The Gaming Den

I'll be posting a little encumbrance idea I've been playing around with on here probably today or tomorrow, inspired by the discussion on Stealth in another thread. It reminded me that I was, for a while, looking to mine interesting ideas from things people have fiddled with for 3rd/pathfinder. I don't feel like personally wading through a bunch of places personally though unless I know it's worthwhile. The last books/pdfs I purchased were from dreamscarred press because I like their work. Does anyone know of any quality ideas in any other 3rd party work? Whether it be from a purchase worthy book or just in other forums. I usually get ideas from either these boards, Facebook groups, or from the dnd wiki. So I'd prefer material not from any of those sources of course. The ideas don't have to be perfect as long as they lay the groundwork that I can channel into my own work.

Well, I think I remarked that Lamentations of the Flame Princess' one redeeming feature is its encumbrance system. Well worth stealing. I tweaked it for Nexus.

Not a mechanic idea, but I enjoyed that Scarred Lands/Relics and Rituals had a very short story for each spell.

erik wrote:Well, I think I remarked that Lamentations of the Flame Princess' one redeeming feature is its encumbrance system. Well worth stealing. I tweaked it for Nexus.

Summary?

LotFP's version:

Different items classed by their cumbersomemness.

Tiny item, an arrow or scroll, a single ration (no encumbrance, a group counts as a regular item)
Regular item, like a sword, or a scroll case full of scrolls, a quiver of arrows, a pack of rations (1 encumbrance pt for every 6)
Oversized item, like a polearm, or full camping pack (1 encumbrance point)

Racking up encumbrance pts penalizes movement and movementish checks.

Armor also counts as encumbrance. Medium armor +1, Heavy armor +2.

It gets rid of caring about pounds/kilos. It has some semblance of raelizm without being too onerous.

I like D66 Hunter's Moon's structured downtime system where between combat you declare an action like "I do some research on the monster we're hunting" "I train with my weapons", "I rest" to get mechanical bonuses to the next combat.

I once played in a game of Blood & Vigilance, which is a set of superhero rules for d20 Modern. As a superhero game, it wasn't great but it was definitely miles ahead of plain d20 Modern and it had some interesting ideas.

For instance, your PC would get a small number of power points (like skill points, but for buying superpower ranks instead of skill ranks) each level for vertical advancement, but she would also get a new "stunt" every other level for horizontal advancement. So if your PC has the power Weather Control, she would start with one ability usable for "free" (e.g. firing lightning bolts) with all of the other Weather Control abilities (e.g. creating fog, raising or lowering temperature, etc.) costing a hero point to use; then as she gained levels, she could spend her "stunts" on expanding the pool of powers which are usable without a hero point. I thought that idea compared favourably to the standard Champions/Mutants & Masterminds/etc. idea of having one power cost X points and having a whole array of connected powers cost just a tiny bit more (via Multipower/Alternate Powers).

You could probably port a similar idea to 3.5E D&D magic (using domains or schools of magic or whatever).

MGuy wrote:I'll be posting a little encumbrance idea I've been playing around with on here probably today or tomorrow, inspired by the discussion on Stealth in another thread. It reminded me that I was, for a while, looking to mine interesting ideas from things people have fiddled with for 3rd/pathfinder. I don't feel like personally wading through a bunch of places personally though unless I know it's worthwhile. The last books/pdfs I purchased were from dreamscarred press because I like their work. Does anyone know of any quality ideas in any other 3rd party work? Whether it be from a purchase worthy book or just in other forums. I usually get ideas from either these boards, Facebook groups, or from the dnd wiki. So I'd prefer material not from any of those sources of course. The ideas don't have to be perfect as long as they lay the groundwork that I can channel into my own work.

Is it alright with you if we discuss useful subsystems from all RPG systems? I have been looking to run a picante 5e game and was thinking of starting a similar thread.

Sir Aubergine wrote:

MGuy wrote:I'll be posting a little encumbrance idea I've been playing around with on here probably today or tomorrow, inspired by the discussion on Stealth in another thread. It reminded me that I was, for a while, looking to mine interesting ideas from things people have fiddled with for 3rd/pathfinder. I don't feel like personally wading through a bunch of places personally though unless I know it's worthwhile. The last books/pdfs I purchased were from dreamscarred press because I like their work. Does anyone know of any quality ideas in any other 3rd party work? Whether it be from a purchase worthy book or just in other forums. I usually get ideas from either these boards, Facebook groups, or from the dnd wiki. So I'd prefer material not from any of those sources of course. The ideas don't have to be perfect as long as they lay the groundwork that I can channel into my own work.

Is it alright with you if we discuss useful subsystems from all RPG systems? I have been looking to run a picante 5e game and was thinking of starting a similar thread.

Go right ahead, what subsystems do you have in mind, and yeah anything outside of combat in 5e is ripe for slotting in subsystems.

Yea I really never intended to imply that I was looking for stuff specifically from D20 iterations. I am just interested in good ideas. My Encumbrance idea came from survival computer games, not from any tabletop game I've played.

For a while now my PF group has tried the Short Rest mechanic from 5E, expanding it slightly to grant one HD and one spell/daily resource or class mechanic back. So far it's working pretty good, and I noticed that I can now structure adventures differently because the group doesn't set up camp as often as they used to.

I've also used the travel mechanics from Adventures in Middle-earth (which, AFAIK, are mostly the same travel rules found in The One Ring, only adapted for 5E) in a standard D&D game, which worked really well. Players seemed to like the 'site-hopping' aspect, I suspect because the game was a short one and it helped to not waste time with me monologuing about the landscape and also let everyone roll dice along the way. Probably not a good fit for every group though (I didn't expect it to work out at all).

For my hexcrawl game I've used elements from Justin Alexander's blog here, and I got a lot of use from that entire article series. The mechanics were often too fiddly for my taste and I dumbed them down a bit. I also spliced in some elements from other blogs and forums, don't remember which ones exactly because there is a like a metric shit ton of hexcrawl ideas out there.

Spycraft's chase system was among the best subgames I've ever seen. It broke down on the merit that D20's skill system blew chunks and you could legit break the RNG, but against similarly skill bonus'd parties/entities it ended up being exciting and fun.

Spycraft 2.0 took the basic engine and splintered it into dragnets, information/disinformation campaigns, interrogations etc... Basically any scenario that had a predator/prey relationship they turned into a "chase system" mechanic.

Basically, the prey started out X units "ahead" of the predator. Each round the predator and prey picked maneuvers from a list. This resulted in bonuses/penalties, sometimes severe, depending on what combination of moves were picked. Then you took that bonus, applied it to, say, your drive skill, and made a drive check. The winner of the check would activate their maneuver. Generally speaking, prey wanted to increase their lead of units over the predator, and the predator wanted to reduce it. Once you got over or under a specific threshold, you could start picking finisher maneuvers to bring the chase to a conclusion. After each driving round everyone got to shoot or got their own round to do something.

There's complications, terrain, things like that, and each chase "system" proceeds to have it's own flavor. But the system is a lot of fun. I've even adapted it to Star Wars dogfighting, replacing the finishing maneuvers with bonuses to attack and the ability to turn the prey into the predator.

MGuy wrote:Yeah I really never intended to imply that I was looking for stuff specifically from D20 iterations. I am just interested in good ideas. My Encumbrance idea came from survival computer games, not from any tabletop game I've played.

Excellent. Two subsystems I am fond of are the Scion stunt system and the Mutant's and Masterminds complication system. They encompass two disorganized but common scenarios in play (taking advantage of the environment and referee mischief respectively) and make them more egalitarian and streamlined.

I also have a predilection for compartmentalization of class features in RPGs (Unearthed Arcana and Pathfinder have both presented similar takes on the idea), but such a subsystem requires robust class balance to avoid degenerative outputs.