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Showing posts from June, 2012

Five Worldly Ascetics & Rogue Exponents

I've always liked psionics in my D&D, both as an innate set of traits, and as a trained or ascetic practice.  But one of Telecanter's blog posts, which helped highlight these differences got me thinking about how odd it is that a character whose claim to fame is self reliance, would be marauding through a dungeon looking for wealth and power. I posed this question in the comments, and in  Telecanter's response , he mentioned a similarity between kung fu narratives and westerns.  This led to a roundabout epiphany on my part. In my mind westerns will now always be associated with this weird little niche of geekdom: The Dark Tower - With it's knightly gunslighters. Knights of Cydonia - Which crosses the kung fu and western genres. 21 Guns - Which crosses the Dark Tower with Knights of Cydonia. The Dark Tower in particular suggests a foil to the gunslinger:  the failed gunslinger. Gunslingers who fail their Test are forced to turn in their guns and head

Toward a Psionic Class

Telecanter's blog post today about psionics, and especially the  older one  he references, got me thinking about the details of my own ad hoc psionic system. Not sure if this would end up Crude Simulation Engine or not. I'm thinking more of a snap-on attachment to any pre-4E systems. I go back and forth about whether to represent characters as classes or just have a single character path where abilities are chosen a la carte. This leans a little in the class-based direction, but is pretty flexible. Aside from a liberal dose of "middle of the road" attack, save and hit point progression for the psionic class, the class would have the following qualities: Disciplines ≈ Spells Trained "disciplines" and wild "talents" are represented by borrowing or slightly re-skinning divine and arcane spells of similar effect. There are a few caveats to this: Psionic powers never consume material components and rarely require words or gestures to work.

From Protozoic to Heartbreak

Circa d20 System era, I'd been posting my D&D ideas to my friends' blog Protozoic.  Since some of that is the basis for work here, it seems best to collect it in one place for reference.  Especially since I keep thinking I've done a writeup of armor for the Crude Roleplaying Engine, but apparently haven't done anything extensive about that yet. Armor & Damage Reduction - The basis for most of my armor rules: Injury & Consequences - Mechanics relating to what injury does to a character and how it is recorded.  Also a revisited version . Playtest - A playtest of some of the armor and injury mechanics. Tradesman & Sage - Two new 3.x classes.

Crude Simulation Engine - New basic class design philosophy

Looking at how various old school derived and inspired games treat classes, I go back and forth about how I should structure these things in CSE.  There seem two be two basic philosophies:  Few (2-5) well defined and relatively unmixable classes, or 1 class that fights and maybe casts spells through items or difficult rituals but typically have no "race" distinctions (elves, dwarves, etc.). The issue that I run into is that neither of these easily allows the kind of customization I'm looking to allow.  Even the Warrior vs. Mage dichotomy I'd proposed earlier seems like it complicates some things (why have a separate class for magic except in the name of "balance"?), and oversimplifies others (so your magical ability, based on class level helps you both to draw forth your natural physical strength, and prepare learn rote procedures better?). So after more hemming and hawing, I'm leaning toward a single-class system (tip o' the hat to Bandits &