Tonight was our first playtest of a new game system I’m working on called the Forge Engine, which is an Abilities and Skills based d10 system: • Ability and skill based system (classless)• Give players freedom to craft their own characters• Increased power through larger dice pools (d10 dice)• Opposed rolls for combat to keep participants engaged• Skill challenges against […]
Looks like the release of the print version of Heroes Against Darkness has shaken out some new fans. +John Bell – The Retired Adventurer – has posted a review of Heroes Against Darkness on his blog: Heroes Against Darkness Gets 4e Right “I mention all of this because Heroes Against Darkness is a 4e heartbreaker, […]
So while all of the helpful playtesters are putting Hero Kids through it’s paces, I reckon it’s a good time to show everyone else what a ‘Hero Card’ looks like for one of the heroes that’s included in the game. From the card you might be able to work out the basics of the system itself. […]
Now that I’ve had time to think about some of the things that those crafty designers are WOTC are doing for D&D Next, I think that a few of their changes to that game are worth pursuing for future versions of Heroes Against Darkness. Things to steal from D&D Next:• Slower scaling progression• Resistance reduces damage by […]
For the last five weeks (or so) we’ve been playing the D&D Next playtest (as have much of the rest of the D&D fraternity). I’ve already posted my early thoughts on what they’re doing with the system, but these weeks as a player have given me plenty of thinking time. My thinking has been prompted by […]
Following my previous exciting and enigmatic post about d6 dice pool probabilities, I’ve also run the same combinations of dice pools through AnyDice to see what the probabilities are when you take the cumulative totals of the pools, rather than just the highest of either pool. The results are (obviously) a lot different. First though, here’s […]
I’ve been mulling over a set of super-simple RPG rules for kids (maybe from 4 and up). As part of this I’ve been thinking about a simple (but playable) dice mechanic that involves opposed pools of d6s, with only the highest dice counting for each of the participants (and ties resolving in favor of the attacker, […]
Of all of the decisions I’ve made during the development of Heroes Against Darkness, the page limitation on spells per class is – at first glance – amongst the most arbitrary. However, my hope is that this limitation actually reinforces the game’s goal of balancing the magi and martial classes. Over the course of the 10 […]
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 […]