Ptolus in BESMd20

1. I'm actually going to be running Everstone, which isn't "pure" BESMd20. A number of different things have been modified, for example, there's a modified version of BaB instead of being skill based. Also, spells in general over 5th level aren't appropriate. I think I've only seen one guy over on the Enworld forums (3 or 4 years ago) that actually ran Everstone. In spite of that...

Anyone has some advice regarding encounters using BESMd20, or has any suggestions on things to watch out for?

I've got the Monstrous Manual already, and I guess that'll be helpful...

The people are _pumped_! There's some serious excitement for Everstone, which is awesome because I thought it a shame that a pretty nice variant of d20 combined with a groovy setting, basically disappeared unremarked.

If you're trying to think of what Everstone is, can read some reviews here: http://www.amazon.com/Everstone-Bloo.../dp/1894938518

Now, the idea that I tossed out was the Everstone setting, but going with a city-based game (at least to start). The group being members of the Watch, and cruising around doing cop stuff.

People got even more excited.

And so it looks like I'm going to be plopping Ptolus down, and basing folks in there. Now, I've been through Ptolus a bit but haven't done a serious study of it, since I hadn't expected to be using it for a while yet.

Anyone with experience in Ptolus that can give any advice regarding the following:

2. In general, magic past 5th level isn't appropriate in Everstone. I figure I can handle certain exceptions (like having a method for people to come back from the dead), but any other bits that I might have missed?

3. Constructs. Everstone has the whole construct thing going, rather like Eberron. The default for the Everstone ones are about 12 foot tall and around 1600 pounds. In an effort to make 'em more city-friendly, I'm simply going to have any PC golems be the "Mark 2 Urban Golem", and shrink 'em so they're more like Warforge. Anything I'm missing here?

4. Any general advice on integrating Ptolus the city into a d20 setting in general? It's going to be the central city for folks to be operating in and around, but if the party wants to take off and roam the wilds outside the city, I'm not going to stop 'em.

5. Anything else you think might be important?

I just wanted to say that I hope this goes well for you! I loved BESM d20 but could never find anybody willing to give it a go (I thought that it was one of the better 'toolkit systems' for d20). Ditto Everstone. Please let us know how this progresses!

Heh, thanks. I picked up BESM d20 (Stingy Gamer's Edition) and thought it had some good potential. It could have done with a bit of an edit so that "normal" people could read and understand it, but I could see some good stuff there.

Everstone though.... wow. They took BESMd20, and look to have made that sucker actually work. At least on paper. I'll be seeing how it plays out in a month when I'm supposed to start running the game. Everstone is the 2nd d20 game that I've looked at and thought, "Yeah, I'd be willing to run that without ripping the system to pieces." Lone Wolf being the first one.

Looking through the Monstrous Manual though, I started getting a bit worried about setting up encounters and stuff. Everstone is unfortunately quiet about handling that sort of thing, and I noticed that the BESMd20 way of assigning CRs is different than the WotC way. They do include both the scores, which is why I started getting worried.

For example, in the back of the BESMd20 MM where they're talking about customizing things, they mention critters not having a Con score. Which happens to be what the War Golems of Everstone and Giant Robots in BESM d20 are set up like. Now, I've seen a number of things about the issue of no Con stuff (when people have talked about it in relation to Warforge), but I'm not especially worried about it at this point. If it's a problem later, I can always just assign a fake Con score, or have any Golem players generate one when it's become a problem.

However, the race section of BESM d20 says that being a Giant Robot is a 4 point race cost (before subtracting out the baseline cost of humans it's a 10 point cost, and humans cost 6), but the back of the MM says no Con with all the benefits it's got is worth 60 CP.

A bit of a discrepency there. I'm going to go with the "default" CP cost of 4 points, but it's little things like that which make me a bit nervous.

I'm also not quite sure what to expect with tossing Ptolus into the whole mix. It's just too incredible a combination not to try it, but I'm not sure what sort of "gotchas" to expect from it. Everstone doesn't specifically forbid the traditional caster types (it calls 'em Dynamic Sorcerers like BESMd20), in fact they say it's still a pretty popular style of magic, just more on the NPC side of things. And they've helpfully said that the Sorcerer is the way to handle the Dynamic Sorcery side of things, as far as the the "power" or style of the traditional caster types is concerned.

So while I should be able to handle a number of the classes in Ptlous right off the bat, I'm sure there's going to be some that provide a bit of a challenge in some fashion. But not knowing the setting inside and out (kinda hard with Ptolus), I thought maybe I'd be able to get some extra insight here.

I think for some of the other classes, the BESMd20 breakdown of the classes will help fill in a bunch more of the gaps, and I guess I'll just have to fake the others. Whatever those might be.

I seem to be pretty far out into uncharted territory here, so I guess it'll be interesting no matter what. Lots of groovy fun too I hope. Like I said, Everstone is the only other d20 game I've looked at and not immediately started thinking about how to rip bits out of it or whatever. I'm even going to leave the skills alone, whereas normally I really dislike the skill system.

So I talked with the players and said, "In an effort to make my life as a GM easier, I'm thinking of making a bit of a change to the skill system. I plan on doing this for the NPCs, but I thought I'd mention it to you guys and see if you're interested in trying it for your characters."

The system I'm planning on using is based off the same one which Wizards of the
Coast is using for the Star Wars Saga edition rpg:

Skill points are eliminated.

Characters still have class skills.

At first level, a player chooses a number of skills from their Class Skills list, and marks these as being Trained. The number of skills chosen is however many skill points a character would normally get when leveling.

So for example (using the regular D&D classes), a human Rogue with an IQ of 18 would choose a total of 13 skills (8 from the class, +4 for the IQ, +1 for being human) to count as Trained. In case that sounds like a lot, bear in mind that the Rogue has a total of 29 skills in their Class Skills list.

After the inital picking of skills to be considered Trained, that's it.
No more decisions about skills. If you want to take another skill as Trained, you would buy a feat called Additional Training, and then pick another skill. Only skills that are explicitly listed as being Class Skills may be chosen to be Trained.

You can still buy Skill Focus, and apply it to your skills as normal.

A skill check is made in the following manner:
Roll a d20, add the stat modifier (if any), and add half of the character's level (round down).

If the skill is one that a character has picked to be Trained, then an additional +5 is added to the check.

So what do the maximum skill ranks look like between both systems?
A 20th level character with a +4 mod to their skill would normally have a maximum possible skill (without feats or anything else) of +24. If they rolled a natural 20, they'd hit a DC of 44.

Under the new system, a 20th level character with a +4 mod to their skill would have a maximum possible skill of +19. On a roll of a natural 20, they'd hit a DC of 39.

Not really much of a difference in terms of what can be achieved, but it makes my book keeping as a GM a heck of a lot easier.

Under Everstone, since feats cost 2 CP and everyone gets 5 each time they level, it means the Fighter types which ordinarily only get 2 skill points a level can go ahead and spend some CP and develop several skills if they want. They're never going to be able to keep up with skill monkey Rogue types though, so the skill monkey characters will still have their place.

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Someone on another board mentioned that the Saga version of skill focus apparently adds another +5. that means that if I used that version, then characters would only be a couple of points behind the normal way of doing things.

2 of the 3 liked the idea quite a bit (my wife is the third one and apparently likes shuffling around skill points), so it looks like the players as well as the NPCs will be doing this.

I'm poking around now for a suitable module to start things off with. As I mentioned, the idea is that they're going to be members of the Watch. All sorts of groovy goodness possible there. One of the players (I picked him as going for a Sun Magi, and it looks like I was right) said, "That's great!!! So are we going to be like regular cops, or are we going to be like SWAT members?"

To which I said, "There's a chance you'll be SWAT members, but we'll deal with that in-game." Of course, before I pitched the game I'd considered making them members of something like Special Branch/SWAT, but figured, "Nah, soft pitch it and go for the city watch."

So what I'm going to do is have everyone make their characters at the table together, and their first adventure will be a Graduation Exercise. The premise will be "You've demonstrated you're fit for the Watch, now we'll see if you're worthy of being members of the elite." They'll be starting out at 3rd level (as the Everstone book suggests), and... well, I guess it depends on whatever module I decide on.

I've thought about it, and there's basically two approaches to take for determining "success". 1) At least one person must "survive" of the team (if it's a dungeoncrawl module) or bring back the object/person (if it's more urban focused).

2) Success or failure will depend less (but still be influenced by) whether they succeed in whatever the goal is, and more on how they function as a team, and how much destruction/law breaking they engage in to accomplish the mission.

I think I'm going to go with option 2, because I'd like to reinforce the team mentality, and kinda gently nudge them in the direction of "blowing up everything isn't really always an option".

Although I'll still let 'em blow up some stuff.

I'm thinking part Hawk and Fisher (novels by Simon R Green) and part Badboys/Die Hard.

One advantage to doing the players doing their skill the way they are (besides making things a bit simpler) is that between the class they pick and the skills they opt for to be Trained, I'll have some immediate pointers to the style of game they're looking for.

One guy I know is going to be going for the flashy blaster mage (Sun Magi), and I think the other is going to go for the sneaky git (Shadow Magi). I'm not quite sure which way my wife is going to go yet, as she hasn't had a chance to go through the book yet (I've got 2 copies of the book, one to loan/have available at the table, and my own personal one).

I don't _think_ she's going to go for a War Golem, but that's about all I can figure. She's had some fun doing a Shifter fighter in Ebberon, but she's also grooving on doing a thiefy type in a Roman based D&D game we're currently in. She _might_ go for a Moon Magi, which means we'd have a "classic" triumvirate by the book.

I've been working a bunch of overtime though, so I haven't gotten as far in going through Ptolus as I'd like. I think I just need to settle on a district and go from there. I might cheese out and simply have 'em posted to Midtown (which is where Delvers Square is).

I also need to figure out something to do about the Temple area, since Everstone has only very recently had its gods coming back. And the city is pretty newly inhabited (only 80 years). I think I'll just make it easy on myself and simply have the city having been established long ago, and it emptied out (mostly) on the Night of Terror 300 years ago. When everyone came back out, it was resettled and is in the process of being repopulated by different folks. And some that never left the city, and instead went underneath it.

So I think the Temples will be to either "outside" deities that the newcomers have brought with them, or in some cases might be to what people think is a different deity but is really simply another aspect of another deity.

The only other thing I'm really going to have to do is get a handle on exactly what races are "established" in Ptolus, and replace them with something appropriate. Like D&D Elves and Dwarves don't exist in the default Everstone book. The dwarves are a simple replacement, but I haven't decided what to do about the elves.

While I can't afford to lay down the cash for Ptolus just yet, based on this thread I had somebody hold back some copies of Everstone and BESM d20 for me (which I'll be picking up Thursday or Friday). I really like BESM d20 when I picked up the initial release back in 2003 (IIRC) but never got a chance to use it. That said, I think part of the "never got a chance to use it" was the fan community climate at the time (people weren't as willing to experiment with 3rd party stuff back then as they seem to be now). Hopefully, Everstone will help me 'sell' BESM d20 as a viable system locally

jdrakeh said:

While I can't afford to lay down the cash for Ptolus just yet,

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I admit I didn't plop down the cashola for this behemoth. It was a gift from a really groovy friend and his wife, who thought I'd be able to enjoy it. And at long last (I've had it about a year) I'm going to be able to.

jdrakeh said:

Hopefully, Everstone will help me 'sell' BESM d20 as a viable system locally

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Heh. While I certainly don't reccomend being underhanded, I personally would be inclined to pitch it more as "a d20 variant" and let the book sell itself mostly. If people are familiar with Eberron (and you are yourself), you can compare and contrast the two of them. While I had fun playing in Eberron, I thought they could have really pushed things further than they did.

Depending on how you see things and what specific objections the player(s) in question might have had, it's distinctly possible that Everstone cleaned up some of the problems/issues of BESMd20. Like dropping the combat skill and going back to BaB. I like it because it brings things closer to being in line with D&D/d20. Which means less resistance to people being willing to try it, because they don't feel like they really have to learn a new system.

For me... I ready BESMd20 and thought, "This has got some solid potential". But it was difficult for me to see _where_ to go with it. And the idea of just playing a "standard" D&D/fantasy game didn't fire me up. But when I read Everstone, suddenly stuff started clicking into place for me. Unnecessary (in my opinion) stuff was dropped (from both BESMd20 and d20), a bright and vibrant world was pushed forward, and all the classes looked like they were about being cool.

If you know your players, you might be able to steer 'em a little by pointing at the class most likely to appeal. I did that with a player that had seemed pretty unenthusiastic with several other ideas I'd had. But I knew he liked blasty, so I mentioned Sun Magi and just handed him the book. Instant convert.

And to keep this from being a total "I'm pimping Everstone rah rah rah"...

At least some of the race things can be dealt with by the simple fact that the Fey have come into the world. Not that long ago (12 years) but since they've been given shelter in Everstone proper (Moss Stone) it takes care of a few things.

Some of the races (like goblins) can comfortably be a part of the city, as they happen to be creatures of the Fey realm, but more on the nightmare side of things than the "happy" side of things, where the Sylphs and Nymphs come from.

A possibility (I haven't been able to get a solid handle on just what all races are actually assumed to be "common" in Ptolus) is that some of them aren't changed. Like... I dunno, say Kobolds. I love the little critters, and there's a couple of ways they could be integrated. On being that they simply came up from downbelow when people started moving back into Ptolus.

The potentially intriguing possibility is that some of the races that came through with the Fey have been dreamed by other races. So if Centaurs are supposed to be an part of Ptolus, a slight shift and instead of Centaurs, have Wemics which have been dreamed by the Khaataan (or however you spell it, I'm at work )

So there could be races that are living in Ptolus that either don't know who dreamed them... or are reluctant to say because they don't want to be persecuted for it. And not just races, but generic monsters.

I want to be careful though and try and avoid the "common" critters. Like orcs. Sure, you could make a case for orcs maybe having been dreamed by the Adone, but that's too easy. And starts carrying things back into the same-old-same-old kind of arena that I'm trying to break out of (or at least move away from).

I might fall back and pillage an old and favorite standby for alternate races... Talislanta. Talislanta is great for all sorts of different things, and one of 'em is simply the fact that it's not really a mainstream product.

Scurvy_Platypus said:

For me... I ready BESMd20 and thought, "This has got some solid potential". But it was difficult for me to see _where_ to go with it.

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When I read it, I thought "Hot damn! A universal, point-based, d20 System variant!" -- but I never did get a chance to do anything with it for reasons previously mentioned. When I put the Everstone books on hold, I also grabbed two Limited Edition copies of BESM d20, though, so here's hoping that I can give it a spin in the next month or two

[Edit: Thanks for posting the Everstone Companion, BTW!]

Rules: Part 1

So here's the official Rules I'm implementing for the game:

1. The setting is Everstone and Ptolus together. In general, the Everstone setting overrides any setting conflict. This means that anything over about 80 years isn't really known about Ptolus, although it could likely be found in the course of research and so forth.

The goal is for Ptolus and Everstone to both function "as is" with minimal changes. The everstone setting does restrict magic over 5th level, as well as certain other types of spells, including dimensional travel and anti-magic. Given the premise of Ptolus, these restrictions actually work pretty well.

2. Level as normal until 8th.
After 8th, characters still collect XP, and get 2 CP (character points) every 5k of XP. 2 CP is enough to buy a feat, or the points can be kept and used to upgrade powers.

Hit Points, BaB, Saving Throws, Defense Throws, Ability increases and Energy points are all capped. There are feats (like Toughness) that can be used to improve Hit Points for example, but since leveling would stop at 8th, they won't increase "naturally".

3. Skills are going to be basically handled as I was thinking in a post upthread.
The Everstone skill list isn't going to change. I could fold this skill or that into another, but it's more bother than I'm interested in.

You can stil buy Skill Focus, the bonus it provides is a +5 instead of +2.

A skill check is made in the following manner:
Roll a d20, add the stat modifier (if any), and add the character's level.

If the skill is one that a character has picked to be Trained, then an additional +5 is added to the check. If the character is both Trained and has Skill focus, then add +10.

At first glance, yes this makes for the potential to have _extremely_ skilled characters, especially for 8th level. This is being done for a few reasons:

A. I hate chumps. If a player is going to invest in their character being able to do something, I want that character to _shine_ at what they're invested in.

B. It makes conversion of other d20 stuff easier. D&D/d20 seems to have this whole "fixed" DC thing going. I don't feel like messing around with it past a certain point.

C. Everstone _doesn't_ use fixed DCs. Instead they tell the DM to determine how hard something is, and then have a little chart that says, Easy = DC 15 and scales up from there. The PCs could (with luck) occasionally be able to hit that DC40 check, and that's fine with me.

D. Originally, I was going to use half the character's level but I also wasn't going to cap the game at 8th level like I am now. So I changed it from half the PC level to simply PC level.

4. Energy Points and Hit Points wont' be rolled, just the maximum given.

5. Characters must have 2 motivations:
A. Why they wanted to join the City Watch in the first place.
B. Something their charcter wants to accomplish outside of being in the City Watch. Something like "Kill every [blank]" isn't an acceptable goal. The characters are supposed to be heroes, or at least fighting the good fight (even if they do some questionable things). I'm willing to let folks skate the edge of doing some nasty stuff, but there is a line.

6. Every character has to know at least one other member of the group. I don't care how, that's something for the players to work out amongst themselves (mostly). Everybody doesn't have to be bestest bosom buddies, but I'm not going to have characters showing up in a complete vaccum in relation to each other.

7. Energy Points as Action Points.
There's a couple of different versions of Action Points floating around, and I need to nail down the exact version I want to use. Additionally the entry for the Everstonian has a couple of bits about using Energy Points for rerolls or whatnot.

Energy Points fuel spells, as well as many of a PC's other abilities (as well as recharge weapons). Instead of creating another resource for players to track, I'm just going to let them use their EP to handle Action Point duties. They'll regen over a certain amount of time (whatever the Everstone setting calls for) and allow people to pretty freely engage in more over-the-top kind of stuff. The fact that they _do_ fuel Spells and Abilities means that players will get to decide which is more important to them, and act accordingly.

8. The War Golem class is gone.
If the class actually had something to it besides buying some upgrades and weapons, I'd keep it. The fact that non-golem characters can buy weapons without spending CP, and can buy Flesh Runes (which basically augment characters with additional abilities) without having to be a special class, means the War Golem class is just a penalty for PCs. I'm scaling back the golem race slightly, so it's a Medium instead of a Large critter, which changes a few of the other things about it (like the HD) as well.

Whether a character spends CP on Flesh Runes, or a golem spends CP on Weapons/Augments, both of the players are basically saying "This means something to the character". As such, a certain level of "immunity" is granted. Access to the abilities/weapons may be temporarily lost, but it won't ever be "taken away", unless I also give back the CP spent on the Rune/Weapon/Augment in question.

I could always make some version of a Tattooed Warrior, and restrict the Flesh Runes to these folks, but I figure I'd rather leave things the way they are, and simply let people have even more options for how to build/modify their characters.

After 8th level, characters are only getting 2 CP per 5k. There's an awful lot of stuff to buy. Flesh Runes, Feats, Class abilities, and Spells. Quite a bit of this stuff also comes in levels, so instead of abilties scaling with level as in normal D&D/d20, instead it's a fixed amount that only gets better when you buy the next higher rank.

World Notes: Part 1

I haven't fully decided on the "race swapping" I'm going to do. Everstone (and the world I'm envisioning) aren't quite set up like the standard D&D, so a bit of shuffling is in order. I have decided after some thought to keep things like the Aasimar and Tiefling though. Again, given the premise of Ptolus I think I can make it work. Centaurs don't exist naturally within Everstone though, so I'm just going to swap in Wemics for them and move on. I've got notes on some of the other race swaps I'm thinking of doing, but don't have the notes with me right now.

Everstone only has a portion of the world detailed, and I've been giving some thought to this. While the game as planned is going to be an urban campaign set within Ptolus, I know that players can be fickle and go off in unexpected directions. To deal with potential questions and sudden shifts in terms of what folks want in the game, I'm thinking about the "back end" of the world a bit...

Given the setup that Ptolus has, I'm _very_ strongly thinking that the Warcraft setting would fit in without too much work (Warcraft, not the WoW version). The Warcraft portion will simply be located on the "other side" of the planet and given everything that's happened within the setting, it's not much of a surprise that neither side of the world has discovered each other.

Given the premise of Ptolus, there's a pretty good reason for why the Hollow Lords suddenly showed up, and why they haven't gone away. It's unlikely that they would share anything or work together with the Burning Legion or Scourge, so if they're even aware of things on that side of the world, they probably don't care too much, and simply avoid it as not being worth their effort or risk.

Arcane Magic corrupts. It's one of the key principles of the Warcraft setting. At first blush, it seems counter to Everstone, with just about every class having spells. However, Everstone doesn't really have an arcane/divine seperation of spells. They do have some specific god granted "favors", but that's about as close as it comes. Warcraft already has Divine magic being defined as not strictly "god" based, but nature based as well. So, I can simply tie the Everstone magic bits into a more nature/divine basis and deal with a lot of problems there. Even the Rune Magic that Everstone employs can be related more towards nature than Arcane.

The Adone (people within the Everstone setting) are all into demon-tech sorts of stuff. I figure that Chaostech (came with Ptolus) will handle that just fine. Hollow Lords/Vor stuff should be able to be handled with a combination of Chaostech and maybe some bits out of the Warcraft setting.

Elves, Dwarves, Halfings, and Gnomes don't exist as is in Everstone. There's a gnome analogue, and there are elven analogues, but the people responsible for the Runes have disappeared. One can infer that it's dwarves, although it's never actually stated. I plan on keeping this default approach for Everstone, and therefore the elves out of the Warcraft setting are going to be their own thing, and not related to the Fey. The dwarves I'm not sure about. Certainly they left the Everstone setting long ago.

Last time the group got together, I explained abit about Everstone to a late addition to the group (former GM of the Ebberron game I played in). Talk drifted a bit, and I mentioned how even back in the day you had some mix of Science Fiction happening with the Fantasy, in the form of some of the Blackmoor stuff, as well as Expedition to Barrier peaks which even has a crashed ship and ray guns.

The former GM was flabbergasted, and couldn't believe it. One of the other guys piped up and talked about how awesome Expedition was, and then said, "Hell, I'd practically be willing to pay someone to run that again. It was kick ass!"

And so, prompted by god only knows what, I piped up, "I'll tell you guys what. If we do wind up playing long enough for everyone to cap out at level 8, I'll run it for your characters. It'll look at least a bit different than the original module, but I'll find a way to work it into the world." Much happiness was had, so now I've got that kicking around in the back of my mind. In part to deal with _that_ aspect of stuff:

I've got Dragonstar, so I guess there's an immediate solution right there. It's nothing that really has to be detailed and can just sit in the background, but it's a way to explain just about anything. Plus, I plan on pillaging stuff from Dragonstar for additional magictech anyways, so why not keep it in the back?

A second possibility that can either work with the Dragonstar background, or on its own is a moon idea. I thought an interesting possibility would be for a moon to essentially be the Dark Sun world. Again, given how the Warcraft setting treats arcane magic, it would mesh together. The ship could even have been how the dwarves got to the Everstone part of the world in the first place.

Stuff can start getting really out there by having a dwarven version of the Stargate system set up.

Now all of _that_ together can make for all sorts of stuff, if people decide they're tired of playing cops in Ptolus and want something a bit different. Stargate and the Mind Flayers would work pretty easily together, and Dragonstar plugs into that pretty easily as well. The premise of Ptolus doesn't rule any of this out really either.

So..... yeah. Almost none of this is actually important to the game though. The only thing I'm committed to is a spaceship and rayguns in the mountains and all that. My main point in posting it is to kinda have the rough ideas for how everything is hooked together, in case I actually need it. Since the game is "action cops in Ptolus", it'd be a big fat waste of time to do anything other than the rough thinking I've given it.