Wednesday, September 4, 2013

D20 House Rule: Favored Weapon

Let's get things out of the way: the Fighter class in Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 sucks.  Not to say that it can't be made effective, or that nobody will ever find it fun to play, but the class simply can't compete on the same level as some of the more powerful classes such as the Wizard, Cleric, and Druid.  Part of the reason this situation arises is likely due to the fact that a fighter's only real class feature is bonus feats, but the fighter will eventually run out of good feats to select, at which point his rate of power level gain will slow.

One of the things that I'd like to do for Tologan-Var is re-evaluate the feats in order to make them more powerful, but I also happened to stumble across the concept of modular weapons in a forum thread.  I don't really like the idea of modular weapons as such (to me, it feels as though the idea removes the already-tenuous connection weapons have to their historical counterparts and turns equipment into nothing more than a mechanical manipulation).  One idea that was suggested in the thread that I can get behind, however, was the suggestion that a fighter may be able to invest more points into his weapon as he levels up.  As such, I have the following class feature as a concept:

Favored Weapon (ex): At first level, the fighter chooses a Weapon Group that he is proficient in.  He may select one of the following abilities to apply to that group:
  • +1 on attack rolls
  • increase damage dice by one size category
  • Increase critical threat range by 1
  • Increase critical damage multiplier by 1
  • Increase range increment by 50% of original value
At 5th level and every 5 levels afterward, the fighter may select an additional weapon group to apply a single effect to.  In addition, at each such interval, he may apply an extra bonus to one of the weapon groups that he has already selected. (The same bonus cannot be applied to a weapon group more than once).

Monday, September 2, 2013

D20 House Rule: MAD Spellcasting

A while ago I posted the beginnings of a procedurally-generated hexcrawl.  While I've neglected further postings on the matter, the project has since expanded into a programming project that implements the techniques that I was developing into a videogame.

A Sample Map of one of the many forms of the Island of Tologan-Var

While I would like to base gameplay off of the D20 rules, I've been considering implementing various tweaks.  One such idea was the implementation of Multiple Ability Dependance (MAD) for spellcasting classes: By default rules, there is only one stat that a given class has to improve in order to improve all aspects of their casting ability (Spells per day, Spell save DC, and whether or not a spell can be cast).  In this variant, each class would have two different ability scores that govern different aspects of spellcasting.