Welcome to the second in-depth beta feedback and system discussion for Forge Engine. This post continues feedback from Reddit user htp-di-nsw. 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. Again this post continues the page-by-page feedback, but we also get […]
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.
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
The other day I posted my early thoughts and opinions of the playtest rules for D&D Next and tonight we finally got a chance to play the rules. First some background. Those of you who are close followers of my adventures will know that a just a year ago I GMed a Basic D&D campaign […]
I’ve been looking forward to the D&D Next open playtest for quite a while. I previously blogged about some of the expectations that I had of this new edition and ways to approach making a modular edition of D&D: • Mechanics of Attack Bonus Progression• D&D 5th Edition DDXP Play Report• Making D&D 5th Edition Modular – Part I […]
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 […]