Engaging the Designer
I was asked a question. This is sometimes a good idea, sometimes a bad idea.
When I get asked things, I tend to answer.
Clarification on Keystone Talents
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 …
Echelon Quick Start Reformulation
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 …
Talent Design Guidelines
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 …
Echelon d20 Forum
I’ve been having conversations with a couple of site members, held in the posts and pages they’re working on. It seems kind of strange to be chatting back and forth in comments embedded in the post content. I’ve set up a forum to hold discussions on design and hopefully elicit …
Paths of Immortality
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 …
Reconsidering the Talent Slot Table
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 …
Alternate Tier Descriptions
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), …
Echelon Intro Box
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. …
What Value Ability Scores?
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 …
