There was a lot of math involved in this. Done by spreadsheet, but dear gods it was a lot of work. At least it suggests that the change being proposed to Level Bonus calculations won’t lead to bad effects in Echelon. See below for detail. Old School (AD&D and BECMI) Hit …
The change I am considering to the Level Bonus (make it equal to level rather than level/2) actually has less impact on skill check DCs than it might have seemed. Evaluation by Consideration This change results in a difference of +12 in the Level Bonus at 24th level. Within a …
In Reconsidering Level Bonus, I realized that the scheme I’ve been using for acquiring new talent slots will probably need to be changed. At each level a character should gain no less than in previous levels, and ideally (given the nonlinear power curve) a little bit more. The existing model …
I started working on Echelon (in its current form) about the same D&D 4e was announced. One of the things I actually liked about D&D 4e early on was the concept of the Level Bonus, and I ended up doing something rather similar in Echelon. It was quite easy to …
Among other things, skill-related talents replace skill ranks and the like. I was starting to copy the RSRD skill descriptions to this site when I realized the change in calculating skill check modifiers would greatly invalidate the DCs presented in the RSRD. I need to think about this. Thankfully, it …
After Doug’s suggestion this afternoon in my post on spell casting options, I put a bit of thought into an Ars Magica-style casting system in Echelon. I’ll ignore spontaneous casting for now because I don’t want to get into it, and rituals for the same reason. Right now, pondering whether Ars Magica makes …
I have written in the Talent Repository about how to convert RSRD abilities to Echelon talents, but haven’t talked about a resource that looks very useful for Echelon talents: Iron Heroes, originally presented by Monte Cook and now published by Fiery Dragon Productions. Iron Heroes is predicated on warrior-types being very much more …
There are many ways spell casting may be modelled in Echelon. Goals of a Casting System I have several desirable goals for the casting system I want to use. Others may have other goals, though. “Class-Based Casting” This model uses existing spell descriptions. This model of spell casting is very simple, but …
GreyKnight asked me this morning “what are we doing for hit points?” There have been a few changes to them over the last year or so, and this conversation opened the door to consider them again. I never considered making them random — I ditched that in D&D and given …
I overlooked the D&D model in my previous post on reconsidering skills, probably because I was deliberately moving away from it. However, for completeness I probably should include it for comparison. Rather than modify the existing post, I am adding it as a new one here. From my previous post, …
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