PR's D&D Revision (Sorry for the Re-Post)

[Avoraciopoctules]

Pretty minor points:

The Indigo color for Prismatic Wall and Spray makes reference to Insanity as an Insanity spell, but Insanity spells aren't in the pdf.

Antimagic Field makes reference to Prismatic Sphere, but that doesn't exist anymore either.

[Username17]

Now I'm having more problems. I'm trying to find a way to make a distinction between warriors, experts, and spellwarriors.

You sir, need to go watch some source material.

I suggest getting kind of drunk and watching Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja, The Scorpion King, and Dragon Slayer.

Having watched those, I want you to come back and tell me with a straight face what the difference is between a fantasy character who is skilled at stuff and a fantasy character who is good with a sword is. Or to put it another way: in the source material, warriors are good at "stuff." Those characters who are good at "stuff" but not good in a fight are sidekicks at best, and comic relief at worst.

The best solution would be to have a two tier class system. One in which you have "real" classes like Warrior and Spellcaster, and then you had "minion" classes like Expert and Acolyte that existed to provide support to real characters. If you insist on having Experts in your game, you have to wrap your mind around the fact that they are just sidekicks for real characters.

-Username17

[Judging__Eagle]

Pretend that the warrior doesn't have his current class features. What would you suggest?

Decide on how you want to describe their actions in out of game terms.

Write the rules to make that happen.

Frank & K wanted fighters to be able to keep their cool no matter what, make their own weapons, screw with other characters actions in combat, be able to fight big shit without getting owned via AoOs, act quickly to changes in a fight etc. etc.

The RoW fighter has abilities that reflect those facts.

For spellcasting.

Give casters one of two options for their spell slots: they put in a spell that they know into each of their spell slots per day; or they leave them blank and can add them on the fly (costs 1 full round action).

Sorcerers never worry about thinking up a spell to use; while Wizards could seriously pull out their book every fight to put a different spell into action each combat.

Forgetting/clearing your spell slots takes X minutes, you also refill Y levels of spell slots while resting in those X minutes.

[Elennsar]

There might be warriors who aren't good at "stuff". But that's because they chose not to take "stuff" that has any adventuring application. (Gimli, for instance, while awesome with stonework, can't fully apply that skill at Helm's Deep because there's not enough time.)

But Aragorn, for instance, is good at "out of combat stuff" and "in combat stuff". And Sam, who is not so good at combat stuff...is definately not adventurer tier.

Any warrior who is skilled enough to be a protagonist will never, ever be short of ability on "stuff". Now, a knight would have a different -set- of "stuff" to a ranger, but "warrior vs expert"...

I am with Frank. The only purpose of that divide is to force multiclassing into "expert" or away from expert, depending. The "I can only fight, I can't do anything outside of combat" guy is a product solely of shoddily designed RPG classes. It has absolutely zero literary basis.

[Psychic Robot]

Hrmm. Interesting. Good ideas. I am considering simply taking some of the talents and creating a maneuvers system as in ToB, although I was loathe to do this in the beginning.

[Psychic Robot]

Here is the updated file. No enemies just yet, but I translated everything to Vancian, created a ToB-ish system, and modified some of the skills.

[baduin]

Could you explain what is the use of those rules, except as mental gymnastics (which is valuable by itself, of course)? There is certainly a need for good rules compatible with D&D - Frank's Tome is a good start. Many people would like to play D&D with better rules, and Paizo seems to have failed dismally at that task.

Of course, you are free to spend your time as you wish, but, as your rules are quite near D&D, wouldn't it be more useful to keep them compatible, at least with monsters and adventures?

[Bigode]

Making from scratch a game "quite like D&D" that works better than D&D would be quite valuable. Don't even try to take me for saying that's what he's doing.

[Psychic Robot]

baduin: Just wantin' to fix things how I see fit. I figure that it's better if I can get all good things under a single, unified system while working to patch up the problems with 3e, I'll have a good thing.