In many encounters, “kill everything!” is often an effective plan. A little predictable, perhaps, but it often lets the PCs get the job done that they came to do. In fact, it’s so effective and can be so predictable that it can become kind of monotonous. Taken to extremes the …
Yesterday I wrote about improving encounter economy and design. Today I’m going to explore how to implement encounters as designed in certain Japanese (console) RPGs. There are several elements to encounters in these games that stand out, and that I’ll describe below, that I don’t often see in encounters in most published …
Developing encounters for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game can be simplified, and easily made more flexible and scalable. I will show how below, contrasting with the PRD Designing Encounters text. Sample Encounter Design In the sample encounter design in the PRD, the party consists of two fourth-level PCs and four fifth-level PCs. This can be done …
I admit, the title is a bit of a stretch, but it lets me publish this on ‘H’ day instead of waiting for ‘P’ day, and I do sometimes refer to the polyhedral process as a One True Hammer in my toolbox. I’ll roll with it. The polyhedral process originated in …
Graded weapons and armor are very simple. Rather than working spells, exactly, they work with enhancement bonuses, plus weapon, armor, and general qualities. They can be crafted or enchanted, and follow the same guidelines regarding assignment of graded abilities. Graded Qualities for Weapons and Armor Many weapon and armor qualities are …
Over the last week or so I’ve talked about assigning graded abilities, graded wands, graded staves, how I determined their market price, and how to adjust their caster level. The first post was fundamental to all graded items, and the other articles were because spell trigger items are quite easy to work …
I released Draconic Bloodlines late last week, and it’s seen some favorable response (decent sales, for me, and a five-star review). I’ve been asked to give the sorcerer fey bloodline a similar treatment. I believe I will.
This should be the last math-heavy post for a while, then I can start getting into creating stuff with this system. When working on Crafted Graded Staves I found that some of the PRD staves cannot be implemented with these rules. For instance, the staff of necromancy has 21 levels of spells …
In Crafting Graded Wands and Crafted Graded Staves, I needed to determine how to price such items. I had a sense that the market price was going to end up being something like “Caster Level times Spell Level times a constant”, but I didn’t know what that constant was going to be. …
In my last post I looked at crafting graded wands. At its base, a staff is now a larger-capacity wand. It works the same, but is a bigger item (and usable as a weapon, a quarterstaff — I’ll look at graded weapons soon) and can have a Caster Level of …