Buy the Numbers

[The Sigil]

Tired of multi-classing, just to get one ability from a certain class? Perhaps you wanted to be a Rogue with a few spells, but the ‘singing’ Bard was not appealing. Maybe you wanted to be a nature warrior, but did not desire all the spells from the Ranger class? Have you ever wanted a mage who could rage?

Have you ever thought it was silly to adventure for weeks and weeks without ever showing improvement, but then you hit a ‘magic’ number of xp and ‘BAM’: all of your abilities increase? Has your character ever traveled into a new land and you asked the GM if you could try and learn the local language? But the GM had to respond “sorry, you can’t learn anything new until you get 4,500 more experience points”.

Now, you no longer have to purchase libraries full of supplements, just to find a pseudo-class that suits your needs. Now you can gain skills, abilities, spells, as you go!

Get ready to change the way you think of character advancement. Get ready to have unprecedented freedom of choice! Get ready for: “Buy the Numbers!”

 

[Crothian]

Buy the Numbers

Dungeons and Dragons is an RPG game that has some very set ideas. Each character will have a class and one progressed through gaining levels and getting set abilities defined by the classes. There are some options now like feats and skills, but for the most part the classes determine most of a character’s abilities. Well, that’s not the way it is going to work if Spencer Cooley has anything to say about it.

Spencer Cooley is the author and publisher behind Buy the Numbers. He has written a few d20 books but this is by far the most radical. This is one of the most radical books I have read for the system. It takes two of the so called sacred cows, classes and levels, and tosses them aside. Almost. It is a class and level base system that this is based off of. Classes and levels do make their way in here but only to keep things balanced and to figure appropriate challenges.

Buy the numbers is a sixty two page pdf. It comes in a zip file a bit over seven megs and unzips to two pdf files. One is made for printing and is under a meg and size and the other is full color with borders and art. The color file is a bit over eight megs in size. There is a nice color border on alternating sides of the book, but with no border opposite it it really makes the other side look bare. The art is okay and the layout is well done. However, the important part of this is the rules.

The idea is simple but the construction of them is complicated. One takes all the abilities that go into the classes like hit dice, saves, base attack bonus, skills, etc and assigns costs to them. The costs are in experience points. There is no longer the waiting between gaining levels to gain abilities. Just take the experience points one gained in an adventure and spend them to improve the character. Every ability in the Players Handbook is given a cost in here. The book also gives good guidelines and formulas for figuring out the cost of any ability presented in the thousands of d20 books.

Personally, I really like the idea. The numbers and formulas are easy to use and while there is some math involved it is not nearly as complex as I was expecting. There are basic rules given for the costs and then there are usually a few options for alternate costs. For instance raising an attribute costs 400xp the first time and then 800, 1200, 1600 etc for each other time. The options though provide ways to have the cost increase only if one is increasing the same ability over and over. If one wants to just increase all abilities once the cost stays cheap under this option. A second option is to make the cost dependant on how good the ability will be after it is raised. Under this option it is cheaper to raise an eleven to a twelve then a twenty to a twenty one for instance. And the third option combines those two ideas. The options presented here should allow any group to find a way that works for them.

There are of course some problems that can arise from this type of system though. A character can easily buy a lot of the cheaper abilities and have a wide range of options for him. A character might be able to acquire a huge base attack bonus at the expense of not learning skills. Obviously it is really up to the DM to watch over what the characters are doing and to hopefully show them that certain types of min maxing while possible will not produce a character that can meet all the obstacles.

There is one thing that is missing from the book though. I would like to see a character generation sheet that can be used to keep track of the experience costs and what the experience has been spent on. I think this type of sheet would be very useful with this kind of character creation and advancement.

A second thing it does not handle is races with level adjustments.

One interesting thing that the author does at the end is show how much experience it would cost to use this system and progress just like the base classes do. The classes are not equal and the levels are not equal. This system will help balance that out and allow the characters to feel more on the same ability level with each other.

Overall this is a fascinating product. It is one of the rare books that can truly say it covers something no other d20 book has. It really has the ability to change the way people play the game without altering the campaign world.