Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 8806885" data-attributes="member: 8461">For me, it's the point-buy character-building supplement <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/51255/Eclipse-The-Codex-Persona-Shareware?affiliate-id=820" target="_blank">Eclipse: The Codex Persona</a> for d20-based games (e.g. D&D 3.5, Pathfinder 1E, d20 Modern, etc.). While it has an expansive list of abilities that can be purchased, and smartly makes race-building work on the same rules as taking levels, what really makes the book shine is that it standardizes a way to tailor any and all of what it offers. Specifically, you can introduce a minor weakness ("corruption") into a power in exchange for a +50% increase in its efficacy or a one-third reduction in its price; you can introduce a major weakness ("specialization") in exchange for a +100% increase in its efficacy or a one-half reduction in its price. Alternatively, you can add both a corruption and a specialization, stacking the benefits accordingly.Of course, that leaves open the cost of what constitutes a major or minor weakness (and, in some cases, what constitutes a corresponding increase in efficacy, where it's not numerically obvious), and that requires adjudication by the GM (along with whether or not various powers, and alterations to them, are available in the first place), which is where the system seems to lose a lot of people. Insofar as d20 games go, there's a persistent mindset that I've observed that "generating my PC is an area where the GM has no say; I can make whatever I want from the available (first-party) rules." So the idea of having the GM look over and give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to a particular idea strikes a lot of people as a bug, rather than a feature.Personally, I disagree, simply because trust between the GM and player is a part of any game anyway, so there's nothing really wrong with extending it to the character creation process. Characters always have the potential to be disruptive, whether they're rules-legal or not, and it's the GMs' prerogative to make sure everything flows smoothly. So in that regard, there's no issue, at least to my mind. With that established, the ability to introduce drawbacks so as to vary the already-expansive list of powers allows for almost anything possible to be generated; in doing so, it expands on what the d20 System is capable of by a lot!The co-author of the book has a blog, and he's posted a metric crap-ton of content generated using the book (and its sister product, <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/51242/The-Practical-Enchanter?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank">The Practical Enchanter</a>, which deconstructs spells and magic under the d20 System rules). Seriously, he has characters ranging from Middle Earth's <a href="https://ruscumag.wordpress.com/2010/09/11/sauron-and-marty-identities-of-the-manifold/" target="_blank">Sauron</a> to Marvel's <a href="https://ruscumag.wordpress.com/2017/11/19/eclipsing-cable-a-k-a-nathan-christopher-charles-summers-dayspring-askanison/" target="_blank">Cable</a> to My Little Pony's <a href="https://ruscumag.wordpress.com/2015/07/12/ponies-of-the-eclipse-rainbow-dash/" target="_blank">Rainbow Dash</a>, and lots more. It's an impressive showing for what I think is a criminally-unrecognized sourcebook.Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.</blockquote>

Verification