Alright, without further ado here is the mechanical skeleton of my 3eish rules. This does not include any character options or combat-specific rules, other than a brief description of how attacks work. It also doesn't include rules for equipment, adventuring hazards or any kind of magic or special abilities. It is literally just the resolution and injury/endurance parts of the system.
So, domain play rules tend to turn games into different games. I like playing Smallworld, so here's campaign rules that kind of turna campaign into that.
Being an excerpt of the beating mechanical heart of Hulk Rats, themselves being a light revision of Maze Rats.
Heaven help me, I'm about to make a "why I haven't been posting as much recently," post, aren't I.
I won't dwell on it because no one cares, but honestly the reason I haven't made many posts is that instead of rapidly flitting from idea to idea I stayed relatively focused on a couple of projects. For a while, this was hulk rats, which I just posted, and then I moved on to my current obsession which I am calling 3eish.
No, I won't be posting a draft (even an incomplete one) of a second whole-ass game today. I just want to talk about the project a little bit.
So, I've worked on hacks that have said they're based on 3e or d20 modern before but their relationship to those systems beyond my invocation of their names have been, uh, unclear. For Target 20 Modern, it was basically the names of the stats, and for my previous 3e-based hack it was basically just the words "Fortitude, Reflex and Will," which were used in totally different ways than before.
Having recently regained possession of my old 3e books, however, I was poring over them and realizing how much I genuinely do like about the first DnD I learned; especially knowing what I know now about the history and motivations of a lot of its pieces. And, inveterate tinkerer that I am, there are simply so many points of pain in the system that I can't help tearing it apart and rebuilding it.
This is not a small project; I'm basically rewriting the entire SRD from the ground up. I'm about thirteen thousand words deep already, big beefy chunks remain more or less unwritten (the arcane spell list, to name a big one). So like, watch this space? But don't hold your breath.
Nevertheless, I feel like I do have a distinct vision for the game, here's my attempt to articulate what I'm doing with it:
Well, it's certainly been long enough since I made that uncharacteristic scifi weapons post, so it was only to be expected (as, indeed, Orbiters Local 519 was itself the sequel to what was meant to be a standalone scifi post) that in the meantime I have written up HULK RATS as its own hack.
To be honest, one of the main reasons I pushed through to completion on this project despite losing my steam for it weeks ago was because I wanted to make more posts about the Maze Rats-derived GLOG chassis I developed here. I really like the way this hack uses templates as "skills" and I really like its lineup of RUN, HIDE and TRICK for the saving throws. I will probably post a more traditional fantasy GLOGhack using them at some point.
