I had originally planned to write about how autoscaling magic items are enchanted (“construction of an autoscaling magic item”) but it makes more sense to describe what they look like mechanically first. Guidelines First, consumable magic items really aren’t appropriate as autoscaling items. The whole point is that the items will …
Yesterday I started discussing the idea of magic items that automatically scale with wielder level. I’d like to explore the idea a bit further and how it might be implemented. To start, I’ll look at some existing approaches to this idea. Prior Art This is not a new idea. I can think of …
Many players of Dungeons & Dragons expect the power of magic items to be roughly commensurate with character level. On the one hand, this can be pretty important to party balance. If one PC in a first-level party has a +5 weapon he will be much more powerful than the other PCs. …
I’ve written quite a bit this month for the 2014 A-Z Challenge. Even discounting Kobold Kommandos because it had been written before I still managed to write (or update, in a couple of cases) 31 articles and more than 35,000 words on a variety of topics. All things considered I’m …
Tomorrow I post my Z-A Challenge 2014 Index, and I’m in a bit of a reflective mood. Early in the autumn of grade six, I found a small group of my classmates sitting in one of the rooms between our classroom and the next. They were rolling funny-shaped dice and …
A few days ago I talked about Unusual Rewards in the Sandbox, and figured I’d respond to some of the comments I’d received. I agree that it is a good idea to assign nominal monetary value to the various rewards. Experience points in many old school games are primarily driven …
Yesterday I demonstrated a bit of how I use Graphviz to visualize game information. I figured today I would describe a bit about how I get certain game data. Capture to MS Word I have created a Word template containing many styles used primarily to mark the start of different …
A conversation on Facebook today prompted this article. And this article ended up rather longer than I expected. I was hoping to get to sleep early tonight. Ah well. Many — perhaps most — roleplaying games involve a lot of information. On the ‘mechanical’ side you might have monsters, spells, …
The other day I was working on The Keys of Heraka-at and realized that by and large ‘conventional treasure’ is not a major feature of this adventure. The primary reward of this adventure is the knowledge needed to become the new Donnerkonig — the items that are needed, where they …
The other day I described the Hall of the Faded Kings as — or rather, updated the description to — This great hall is lined with mosaics showing great acts of the Donnerkonig over the centuries they ruled, from the mighty acts that established their powers, through acts during their …