This post and the next few blog posts include long and in-depth feedback and discussion from the recent Forge Engine beta playtest and feedback process. In the text below, the text in italics is the comment from the playtester/reader, and the following normally formatted text is my response and discussion. Special thanks to Reddit user htp-di-nsw for […]
I’m struggling with how to word magic attacks in Forge Engine. Anyone got strong opinions on these variations of the lines beginning ‘Make an arcane attack’: Drop a comment below with your thoughts.
Well this is unexpected. WQRobb over at Graph, Paper, and Games has just posted a review of my first RPG, Heroes Against Darkness. Graph, Paper, and Games – Heroes Against Darkness review… It’s unexpected because it’s been a while since I’ve had a review of HAD; the world of D&D variants has moved on from HAD […]
So I just got the new survey from the D&D Next team about the playtest, and I’m frustrated with this one. It asks which spells must be in the game for it to be D&D and then it lists all Wizard and Cleric spells, and you can choose which ones must be in the game. […]
One of the deliberate features of the magic system in Heroes Against Darkness is the strict limits on the amount of anima that is available to magi. Level 1 magi have about 9 anima and by Level 10 they have about 15 anima. This is combined with the rules that limit the amount of anima that […]
Yet another of my self-imposed ‘rules’ for Heroes Against Darkness is to avoid the sorts of absolute effects of earlier (and future!) versions of D&D. The history of D&D is littered with absolute effects, here are a few of the more egregious that come to mind: • Immunities (such as the Dwarven immunity to poison that has […]
Much to the consternation of some of my more seasoned D&D players, Heroes Against Darkness doesn’t have some of the staples of magic that feature in D&D. When looking for solutions to some problems their characters faced, they’d ask about spells that they’d used in D&D to solve similar situations. I made a conscious decision in […]
First, a quick confession. I’m generally such an isolated throwback that I hadn’t even heard of ‘niche protection’ until just a few weeks ago. In spite of not having heard the damned term, the idea that each class in a RPG should have its own thing was apparent during the development of Heroes Against Darkness. One […]
Heroes Against Darkness employs a number of techniques to keep magi relatively balanced against the martial classes. First, the combination of the total pool of anima that magi have (5 + Magic Bonus) plus the speed with which they can spend their anima (Level + 1 anima per turn) limits the speed with which they […]
Let’s get this out of the way: I strongly dislike Vancian magic. When I started work on Heroes Against Darkness we’d just finished playing a long 4th Edition campaign followed by a shorter Basic D&D campaign. The switch from 4th Edition to Basic was caused by a general dissatisfaction with 4th Edition (don’t get me wrong, […]