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Category: Electrum Pieces (Page 111 of 156)

General heading for all RPGs.

Delphinus Formicas

July 11, 2011 /

Earlier today, my son told me about a creature he calls the ant-dolphin. It is a type of ant that feeds by transforming into a dolphin and eating fish. At night, it returns to ant form to sleep in an ant hill with the rest of the colony. I asked him if the ant changed into a regular-sized dolphin and he said yes.

I'm losing my current bout with insomnia, so stating it has proven difficult. However, as odd as it may sound, it seems to work in a way given the group survival instincts of both species.

I didn't ask whether or not the ants were normal-sized, but I'm going to go with a larger-sized ant, approximately half the size of a common dolphin.

I imagine either an island or a near-tropical oceanfront locale with twenty foot towers near the water's edge. The ants have tunnels underground inside their nest that lead to the water to ease transformation. In general, they are friendly to humans that live nearby, but prefer to interact with them in dolphin form instead of ant form.

Combine them with a city of merfolk and a local group of humans/good humanoids and you have two cultures bound together by their domesticated animals.

Hmmmm. Hopefully there will be more later on this.

Posts About the Game You Think You Know

July 8, 2011 /

2eDM over at THAC0 Forever! has been posting a series about the actual rules of 2e. When I joined a 2e group recently and went through the rules, I was surprised at all the optional rules provided. In fact, based on the rules that are NOT optional, it plays a lot like my first 1e group.

I was surprised by Chapter 11 stating that surprise was determined by 1d10 with 1,2,3 being a success. I had always done a roll of 1 on a 1d6. I know, works out about the same. Still, it's something I didn't pick up on until I started with this most recent group.

Anyway, here are links to the series thus far.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

I've been interested in reading these and comparing them to the optional rules made mandatory in various Skills and Powers books.

In my clone, I'm still looking for a good way to include Non-Weapon Proficiencies in a sane manner. In addition to rolling the Thieves Skills into the same mechanic, I keep going back and forth between the PHB way of listing them (Attribute - Modifier, roll under to succeed) or the Skills and Powers way (Start with a score ranging from 4 to 8 depending on the NWP). Thieves Skills would operate the Skills and Powers way because of the nature of their improvement over time. The difference is, that the PHB way ties Non-Weapon Proficiencies to an attribute, something recently mentioned by none-other-than-Mike-Mearls, while the Skill & Powers way completely divorces the NWP from attributes.

The question is, could I make Thieves Skills attribute based? Climbing Walls would probably be DEX -2, but some of the other could be awful. Pick Pockets at DEX -8?

Then again, maybe I can leave them detached from an attribute. The only thing I really changed from the PHB is that a d20 is used instead of d%. Consequently, a Thief begins with 12 points instead of 60 and gains 6 points instead of 30 points at each new level.

Rock on, 2eDM!

Changing Feeds

July 8, 2011 /

I realized that with my Statis-Pro Football post earlier that I setup my feeds incorrectly on the Old School RPG Planet and the RPGBA.

I have fixed the issue so that only RPG articles will appear in both places. Although it is well after the fact, I hid my Statis-Pro post in the RPGBA feed before making the correction to the feed itself. My apologies for any annoyance this created.

Although the Joesky tax technically doesn't apply, here is something to actually add RPG content:

When thinking about spell points for the Arcanist, I originally looked to the Magus Divlantia section of the Net AD&D Players Supplement (written sometime in 1995 and edited in 1996). The formula for starting points is (((2INT)+CON)-30) /4. The formula for points gained every level was (((2INT)+CON)-30) /7. In the example of the Arcanist I gave earlier, I had assumed an INT of 16 and a CON of 12. Following the formulas, he started with 4 points and gained 2 points every level.

In the end, I simplified to INT bonus + CON bonus + 2 as the initial points and INT bonus + CON bonus every level after that. It calculates the same as the other formula. Don't get me wrong, I'm not afraid of a little math. It just is simpler for newer players to use numbers already on the character sheet and perform simple addition.

I still believe I need to tweak it to generate more points. If a different idea tests well, I'll be happy to post about it here.

If you want to test it out, basically download the OpenQuest developers kit and look at chapter 9 about sorcerors. Use that spell list and Magnitude table for spells. Use the simplified formula above to calculate spell points. I would post it if I had it written in a better format than some crawled notes on a printout.

 

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