Recent content by Staffan

You can still have quests for MacGuffins, but they'll likely be desired for something they allow rather than something they themselves do. One example would be the Darksaber – sure, it's a nice weapon if you can master it, but the true power lies in its symbolism for the Mandalorians. A more...

Draw Steel does something similar. Attacks are resolved using a "power roll" of 2d10+stat (which usually starts at 2 and hits 5 at max level). On an 11 or less you get a poor result, on 12-16 you get an OK result, and at 17+ you get a really good result. In many cases, attacks inflict various...

Funnily enough, back in the 80s Äventyrsspel (the creators/publishers of Dragonbane's predecessors) had the license from Iron Crown Enterprises to translate their MERP books into Swedish, and dual-stat them so they'd work with both MERP and Drakar och Demoner.

Not sure about the 14+ qualifier, but overall the chance of rolling doubles or triples on 3d6 are close to 50%.

Feats in PF2 are pretty siloed off, however. You never get "a feat", you get "a class feat" or "an ancestry feat" or "a skill feat" and so on. And those categories are further limited – you can't take a gnome ancestry feat if you're an elf, for example (with certain exceptions, but they require...

Sure, you could make a game where the skill values overpower the RNG in most cases. Just taking some numbers off the top of my head, you could have a system where a novice has a skill value of like 10, a master has 50, and you roll d10+skill to see if you succeed. Maybe even an exploding d10 to...

An issue with skills in many RPGs is that they rely too much on random chance. Linear systems feel particularly prone to this, but other types of systems can also have that problem. Basically, in real life most people have a number of things they can do reliably. There are also a number of...

"But wherever there is evil, whenever an innocent would suffer, there would be Hercules!" I knew that Sorbo guy was up to no good...

IMO, roll-under systems work best when dealing with relatively grounded characters. Characters can improve, but they'll always be fundamentally normal humans. No matter how good a boxer you are, you're not going to win a fistfight against a 20' tall giant. If the game does want an experienced...

This is what I disagree with. I think the "what" is more important than the "how". A frontliner can fight using pure martial badassery, or by being divinely empowered, or by using arcane powers learned through study. They still fulfill the role of "frontliner", but the play experience will...

PF2 has more up-front complexity, because you need to familiarize yourself with a whole bunch of keywords and choose feats and sub-classes and such. But once you get past that hurdle, it gets a fair bit easier because everything works off the same principles. You also have various character...

So far, so good. But the problem is that you see niches as a single thing each class does. This leads to rather stale classes and characters. You want a good healer in your party? Well, then you need a cleric and that means a bunch of religious baggage as well. If you instead approach class...

This is a bit more concise than Interstellar: