d20M: new Talent Trees?

[EditorBFG]

The first one is a mixed bag. The second, in my opinion, was a real stinker. I had to remove a few talent trees, like the Tough Hero tree that gives you SR 27 by 7th level.

Another 22 Talent Trees seems to simply bastardize a lot of material from D&D 3.0/3.5, like the Rage talent tree. Since I went into d20 Modern to play a different sort of game than D&D, most of the material in Another 22 Talent Trees held no appeal for me at all.

There are a lot of less than stellar talent trees out there in the existing body of Open Game Content. I'm not going to say which, but a good number of the trees in our Talent Tree Compendium are "repaired" trees from other products that were not quite balanced the first time.

Admittedly, we had our own version of a Rage talent tree, but adapted D&D stuff represents a tiny fraction of the 58 trees in the book, so hopefully we get a pass. Most of Talent Tree Compendium is pretty grounded in the modern world-- trees for mechanical repairs, business sense, engineering, surviving gunshot wounds, etc. But if you don't like d20 Fantasy converted for Modern, the Fantastic Classes product we're discussing above would not be up your alley at all.

 

[molonel]

There are a lot of less than stellar talent trees out there in the existing body of Open Game Content. I'm not going to say which, but a good number of the trees in our Talent Tree Compendium are "repaired" trees from other products that were not quite balanced the first time.

Admittedly, we had our own version of a Rage talent tree, but adapted D&D stuff represents a tiny fraction of the 58 trees in the book, so hopefully we get a pass. Most of Talent Tree Compendium is pretty grounded in the modern world-- trees for mechanical repairs, business sense, engineering, surviving gunshot wounds, etc. But if you don't like d20 Fantasy converted for Modern, the Fantastic Classes product we're discussing above would not be up your alley at all.

Sorry I didn't respond to this, sooner. I added both of those PDFs to my RPGnow.com cart. Thank you for the recommendation.

 

[EditorBFG]

Sorry I didn't respond to this, sooner. I added both of those PDFs to my RPGnow.com cart. Thank you for the recommendation.

Always happy to recommend my own work!

Seriously, tell me what you think. One does ones best when balancing new character abilities, but it is not always an exact science. Also, I am anxious to hear about how some of the more esoteric talents might be seeing use in play.

This goes for anyone else using a POSTMODERN book too-- are the rules getting used? And working fine?

 

[molonel]

Seriously, tell me what you think. One does ones best when balancing new character abilities, but it is not always an exact science. Also, I am anxious to hear about how some of the more esoteric talents might be seeing use in play.

It's going to be a little bit before I get to it.

I should also add the caveat that I'm running a grittier sort of game, closer to Call of Cthulhu than standard 3.5 D&D. While I love playing raging barbarians in the latter, I didn't want them in what I'm running right now. I know there is a rage ability in Grim Tales, and if I were running a low-magic fantasy game using that system, the talent would be entirely appropriate. I didn't like it because it didn't fit the flavor of my present game.

In any case, when I get to it, I'll post it here.