Headed for rune

[AeroDm]

Thanks so much for the shout out. I'm stoked you like the logic behind my design. I put a lot of effort in being explicit so people can attack my ideas on the merit and so far it has paid off. The criticisms I've gotten have been poignant, helpful, and generally awesome.

I'd be a little frightened if all of our ideas lined up so I'll take what we got. Drop me a PM-link if you ever make a thread and want input on your ideas or feel free to bring them up on my site in any of the threads where they even sort of relate. We (meaning the handful of regular commenters) have discussed other people's design issues a handful of times. My effort to help someone else led me to discover something new and culminated with this post. Now that discovery is driving my current design around skills in my game.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Reported for spam.

EDIT: Because there was spam. Not you AeroDM! Your stuff is interesting. Keep up the good work!

 

[AeroDm]

The work on zones changed a lot and I had some great feedback from commenters. They are presented in two posts: abstract and details. They are both pretty long posts, apologies.

I also did a normal size post on a different approach on stats inspired by the discussion around Mearls' most recent article. I think it has a lot of potential to stop ability bloat, fix the problems with stat raises, and encourage players to build more well rounded characters.

 

[AeroDm]

The conversation on stats continues with alternate mechanisms to encourage folks to invest in stats on the non-modifier increasing levels. In essence, creating strata such that there are no dead levels for ability scores. The goal is to create a laundry list of possibilities, so any potential addition is appreciated. Feel free to respond here or on the site.

 

[AeroDm]

Reported for spam.

EDIT: Because there was spam. Not you AeroDM! Your stuff is interesting. Keep up the good work!

Haha. Thanks for that. I did sort of feel awkward posting an update right below your comment when the spam had been removed. Now I feel like I can power on.

 

[AeroDm]

Two new posts.

The first continues the discussion building on taking a second look at stats and pursues a different approach on encumbrance. The design goal was to make it quick and light but, when encumbrance ought to matter, suddenly allow it to organically become more strict. I think it does that surprisingly elegantly. Yet, it has not been well received...

The second is soliciting ideas and feedback for how zones can be incorporated into class powers to make sure zones reach their full potential. Just flavorful and light rule ideas that make sure to more consistently adopt the strengths of zones into play.

 

[AeroDm]

This idea was originally posted by a different blogger but I decided to see how far I could run with it. The goal is to find ways to organize random generation tables such that a relatively small set of ideas can organically populate many random tables through their relationships. I think it is neat; certainly a good start towards fleshing the idea out.

Double duty table generation

 

[AeroDm]

A quick excel doc that makes sudoku type puzzles. They are pretty handy game puzzles if you replace the numbers with symbols (think dwarven runes) and it makes the puzzle A LOT harder. It is always nice when people grumble to be able to say that you based it off of an "easy sudoku" that you then made even easier.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Tried a quick post on the blog, but not sure if it let me or not. Anyway, this is what I had to say about zones and movement:

Really like the articles so far, and some useful stuff for the direction I have been going myself. One of the similarities is that I was looking at abstract time in combat, in order to handle player action order efficiently, but I had not considered zones.

So have you considered rolling initiative every round and/or combining the initiative roll with the movement roll? That gets a lot of good mileage out of one roll. Roll well enough, you get where you want to be, and get to act first. But if where you want to go is far away, those modifiers mean that you act later. "Fail" your initiative/movement roll, and you get stopped short of your goal and you go very late in the order.

This combo solves another issue I was having, too. Namely, I wanted a declarative phase that was very simple and general, but did lock in the player slightly and have consequences. But I also wanted the players who went late to still be free to act based on the situation as it then stood. Declaring desired location, then rolling for success/initiative order, then dealing with it, meets that goal, I think.

Using stuntways could be a gamble, here. Make it, and you are effectively improving your initiative. Miss it, and you hurt initiative.

 

[AeroDm]

Double post