Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
The latest podcast was, by their own admission, light on crunchy goodness, because so much is still in flux. Still, there was a lot of talk about design process, and it had some good news for DMs who like to homebrew.
While the 3E DMG had nice guidelines for spell creation, they still left a lot of it up to guesstimization. And while Expeditious Retreat Press was able to reverse engineer a pretty good monster design book, apparently there weren't any hard and fast monster design rules and philosophies for 3E early on.
In contrast, it sounds like things are different in 4E. One of the two speaking mentioned there's currently an in-house four item bullet point list of what makes a feat (and feats sound like they might be getting watered down at the same time as characters get many more of them), so that designing them goes a little more smoothly and uniformly.
I've always wanted to be a monster designer, but my designs -- even when they were functionally almost identical to another monster, like my Ethereal Marauder-to-Shadow Grue change -- typically felt "off" to others, or the process was just too complex to really dig into in a satisfactory way.
On the other hand, I've created a lot of spells, a few of which have even been published (in the Koboldnomicon). But once spells get at all creative or powerful, it becomes very difficult to peg how powerful they ought to be or to figure out where to tweak to bring them back into line without, frankly, making them boring as hell. If there's a design doc for spell creation -- and it sounds like there probably is -- I'm a very happy camper indeed.
While the 3E DMG had nice guidelines for spell creation, they still left a lot of it up to guesstimization. And while Expeditious Retreat Press was able to reverse engineer a pretty good monster design book, apparently there weren't any hard and fast monster design rules and philosophies for 3E early on.
In contrast, it sounds like things are different in 4E. One of the two speaking mentioned there's currently an in-house four item bullet point list of what makes a feat (and feats sound like they might be getting watered down at the same time as characters get many more of them), so that designing them goes a little more smoothly and uniformly.
I've always wanted to be a monster designer, but my designs -- even when they were functionally almost identical to another monster, like my Ethereal Marauder-to-Shadow Grue change -- typically felt "off" to others, or the process was just too complex to really dig into in a satisfactory way.
On the other hand, I've created a lot of spells, a few of which have even been published (in the Koboldnomicon). But once spells get at all creative or powerful, it becomes very difficult to peg how powerful they ought to be or to figure out where to tweak to bring them back into line without, frankly, making them boring as hell. If there's a design doc for spell creation -- and it sounds like there probably is -- I'm a very happy camper indeed.
