Recent content by azabaro

I seem to recall one of the OSR blogs suggesting an easy way to get the feel of limited proficiency in a language was to communicate with only nouns - no verbs, adjectives, prepositions, etc. (though I imagine you could include interjections and pronouns without altering the feel any). This...

Based on the pre-errata 5E’s version of the GOO Warlock, I went looking at the William S. Burroughs quote “Language is a virus from outer space.” The idea was the Warlock made a pact with some psychic entity which was language itself and slumbered distributed across the minds of all beings...

I don’t think so, because Gygax wrote that in the context of a certain mode of play (or rather, overlapping modes of play) which aren’t common these days. The first involves a concern with logistics - you’re concerned about how long supplies you’ve brought with you (rations, light sources, etc.)...

This suggests any improvement to those attributes must be one those casters are incentivized not to use. E.g. for Charisma it might be something like: As long as your Charisma modifier is at least +1, you can communicate to an ally to give them Inspiration. Doing so reduces your Charisma...

Many years ago, I encountered Ars Magica and found a lot of things I liked about its magic system. Some people will of course cite its ability to handle spontaneous magic, or its noun+verb ability to define groups of magical effects, or the way it lets you give characters affinities with certain...

5th level sounds good to me. I’ve often felt one of the early defining aspects of D&D was the way it just assumed that characters could come back from the dead purely as a result of player agency - haul your buddy’s corpse back to town and to the right temple, and as long as you’ve got the money...

The named spells are a good point: these aren’t natural or intuitive functions of magic, but things that specific individuals brought into being by their own efforts. I’d also include Read Magic - fundamentally a spell about running into someone else’s writings and turning them into something...

5E might not have a lot of skills, but even so coming up with a handful of sub-skills for each seems like quite a bit of work, especially since some aren't likely to be amenable to adding simple modifiers to existing actions (e.g. what does a 3rd or 4th stage Religion sub skill look like?)...

Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game tries to emulate simultaneity. Every character has a Speed that they declare at the beginning of the round, based on the maneuver they’ve selected, their attributes, and some other conditions. Actions are resolved starting with the character who has the...

I think it's a neat idea - I'd been thinking about something similar, a way to focus the Monk on Wisdom and reduce some of the MAD problems. I have to agree with Technik4, though, that this ability is front-loaded and therefore just an invitation to 1-level dips from divine casters. How about if...

I'm not fond of random character generation as things stand - this adds randomness, which means that characters of a given level can be even further apart in ability. Pity the poor Sorcerer who not only has to cope with d4 HD, but who also rolls badly for spell points - he knows fewer spells...

I'd be concerned about two things. First: spontaneous healing was given to Clerics so they'd feel free to prepare non-Cure spells. If that's taken away, and if the Cleric is still the party's main source of healing magic (as opposed to a Wand of CLW), the Cleric's player may feel pressured to...

Good point about the healing and utility spells. The healing spells could probably be handled as a special case - say that the spellcaster can't use Mystic Focus to generate an effect that heals (much as spells like Minor Creation can't be used to create material components for spellcasting)...

One of the problems I've seen with low-level casters is that they can run out of spells very easily. Of course, to some degree they're designed to follow a limited ammunition model, but the current rules seem a little too harsh. After all, didn't Complete Mage introduce reserve feats to keep...

One possibility is to allow a character to focus on a single other character in combat (typically, this would be one they are dealing with most directly; for example, if they had the Dodge feat it would probably be the one against which the Dodge bonus to AC is applied). Trying to sense the...