The Gaming Den

So, a friend of mine asked me to help them make a game that is loosely based on D&D and is as rules light as possible. We haven't got too much crunch at the moment, but I've worked out some basic ideas. However, being a fairly inexperienced hand at this I thought I'd bring my ideas here and ask if anything popped out as necessarily bad. So here it goes.

We're going with a d20 system that will ideally use only the d20 for rolls, just seemed like the simplest thing to do.

There will be for stats. Stabbing, Magic, Toughness, and Endurance.
- Stabbing increases to-hit (handled by skills) and damage
- Magic adds to your casting ability (handled by skills)
- Toughness increases HP and possibly reduces damage
- Endurance determines how long you can maintain strenuous activity as well as determining spells per day

We plan on having two classes, Fighter and Caster, which will in turn have several packages they of skills and abilities they can choose from.

Skills will be broad, and characters will be made on a point buy, the numbers haven't been worked out, but stats, skills, and character packages can all be invested in. Each ability in a package will have a point value and can be unlocked by investing that amount of points into a package. So a one point ability requires you invest one point, and a two point ability requires you invest an additional one point. Additionally you receive all of a package's one point abilities for investing that first point.

Each character will have a main package, and they'll have to always have some amount more in their primary package than their secondary ones, perhaps double, as well as having some lower skill cap for secondary package skills. I figure that this will encourage caster's who have fairly limited spell lists within a package, to diversify, while fighters will be more likely to focus on one area.

I'll add more stuff as time goes on and we come up with more, but for now, what do you think den, anything just overtly stupid?

So... Fighters tend to get tired faster than Casters, because Endurance is a dump stat for them?

I might recommend making the Casters specialized and the Fighters generalist. If you're allowed to think outside the box, a single spell like Telekinesis can provide dozens of new options, and things like Fireball and Charm provide several, but an ability like Great Cleave gives you closer to one.

No, endurance is important for fighters as well because fighting is a strenuous activity. And, I was thinking we'd divide casters into things like Blasters, healers, buffers, and the like, while fighters would have a packages for things like stealth, brawling, and archery.

darkmaster wrote:No, endurance is important for fighters as well because fighting is a strenuous activity. And, I was thinking we'd divide casters into things like Blasters, healers, buffers, and the like, while fighters would have a packages for things like stealth, brawling, and archery.

But it's at best their third most important stat. The people with the most endurance are wizards and archers, because those are the people who can afford to be physically fragile. Basically it's a fucking retarded division of attributes and you need to go back to the drawing board on that.

-Username17

Simple as possible. Characters are either: Fighter, Wizard, Rogue, or Cleric.
They roll 1d20+level+3 vs DC (15 +-3). Everyone has 5 HTK. Monsters attack at 1d20+HD, 1 HTK mooks, 2 HTK normals, 5 HTK champions.

Fighters can attack. Wizards can enspell. Rogues can do tricks. Clerics can aid.

Found some orcs? DC 12 mooks, 1 HD, plus a normal leader DC 15 @ 2 HTK.

Fighter attacks. Wizard enspells. Roque does a killing trick via stealth. Cleric aids the fighter for an extra attack. Fighter and Cleric DC 18, Rogue DC 15, Wizard DC 12. Put them on a grid with Mv 6-8 and you're playing D&D, done.

Simplest possible is that there are two character classes: Rogue and Magic User. The Rogue uses physical skills and stabs people with a weapon. the Magic User uses magic. If you add any other classes, you are dividing or combining those two shticks somehow.

The "Fighter" is a really shitty archetype in almost all games, being basically a Rogue who doesn't have skills. There aren't any major characters in books or movies who fall into that archetype. Even characters who have iron thews and hit people with big weapons like Conan, Krull, and the Scorpion King spend a lot of time sneaking around and disabling devices.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:Simplest possible is that there are two character classes: Rogue and Magic User. The Rogue uses physical skills and stabs people with a weapon. the Magic User uses magic. If you add any other classes, you are dividing or combining those two shticks somehow.

The "Fighter" is a really shitty archetype in almost all games, being basically a Rogue who doesn't have skills. There aren't any major characters in books or movies who fall into that archetype. Even characters who have iron thews and hit people with big weapons like Conan, Krull, and the Scorpion King spend a lot of time sneaking around and disabling devices.

-Username17

This.

I have yet to see a single protagonist character (or PC) in any television series, comic story, written book or anything else that classifies characters as anything except highly plausible and "class" compressed characters.

If your "fighter" can't lie convincingly enough to get into a seedy bar, ambush a bunch of enemies or sneak through a city; then the plot with one or two characters might very easily get tripped up, and that's a bad thing.

Luke Skywalker starts as an ace pilot with no useful skills, it's all Obi-Wan doing the Jedi shit, which is Fighter plus hand-wave, Han doing the sneaking and social, and Chewie being a dumb grunt with mechanic background skill. What's Leia other than a Fighter from a noble family: shoots strait and complains a lot?

Yeh, your one-and-two character books focus on Rogues, but don't slightly bigger teams usually have a weapons guy, once it gets silly to see them all sneaking around on screen at once? Maybe those are all D&D stories. Seven Samuri and Dirty Dozen probably had some influence on early D&D, plenty of Fighters there.


Plus, there's Fighter tricks (hide behind a wall, climb a knotted rope, take the gold by force, break the lock, tell the guard who you are), and then there's Rogue tricks (hide in a shadow, climb a sheer wall, pilfer the gold under their noses, silently open the lock, tell the guard who he wants you to be). Direct vs subtle, but the same end results.

Edit: sorry for the thread derail.

There are also conjurer tricks and transmuter tricks, and the two are generally rather distinct as well.

In other words, you can make a division, but you don't have to.