Posts regarding various design elements of Echelon.
Iron Heroes (originally from Malhavoc Press, now from Fiery Dragon Press) has ‘mastery feats’, groups of related feats that can only be accessed by characters with particular ‘mastery levels’ of a sort suitable for the feats. Classes provide different progression rates in the different masteries. Some might focus on “Power …
These talents are derived directly from FantasyCraft feat trees. FantasyCraft makes heavy use of some mechanisms that I have not decided to incorporate in Echelon yet. I will translate as I can, but will not at this time invest a lot of time in them. The talents in this document …
Agents of Faith: Crusaders of the Gods from Living Imagination Inc. provides a set of six feats for each domain described in the book. They are made available for characters of any class, but may be taken only with the feat slots gained every third character level. It is possible …
I am still working on a core rules document for Echelon, but I needed some talents in place to give the framework some content. I have several sources I will be leaning on heavily for talents: Iron Heroes (revised edition), FantasyCraft, and a supplement titled Agents of Faith: Crusaders of the Gods. …
Actions in Dungeons & Dragons 3.x and Pathfinder come in a wide range of types. Not-an-action, Free, Immediate, Swift, Move Equivalent, Standard, Full-Round… I think that covers all the ones that come up. Some… things done by characters don’t fit the round-based action model, such as spells that take more …
Character creation is a very important activity, since it establishes what abilities the players’ avatars bring to the table. However, it can be a fiddly pain sometimes (often, or even usually!), and I am trying to avoid that in Echelon. There are two primary considerations, building a new character and …
Echelon, being derived primarily from the Revised System Reference Document, uses a d20-based task resolution system. Pretty much all character-related actions that can pass or fail have the decision made with a single die roll: d20 + modifiers >= Difficulty Class (DC) This is about as simple as it gets, really. …
Rounds per level, minutes per level, hours per level… or some random number of rounds, minutes, or hours, or a combination… This gets to be a pain to manage. I can’t be bothered to count things too carefully, especially when most of the time the duration doesn’t run out while …
Range can be abstracted. I discussed it recently in Weapon Speed in D&D at KJD-IMC, but it can be abstracted slightly more than that. Range honestly amounts to “too far away”, “just right”, and “too close”. “Too far away” means you can’t affect your target, or can only do so at a …
I was talking with John Payne from Sycarion Diversions about system simplification. Many games build complex systems, then offer means to simplify the rules. John suggested that perhaps games should build simple systems, then offer options to make them more complex. I can’t help but agree. I aim to make the …
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