Well, it’s time for another unofficial review. This isn’t one of the products that were sent for this year’s contest, but rather, one I traded for. The Advanced Player’s Guide sounds interesting with variant and optional rules for a wide variety of areas.
It’s broken up into six chapters, character options, character classes, combat, arcane spellcasting, variant magic, castle and keep. The first section starts off with heroic merits and tragic flaws. If you have an ability score below 10, you have a heroic merit and if you have an ability score above 18, you have a tragic flaw. Each stat has it’s own section so if you have an 18 dexterity, you’d look under that flaw and either roll 1d6 or pick, GM’s option.
These are fairly minor bonuses and penalties. Take the Daredevil flaw, if you have a dexterity of 19+, you are addicted to death-defying stuns and have to make a Will save vs DC 25 to avoid the situation. I don’t like the idea of rewarding and penalizing characters based off of statistics as opposed to in-game actions. I figure the bonuses and penalties of their statistics are enough to influence their role-playing decisions.
Another option I tossed was racial modifiers. Here different races have different abilities they can take for their class. If all the characters have the modifiers, it’s not bad as all the characters at least have this option, but it’s add on, it’s not something that requires the character to give up something. These are minor bonuses like Adroit Feet, where you get a +1 bonus to Reflex saving throws or Sharp-Eyed, gaining a +2 bonus to all Spot checks in a few situations. I just don’t see the need to augment the characters blindly. They could probably be combined with say, Action Points or something to develop a high action campaign but I’m not terribly impressed with them by themselves.
The new prestige classes offer some new options and have art by Timothy Truman, always a good thing. These range from the Dilettante, a master of everything, in theory, like a bard, to the Sidestepper, a rogue who uses abilities like blink and teleport to go where other rogues can’t go. My favorite in this section is either the Elementalist or the Gallowglass.
The former is a chaotic spellcaster whose mastery of metamagic feats and elemental spells, grants them spells from an elemental domain as well as elemental summoning and resistance. The latter is a master of heavy armor whose ability to wear variant armors of increasing protection and weight is unmatched by almost any other character. The dwarf PrC Ironbound from Green Ronin’s Hammer & Helm might come close.
Of particular interest is the elite PrCs. These are similar to the Legendary PrCs from various Fantasy Flight Books in that they require the PC to be of a higher level of ability than a standard PrC, where most characters can enter it from anywhere between 5th-8th level. The section starts with the Arcane Warrior, a warrior based PrC that uses magic to augment their combat abilities ranging from an aura of protection to the ability to augment their own weapons in combat. This ranges from granting the weapon a bonus to giving it an alignment to bypass damage reduction. It ends with the Undead Bane, a master of slaying undead. Their flesh resist being turned into an undead after death, and they also have abilities of detection and destruction against the undead. In between we have some other options like Rogue Hunters and Plant Masters. A well rounded section for the most part.
Now because these are ten level PrCs, they decide for some reason that we need an alternative set of epic rules. Now the DMG has rules for Epic play and there is an Epic handbook that does the job fairly well. To be honest, I just looked this section over briefly as I had no interest in an unsupported 3rd party epic set of rules. Base attack and saving throws continue to advance and abilities continue to be gained. Good for someone who just wanted to follow the logical progression of the Player’s Handbook but not for anyone using the official rules. And no, there are no 10th level spells, just more spells per day. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a very nice section and the artists at UDON did a fantastic job of illustrating it. It’s just not needed and in my campaign, not wanted.
I didn’t pick up too much from Chapter Three, Alternate Combat Rules. There are some different initiative systems but I’m not in the market for one so I breeze through those until I get to critical fumbles. Now in my campaign, I use a simple rule. If you fumble, you’ve opened yourself up for an attack of opportunity. Pretty simple right? Here we have simple and complex fumbles. Both rely on the character threatening a fumble and then confirming the fumble. On the simple one, the ideas are well, simple. Take ranged. On a fumble, you might hit someone else in the area. On the complex, you can of course strike yourself with your own weapon.
In terms of combat rules, they have some interesting variants like phased combat. This replaces initiative and reminds me of something like Warhammer TableTop in that it has different actions like Free Actions, First Half Movement, Second Attack and Final Spellcastings. It could work in some campaigns pretty easily I imagine.
Weapon speeds get another look at with the size of the weapon adding a bonus or penalty to your initiative roll that is cumulative on every round so that you may actually go latter than someone in a long combat. Things like unarmed attacks give you a bonus of three while using a greataxe gives you a penalty of two.
There’s other options here for things like damaging armor and objects, changing how concentration checks work and making other optional changes to things like coup de grace attacks. I flip through them but don’t find anything that tickles my fancy.
Then I get to Detailed Critical Hits. My long term players will have horror stores no doubt of my use of the old critical hit tables from some old Best of Dragon Magazine or one of the various Arduin books. Who could ever forget the cutting off of a butt check with an arrow or the decapitation of another player’s minotaur with another arrow? Ah, the glory days. More recently and even in 3rd edition, I’d been using Blood and Steel off and on. It leaves hit points alone but adds wound points, a factor determined by your size. It includes critical hit tables, but they were modified by your size compared to your enemies size.
The system here reminds me of that for some reason. Here you lose one multiplier off your critical damage, so if you did x3 on a critical, you now do x2. You take your total damage and add it to a percentile roll. You then check to see what the location is. You use the size modifier as a modifier on the d10 roll. This helps show that smaller creatures will wind up hitting the leg or arm of a creature while larger ones will hit the head or torso more often. Good deal.
The critical hits are then broken into tables with different tables for each of the locations. This gives us locations for legs, arms, torso and head. Each has a minimum of 02 and a maximum of 150+. The results range from say, solid head shot where you roll the damage dice plus bonuses again and add that to the total damage done to caving the skull in and turning the brain into paste with instant death as a result.
Yeah, I’m going to be using those real soon. While I hate the tyranny of dice and use action points and things like the Dork 20 cards to minimize bad dice rolling, there’s something inherently satisfying with a good critical hit.
Chapter Four is another chapter I didn’t get a lot out of. A mana-based spellcasting system isn’t a bad thing by any means but it’s not something I’m interested in at the time. Between Sorcerers in standard d20 and Magisters from Monte’s variant, I think most player’s have enough options. This doesn’t count the various other spellsystems that’ve already been out, including a mana system in oh, Everquest from the same company. Another option I skip over is skill-based spellcasting. Spells have a spellcasting DC to meet that ranges from 10 for a 0 level spell to 35 for a ninth level arcane spell. Options for physical fatigue are included so it’s not completely out of balance but I still find myself shrugging my shoulders. What is this, Spells and Magic?
One thing that catches my eye is spell criticals. It reminds me a little of Monte’s variant spellcasting system in that you can augment your spells by burning another spell of the same level and making a Spellcraft check. You then roll 1d20 plus the level of the spell and consult a table. Not bad overall and something I may have to think about using.
When I get to Chapter Five, Variant Magic, I don’t’ know what I’m expecting. A bunch of classes that have their own spell lists and follow different paths of magic doesn’t really impress me because for the most part, that’s not really variant magic as it is new core classes. Some of the ideas are great like the Aethersmith, masters of the mechanical that remind me of a certain other faction in a game called Mage. Another class, the Soulcrafer, has origins that remind me of the Farseer Trilogy. See, at the end of that series, the young hero is at a place where the old race, the Elderlings sacrificed their lives and essence to sculpted dragons that then took life. The hero in the series has suffered some pretty horrible events and feeds those to a dragon statue and is healed a little of his pain. In that way, the healing of the soul, the Soulcrafters were started.
Of course no good deed goes unpunished. Some of these casters found that they benefited greatly from the bits of soul stuff they took and began to take such energies not for the healing of others, but for their own benefit. It’s something I may use as a subtle menace but not something I’d probably put out for player use.
The new classes have their own spell lists and of course, many new spells to go along with them. Unfortunately, most if not all of these spells are only for the new classes. Ah well.
Chapter Six, Castle and Keep is one I look over briefly. It’s about creating communities. These are relatively small things but the book suggests that if you want to make larger communities, just make several small communities. It’s a good idea as it represents how most cities come together anyway with different factions of the city each having their own area.
I guess the thing that turned me off this section so much is that it gives communities ability scores but doesn’t use the standards, instead making up new stats and then giving them an equivalent explanation. Here’s a hint, if you have to say that Command is equal to Charisma, just use Charisma. I’d use this section to come up with some ideas for specialty places but it’s really not worth it for an every day type of town as there’s a little bit of work involved with it.
If you’re looking for optional rules, this book has them. Perhaps it’s just that having Grim Tales and Unearthed Arcana out in the same time frame prevent this book from sitting well with me. Perhaps because the sections that I find interesting, elite PrCs and Critical Hits, have been covered by others, like Fantasy Flight Games and Torn Asunder, I don’t know if the book is worth the price.
It’s not a bad book by any means it’s just not one that’s leaping past my horde of d20 material to demand use.
