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February 5, 2012

December 23, 2011

Retrospective on Andras

by John Payne — Categories: Andras and Electrum Pieces — Tags: , , — Comments Off

I began serious work on Andras in March of this year. Before March, I posted here occasionally at best. There were no posts between December 2010 and March 2011. Yikes!

There has been constant change. There have been a few stops and many restarts. I don’t consider any of this a problem. Instead, I see it as normal to the development process.

I consider the starting point to be my restating of the goals of the project. I also laid down a few ground rules to guide development. Looking back, I am happy with the progress considering my lack of large blocks of time. (Large blocks means more than 20 minutes at one sitting.)

The Arcanist class, my attempt at a skill-based Mage, has undergone several transformations. I feel good about where the class and the spell-building system used for this class are right now. I have a working copy of the spell building system and it seems to work fairly well. I may even translate the 3.0 SRD if I have time.

The Skill System was the biggest change. Rolling under a d20+d10 presents some interesting possibilities. In my goal to streamline sub-systems, this system guides non-weapon proficiencies and Rogue Skills. It also appears in the spell-building system. It may be a personal weakness that I keep this subsytem. We’ll see what happens with the class builds!

Overall, I’ve tried to develop the entire game in three different ways: I tried sketching it in M20 first, reorganizing the rulebooks, and just editing LLAEC and changing the parts that don’t fit. I believe that I have the definition of magic finalized, so I do not expect large changes in Player information at this point.

For the GM, though, the cycle may be pretty severe. I want to have lots of information and tools. While magic may be in good shape, the random tables and “how-tos” have yet to be created.

I expect to have it finished in 2012. I’d like to believe that it will be sooner rather than later, but who knows what tomorrow may bring.

I hope that whatever your secret project and/or labor of love is that you will be able to finish it in the coming year. Good luck!

December 22, 2011

Paper Pills – A Different Kind of Red Box

by John Payne — Categories: Electrum Pieces and Paper Pills — Tags: , , — 3 Comments

I’ve started a new category for ideas that sound really neat, but I don’t really know where they lead. Sometimes, like today, it may be a really bad idea. It’s posted because it contains a certain “What If?” quality that for whatever reason feels compelling or fascinating.

So here goes:

What if you combine a different arrangement of RPG rule books with a box that contains the perfect Newbie DM kit?

The first thing that pops into my head is “A Box for GMs and separate boxes for players? What the? Are you nuts?”

Then the second thing is “It’s just like the Red Box except that you have more than two books.”

Somehow, I’m thinking of something that is not either of those two ideas. I would like a perfect newbie GM kit *and* a perfect newbie player kit. It’s just that the newbie player kit would be focused enough to be a few pages and limits choice in a way.

Maybe the GM kit features a four page handout that provides an overview of  various races and classes so that players can pick which newbie player kit to use. Then the player kit has everything needed to play that specific race and the classes available to them.

What say you?

December 20, 2011

Looking at OpenD6 Spells

by John Payne — Categories: Andras, d6, Electrum Pieces and OSR Project — Tags: , , , , — Comments Off

I had mentioned a long time ago that I was looking at the Spell Building system in OpenD6 Fantasy and OpenD6 Magic for Andras. The main reason was that I wanted a spell building system in Andras that wasn’t too cumbersome, but offered some real choices.

It’s true that doing this makes magic quite scientific. Instead of bemoaning that fact, I will create a Mage class that takes a scientific view of magic. While the development of the Arcanist class has hit a couple roadblocks, I believe it will work a lot better now that this investigation of the OpenD6 spells is complete.

For those looking on with interest, anything shaded green is something that I corrected. For whatever reason, some of the calculated difficulties in the original pdfs are not correct. In a couple cases, there is a missing spell attribute or the wrong effect value.

One worksheet sorted all the spell by difficulty, another presents them all in a format similar to the OpenD6 Spell Design Worksheet. The “raw” or original values and descriptions are on pages called Raw.

I hope this spreadsheet will be useful to D6 fans. For me, now I can make analysis, pick spells and work out values that are closer to retroclones. I may end up sticking with meters and kilometers, but we’ll see.

Here is the spreadsheet in M$ Excel Format:

D6 Spell Spreadsheet

Here it is in LibreOffice or OpenOffice Format:

D6 Spell Spreadsheet

Soon, I hope to add it to the Downloads page.

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