Category Archives: D20

From a GChat with the DM in my once-a-month DnD game: 12:59 PM Dale: Congratulations: your character gets 175 xp in celebration of you living another year 😉 Cha-ching.

It is something of an irony that the players in my d20 game have been so interested and involved and generally pleased with the last couple sessions that have followed the dungeon-crawl-that-wouldn’t-end. Having well and truly poisoned the well with regards to combat (six months of nothing but pretty much put paid to that need […]

You can get a pretty cool player-driven narrative out of 3e play. See here.

I’ve heard a lot of interesting stuff about the new Conan RPG from Mongoose publishing — that it gives players alot of input on the story, et cetera — the sorts of things that currently flip my skirt up — whatever. I’d also heard that the author both read Sorcerer, Sorcerer & Sword, and talked […]

As noted here: Where d20 breaks down is when it shifts to non-combat rolls where the entire task (skill) is handled with a single, linear-odds roll. Here’s how to fix that. There’s a little known optional combat rule that states that people can choose to ‘roll’ their AC every round. Basically, you don’t have a […]

Overheard on The Forge :: d20 vs. 3d6, regarding “linear curves”. D20 combat is really a die pool system (rolling multiple dice and counting sucessess) in disguise. You roll so many to-hits on single d20s in any given combat that, over the course of a battle, you get a reasonable normal distribution of expected results. […]

One of the things I said in the comments on this post regarded the way that d20 (or some other ‘classic’ games) de-protagonize the player character though those instances where you’ve got this great character that blows stuff he’s supposed to be good at. Eventually, that’s the character they become, and they aren’t the guy […]

So I wrapped up the OA campaign last Friday night with the the most unwrap-uppy wrap-up I’ve ever done. Let’s go over the salient points: I introduced a new Evil Faction. I reintroduced a new Bad Guy. I failed utterly to bring closure to any of the various personal storylines going on, merely advancing them […]

Sunday: Finished up the second serial in Dave’s In Deo Confidemus :: Spycraft campaign in a blaze of gunfire (mostly not ours, surprise surprise) and a couple of fine moments for [self-centered] my own character[/self-centered], the most married man in the entire intelligence community, ever. (Crap, Dylan still needs to call his wife.)

While talking about something else, Bryant mentioned something called the “No Myth meme”, which sounds vaguely interesting, especially when combined with task resolution: The No Myth meme rejects preplotting altogether; a No Myth GM doesn?t know anything about the world other than what the players have seen; a failed task resolution check doesn?t mean the […]

OGL, D20 compatible CROSSGEN Campaign setting? Hmm.