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Message: <blockquote data-quote="afreed" data-source="post: 2129109" data-attributes="member: 2281">A few comments from someone else who's worked on the Primer, here...To my mind, there are three main varieties of d20 rules material:1) New material using existing templates. e.g., new races, classes, feats, spells, magic items, and so on. The Primer covers this territory, focusing on Violet Dawn-specific bits. You won't see 'generic' feats, for example--the feats tie pretty closely to the setting. That doesn't mean you can't use them elsewhere, but you'd need some new fluff justification. The new races, of course, are tied to the setting pretty heavily.2) Rules expansions--subsystems which either further develop existing systems or which describe entirely uncovered areas. The Primer has a few of these--rituals and taint come to mind--but it's not the focus of the book, and none of these systems are required to jump in and play.3) Rewritten and modified rules--that is, new rules for existing gameplay elements. The Primer shies away from this overall--it doesn't rewrite the skill or combat systems. It does tweak things here and there--mainly class abilities--but it's still clearly working off the basic d20 rules.One of my hopes for the book is to minimize the learning curve. In theory, the only new rules one has to learn are for the races. As you explore the setting, though, all the other rules--the new classes, the regional and racial feats, the faith rituals, and so forth--can be brought into play.I suspect Jeff's unspoken concern is that, by retaining so many of the standard d20 rules, we're setting up people to inherit certain preconceptions. For instance, druids and bards are two of the most important classes in Violet Dawn. They're significantly different in style and flavor than, for example, Forgotten Realms or Eberron druids and bards, but their rules are mostly the same.Is there a danger, then, that people will tend to gloss over the flavor changes and assume that druids and bards are the same as in more 'baseline' D&D worlds? Sure there is. But we decided to trust that people would get a feel for Violet Dawn druids and bards from the 'fluff'  and mechanical tweaks in the book, instead of writing two completely new classes that fill the same roles but don't carry the same preconceptions.Hopefully, it's a balance that'll work.Also--in response to earlier posts, the Polyhedron version of Gamma World and Oriental Adventures are two of the best d20 products out there. I'm just sayin'.</blockquote>

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