E6 SRD - community project

[Theo R Cwithin]

file: Magic Items III

status: done

comment:
Looks good, no changes.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

file: Magic Items V

status: done

comment:
-Inlined relevant info into lesser bracers of archery from non-E6 greater bracers of archery.
-A few illusions in deck of illusions referred to monsters that have been edited out, so I changed those to similar monsters that remain in the SRD (specifically, HighPriestess:lich-->vampire; Strength:iron golem-->stone golem; Empress:glabrezu-->succubus).

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

file: Magic Items VI

status: in progress (proofreading & consideration)

comment:
Ugh, this is a difficult section to reconcile with E6 while injecting no rules changes! I'll have some comments soon.

 

[Lord Xtheth]

Ok... Ok... I kinda got distracted by real life emergencies, but I'm getting right back on track.

... Maybe this is why game companies get their own delays? I'm not going to critisize a company again for delaying their projects.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

file: Magic Items VI

status: awaiting comment

comment:
Finally at a point where I can comment on the Artifacts, Cursed and Intelligent Items.

Basically, first I pondered how I'd do it, then went over ideasmith's version, and saw the variants were quite different. So point-by-point:

Intelligent items:

All I did here was rip out anything referring to spells/effects not explicitly E6ish. Other than that, it's fairly close to ideasmith's version. I've never used RAW intelligent magic items, so I don't really have other opinions on the matter.

Cursed Items:

These are peculiar because practically all the ones in the full SRD are beyond E6 in power (ie, they're mostly epic items). I understand that ideasmith ran into this problem, too, having removed all non-E6 items, then putting most of them back in after seeing there were only two left.

I ended up compromising, more or less just cutting the list off above CL11, witha few exceptions. Why CL11? That's the dividing line between RAW detect magic's "moderate" and "strong" auras-- a fact I ended up using later on in differentiating artifacts. So the cursed items list has a couple items that detect as "normal" level magic; several that detect as "moderate" (=epic level); and a couple that detect as "strong" (=super-duper epic level).

Artifacts:

Very difficult. The assumption beyond artifacts in normal D&D seems...[casts dispel on unsightly wall of text]

Here's the tl;dr version: "I've basically reinterpreted minor artifacts as uncreatable items of power levels equal to or beyond epic E6 PCs (ie, CL6-11); and major artifacts as items beyond even the power levels of epic E6 monsters (ie, CL12+). This was driven mostly by how auras work by RAW using detect magic, and conveniently maps into how we had already decided to cut monsters from the SRD."

End result is that my rework looks very different than ideasmith's, not least because I included more artifacts; because (I think) I've assumed a much less important role for minor artifacts; and just because of personal taste, obviously. Also, I didn't rename items ported over from the normal magic items list into the artifacts list, and made (almost) no mechanical changes to those items; just made a few editorial mods to emphasize the items' "artifactiness".

Anyway, it's not a critical part of the game, imho, but I'm looking for a little discussion on this before moving on to the next phase of the project!

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

And looking forward....

I've got a rough and ugly! static webpage template for this SRD ready to go. Dropping it into a wiki at this point looks like it will be a lot of upfront effort, so I'd rather keep it static for now and slowly wiki-ize (or whatever) as the final proofread gets done.
[edit: This is looking to be easier than first anticipated. ]
[edit: Spoke too early. rtf to html tables are a pita.]

I'll likely just make up a googlesite (or whatever) page or something, though I'm open to suggestions. I'm not a web-developer, so I'm not really aware of tools that might be available for making this thing nice in the long run.

Comments & suggestions are most definitely welcome. In any event, I'll put up a link in this thread when I actually get the site established somewhere. Then we can more widely advertise the invitation to comment after we decide exactly how that process will work.

 

[ideasmith]

file: Magic Items VI

status: awaiting comment

comment:
Finally at a point where I can comment on the Artifacts, Cursed and Intelligent Items.

Basically, first I pondered how I'd do it, then went over ideasmith's version, and saw the variants were quite different. So point-by-point:

Intelligent items:

All I did here was rip out anything referring to spells/effects not explicitly E6ish. Other than that, it's fairly close to ideasmith's version. I've never used RAW intelligent magic items, so I don't really have other opinions on the matter.

Cursed Items:

These are peculiar because practically all the ones in the full SRD are beyond E6 in power (ie, they're mostly epic items). I understand that ideasmith ran into this problem, too, having removed all non-E6 items, then putting most of them back in after seeing there were only two left.

I ended up compromising, more or less just cutting the list off above CL11, witha few exceptions. Why CL11? That's the dividing line between RAW detect magic's "moderate" and "strong" auras-- a fact I ended up using later on in differentiating artifacts. So the cursed items list has a couple items that detect as "normal" level magic; several that detect as "moderate" (=epic level); and a couple that detect as "strong" (=super-duper epic level).

Artifacts:

Very difficult. The assumption beyond artifacts in normal D&D seems...[casts dispel on unsightly wall of text]

Here's the tl;dr version: "I've basically reinterpreted minor artifacts as uncreatable items of power levels equal to or beyond epic E6 PCs (ie, CL6-11); and major artifacts as items beyond even the power levels of epic E6 monsters (ie, CL12+). This was driven mostly by how auras work by RAW using detect magic, and conveniently maps into how we had already decided to cut monsters from the SRD."

End result is that my rework looks very different than ideasmith's, not least because I included more artifacts; because (I think) I've assumed a much less important role for minor artifacts; and just because of personal taste, obviously. Also, I didn't rename items ported over from the normal magic items list into the artifacts list, and made (almost) no mechanical changes to those items; just made a few editorial mods to emphasize the items' "artifactiness".

Anyway, it's not a critical part of the game, imho, but I'm looking for a little discussion on this before moving on to the next phase of the project!

Looks good.

1. Since creating an intelligent item requires a "caster level of 15th or higher", all intelligent items are artifacts. I recommend making this explicit in the first sentence as "Artifacts sometimes have intelligence of their own."

2. Since artifacts are determined randomly, the d% columns in various tables should be dropped.

3. Since artifacts are not provided with build information, the base price modifier columns in various tables should be dropped.

Except for the intelligent non-artifacts issue, and the typo in the name of the Ring of X-Ray Vision, your changes look fine to me. Dropping the non-6e intelligent powers fixed a bad oversight of mine, and the other changes amount to making a somewhat-less-arbitrary set of judgement calls than I did.

Nice work.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

Good calls. I'll update the file when I have a bit of time.

Meantime, I'm slowly getting a site up and running in my spare time. I've decided on google sites. Code is fairly restrictive on it (no css, for example), so it's not optimal as a pretty presentation-- but so far it's easy, and has some minimal sharing and revision tracking ability.

The table formatting is proving to be a capital mess, so I'm mostly ignoring that issue for now. This first online cut will be ugly; but as a content review, it should suffice. I hope to have everything converted & ready for a look-see by Thursday.
Until then, I'll likely be fairly absent.

 

[Gilladian]

I agree with you guys; this version is good as far as I'm concerned.

My only experience with building a website from scratch is with pbwiki. I like it a lot, and would suggest it as a possible option when you're ready to go there. I've never worked with a google site, although I do have some (very) basic HTML skills.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

I took a look your page and pbwiki in general, and it looks like it may well serve our needs. It might even be appropriate to move it into a wiki sooner rather than later, now that I'm starting to better understand the differences between the various options.

Since it looks like moving the material around really isn't a big a problem as I thought, we could probably try diffierent things over time before settling on something.