Posts regarding various design elements of Echelon.
Characters change over time. In many games they become “more of what they were” — a better fighter, a more knowledgeable wizard, and so on. Some games allow you to change this, and become something else. In Dungeons & Dragons 3.x and in Pathfinder, this is done using the multiclassing …
I realized not too long ago that perhaps we’re headed the wrong way with capstone talents. Most talents have something of a natural order and progression to them. As you practice and develop a combat style, you learn more specialized techniques related to the combat style. As you study a …
I recently bought Adventure Fantasy Game, an OSR game by Paolo (tsojcanth of Lost Pages — how’s that for an inversion?). When he sent me the PDF we ended up striking up a conversation that drifted into Echelon and he asked me where I want to go with it. Ultimately …
Over in the forum, GreyKnight commented about keystone talents and asked me a couple of questions I don’t have ready answers for. I found the question especially insightful, because it highlights something that has niggled at me off and on for a while now. If a cornerstone talent is “what …
Ray Case at google+ had some questions about keystone talents. +Keith J Davies has thrown me for a loop with his echelonD20 ruleset – his keystone idea won’t get out of my head! I am struggling with what makes a cornerstone versus what makes a capstone. Even while I am …
A while ago (January 1, so almost four months now) I considered an Echelon Intro Box Set. I evidently don’t have enough to do with my copious free time (do I really need to mark that as sarcasm?), so on top of all the other stuff I’m doing, I’m thinking …
I’ll be using the forum to develop things (and so others can suggest things by starting new topics) before including them in the main body of the site, and to discuss and amend existing site contents. The forum is a little slow yet though, so for a while I think …
I was talking with tussock in rec.games.frp.dnd about talent design and what various tiers mean, for practical purposes. Among other comments, I read (with [new tier names] added) Speaking of which: I flicked through the OD&D Deities, Demi-Gods, and Heroes the other day, and couldn’t help but notice they considered …
I have been reading Rule of Cool’s Legend and am starting to think that the baseline Talent Slot table may give too many talent slots to be practical. Six top-tier talents plus five of each tier below that makes for a lot of talent slots to assign. I think it …
In writing about Rime Tower over at my other blog, I realized something that might make tier definitions easier to cement in peoples’ minds. Consider a difficult living environment — arctic taiga, Saharan desert, Amazon jungle, and so on. For those with strong associations to those environments (that is, talents), …
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