Years ago a friend summarized some hero design guidelines for me. Three of the key ones were Have a way to get to the action. Have a way to survive the action. Have a way to take part in the action. There is also an implicit ‘have a reason to …
I remember posting a bit about this to rec.games.frp.dnd, but don’t remember if I included the bits about weapon reach. This article is a first cut of recapturing that post, with some additional information. The rules are generally complete, but some of the weapon modeling needs some adjustment. The model …
Down to the last set of failures, and can’t say that they are necessarily serious problems for everyone. However, I have seen complaints about them a number of times, so I’ll do what I can to describe them. These are things where reasonable applications of the rules lead to possibly …
I’ve described perhaps the biggest systemic problems, now for a few things relating to application of the rules. These points aren’t as critical to game balance, but certainly detract from the game experience. Preparation time and complexity, temporary changes, and figuring out just how powerful something is can all be …
I think I’ll start my ‘Thing a Day’ series with a description of why and how I think D&D fails. This is likely to be a work in progress, the points below are more or less off the top of my head. I’ve been playing RPGs for almost thirty years, …
In an effort to get back into the habit of writing regularly, I’m staring a ‘Thing a Day’ series here while I load my older writings. I’ve gotten a fair number of ideas just by rereading my old articles, but I could use some more. Suggestions and requests are welcome. …
Tetsubo and I have spent some time in the last couple of years discussing weapon design and rules in D&D 3.5. I have come to the conclusion that the existing rules do not work the way I’d like. These rules are adapted from the Weapon Group rules presented in Unearthed …
For some time I’ve seen comments that the separation between good saving throws and poor saving throws is too big, and that it is difficult to find challenges appropriate to higher-level characters with different saving throw progressions. Mathematically, I can see the argument for this. A high-level spell from a …
Something I’m considering for my next campaign is largely divorcing gods and the like from alignments altogether. Basically, the more powerful the god, the less the god is aligned. The idea here is that to gain full power over something, the god must encompass all aspects of it. This would …
I’ve never been entirely happy with how bastard weapons were handled in 3.x. I’ve had characters use them where it was a good fit for the character concept (okay, one PC that I played, and some NPCs), but most of the time it’s grossly inefficient. If you want more damage …