Posts and discussion about how various pieces of Echelon work.
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), …
I’ve been following John Payne’s discussion on the design of an RPG Introductory Box, including the More Thoughts About An Intro Box. I think these are valuable pieces of work, both his blog posts and an introductory ‘box set’, and I’ve been thinking about what it might look for Echelon. …
I was recently working through some mechanics and I realized that my current approach won’t work the way I want. I think it was a good decision to move to a 1..9 range for ability scores (in place of D&D’s 3..18 range). Using the actual value rather than the modifier …
I realized last night I may be trying to do this the hard way, at least as far as talent design is concerned. I’ve been trying to define talents in their entirety, up to Legendary. That’s six tiers of geometrically-increasing awesome, and it can be difficult to find good upper-end …
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 …
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