Even more than categories, posts in a series are related to a single recurring topic.
Living Document: Feats Feats have been part of Dungeons & Dragons for more than twenty years. They replaced the proficiency (weapon and nonweapon) systems from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and offered what was, at the time, a great method of customizing characters. Any time you were eligible for a feat, …
Living Document: Skills As with so many things, skills can be implemented many ways. Pathfinder first edition followed a model close to the Dungeons & Dragons 3.x model: you get skill points every level and can spend them to advance you skills. This edition simplified the ‘class skills’ mechanic: you …
Living Document: Classes There are so many ways for me to implement classes. I’m sure I’ll still have classes, I’m not prepared to diverge that far from the base game, but I can see many ways to go about it. Pathfinder first edition model, where a character can freely take …
Living Document: Ancestries Pathfinder first edition has races, second edition has ancestries. To my mind they are fundamentally the same thing, but the implementation is different. First edition races are reasonably close to the D&D 3.x races. You get some abilities at character creation and and that’s mostly it. Unless …
Paths Not Taken In August 2009, Paizo Publishing released the first edition of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. This was a refinement of Dungeons & Dragons third edition (it came out after 3.5, but the Open Game License details refer to the System Reference Document, not the Revised System Reference Document …
Uniquely identifying objects is one of the more vexing activities in building the Echelon Reference Series. It is good to have a human-readable ID (it’s a great kindness to the developer to be able to see that yes, a parsed link looks like it does refer to the correct item, …
Any time you build a nontrivial data model, you have to expect the original assumptions will be tested, and found wanting. You’re not going to get it right the first time. In fact, I’ve read design books — data modeling and software design — that advise the reader to be …
In Polyhedral Pantheons I described a process where you assign a domain to each face and each point of a polyhedron, then use adjacent sites to define deities based on those domain assignments. For instance, in the Shu-Shi pantheon (worksheet shown below) the ‘1’ face has the Nobility domain assigned, …
Most roleplaying games I’ve played have the PCs at more or less full ability at all times, unless they have exhausted their resources or are otherwise specifically constrained. There are a few exceptions, and I’d like to explore them a bit. In 13th Age, a d6 is placed on the …
Some years ago, Ben Robbins described his West Marches campaign. I’ve always wanted to run a campaign like this. Me being me, though, I like to be able to see at least over the next hill. For a West Marches campaign I don’t need to know a lot about what’s …
