Update: feats! Core20 by Scott Fitzgerald Gray, a teaser introduction.

darjr

I crit!
Scott made it known that he has a game he's been working on for years that is imminent. D20Core. Think of it having a D&D engine with Traveller character mechanics. He posted a long thread about it on socials and I'm pretty excited about it.

core20.png

So I’ve written a d20-based fantasy RPG, as one does, whose underlying system is called d20CORE. (The game proper has a different name, but I’ll tease that later.) This is a thing I’ve been working on/playing for about twelve years now ...
  • First thing you need to know: Given the opportunity to do something, I will almost always sit back and wait for someone else to do it instead. (I’m relatively quiet on social media because I know that if I wait long enough, someone else will say what I wanted to say.)
  • Second thing you need to know: D&D was my first RPG, which I started playing in high school. It saved my life, in a very literal sense.
    (I know that’s not a unique story. If it’s your story too, I’m glad we’re both here.)
  • Third thing to know: Traveller was my second RPG. And though it didn’t carry the same emotional/life-saving weight, it was equally important in shaping my sense of what roleplaying games were, and of the kinds of stories an RPG could tell.
One of the things I liked about Traveller was that unlike D&D, its advancement mechanics featured no classes and no levels. I know lots of other games have done the same thing, but Traveller and D&D were my games. They were the framework and foundation for me.
...
So here we are. I’ve got a game called CORE20, whose foundation is D&D — the game that saved my life, and that I’ve loved for forty years, and that I’ve worked on for eighteen years and three editions. It’s heroic fantasy in the style that D&D has long driven, with no classes and no levels. It’s freeform character building, built around the idea that even before the DM asks the in-game question, “What do you want to do?”, you get to ask the question: “Who do you want to be?” And then you get to answer that question in a new way.

There’s a whole ton of other new stuff in the game as well, including pushing the rules toward maximizing the potential of a high-magic, high-fantasy world, and building real heroic story within that world. I’m lazy, but I’m also hyper-ambitious when I finally do get going.
I’m looking at having a public playtest launch sometime in January 2023, and I hope folks will check the system out. I’ll be talking about it more before then, so keep an eye on this space or the #CORE20RPG hashtag for more info.
And for any industry mutuals and other folks I’ve worked with: If you’d like more info to figure out if the game might be something you’re interested in working on, I’d be very pleased to hear from you.


please note I lightly edited the above. See this link to his mastodon post to get the full quote.

If you are wondering who Scott is he's worked on books from WotC in thrid, 4th and 5th edition, primarily as a games editor for prose and rules. He's credited in the 5e PHB, DMG, and MM among many others, for instance. He also has several author titles on DMSGuild and with other publishers.
 
Last edited:

log in or register to remove this ad





darjr

I crit!
He’s posted about skills and uploaded the chapter.


the skills system in CORE20 allows a lot of customization. For a start, individual skills are set up within skill groups, giving players the choice of a straightforward focus on a broad range of things characters can do, or of drilling down to get really good at very specific tasks


I like the idea of how skills provide this variety of ways a character might perform

skill checks aren’t a binary pass/fail in CORE20. Rather, every time your character makes a check, there’s a chance you’ll succeed perfectly, a chance you’ll fail badly — and an even wider range of chances for you to succeed, but not quite in the way you’d intended.


I haven’t read the free chapter yet but am looking forward to it.
 



Following this project with a lot of interest!
Also, there was a system probably like this back in the 3.5 era, it was called Eclipse: The Codex Persona, where every single aspect of a character could be purchased via point buy. It might be useful to let it know to the creator, but I couldn't find a way to contact them through their blog. Not to bother them, I genuinely want to support them

Edit: found their contact info in a blog post
 
Last edited:


Remove ads

AD6_gamerati_skyscraper

Remove ads

Recent & Upcoming Releases

Top