The rules I drafted for Eldritch Weaving and Martial Disciplines both looked workable when I wrote them. When I compared the results, though, I found they didn’t feel quite equivalent to me. Among the differences, I think that the buy-in cost for martial disciplines is higher than for eldritch weaving; …
In 2005 Malhavoc Press published Iron Heroes, written by Mike Mearls as a variant Player’s Handbook. This supplement and setting focused on martial characters, with only minor support for spellcasters and other arcanists. A great deal of work went into making for more cinematic combat in D&D, where low-level combatants …
Polymorph and wildshape (limited target form polymorph) have long had problems in D&D. I don’t remember what the problems were in AD&D, but I remember that in D&D 3.x there were problems with the choice of target form, how exactly to apply the polymorph, and the escalation caused by ever-increasing …
Previous editions had some real problems with multiclass characters. In some cases they didn’t exist (BECMI, ignoring the ‘prestige’ versions of the classes), were way too effective while at the same time being strictly structured (AD&D), or tended to pretty much cripple multiclass characters unless various patches and workarounds were …
I’m really tired tonight (less than eight hours sleep in the last two nights together) so I’m going to keep this one short. A few days ago I posted an article titled “Martial Disciplines, Take 1” to incorporate Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords into Echelon. It looks more …
Yesterday’s post about the Kobold Kommandos reminded me I haven’t really written much about non-human characters. It seems this would be a good time to do that. Okay, maybe not. I expected to spend about an hour jotting down some notes, I ended up spending about four hours doing analysis …
After presenting talents based on the domain feats published in Agents of Faith I got some useful comments. Some were as simple as identifying that particular tier abilities kind of sucked, some were suggestions for alternatives that looked like a rather better fit. I’ve decided to present talents for a …
Reginald suggested in rec.games.frp.dnd that charts showing the hit points gained by level would be handy, I have to agree. I decided to put those together and really look at what the calculations come up with. I included all even Constitution values from 10 through 30 (the range of values …
I mentioned in a comment yesterday that I might take a run at talents to implement the martial disciplines from Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords published by Wizards of the Coast. I’ve reviewed the book this evening and decided that a close match for the initiate classes …
One puzzle I’ve had for a while is how to calculate hit points. The D&D 3.x model failed for me in some degree because of the emphasis on Constitution compared to Hit Die. At higher levels the martial characters (who were supposedly tougher than the non-martial characters like wizards) often …