jdrakeh said:
I've been meanig to ask: How did you like Eclispe? I've been fairly impressed despite the lackluster layout and stupid (yes, stupid) art captions -- I just don't have enough free time to write a review (or much else, really).
I've been meaning to write a review of it. It's an interesting system, in that unlike other point-buys it reinvents the wheel for quite a few things. While a lot of books would screw that up pretty badly,
Eclipse actually ended up pulling it off quite well. While at first I wasn't impressed with how spend you CP (character points) on things like hit dice increases or additional skill points, but when they got to special abilities, I admit I was wowed. Reinventing most feats and class features (among other things) as special abilities was impressive, but the way they made them have subsets was even more impressive. Things like the metamagic theorems were a great way of redesigning basic d20 staples.
The epic spells were great, as mentioned, but the work with deities and Godfire doesn't seem quite as impressive when compared to U_K's mechanics for divinity for the IH. It still works pretty well though. I was a bit annoyed that the epic monsters were just descriptions with no stats, though.
As you mentioned, the layout wasn't that great. Even with the table of contents and a glossary, I still find it a bit hard to navigate through the book. The art captions weren't that bad...not compared to the commentary the author, editor, and Grod do in DHG's other book at Lulu,
Practical Enchanter.
I really liked the fact that it uses a point pool based on INT, rather than awarding new characters a big block of XP up front (which, IME, tends to knock the numbers for everything else -- from CR to level advancement -- out of whack).
This, of course, presents the issue of making INT much more important in actual play that it is by default, though that honestly does't bother me much (it typically being a distant second dump stat following CHA).
It seems to be implied more than outrightly stated that GMs will simply declare when characters gain a new level, earning a new lump-sum of CP to spend, rather than carefully doling out and charting XP to see when their totals hit pre-determined amounts. This works well for the system as presented, except that the book is still based on the 1-to-20 (and then epic) style of standard d20, and the aforementioned way of levelling seems a tad too freeform for a rigid step-progression of power.
It also doesn't give extra CP based on Intelligence; you gain extra SP (skill points) that way, not extra CP (which are 24 per level, and 12 per level once you become epic).
It's a very good book, and I'd probably give it pretty high marks all-in-all. It's not perfect, but it gives you a point buy character creation system that's surprising in how freeform it feels while still being d20.
