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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Soramain" data-source="post: 5527153" data-attributes="member: 52298">I'm a little late to the party.I've been using some TB rules (action points, simplified iteratives, treasure parcels), but TB revolutionized my GMing style with its first principles.  I'm talking about "the Spine," where the book breaks down the math for encounter difficulty in terms of averages.  It led me to realize something that should have been obvious - the game is all made up of numbers.  I can make any monster I want fitting any description, and there's this handy chart in TB that if it is CR 4, it usually has a base attack bonus of X, saving throws of Y, etc.  This, in turn, led to a realization that the player character classes are similarly all numbers.  When I was writing the rules for my current campaign, I approached the classes not as concepts (a ranger is a woodsman; a cleric is a devotee of a faith) but as packages of abilities that can be re-flavored as needed.  A druid can easily be used as a shape-shifting spy, for example, eventually being immune to poison and being able to look like anyone he wants.  A bard can be re-flavored as a priest who specializes in perform: oratory and wows his audience with the beauty of his sermons.   Writing it down here makes it seem incredibly obvious, but it gives me so much flexibility.  I'm running a game with almost no magic items that is nevertheless a high-magic game, and the TB spine helped me devise an advancement chart that replaces magic item bonuses as character abilities.  As a result, some 9 months into my campaign, my players are still discovering new and cool things about the campaign world because they can't just look in the DMG and deck out their Christmas tree when planning their character.</blockquote>

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