3eish: what's a level

Theoryposting, maybe I'll get to the point of concrete details by the end of this post, maybe I won't.

Artist: Tennis Cramer

So, my goal of 3eish is to make something that feels like 3e to me, while also keeping it light enough to hold the whole thing in mind and play fast and easy. Can't get rid of levels without it starting to feel like something else entirely so it's worth asking: what's a level. In 3e there are a couple clear answers:

• One HD.
• 1, 3/4 or 1/2 a point of BAB
• 8, 6, 4, 2 + Int skill points
• 1/2 or 1/3 a point of each saving throw
• 1/4 of an one-point improvement to an ability score (1/8 of a one-point improvement to its modifier)
• 1/3 of a feat and some class features
• various scaling on spells you cast

There are some rationalizations that suggest themselves, like making attack bonus or saving throws a part of the skill system, but I've been down most of those design roads at this point and most of them wind up reinventing RuneQuest. So instead I'm going to reinvent True20; a level is a feat and one HD and everything else falls out of that.

Let's nail that down somewhat:

• As in the base rules, the benchmark for a boring feat is that it applies +2 on two different kinds of rolls. 
• Boring feats (that only add bonuses to rolls) are now called skills and can be taken multiple times. This replace the skill list and save progressions; if a character does not have any skills that apply to a saving roll, they use 1/3 their level as a bonus.
• Obviously not all feats are boring ones. The ones that grant more interesting abilities can generally only be taken once.
• Each feat specifies an amount of HP (2, 3 or 4) gained when you take it. If you're proficient with it, add +1 to an attack roll for every 4HP you currently have. If you're not proficient, apply a -3 penalty.
• Abilities for combat add 4HP.
• Skills and miscellaneous abilities add 3HP.
• Magic abilities adds 2HP.

You may notice there's no real purpose left for classes. That's probably for the best, let's lose them. Carve out their interesting bits into feats and leave the rest.

One-feat character creation is probably too bare to be fun. Instead we'll have two-feat character creation (truly, I have a dizzying intellect). There's a special set of feats called backgrounds, and you pick two of them to start. Your starting HP is 4 if both of them have experience with violence, 3 if one does and 2 otherwise.

The 3e PHB had 7 races and 11 classes, so for parity with its 77 combinations a pool of backgrounds would need...a pool of 14 backgrounds (14 choose 2 is 91, fourteen more combinations for a pool with three fewer elements). Now that's of course not the full range of customization of a 1st level 3e character but it's close enough for my purposes.

cultural proficiencies: a modest proposal

The idea here is that "martial weapons" refers to the type of weapons used by the warriors of a given culture rather than just "weapons that are good."

Everyone can add their base attack bonus/proficiency bonus to attacks with a crossbow (2H 1d8, loading), dagger (2d4 in a grapple, 1d4 otherwise) or one-handed tool (1d6) such as a cleaver, hammer, hand axe, etc.

Fighters are proficient with the weapons of their culture. Other martial classes may have specific weapon groups associated with them. You can learn a group (or a specific exotic weapon) as a feat if you have a teacher.

• Northern men: battle-axe (1H 1d8 or 2H 1d10), saex (1H 1d8) and thrown hand-axe.
• Paladins and Eastern men: mace (1H 1d8), thrusting spear and arming sword (both 1H 1d8 or 2H 1d10).
• Southern men: thrown or thrusting spear (1H/thrown 1d8 or 2H 1d10) and gladius (1H 1d8).
• Elves, Rangers and Western men: self bow (2H 1d8), thrusting sword (1H, 1d8 finesse).
• Dwarves: battle-axe and war-hammer (both 1H 1d8 or 2H 1d10). 
• Barbarians and Goblins: mace, saber (both 1H 1d8) and composite bow (2H 1d8 ranged).

Attacks with these weapons are not usually penalized if you are not proficient. Attacks with exotic weapons are at a -3 penalty for the non-proficient.

a linguistic anthropology of fantasy folk

The nice thing about fantasy races is that they give character creation choices with a good degree of granularity and comprehensibility and are a neat way to pull folkloric material into your game. The bad thing about them is that they mean that race science (that is, the false belief that races as understood by society correspond to biologically distinct types of human beings) is true in your fantasy world.

Honestly, the bad part is bad enough to completely sink the goodness of the good part.

This is another in my ongoing struggle to formulate different fantasy folk in a way that isn't race science, but emphasizing the ways that real people saw themselves and others, particularly before the race-scientific idea became prominent in the modern era.

The problem with making things nuanced is that also makes them complicated; race science is conceptually pretty straightforward, which makes it very game-able. Trying to embed fantasy folk in a realistically nuanced web of relationships with each other also buries the conceptual clarity of a player looking at the list of options and saying, "I'm going to play an elf, that means I live in the woods and don't particularly like dwarfs." One runs the risk of overloading the player with world-building, particularly if one chooses to foreground linguistic groups which are among the more salient in-universe distinctions between peoples.

I'm far from a solution to this, but my current idea is to use somewhat-transparent names for languages (or groups of languages) wherever possible, and doing as little "hard" worldbuilding as possible to keep things relatively setting-neutral, while still keeping things complex enough to stop collapsing into the fail state of race science. It's a tall order, let's see how I do.

When making a character, you must choose a people for them to belong to (or at least stem from). A people is defined by a language, a way of life and an alignment, all of which affect how they see themselves and the world.

To make this your own, you only have to identify the peoples in your setting, their languages, ways of life and alignments. You may choose to give every people a distinct ethnonym; I'm not doing this so as not to overload a player with unfamiliar names. Instead, I'm going to organize peoples by language family, grouping setting languages together into four groups (middling, rhuno-buggish, sylvene and foreigner), the first three of which correspond to actual language families. Each family contains a number of peoples with different ways of life and dramatically different outlooks on the world and their place in it.

GLOG/echo

This is a GLOGhack, I guess, or the first part of one. The original GLOG is from Arnold K but it seems that the real GLOG is the GLOG you had inside you all along.

The most gloggy feature of this is the class structure, since rather than more traditional dice mechanics, this uses the an only slightly modiefied version of ghost/echo. I drew from a lot of GLOG classes from different bloggers, but particularly from Finders Keepers for the backgrounds and Vain the Sword for a couple of the classes.

Dice

Before rolling dice, identify dangers, edges and goals. Roll one die for each and assign one roll to each danger and one to each goal (discarding any left overs):

Roll	Danger	Goal
1-2	Comes true.	Failed, opportunity may be lost.
3-4	Mixed, danger remains.	Mixed, opportunity remains.
5-6	Avoided.	Achieved.

Nothing extremely good or bad should happen on a mixed result, but it may make those outcomes more likely; mixed results should maintain or increase tension, not resolve it.

Roll dice in the following situations and pick the appropriate goals (including ones not listed) and use the given danger (in addition to others the situation may call for).

• Act under pressure. Goals: complete a task, get out of harm's way, rescue someone in peril. Danger: you suffer harm.
• Sneak. Goals: move without being noticed, plant an item, remove and item, defeat a lock. Danger: you are caught in the act.
• Close combat. Goals: cut down a foe, dodge past a foe. Danger: you suffer harm.
• Fire missiles. Goals: stop a foe short, cover an ally, destroy something. Dangers: you cause unwanted harm or get unwanted attention.
• Suffer harm. Goals: shake it off, fight through the pain, impress with your toughness. Danger: you are incapacitated.
• Make an impression. Goals: they believe your story, they remember you later, they answer your question, they agree to a bargain. Danger: they distrust or dismiss you.

Characters

Characters are defined by lots ("templates" if you prefer). You set out with four lots: the Adventurer rank, two backgrounds, and the first of a class of your choice. 

alignments and way of life

Characters have to come from peoples, and those peoples have ways of life. Where is home for your people, and how do they see themselves?

• The boats or carts you travel from place to place, plying your trades and peddling your wares. Alignment: civil.
• Grand cities rising from the plain or shore. Alignment: civil.
• Ancient holds cut into the deep earth. Alignment: goodwright.
• Rough warrens in the clefts of hillsides. Alignment: goodwright.
• Sound houses of timber or stone. Alignment: civil.
• Beneath the open sky. Alignment: free.
• Under canopy of thick woods. Alignment: moonfolk.

Alignment describes how a people sees themselves and how they divide up the rest of the world. Some see themselves as worldly and do not share the alignment of their folk. Even those who share an alignment do not necessarily like each other or agree about where one another fit into the order of things.

Civil

A civilized fellow knows that without the nameless gods of heaven to teach mortals the arts of civilization, we would be naked heathens all. Elders who still name the gods of the earth may know no better, but the barbarian who call on demons from behind the sky and beneath the sea. A heaven-fearing fellow knows a 'worldly' one for what they really are: a scoffer not to be trusted.

Civil folk all see the peoples of cities and houses as civil (though they may war with one another just the same), woods-dwellers as elders and nomads under the open sky as barbarians. However, they differ on a few points:

• Boat and cart-folk have a dread of the barbarians of the deep earth but call the herders and traders of the hillsides elders.
• City people consider the half-settled lives of boats and carts or hillsides to be fit only for scoffers, but consider deep earth-delvers old-fashioned elders.
• Dwellers in stout houses see travelers by boat and cart and miners in deep earth both as elders, and raiders from the hillsides as barbarians.

Free

Freedom is especially treasured by those who live under the open sky, viewing the labors of settled peoples as a kind of thralldom. They honor their beloved dead and all the spirits of the air and earth that touch their lives, chanting their names and deeds for later generations. The 'worldly' fellow who scorns these gods is a lonesome one, a tiny fellow adrift without ancestor to guide their feet or shelter them from the cruel winds.

Those of cities, the deep earth and houses are seen as thralls, while those who range in boats and carts, from the hillsides, or in the deep woods are seen as half-thralls. A free neck does not bend to the yoke of a thrall, and a warrior certainly does not fear one.

Goodwright

Goodwrights have learned the secrets of craft from the earth itself. They celebrate the good earth with the work of skilled hands. Though a goodwright will take spoil from war, they detest nothing as much as a thief. And what is a 'worldly' creature who pays no mind to their mother earth but a thief of her gifts?

All outsiders are seen with a measure of suspicion, but wrights of the deep earth and of the hillsides revile one another as thieves nearly without exception. Hillside wrights will treat with most other outsiders, but those of the deep earth consider the folk of boats and carts or the woods as thieves as bad as hated hill-wrights.

Moonfolk

The day is for the sun, the night for the stars, but the moon wanders through day and night in its turnings. Moonfolk chase the balance of the moon, honoring the earth in all its seasons. Moonfolk cultivate the woods around them with a gardener's care and live from the game and fruits thereof.

The enemies of the moonfolk are the nightfolk who harry them from the deep earth and open sky, while city and house dwellers are dayfolk and useful allies against the nightfolk when they can be roused to it. Those of boats and carts or hillsides or 'worldly' folks who think themselves wiser than everyone are smallfolk and not worth serious consideration.

Worldly

The worldly are not many, and they are called lonesome, scoffer, smallfolk, thief or worse where they go. Nevertheless, a worldly fellow hates to suffer fools and sees no reason to give up the better parts of life to distant gods. They can't abide the small-mindedness of boat and cart travelers, the cruelty and hypocrisy of the cities, the incurious provincialism of the deep earth, the baseless boasting of hillside folk, the credulous superstition of house holders and open sky nomads both or the sanctimonious mysticism of the woods.