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Li Shenron, After visiting my FLGS recently and taking a look at Iron Heroes, I think you might want to take a look at the way they do things. It's almost exactly what you have in mind.

I concur with "Cast a Deadly Spell." If you want to put a D&D spin on it, adding some non-human races would be pretty neat. "Sin City" also comes close to fantasy in some cases.

Since I use 3.5, some of my comments may be irrelevant. However, I'll go from the best of my knowledge. In any case, I like your idea. The thematic aspect of the skills are pretty cool, but some themes are more equal than others. But I digress. Here's something I would use. Basically you...

I agree with Crothian. I personally could care less about limiting an NPC's BAB, saves, and HP. However, if a character can have up to 23 levels of a class skill, limiting things to bonuses or to so few ranks seems very awkward. It's easy to keep things on the low end when you're only talking...

I had actually forgotten about UMD. Thanks for pointing that out. That's a sound idea if you have half-orcs as a hybrid and not as a distinct race in its own right. However, I completely shifted that, opting to simply have orcs instead. Like I said, more Disney's gargoyles than Tolkien's...

That's the sort of thing I'd been hoping to encourage with my revisions. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to playtest them.

I concur. If you don't mind my asking, how did you categorize the various themes? Were they similar to the domain wizard variant in Unearthed Arcana?

I did something similar in my rewrite (that I'll likely never get around to playtesting). Mind you, my orcs replaced the PHB half-orc and are more like Disney's gargoyles (sans wings) than Tolkien's Orcs. I gave them +2 STR, -2 INT, and a disadvantage I call Social Stigma. I gave them a -2...

I'm sure that there is more supernatural stuff going on around me than I'm willing to spend a lot of time investigating, but that's neither here nor there. I think a spirit lives in my house. Nothing scary, never saw what it looked like, but the thing likes to toy with me. A couple of times I...

Interesting. You mention that the students need trainers to learn their special abilities. How about, instead of keeping their levels low, they gain none of the class abilities of the next level until they find a trainer? Not to mention, new trained-only skills may need to be put on hold. Of...

A source you may want to use, if you don't already have it, is Bastion Press' Faeries sourcebook. It's really cool for incorporating various things involving the fey. There are a lot of spells that you can pluck from there to flesh out the NPC as a faery gold hunter.

Given that reducing the cleric's combat effectiveness is a trade-off for expanding the possible archetypes within the class, how do you envision the mechanical write-up for the cleric?

There has been a lot of debate over the years about whether or not the cleric is overpowered. However, considerably less dialogue has focused on the roleplaying and mechanical potential of the cleric class. Domains aside, it seems that the cleric has few options aside from either the healbot...

What I find more puzzling is the fact that WotC seems to have expected players to not notice this.

Given these problems, I think there are some additional options you may consider as well. The first is to increase the number of skill points some classes have access to. The second is to consolidate some skills (Balance + Tumble = Acrobatics) and get rid of others (Use Rope). The system you...

I'm not too keen on special monk weapons either, but it's not because of them being "Asian-themed." Rather, it's because they sort of violate the idea of martial artists being able to take simple tools and make them into weapons. In addition, they function similarly to their simple weapon...

I agree, but to take this further, I think it's equating conflict with combat that makes it difficult for some to fathom why PC vs. PC conflict is allowed in some games. In a dramatic sense (which is the same sense I would suppose for RPGs), conflict is what happens when what one PC wants and...

At first I was thrilled with the idea of including elves who resemble humans of different ethnic groups. Now I am sort of just shaking my head at it being more of the same stuff. While you could technically say that people would react to a dark-skinned elf the same way they react to Drow, I...

Something that is probably obvious to a lot of you that some players may overlook is the idea that you want to create a scenario that cannot be solved simply by killing the enemy. At least, not right away.

I finally had an idea people respond to. Anyway, as far as monsters being better, you could theoretically apply the absolute skill rank max according to HD, although simply giving monsters levels may work too.