Cephalon Dusp's Archives

    One problem that I believe many people notice in RPGS and work to fix, even subconsciously, is having too many choices during character creation. It sounds crazy, but it is a real problem. Anyone who has attempted to make a character in Cyberpunk, Pathfinder, or even 5th Edition D&D knows that the number of choices to be made can make it difficult to quickly make a character, even for experienced players!     5E specifically has 13 classes, a huge number of races, and even more backgrounds, nevermind the character options that unlock as characters level up like spells, subclasses, and feats! There is an enormous number of options to consider, and it can be completely overwhelming for new players.     From my experiences, OSR games generally try to shy away from this, but not nearly as much as we might like to think. Sure, everyone knows about the three main classes of Fighting-Man, Magic-User, and Cleric or Thief, but it is important to remember tha...

    I'm back again! To help make up for the content I didn't make the last couple of weeks, I have decided to make this week a double post week! Hope you all enjoy.      It shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone who has played any version of Dungeons and Dragons (or most of its spawn) that many RPGs have a large focus on combat. It makes sense, considering the game's roots of dungeon crawling and exploring the wilderness while fighting off the monsters that call it home. So lets spend some time working through design decisions to sketch out the broad strokes of a new(?) combat system. Some Quick Background     There are many, many ways to simulate combat in an RPG. Most fantasy RPGs all come up with their own way of handling it too, so there are a lot of things to pull from. For brevity, I will only pick out a few particularly notable examples.     First, in 5th Edition D&D, combat works by having every character and monster take ...

       Wow, it has been quite a bit since my last post. My new schedule is pretty hectic and the posts I really want to make are going to take more time than I seem to have, so instead I will write this apparently simple post instead.      I recently came across a post on Delta's D&D Hotspot  that I found very interesting. I will quickly summarize the post for anyone who doesn't feel like reading it (I recommend reading it). In short, the formula OD&D uses for determining if someone hits someone else in combat can be written as: d20 roll + mods >= 20 - level - AC      From there, this can be trivially rearranged for a variety of different systems, including what 5e D&D uses: d20 + level/bonus + mods >= (20 - AC)      In this schema level is replaced with your appropriate bonuses and AC is the hidden THAC0 AC that still sort of underlies the system. (20-AC) is how you convert that THAC0 AC to be the m...

    One system that keeps creeping into roleplaying games is the idea of skills. Effectively, they are tools meant to show that some characters are better at certain things than others. The origin of full skill systems can be fairly easily traced back to the original D&D Thief class.      Before thieves, there were only a few things characters could do (and they weren't officially skills) like listening at doors, being stealthy, and forcing open doors. All of these usually had a 1 or 2 in 6 chance of success. In contrast, thieves were given a list of special skills:  climb walls, find traps, hear noise, hide in shadows, move quietly, open locks, pick pockets, and read languages. These skills got rated with a % chance of success and whenever a thief wanted to use one of their skills, they would roll 1d100. If they rolled at or under their skill rating, they succeeded! Fairly simple.     The problem with Thief characters, and something people ha...