Alzrius
The EN World kitten
Very recently, I was making some off-the-cuff homebrew material for a d20 version of Fred Perry's Gold Digger comic. However, even using the various bits and pieces of d20-related material he'd posted on the web and in a few comics, I found myself rapidly getting frustrated by how much the system didn't seem to accomodate things from the comic.
The d20 system's greatest strength, to me, is that is can support a large amount of fairly in-depth rules while still maintaining a large degree of flexibility. However, while driving myself crazy with my personal project, I realized that there's one canon in the system that it doesn't seem to be able to do without:
All power is relative, and always measured on a linear, step-progression scale.
What this basically means is that everything is tied down to the system of levels/hit dice. If you want a character to grow more powerful, in any way at all, they need to advance their levels/hit dice, and the only way to do this is on the step-based scale (built with experience points). Level 1 leads to level 2, level 2 leads to level 3, etc. You can't have a character that has the BAB of a 50th-level character, but the hit points of a 1st-level character. There are a few things that try and sidestep this rule. Templates can offer an immediate jump in power. But even those have a "pay me later" feature built in, thanks to level adjustments.
The reason I'm ranting about this is because the aforementioned conversion project drove this limitation home pretty hard. Gina, the main character in GD, lives on modern-day Earth, but has technology so advanced that it'd still be beyond conventional science centuries from now. However, there's no way to justify giving her an Intelligence score of 40 in the d20 system; she doesn't have magic items for bonuses, and the rest of her abilities aren't developed enough to give her the ridiculous amount of levels she'd need to boost her Intelligence that high naturally. Other than giving her a seriously-overpowered template, there doesn't seem to be any recourse.
Has anyone else run into this problem? Did you ever want a character who was extremely powerful in one very narrow approach, and found that the d20 system wouldn't let you do that? How did you answer that?
The d20 system's greatest strength, to me, is that is can support a large amount of fairly in-depth rules while still maintaining a large degree of flexibility. However, while driving myself crazy with my personal project, I realized that there's one canon in the system that it doesn't seem to be able to do without:
All power is relative, and always measured on a linear, step-progression scale.
What this basically means is that everything is tied down to the system of levels/hit dice. If you want a character to grow more powerful, in any way at all, they need to advance their levels/hit dice, and the only way to do this is on the step-based scale (built with experience points). Level 1 leads to level 2, level 2 leads to level 3, etc. You can't have a character that has the BAB of a 50th-level character, but the hit points of a 1st-level character. There are a few things that try and sidestep this rule. Templates can offer an immediate jump in power. But even those have a "pay me later" feature built in, thanks to level adjustments.
The reason I'm ranting about this is because the aforementioned conversion project drove this limitation home pretty hard. Gina, the main character in GD, lives on modern-day Earth, but has technology so advanced that it'd still be beyond conventional science centuries from now. However, there's no way to justify giving her an Intelligence score of 40 in the d20 system; she doesn't have magic items for bonuses, and the rest of her abilities aren't developed enough to give her the ridiculous amount of levels she'd need to boost her Intelligence that high naturally. Other than giving her a seriously-overpowered template, there doesn't seem to be any recourse.
Has anyone else run into this problem? Did you ever want a character who was extremely powerful in one very narrow approach, and found that the d20 system wouldn't let you do that? How did you answer that?
