Early on in my 4e campaign, I wanted to experiment with odd powers and temporary change-ups in character stats. I was a little more adventurous in the general area of kitbashing in the first year of the campaign’s run, when only one or two players were using DDI heavily. As […]
In working on Dust to Dust, one of the significant areas of design theory discussion has been which rules to reveal and which to keep secret from the publicly-posted rules. That secret rules exist should be no surprise to most gamers; in one form or another, it’s a practice as old […]
As I’ve established pretty thoroughly in this blog, I’m interested in 4e rules hacks, tweaks, and general brainstorming. This is because I believe the most essential part of 4e is the way information is presented in the form of powers; everything else is worth examining for other applications. The 3e […]
So, a blog much more widely-read than this one recently posted about doing away with XP tables and transitioning to achievement-based advancement. This reminded me, naturally, of Samhaine’s series “To End an Era of Exp,” particularly the concluding post. Notably, Samhaine was really talking about video games, but the ideas […]
I wanted to do something kind of big and special for my 50th post in this blog, but I’ve had some trouble deciding between the various post topics bouncing around in my head. I chose this topic firstly because it was the one that Kainenchen was the most enthusiastic about, […]
Way back in this post, I proposed a rework of 3.5e spell lists to create a new and different cosmology in a setting, one based on planets and constellations rather than the eight schools of magic. At the time, I was not at all sure that I would do anything […]
While on a long drive with Kainenchen and Stands-in-Fire recently, we started talking about skills and skill challenges in 4e. At its most macro level, the skill challenge is one of the best ideas that 4e has added to D&D as a whole. I have seen skill challenges be an […]
In this post, Kainenchen talks about what she would want out of her ideal psionics system. I started thinking about how I would make that happen, wrote my initial thoughts in comments to that post, and let my brain percolate on it for awhile. I think there’s a chance, by […]
From January of 2009 to January of 2011, I ran a D&D 4th edition game set in a reinterpreted version of the Dust to Dust setting (as Dust to Dust does not natively have dwarves, eladrin, half-elves, or tieflings, this was necessary). We had a lot of good times with this […]
This post is a response to one section of Samhaine’s latest post, so go read that first. I’ll wait. You’re looking for the “I Won this 18 in the Lottery” section.Maybe there is a middle ground between randomly generated ability scores and point-buy ability scores that gets it all right. […]