care.

This is partly my bad because I wrote it wrong but the idea is that tiers are sliced 3/6/6/6. The reason why basic is smaller is that there's less meaningful content that you can actually write for it and the range of power it covers is much smaller.

To support this, your list of spells should be 3.X-like huge. In fact, if you want themes like "Void" and "Shadow" to be distinct and viable at all levels, it has to be a good deal bigger.

Well the number of viable spells goes up a fair bit when people a picking the a big chunks instead of one by one. At least the current plan is that every sphere is 10 spells occupying levels 1-9 with an additional "X" which can be prepared in any slot and "scales" to the level it's cast at which let's you cut a lot of redundant nonsense. So instead of there being a summon monster I-IX for example there's Summon which is one spell that summons better things if you putt it in higher levels. Stuff like the image line of spells can work similarly.

[Kaelik]

1) IF YOU ARE MAKING A GAME FROM SCRATCH, ALL TIERS SHOULD BE JUST AS MANY LEVELS. There is no fucking reason to have a 3 level long tier, and a 5 level long tier, and 6 level long tier. Or rather, there would be reasons, if you thought a specific Tier needed more graduation than other Tiers, but by that logic, Basic Tier is the tier that needs to the most graduation, because it has to cover everything from rats to trained soldiers, whereas everything else could be compressed into like 2 levels per tier and no one would even care.

This is partly my bad because I wrote it wrong but the idea is that tiers are sliced 3/6/6/6. The reason why basic is smaller is that there's less meaningful content that you can actually write for it and the range of power it covers is much smaller.

The range of power for Basic is the widest relative to what you actually need to write. Epic Tier has at most 3 levels The level where you cast Trap the Soul, the level where you cast Shapechange and Gate, and the level where you make Epic spells and no one cares because everything is far beyond broken that no one can even tell what the broken things are.

Basic has to have Literal Cats and Rats and Snake, Commoners, Dire Rats, Trained Soldiers. That's at least 4 levels right there, and you probably want to have at least 2 levels of Soldier.

Once you accept that you are going to write "PCs start at level 4 by default" somewhere, you realize that Basic has to cover lots of different stuff that is weaker than PCs start, and that come in numbers.

[Mistborn]

Basic has to have Literal Cats and Rats and Snake, Commoners, Dire Rats, Trained Soldiers. That's at least 4 levels right there, and you probably want to have at least 2 levels of Soldier.

Do animals smaller than a breadbox have to be meaningful game objects in and of themselves? Like when very small animals show up as threats in D&D its not "oh noes there are 5 rats in the next room" it's more like "there's swarm of rats over there, hope you assholes brought lamp oil or something".

[Kaelik]

Basic has to have Literal Cats and Rats and Snake, Commoners, Dire Rats, Trained Soldiers. That's at least 4 levels right there, and you probably want to have at least 2 levels of Soldier.

Do animals smaller than a breadbox have to be meaningful game objects in and of themselves? Like when very small animals show up as threats in D&D its not "oh noes there are 5 rats in the next room" it's more like "there's swarm of rats over there, hope you assholes brought lamp oil or something".

If you are at basic Tier, YES. That's the point. 1 snake is enough to kill a common person, you don't need a swarm of them and lamp oil to be a Basic tier threat. A trained but green soldier should beat a snake, sure, but he should also feel threatened by like 6 of them. Which means yeah, you need to model a level of threat that is LESS threatening than Steve the Crap Covered Farmer with a Hoe.

And the best way to model that is to have that be a level 1 thing, and then build up to PC starting at level 4 as trained soldier levels at the lowest by default, and then can be shittier if you really want to go basketsweave.

[Mistborn]

Well obviously one of the points of having a explicit tier system is that it clues people in to where PCs might want to start. For most people that may be the start of heroic tier at 4.

However there's a lot of classic D&D you lose by dismissing level 1-3 stuff out of hand like that were a lot of the old school D&D tropes have their home. Like the big goal of Basic tier is making that sort of game play more fun.

[Kaelik]

Well obviously one of the points of having a explicit tier system is that it clues people in to where PCs might want to start. For most people that may be the start of heroic tier at 4.

However there's a lot of classic D&D you lose by dismissing level 1-3 stuff out of hand like that were a lot of the old school D&D tropes have their home. Like the big goal of Basic tier is making that sort of game play more fun.

You are a dumb idiot who is dumb.

LEVEL 4: The level of a Trained Soldier who is Green (IE has never seen combat) is the level of D&D level 1.

Level 1: The level of a fucking Snake, is lower level than that. So people should probably not start there.

[nockermensch]

Next question then is: What's the Least Threat such a system needs to map?

[Mistborn]

You are a dumb idiot who is dumb.

LEVEL 4: The level of a Trained Soldier who is Green (IE has never seen combat) is the level of D&D level 1.

Level 1: The level of a fucking Snake, is lower level than that. So people should probably not start there.

Like you've actually played 3e right fractional CR is a thing. Snakes are not level 1 they're CR 1/3 or 1/2 (and a single snake is more of a trap than a monster really). Level 1 ought to be as low as you can get and still be a reasonable PC but that doesn't preclude there being things even weaker than that.

[FatR]

Basic has to have Literal Cats and Rats and Snake, Commoners, Dire Rats, Trained Soldiers. That's at least 4 levels right there, and you probably want to have at least 2 levels of Soldier.

No. It haven't. All Basic (Apprentice) tier has to have is the levels where PCs can semi-regularly be dropped by a single crossbow bolt or axe swing, and any human-sized opponent seriously intending to kill you is a hair-raising challenge, so the game can vaguely pretend to be realistic and gritty and provide experience for masochists.

And like in most DnD editions so far, this tier should not be longer than 1-2 levels. And unlike them it should have an explicit warning "this is for those who don't want to be Zorro or Aragorn just yet, otherwise start as level 3".

[Kaelik]

You are a dumb idiot who is dumb.

LEVEL 4: The level of a Trained Soldier who is Green (IE has never seen combat) is the level of D&D level 1.

Level 1: The level of a fucking Snake, is lower level than that. So people should probably not start there.

Like you've actually played 3e right fractional CR is a thing. Snakes are not level 1 they're CR 1/3 or 1/2 (and a single snake is more of a trap than a monster really). Level 1 ought to be as low as you can get and still be a reasonable PC but that doesn't preclude there being things even weaker than that.

You are dumb and you should feel dumb. You are proposing making a new game, and you defense for literally every decision you make is "Well it was this way in 3e, so I think we should just exactly replicate this the same exact way in the new game, without thinking about whether that is better or worse than the alternatives at all."

If you don't want to make a new game, don't make a new game. You fucking idiot.

But since you are making a new game, you should seriously consider the idea that level should not be different from CR, and that instead, you should fucking make the goddam game so that level 1 is the lowest, and PCs don't start at level 1.

Or you know, just keep copying 3e and inheriting all the problems of 3e and doing no actual design work at all and recreate exactly 3e.

[Mistborn]

Or you know, just keep copying 3e and inheriting all the problems of 3e and doing no actual design work at all and recreate exactly 3e.

I think you're excluding a lot of middle here. Running Castles and Cocks on the basic d20 engine cuts down on a lot of work, and it makes things more accessible to the general populace. Like seriously is being able to model snakes and house cats a little better actually worth that much design work?

[Kaelik]

Or you know, just keep copying 3e and inheriting all the problems of 3e and doing no actual design work at all and recreate exactly 3e.

I think you're excluding a lot of middle here. Running Castles and Cocks on the basic d20 engine cuts down on a lot of work, and it makes things more accessible to the general populace. Like seriously is being able to model snakes and house cats a little better actually worth that much design work?

If you aren't going to make a new game, don't make a new game.

If you are going to make a new game, the "extra design work" of designing a system that doesn't fall into the CR X monsters have between X-3 and X+56 HD are are considered HD+3-40 level player characters is a good idea and is absolutely worth the work.

And the fact that one change to the game from that is that snakes are CR 1/4, so if you want to define an actual honest to god Basic Tier, it has to feature starting PCs at level 4, means that you either do that, or you don't make a new game at all and literally no one ever cares about this thread or anything you do and we let this drop to obscurity because you aren't even making a new game you are just making some houserules for 3.5 that are worse than the houserules we already have.

[Mistborn]

Like. I. Said. You're excluding a lot of middle here. There were (and technically still are) non-D&D d20 games. Like they mostly sucked but they were different games than D&D 3e. But if you write all new feats, classes, and spells while reworking the skill and magic item systems you've essentially created a new game.

A Level 1 character is the minimum competence that can be expected from a PC. A CR 1 threat is something like a wolf or a orc a serious to an adult human in direct combat. But there are weaker thing out there that can still be relevant threats. Like the common poisonous snake is less of a combat encounter and more of a trap.

[Kaelik]

But if you write all new feats, classes, and spells while reworking the skill and magic item systems you've essentially created a new game.

A "new game" that inherits all the flaws of the old game. Congratulations on your accomplishment.

A Level 1 character is the minimum competence that can be expected from a PC. A CR 1 threat is something like a wolf or a orc a serious to an adult human in direct combat. But there are weaker thing out there that can still be relevant threats. Like the common poisonous snake is less of a combat encounter and more of a trap.

3E DID IT! I'M DOING IT! I REFUSE TO DO DESIGN WORK!

[Mistborn]

Listen there are two options in this.

A) make something quick and imperfect, but actually exists and is a complete game.

B) allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good and end up making no game.

You seem to to really like option B but I'd rather do something different. You also seem to be really strung up on the potential for hd bloat. Consider that taken into advisement. Now if you have anything else to contribute please do so, otherwise go kaelik elsewhere.

[Kaelik]

Listen there are two options in this.

A) make something quick and imperfect, but actually exists and is a complete game.

B) allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good and end up making no game.

You seem to to really like option B but I'd rather do something different. You also seem to be really strung up on the potential for hd bloat. Consider that taken into advisement. Now if you have anything else to contribute please do so, otherwise go kaelik elsewhere.

Your refusal to make a game at all is not part of a great quest for making a game now instead of never. I don't know how long Frank took to make After Sundown, but it was sure as fuck less than forever, and he did it without arbitrary demands that everything most conform perfectly to every rule decision that OWOD or NWOD ever made.

You are refusing to make a new game. Good for you. I'm going to leave the thread, and then, we can watch to see if a single fucking person gives enough of a shit about your bullshit attempt to make Pathfinder 2 to make up new classes and monsters for 3e D&D that are 100% compatible with 3e D&D because you refuse to even recognize that fucking LA is bad and that CR=HD is better than the alternative, so getting even a single substantial improvement to the game into the system, like fixing flying rules, is impossible.

But my guess, is that this thread immediately dies, and goes straight to the trash where it belongs.

[Lokey]

So how long until the next copy/paste of the OP? At least change it a little next time so Kaelik can't copy/paste his responses from the nth ago appearance of this thread.

[nockermensch]

How do you resolve damages in Kaelik's proposition? A "green trained soldier" (4HD) should still risk dying from a sword slash or a 20' fall, and these guys should have like 25 hp.

[Grek]

How do you resolve damages in Kaelik's proposition? A "green trained soldier" (4HD) should still risk dying from a sword slash or a 20' fall, and these guys should have like 25 hp.

Don't determine hit points using HD, particularly level-based HD? The Basic Tier should honestly just have hit points decided by size or species and have defense scale with AC and save bonuses for all of Basic.

[OgreBattle]

Castles and Cocks should have a "hard scaling" level system. One of the things that's fundamental to D&D is the idea that your PC can a might over the course of his adventures go from stabbing rats in the basement of the village in to stabbing Orcus in the fvcking face. There a plenty of games where you play low fantasy schmucks and fewer that make a serious effort to let PCs be movers and shakers in a fantasy world.

D&D at it's best is a game that lets you play both. You want players to essentially start out as Rand Al'Thor the farmboy and slowly become a world shacking badass through accumulated levels without the players ever having to do a sudden rewrite of their character sheet.

Castles and Cocks should use the Mistborn tier system. That means 4 tiers, Basic/Heroic/Paragon/Epic. Basic is level 1-3 Heroic is 4-9 Paragon is 10-15 and epic is 16-21. There are several reasons for this the most important is that it helps break up the game into more manageable pieces to develop. Like the first goal of this project ought to be to develop a "full game" the only goes up to level 3, because that way we have a solid foundation on which to build everything else.

...

The 'bind system' cuts down the christmas trees and also gives stuff like lycanthropy or other weird sideways advancement a place to hand it's hat, like if you got dunked in the river styx or something and now have Damage reduction that occupies an item slot. Major buffs could potentially occupy those slots as well to cut down on cleric archer nonsense.

* Is leveling up a linear or quadratic advancement in power?
* Making every tier the same levels long, like say 5, seems neater and will make players who like different tiers feel that the game pays equal attention.
* It'd help to make your list of monsters/challenge by level first, so we know what a level 1 vs level 20 hero is suppose to be able to overcome

The second reason is that it helps hide the certain concepts have a shelf life. It's easier to get fighter guy to expand his concept if everyone is getting a class change dumped on them a once. It also makes it easier to have 'powerful races' if you want to be a Drow or Dragonborn or whatever that can slot in place of your Basic levels.

Castles and Cocks Feats should be small in number and high in impact. Basically every official revision of the feat system has given players more feats while making feats be worth less, and that's terrible. It leads to terrible play patterns where people feel like they have to take certain feats just to keep up or have to overspecialize just to remain relevant.

Instead feats should be the second most important thing you chose after classes, if for instance fighting with two weapons is core to your characters you should be able to take "Two Weapon Fighting" at level one and that should be that. Basically we want Tome feats but in smaller numbers. Anything that's not worth a feat ought to be folded into the skill system.

* How many 'pieces' does a player choose to create a character? You've mentioned 'powerful race' taking up 'class' levels. Does it vary from level to level? What do you do with 'weaker than human' races like a talking house cat or kobold.


* I think the current opinion on Feats, at least from Franktrollman and Koumei, is veering towards "At least one every level, doing a thing that you could live without but makes you feel special compared to another character of the same class/race". Scaling feats seem to have been regarded as a dead end.

* What do you consider appropriate as a feat vs a class feature vs a racial ability vs a skill? WHY does your system have feats?

Castles and Cocks should have magic items that a few in number but high in impact, and those items should have a "bind system". What ought to be interesting about magic items is that they are character advancement that you didn't specifically chose. The fact that you found the Sword of Ice and Fire instead of the Sword of Light and Shadow should be interesting and meaningful.

Are you going to be designing monsters with the expectation of "level X has a sword of elements"? My thought on magic weapons is it should be powerful enough to feel like having a cohort/henchman and be calculated that way. So a level 10 party can take on a level 10 daemon challenge with just his class features, but a level 10-X party can take on a demon with magical gear that increases his party's effective power level by +X.

[Ice9]

But since you are making a new game, you should seriously consider the idea that level should not be different from CR, and that instead, you should fucking make the goddam game so that level 1 is the lowest, and PCs don't start at level 1.

Good luck getting people to do that. Many DMs are going to start at level 1, regardless of what the book recommends, because "that's how it's done". So make level 1 fucking playable.