I found this extremely insightful post about trust issues that can crop up in gaming, and wanted to bookmark it. Then I thought, why not share it here?
(via nerdwerds)
So, one of the many games I've backed on Kickstarter is Old School Essentials , which is a cleaned-up, streamlined, and corrected version of the B/X version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons (Moldvay/Cook) rules. Gavin Norman (who posts as Necrotic Gnome) does an incredible job editing and collating info into a super-easy-to-read format. One of the modifications to the B/X rules introduced in the OSE Advanced Fantasy book is separating race from class. In original B/X, the races are represented as classes, with the idea that, if you're playing an elf, that should be special enough in-and-of-itself. If you allowed non-human races to take classes, then players will play the non-humans because their innate abilities make them better than equal-leveled human characters. Separating race from class, the default introduced in AD&D, caused huge flamewars and continues to do so today. The Advanced Fantasy book has reasonable versions of the races so that, if it's your preferen...
With shifters, the problem is the new edition's focus on simplicity. Shifting changed your characteristics, and if you wanted your shifting to become really good, you had to take a tree of shifter feats. There were builds focusing entirely on maximizing your shifter advantages. The new edition doesn't really do temporary ability score changes in the same way -- the barbarian's rage, for example, gives a boost to damage and hit points, but doesn't require recalculating your character's abilities. Similarly, the gauntlets of ogre power / amulet of health / headband of intellect change the impacted ability score to a flat 19 -- a +5 bonus that's easy to plug in, and lasts indefinitely as long as you leave the item on. So I decided that 5E shifters should get their +1 stat bump from their trait, and tried to make the traits (which I had to rename "legacies" because "trait" in 5E is a very specific thing) almost as powerful as a feat, ...
Another creature adapted from Dragon issue #156, "Not Necessarily the Monstrous Compendium" -- the feared Blink Wooly Mammoth! It probably would have been even more thematically appropriate to have worked up the werelagomorph (were-hare) but I only thought of that last night. Ancient people, accompanied by the first domesticated dogs, hunted mammoths during the Endless Winter at the beginning of the world. Some mammoths developed a strange magical ability to escape their pursuers – the ability to teleport short distances. While the vast herds of mammoths were eventually greatly reduced through hunting, these blink wooly mammoths proved tricky and many herds survive at the outskirts of civilization, especially in areas that border frozen climates. Some sages believe that some ancient hunters may have bred their dogs in an attempt to create a hunting companion that was a match for these mammoths; these sages believe that this is the origin of the blink dog species. Blink Wooly ...
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