In this review I look at http://www.d20openrpg.com/gamemastering/combat-encounters and the pages under it. Encounter Checklist The encounter sequence looks fairly reasonable. Surprise and Initiative It might be worth changing “those that exceed the DC by a large margin” in the Perception check description to “those that make the Threshold on their …
I’d like to thank John Reyst for taking a look over what I’ve written for Echelon d20 and providing feedback. I’ve been doing a series of articles that does much the same for his Threshold d20 system. This post is my response to his initial feedback.
Also responding to John’s post “In Response…” (the second half, regarding archetypes). “This may seem harsh…” Ah good, a mature response. I’ve been told I can be a trifle harsh (“you just told him his baby is ugly!” “it’s got three eyes and two noses, I think that qualifies” – …
Responding to John’s post “In Response…” Resources Yes, resources/money/etc. is a tricky thing, especially when you’re trying to be generic. You might look at FantasyCraft’s approach here (which I have to admit I don’t remember well enough off the top of my head to summarize, and I don’t have the …
In the last couple of months I have seen comments linking anime and role playing games. It is not a bad link, really, given the overlap between ‘watchers of anime’ and ‘players of RPGs’ and the influence anime and RPGs have on each other. However, it is incomplete because ‘anime’ …
In this post I will discuss material from http://www.d20openrpg.com/characters/talents http://www.d20openrpg.com/characters/talents/all-spells In the first page, John describes how Talents are categorized and their general characteristics. In the second he provides a list of specific Talents.
I take a quick look at how Threshold handles other character considerations, including resources (money and stuff) and races. Talents will be in another review. Here, I look primarily at http://www.d20openrpg.com/characters/resources http://www.d20openrpg.com/characters/races http://www.d20openrpg.com/characters/allegiance and their subpages.
In this post I review pages starting at (and under) http://www.d20openrpg.com/characters/archetypes These pages tend to be fairly content-light, so I’ll just do an overview. This section of my review may seem harsh. It is based on material that has not been completed (the number of partially-implemented archetypes makes that point …
John’s doing some fairly common things with ability scores, and a couple of interesting ideas regarding them. Related Threshold Pages For this post I’m looking at http://www.d20openrpg.com/characters/ability-scores http://www.d20openrpg.com/characters/ability-conflicts http://www.d20openrpg.com/characters/ability-challenges
Here is my commentary on the Characters page. Characters do not have Classes in the normal sense in this system. Instead, all characters share certain fundamental features and then differentiate themselves by the players choice of Talents. Player’s may instead choose a classic “archetype” that closely models normal classes if …