D20 Iron Age: Preliminary

[angelfromanotherpin]

Okay, here 'tis. New D&D-like product edition project. This will eventually get successor threads for smaller pieces of it, like Attributes and Alignment, but this is the first one for first ideas.

Relevant bits from other thread:

So step one would be deciding what stories it was actually going to tell. "All of them" is a non-answer. My assumption is that it's basically based on Greek Mythology. Iron Age Heroes, lots of vertical advancement, and Gods that are basically just very powerful warrior mages that you can (and eventually will) beat the crap out of. The fact that half the classic D&D monsters or more are one way or another Greek Mythos rips certainly makes that easy conceptually.

I'd like to see some of the Iron Age Celtic stuff in there as well. The battle feats of Cu Chullain should be the basis for high-level martial abilities, not the relatively tame stuff we see in most of the Greek myths. Those cultures are very compatible in many respects, though.

And step two would be to define a basic mechanic. The d20 mechanic works fine, and might as well be kept. Within that context, something drastic needs to be done to keep things on the Random Number Generator - something 4e tried to do but lacked the discipline to accomplish.

I vote to keep the d20+mods vs TN mechanic if at all possible.

I'd personally like to stick with the d20 system myself.

Step 3 would be to define how characters are made. Personally, what I'm leaning towards right now is simply a system that K was throwing around where you advanced by gaining powers and they had tags on them and your class was a package that you selected based on what your powers allowed for you.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Hmm, race-wise, most protagonists from the relevant myths are human, although many of them are half god, or half god-like sidhe, or some such thing. I'm not particularly attached to the bog-standard D&D races, but I know some people are. What's to be done?

[MGuy]

Are races really the first concept that should be covered? Races, fluff, all that good stuff should be further down on the "to do list" for a new edition IMO. I think the first question to ask so this doesn't end up like other unfinished projects is: who's in?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Alignments aren't especially popular, and Iron Age stuff tends to be very morally grey in any event. If this game's going to include any morality stuff, I think it should be based on actual philosophies; and Detect Evil becomes Detect Dishonor, or similar, where you get a line on what people may have actually done.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Are races really the first concept that should be covered? Races, fluff, all that good stuff should be further down on the "to do list" for a new edition IMO. I think the first question to ask so this doesn't end up like other unfinished projects is: who's in?

Step 3 is how characters are made, apparently. If this really is a D&D-like thing, that means attributes, race, class, etc. and how we handle those.

Who's in will be apparent when people chime in, I think. The Den has a really strong tendency to produce things through anarcho-volunteerism in any event.

[Quantumboost]

Alignments aren't especially popular, and Iron Age stuff tends to be very morally grey in any event. If this game's going to include any morality stuff, I think it should be based on actual philosophies; and Detect Evil becomes Detect Dishonor, or similar, where you get a line on what people may have actually done.

I'd argue that we should just toss moral alignment outright and at most have "you are this tribe; it's pretty much just a tag which says where you're a foreigner and where you aren't" and leave the detection spells to "detect monsters" and "detect fire magic" and "detect pissedoffness" sorts of things.

[TarkisFlux]

Step 3 up in the OP, how you make your character, sounds like it includes how you advance your character. If your pick of race has some influence on your options later on, it's something important we may as well evaluate now. If it doesn't, like it mostly doesn't in DnD, we can ignore it for the time being. I could see a racial or cultural powers list that wasn't ass and racial or cultural prestige classes with their special templates and what not, so it could impact advancement. The question then is should the game have those things in it or not, and that probably should be answered fairly soon. I say support those things and make choice of race mean choice of options later (not just choice of stat mod and beginning bonuses which mean next to nothing in advancement).

Same thing with alignments. If doing stuff for your alignment gets you stuff that impacts how you can level, it's relevant now. If it doesn't, it's window dressing to deal with later. I say this cow gets sacrificed in an Iron Age game.

[Username17]

The Power Source model is actually not bad. The key to understand is that "Fighters" get the Divine power source because they are Champions or the Sons of Gods or something. If you don't have an awesome power source, you aren't a fucking player character.

Off the top of my head, the power sources could be:

Divine (Includes Perseus, Hanuman, and Cúchulainn)
Arcane (Includes Cu Roi, Achilles, and Siddhartha)
Shadow (Includes Oisin, Yama, and Orpheus)
Primal (Includes Agathyrsus, Ghatotkacha, and Fergus Lethderg)

If you wanted, you could throw in Elemental or Psychic power. I'm easy either way.

Hmm, race-wise, most protagonists from the relevant myths are human, although many of them are half god, or half god-like sidhe, or some such thing. I'm not particularly attached to the bog-standard D&D races, but I know some people are. What's to be done?

Everyone loves Orcs. Seriously. Everyone. People like Dwarves too. And yes, Elves.

D&D gets way bogged down with racial chicanery, but the core four have a lot of resonance. Evil Dwarves don't have to be a separate race, and indeed they probably should not be. But even having Parthelonian super-elves isn't necessarily a problem. Just remember that a human PC has to be juiced up to hell and gone over a normal human. He has got divine parentage or some shit. So if you throw in a player character ogre or Tuatha who happens to be like that naturally, that's OK.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Divine (Includes Perseus, Hanuman, and Cúchulainn)
Arcane (Includes Cu Roi, Achilles, and Siddhartha)
Shadow (Includes Oisin, Yama, and Orpheus)
Primal (Includes Agathyrsus, Ghatotkacha, and Fergus Lethderg)

What do these sources mean? Akhilles is the son of a nymph (a minor god) and gets his invulnerability by being dipped in the river of the dead. How is that Arcane as opposed to Divine? How is Orpheus, who is the son of a Muse and given a magic lyre by Apollo Shadow instead of Divine?

I can certainly see how one could get non-Divine power sources into the space. In particular, the witches and druids of the time seem to work on an Arcane sort of source, I'd just like some more clarification.

Must go to work. More later.

[MGuy]

Each power source has a certain set of abilities that should be attached to them I'm sure. Anyway I don't think race should have any major effect on advancement. I heard that's how 2ed did it and it didn't sound particularly thrilling the way its described.

Race should give a player a sense of cosmetic make up, background crap, and maybe some minor bonuses/abilities Orc physically stronger than everyone, Elf is faster than everyone, Dwarves are physically and mentally tougher than everyone, humans are more versatile than everyone. But shit like that can vary from campaign to campaign. I'd say lets tackle the core mechanics that shouldn't vary.

Edit for Afterthought: If we're starting from the ground up what numbers are we looking at and how do they advance? Are we changing attributes around (since there's been some debate over them lately). What do we and don't we have now? Are we still using the feat/ability/skill set up or are we changing things like that around?

[Username17]

Edit for Afterthought: If we're starting from the ground up what numbers are we looking at and how do they advance? Are we changing attributes around (since there's been some debate over them lately). What do we and don't we have now? Are we still using the feat/ability/skill set up or are we changing things like that around?

I am in favor of going to four base stats: Strength, Dexterity, Wisdom, Intelligence. Constitution doesn't do anything except push basic level thresholds off the RNG. Removing it improves the game. Charisma does not do anything that makes sense. Why should Nymphs be better at seducing Ogres than Ogresses are? By the time you include enough caveats and special cases to cover all that kind of crap, you're left with the Charisma stat not really doing anything. Seriously, if a Dryad isn't more intimidating than a minotaur then Charisma shouldn't be a stat. And if she is, then your game is retarded.

Now as for skills and such, D&D has never had a good system. Nonweapon Proficiencies were crap. Thief Skills were crap. 3e skills were broken. 4e skills were broken and crap. It's all been shitty. The core mechanic of having a bonus, rolling a d20, adding them together and comparing to a chart to see what your results were like is quite salvageable. It's easy to explain and use in the game, and it resolves very quickly. That can be kept. But frankly, both the 3e ranks and the 4e auto-rank have got to go.

Feats shouldn't exist as such. People have abilities. They can come in different categories and shit, but the ability "+2 when using this other ability" is not acceptable. That shit adds to breaking the RNG and nothing more.

-Username17

[shadzar]

Localized classes would work best. If not in the far east, then don't include things FROM the far east. That will cut clutter cruft and crap out. You don't need barbarians and ninjas for example. Pick a location and keep with that location.

[MGuy]

I wouldn't be so quick to jump on the character concept banning wagon. It's better to just lay the line of abilities out and not worry about if someone can make a "ninja" out of it or not.

Now as for skills and such, D&D has never had a good system. Nonweapon Proficiencies were crap. Thief Skills were crap. 3e skills were broken. 4e skills were broken and crap. It's all been shitty. The core mechanic of having a bonus, rolling a d20, adding them together and comparing to a chart to see what your results were like is quite salvageable. It's easy to explain and use in the game, and it resolves very quickly. That can be kept. But frankly, both the 3e ranks and the 4e auto-rank have got to go.

What would you use as an alternative skill system (how would you derive the numbers, bonuses, etc)?

[shadzar]

Well a localized game can prevent the excessive weapons, and such and have a more robust game without having to water it down because you have so many mechanics for so many different little bits of this and that. How many different swords are there, and how many do you NEED?

Each new culture introduced creates a world of its own in regards to volume of material and mechanics.

So if you plan on using the Iron Age of us, then picking a good place and sticking with it will prevent having all that extra material to have to wade through, balance out, etc. I mean weapon speed in 2nd for example looking at all the various weapons. Not only creating that takes time, but applying it in game; or like many just ignoring it.

The more concise the game is with things that properly work, then the less of that work is thrown out. Then people can add things at their own leisure. Otherwise you might as well re-make all the Complete series and other splatbooks from the start....If you are doing open source design here, then let players everywhere add and create little things, but the "core" should be focused enough to allow comparison for things without preventing people from designing their own.

[Orion]

Akhilles got his power primarily through an arcane ritual (the lethe-dipping, which is not explicitly divine), while Perseus has divinely gifted artifacts.

Akhilles also does ritual magic (by calling on the gods, admittedly) which the other greek heroes hardly ever do.

Orpheus is "shadow" because his powers are related to the underworld.

[Mask_De_H]

You do realize that a solid generic mechanical system would cover conciseness just as well as banning things and making the world localized right?

Especially since we're making everything from the ground up and apparently our skills/powers are going to be somewhat modular, then bloat should not be a big of a deal as say, in 3.X. You're kind of jumping the gun here.


I like the four stat/four race setup as well, although I'm partial to five:
Strength/Shadow (Orc)
Dex/Primal (Elf)
Int/Arcane (Sidhe)
Wis/Divine (Dwarf)
And Human as the Any/Any wildcard.

[Quantumboost]

Along the lines of what MGuy and Mask were saying:

Localized classes would work best. If not in the far east, then don't include things FROM the far east. That will cut clutter cruft and crap out. You don't need barbarians and ninjas for example. Pick a location and keep with that location.

That's silly.

A "ninja" is a sneaky guy from Japan who does some subset (possibly including all) of: not care about honor, go around in disguises, use special gadgets, kill people with pointy things, kill people with poison, and spy on people. The only one of those things you'd expect a scoundrel character from Greece to not do is "be from Japan".

Likewise, we don't *need* a "katana" - we can have one entry for "sword" and one for "big sword" and then the Roman Legions use Gladii, Miyamoto Musashi uses a katana with two hands, and Achilles uses whatever swords the Greeks had. And we don't care mechanicswise, because they're all "swords" or "big swords".

We seriously don't have to consider cultures here, because the characters we're dealing with are seriously badass enough that the only time they particularly care about weapon details is times like "oh hey, it's Mjollnir, thundershock time!"

I like the four stat/four race setup as well, although I'm partial to five:
Strength/Shadow (Orc)
Dex/Primal (Elf)
Int/Arcane (Sidhe)
Wis/Divine (Dwarf)
And Human as the Any/Any wildcard.

I'm really, really favoring Dwarves tending to Int/Arcane in that setup.

Dwarves are clever craftsmen who use runes to make magical items. Int is totally appropriate for them.

Sidhe and elves are the same thing. They're the Tuatha de Danaan and other such characters.

And then the "god-son" human characters are Wis/Divine.

Edit: to be perfectly clear, I mean that the Sidhe and elves are the same as each other, not as the Dwarves.

[Orion]

Man, I was just about to start a post laying out how I would finish d20 Sumeru.

But If Aktariel's Tome revision is going down, and I end up in authority, I don't want to overcommit myself.

speaking of which: I would highly recommend that d20 Iron Age be given a formal design team with a chain of command. Everyone can still volunteer content willy-nilly, but you need someone to decide what goes in and what doesn't. Also, if we make sure that the design team for d20 Iron Age is different from the team for Akteriel's Tome completing project, we can try to keep both projects on the rails.

I like to think I have pretty good organizational and conflict mediation skills, so I'm happy to facilitate one of those projects, but if I'm sticking with Aktariel I need to know that not everyone is jumping ship.

[shadzar]

You do realize that a solid generic mechanical system would cover conciseness just as well as banning things and making the world localized right?

Especially since we're making everything from the ground up and apparently our skills/powers are going to be somewhat modular, then bloat should not be a big of a deal as say, in 3.X. You're kind of jumping the gun here.

That is why I say from the ground up localize it. Get the system working with JUST a localized culture, and then work other things into it one at a time.

Don't jump into adding 20 cultures at once. Once you have a stable system, and a mechanic to add more cultures, then they will fall into place, rather than the MtG approach of just making up a casting cost, and futzing with it until it works.

Kind of like what 4th attempts to do with balance, but starts by adding things from all over the place to make later balance easier. You can add the things later, but in the beginning a small core will help show discrepancies in the system.

Or just go classless and let abilities be chosen at-will so that anybody can pick anything without having to be forced into a role like the walking first-aid kit.

[IGTN]

Why should race be linked, mechanically, to stat and power source? Unless there's something keeping them (i.e., Ogres cannot learn arcane rituals), every race should be able to do everything.

If you want elves to be Dex and Primal favoring, that would probably best be done with NPC frequencies.

I like the idea of making Humans the divine race and Dwarves arcane, and, unless you're doing D&D style pickiness (Drow, Derro, and Svartalfar as different races), not separating elves and sidhe.

Personally, I like the idea of building functionality for monstrous PCs into the core rules. While you shouldn't be able to play the Nemean Lion because it's dumb and doesn't have opposable thumbs, a dragon (with thumbs), or a spirit creature would be good.

For spiritual creatures, demons and fae are fine, but angels and the like are kinda a waste. Not only are they not going to be as well-used by DMs unless you do something shitty like make them into mercenaries (see 4e), but they also require there being an objective good, which we don't want.

[Orion]

demons and angels are interchangeable anyway.

[Quantumboost]

Yeah... Angels are just middle-eastern spirit-beings who are associated with fire/light/wind, have teleporting powers, and may or may not be flunkies of a particular tribal god. Having an "Angel" in an Iron Age setting is roughly like "Rakshasa" or "Oni". They'd show up if you're setting things in the Middle East (just like you're likely to see Rakshasa in India or Oni in Japan). Outside that area, they'd be rarer. And whatever scheme you're using for other fire, wind, and light monstrous creatures would probably work just as well.

If we're not doing anything particularly unique mechanically for local cultures, we may as well not do anything particularly unique mechanically for local spiritual beings.

[The Lunatic Fringe]

How is the relationship between classes/races/stats going to work (which, if any, are going to be dependent on the others)? It seems that stats have to be tied to either classes (stat->class) or races (race->stat), as having both makes race determine class and having neither makes at least one of the categories superfluous (or is really complex).

My proposal is that abilities should be attribute-dependent, within each class a majority of the abilities would be dependent on that stat (the other abilities distributed evenly). Race then operates as a mini-class, offering access to a small number of abilities for each attribute. A player can select off of either list when advancing his/her character.

Also: sidhe/elf is redundant and power sources need to be divided up in a manner appropriate to the setting.

How about we make each power source representative of a sphere of divine influence. Or something. Point is, in this world "arcane" magic (the ars magica in history) is actually performed by invoking the gods in curses written on lead scrolls or defixiones and then nailing tese scrolls shut and putting the curse tablets in funky places. It is not acceptable to have a "divine" power source.

[Orion]

Race SHOULD determine class.

If you are a Giant, your power source is primal, full stop. because primal power is the power of the titans, and if you're a giant you ARE a titan or their descendant.

Same goes for elves and arcane.

EDIT: maybe. Folkloric elves usually have inherent power rather than information-based power, so that might get thrown in with divine, in which case we should go with arcane dwarves.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Attributes
I have nothing against moving to a four-stat system. I assume we'll be using some non-random method of generating them, whether point-buy or array-select.

Races
If the races aren't going to be just forehead aliens, we need to stake out some distinct turf for each of them. Everyone may love orcs, but some people like the AD&D gammorean-style orcs, and some people like the WoW klingon-style orcs, and some people like the Warhammer kzinti-style orcs, and so on. We can do each of those as different cultures, I suppose, but then we have to get the baseline they all arise from well-defined.

Races should definitely have race-specific ability lists they can choose from.

Power Sources
We need a firm list of these and firm definitions for what each of them means, which is going to be a big part of the setting.

If Divine is what comes from godly patronage, and Shadow is underworld-based and distinct from that, then the god(s?) of the underworld is either double-dipping or fundamentally different from the more usual gods.