F. Douglas Wall's page

I was a little disappointed to find out that ships were not purchasable items. Mostly because putting a price on it has a few implications. First of all, GMs are going to see that cost and say "If it costs this much, it must be for X level characters only," since that's how gear works in Starfinder and since any reasonable number for the cost of a ship would be huge, that would put ships out of reach of low-level players. Since a lot of the campaigns they want you to run with Starfinder involve spaceships and spaceship battles from the beginning (For example, Star Wars would suck if nobody in the party could afford the Millenium Falcon), they couldn't restrict access to them.

And if they create any financial loophole to artificially lower the price (like the fact that nobody drops the cash to buy a new car these days. It's all loans and leases), that just means that someone is going to use that same loophole to get their hands on some crazy high-level weapons or other nonsense. (Imagine getting a car loan and then buying guns with that much money.)

It's meta and not terribly satisfying, but there it is.

Nuckelavee, nuckelavee, you're big and evil and heinous...

IIRC, this is about all that's been revealed.

Short version: CG, creator of language, god of freedom/free will.

So who's taking advantage of the GM's Day Sale to pick up something that they otherwise might not? Get 20% off Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road and start exploring America's Fairyland today!

Just in time for the movie, too.

Next race on the list: The Feiyin. The "half-elves" of the setting, if elves were lawful evil fey. They are typically used by their fey parents as sword fodder, either in slave armies or the arena. Those who escape to other lands are treated as second-class citizens or potential spies for their fairy progenitors. Original writeup here.

Feiyin
Type
Humanoid (0 RP)
Size
Medium (0 RP)
Base Speed
Normal Speed (0 RP)
Ability Score Modifiers
Human Heritage (0 RP)
Languages
Standard (0 RP)
Racial Traits
Defense Racial Traits
Fey Damage Resistance (3 RP)
Feat & Skill Racial Traits
Skill Bonus: Perception (2 RP)
Senses Racial Traits
Low Light Vision (1 RP)
Total Cost: 6 RP

Notes: The Feiyin also do get a +2 to saves vs spells, but there's no ability in the ARG that gives them just that. The closest thing in there gives +2 vs spell and poison for 3 RP. If I were to make an eyeball estimate, I'd call it a 2 RP ability, bringing the total to 8 RP for the race.

Also, the write-up only gives them DR 2/cold iron. This is deliberate. Many of their abilities are akin to those of their fey heritage, but toned down somewhat.

I'm tempted to add something as well, but still wrestling with exactly what. Profession (sailor) seems my best choice, as they are a race of ocean-going nomads.

Though on a quick double-check, all of the elemental planetouched races (Ifrits, Oreads, Sylphs, Undines) clock in at 6 RP, as do the grippli (which I think are pretty cool). So perfectly viable races do exist in that range.

My wife's been dreaming up her own campaign setting for quite some time and has come up with a few interesting races. Since I recently got the Advanced Race Guide, I thought I'd look at her races through the lens of the Race Builder. I'll be posting some of these here in order to get some feedback on how well I'm using the Race Builder as well as drum up some fans for her setting.

The first race (alphabetically anyway) is the apsuri. They're an oceangoing race of small humanoids. Original writeup is here.

Apsuri
Type
Humanoid (0 RP)
Size
Small (0 RP)
Base Speed
Slow (-1 RP)
Ability Score Modifiers
Specialized (1 RP)
Languages
Standard (0 RP)
Racial Traits
Feat & Skill Racial Traits
Static Bonus Feat: Agile Climber (2 RP)
Movement Racial Traits
Swim (2 RP)
Senses Racial Traits
Low Light Vision (1 RP)
Other Racial Traits
Hold Breath (1 RP)
Total Cost: 6 RPs

Notes: The original write up for apsuri allows them to hold their breath for 3 x Con minutes, while the ARG Hold Breath ability allows for 4 x Con minutes. I haven't settled on which to use.

Although Agile Climber is not an existing feat (that I'm aware of), I think it's on par with a feat and priced it accordingly. It's kind of like Weapon Finesse, but for a skill rather than a weapon.

I've been running an OSRIC Campaign for the last year or so, and it's taught me a lot about old school gaming. There have been a few deaths and 1 party wipe, but for the most part, I'm a pretty nice DM.

Next question:

Does anyone play/design for anything other than the Medium advancement track? As I'm equipping my NPCs, should I just assume Medium treasure amounts? Is there a value to gearing towards another advancement track or including notes and sidebars to the effect of "In a slow advancement game, this treasure stash has x, but for medium advancement, it also has y, and fast advancement gives it z as well"?

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that I'm better off just going with Medium treasure allocations.

While the availability of such a device is up to your GM, you can find the cost per charge by dividing the retail cost by 50. Buying one from a used-magic-item shoppe might also mean that you have to pay for the identify spell they had to use to determine its number of remaining charges.

Sorry; to clarify, I meant "of the skills the doppleganger has, only Perception and Stealth are class skills."

That's what I figured you meant.

And I think the thing about "assume that any skill that has points in it is a class skill" was something that somehow survived an edit from a previous version of the rules, when class skills and cross-class skills had different costs (like in 3.5)

Next question:

Does anyone play/design for anything other than the Medium advancement track? As I'm equipping my NPCs, should I just assume Medium treasure amounts? Is there a value to gearing towards another advancement track or including notes and sidebars to the effect of "In a slow advancement game, this treasure stash has x, but for medium advancement, it also has y, and fast advancement gives it z as well"?

Actually, my wife (who is a hot gamer chick) just pointed out that Monstrous Humanoids have their own list of class skills (Bestiary 308) that includes Perception and Stealth and a few others.

1) The plot of my adventure involves children kidnapped and forced into crime and in the course of the adventure, I expect the PCs to encounter at least one of them (getting pickpocketed by the kid). I've got the kids statted using the Pickpocket from the GMG and applying the Young template from the Bestiary to it. The Pickpocket is a level 1 rogue and is CR 1/2. The Young template reduces the CR of the creature by 1. Would the CR of the Young Pickpocket be 1/3, 1/4 or what?

2) The mastermind of this operation is a doppelganger with some rogue levels. I decided to break down the basic doppelganger to get a stronger idea of what I was adding rogue levels to and maybe reallocate some of the resources from the base build to make it a stronger rogue. Everything holds together rather well except for the skill points.

As a 4 HD monstrous humanoid with a 13 Intelligence (+1 Int Mod), it should have 20 skill points. But once I factor out stat bonuses, racial bonuses and class skill bonuses (assuming that it gained the class skill bonus on every skill listed in its description), I see only 8 skill points being spent.

One solution I'm seeing would be to assume that only Bluff and Disguise are actually class skills and all other bonuses were acquired with skill ranks. But I want to be sure before I start mucking about.

When I published the Adventures in Oz RPG last year, I encouraged gamers to take their Oz experience beyond the Yellow Brick Road. Oz is a very big place, and no single road is enough to explore it all. L. Frank Baum wrote 14 Oz novels over his lifetime, adding new wonders in each volume. Later authors continued to add to the richness and diversity of this fairyland.

Now, I want to take it a step further. Stepping outside of Oz, traveling beyond the Deadly Desert that separates that land from its neighbors. Neighbors like Mo, home of the Purple Dragon and the Wise Donkey, and the Laughing Valley, where Santa Claus makes presents for children all over the world. The vast oceans where the Sea Fairies live. The floating majesty of Sky Island. The underground empire of the Nomes.

Baum created not just one fairyland, but several.Travel with me as I explore these lands in Adventures in Oz: Beyond the Deadly Desert!

The money that is raised will help me afford art, editing, layout and all of the other things that will make this book a treasure to own and use at your gaming table.

Give me a Kick!

I wonder if any of you PATHFINDERS/D&D3.5 Roleplayers have tried to play GURPS 4ed. Or do you like me("i have been a dungeonmaster the last 22 years in D&D.")have players who only wants to play D&D/Pathfinder...

What i have seen GURPS 4ed is a wonderful, low fantasy game, with a better combat system than Pathfinder.

I consider GURPS to be my primary system, actually.

Some caveats in regards to switching to GURPS from PF: Character creation requires more oversight from the GM and more willingness to say No. The GURPS 4e Characters book has rules for building just about any character you can think of. Feel free to set limits, ban options, and say no to anything that doesn't suit the campaign that you want to run. Templates are your friend, seriously.

Combat is going to take some getting used to. The main things that you will have to keep in mind is that an attack roll is generally followed by a defense roll (Block, Dodge, or Parry), and the wounding modifiers for cutting and impaling weapons.

Your players may also notice how much/how little they can do in a one-second turn. They can move or attack, but doing both in a turn is a penalty. However, they can Parry once, Block once (if they have a shield) and do a nearly infinite number of Dodges in that same turn.

Armor does not impede spell-casting or make you any harder to hit. It is simply encumbering (which is usually enough, given the encumbrance rules) and reduces the damage you take from attacks.

There's a good way to emulate psychic powers without using a Vancian system. That would be a skill based system like the magic system for Black Company.

Fatigue, sickness, other and actual ability damage for different levels of failure when you push yourself.

The problem with skill-based systems is that skill points tend to be rather precious. Actually, all of the character components (class levels, feats, skill points, spells slots) are rather precious.

F. Douglas Wall wrote:

KaeYoss wrote:

Arevashti wrote:

My husband is actually at work on an alternate psionics system in the form of feat trees.

I never liked feat trees for magic or psionics. I don't think psionics is something you just dabble in, and Pathfinder is a class-based system, so delegating it to a secondary system like Feats instead of the primary system (= class abilities) trivialises it.

It can make sense, like magic in Midnight, but there, magic wasn't supposed to be as easy and ubiquitous as in your usual D&D setting.

As the husband in question, I'd just like to throw out some of my reasoning for the design.

Psionicists are not wizards. Most of the psychic heroes in fiction have nowhere near the breadth of power that a Pathfinder wizard has. They will typically have one or two tricks that can be rather flexible, and very little beyond that.

Which means that psionics rarely defines such a character to the point that they would be considered members of a class. They will usually have a "day job" and use their abilities as part of that job. So having a psionics system that served as an adjunct to the class system rather than a replacement made more sense to me.

And I tried very hard to avoid "access feats" (i.e. "waste this feat slot now and we'll give you something cool later"), making sure that every feat is useful. So if you only take one psionic feat, you've still made a good investment.

I tried to do something like this and design proved too time consuming. I'd be interested in seeing what you've done. Incidentally, how do you handle Psychic Warriors? Is their base class Rogue or Fighter or Ranger or what?

I did not go out of my way to emulate anything that appears in the existing psionics rules. A "psychic warrior" under my system would have taken some psionic feats that enhance their fighting ability. Telekinetic feats that let them wield weapons remotely. Shape a weapon out of ectoplasm. I'm working on a few others, too

Arevashti wrote:

My husband is actually at work on an alternate psionics system in the form of feat trees.

I never liked feat trees for magic or psionics. I don't think psionics is something you just dabble in, and Pathfinder is a class-based system, so delegating it to a secondary system like Feats instead of the primary system (= class abilities) trivialises it.

It can make sense, like magic in Midnight, but there, magic wasn't supposed to be as easy and ubiquitous as in your usual D&D setting.

As the husband in question, I'd just like to throw out some of my reasoning for the design.

Psionicists are not wizards. Most of the psychic heroes in fiction have nowhere near the breadth of power that a Pathfinder wizard has. They will typically have one or two tricks that can be rather flexible, and very little beyond that.

Which means that psionics rarely defines such a character to the point that they would be considered members of a class. They will usually have a "day job" and use their abilities as part of that job. So having a psionics system that served as an adjunct to the class system rather than a replacement made more sense to me.

And I tried very hard to avoid "access feats" (i.e. "waste this feat slot now and we'll give you something cool later"), making sure that every feat is useful. So if you only take one psionic feat, you've still made a good investment.

Thanks. One day, I'll get this thing figured out. Today is not that day.

And don't forget to check out the support blog at [URL]http://fdouglaswall.blogspot.com[/URL]. It's updated weekly and I stat up something from the Oz books once a month. I was doing Oz characters, but then I started to run low so I switched to spells and magic items.

If you have any questions or comments about the game, feel free to drop me a line on the blog or at adventuresinoz@thegame.com

F. Douglas Wall wrote:

Just got reviewed over at RPG.net. Check it out!

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/15/15076.phtml

Linkified!

BTW, could you explain the skills interacting with the dice? From the above review:

To find out if you succeed or fail, the player rolls 2d6. If one of the dice is equal to or lower than the skill, they succeed. If both dice roll higher than the skill, they fail. If both dice roll low then it is a special success. This is another point in the game’s favor...

So I assume the maximum skill rank is 5?

Exactly! All Basic Skills are on a scale of 1-5.

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/15/15076.phtml

It was a compensated review, so she didn't have to pay for it and might not have noticed the MSRP printed on the back of the book. The print version normally sells for $14.99 and the PDF (as you can see) is $7.99. When I get a little more money, I might see about selling the print version here at Paizo (hinthint)

My own game, Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road, characters don't gain experience points or level up. They gain Oz Points by making friends. They can spend these Oz Points to call on their friends in times of need. Depending on the power of a given friend, this can be significant.

Pokethulhu by S. John Ross also doesn't feature traditional advancement. Instead, the assumption is that characters will grow in power by capturing and taming more little monsters and training them to battle.

Just uploaded today: The Adventures in Oz Characters Pack! 15 classic Oz characters for your gaming table!

Just got the game reviewed on RPG.Net

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/15/15076.phtml

Just got reviewed over at RPG.net. Check it out!

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/15/15076.phtml

Hey guys,

OK, so I know this question is naive. But I thought this was the place to ask it.

How does one go about getting into the gaming industry? I bet the market is glutted with wannabe rpg writers, but does anybody know how the writers at Wizards, Paizo, White Wolf or whatever got where they are today?

Just curious, and appreciate the feedback!

Quite simply, you do it. You write something and you put it out there. Whether it's a submission to a publisher or a forum post.

I wound up self-publishing because my project seemed a little too niche to shop around. The upside of self-publishing is that you get all the rewards for your efforts. The downside is that you also take all the risks.

Arevashti wrote:

If that's a tien-lung, I will squee.

This isn't Deliverance, you're not Ned Beatty, you don't have a pretty mouth. So no squee-ing, please.

I can state with authority that Arevashti does indeed have a pretty mouth. There is, in fact, much that is pretty about her. The almost exact opposite of Ned Beatty. And neither of us have seen Deliverance.

And she said squee, not squeal.

No problem. I find Landscape to be great on screen, but useless to print (I print my PDFs in a 8.5"x5.5" digest size). As it is if I'm going to give this a thorough read through I will have to chop it into portrait orientation to print it or read it in a very weird format (although I may give it a try).

The pages should cut neatly in half to produce 8.5x5.5 pages. Depending on how you do this, it can easily be a minor annoyance or a total pain.

Is the game system compatible with or easily convertible to Pathfinder or any other system?

The system itself was built from the ground up to model the Oz stories, so it wasn't designed to be compatible with anything else. You're certainly free to try, though.

I like the content, but I'm not a big fan of the landscape format of it.

I figured the two-column landscape format was the best compromise between screen-readability and printability. If you only need one of those, then it's probably not that great.

Thank you for the first negative feedback I've gotten on this project. Helps keep all the good feedback from going to my head. :)

I missed this when it first came out but ordered the hardcopy today after seeing the PDF up for sale. I think it will make a good christmas present for one of my kids. Just need to figure out which one now. :)

If I had any supplements, I'd say get the core for one and the supplement for the other. That way, they'd have to cooperate to play.

Since I don't, get the other kids Oz books. I recommend the Books of Wonder editions, which are faithful reproductions of the original books. Avoid Lulu for Oz. A lot of people there are trying to make a buck off of the Gutenberg e-texts.

Yeah. Over at Lulu.com. I'm also looking at the POD option over at RPGNow/Drivethru, but I haven't seen their print quality yet.

Also, if you do purchase this game, please post a review. There are some reviews for the game out there, but none on my direct purchase sites. Share the Oz love!

Good to see this up here Mr. Wall.

It's been here for a while, but nobody's bought it. So I decided to give a little bump to this piece of "based on the book" goodness.

If you've been looking for a game to play with your kids, this is something you might look into.

I'm thinking for a low level ability (3-5th or so) for the Justice Domain, a sort of divination ability to help gather clues. You've already got the good divination spells in the domain spell list, so I don't really have a solid suggestion there.

For higher level power, how about a smite guilty ability 1/day? It works like smite evil, but it works regardless of alignment as long as you have evidence of the target's crime.

F.A.T.A.L. and RAHOWA have been mentioned. Therefore, the thread is over and done with.

Although Palladium is pretty bad, and Cyborg Commando just sucks.

Cool stuff. I just went down a rabbit hole looking at Oz stuff after seeing this post. I had no idea that there was so much out there...and only the vaguest concept that a good portion of the material was in the public domain. Good luck with this.

M

It's a big world and my biggest marketing challenge is getting people to see that rather than some land where everybody sings about the things they're missing.

Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road.

This 136-page softcover book contains:

All you need to create and play your own Oz hero (or recreate your old favorites).

A bloodless combat system, making the game suitable for all ages.

Descriptions of over 30 locations from the classic Oz stories, as well as advice on creating your own Ozzy locales.

"The Jaded City of Oz" a sample adventure to get you playing quickly.

Dorothy may not have learned any magic spells, but it seems like she must have gotten more hit points and better saving throws, because she started going on adventures more and more recklessly, without fear of danger, as the series progressed.

Actually, Dorothy never took a hit throughout the entire series. What made Dorothy grow as a character was her friends. Especially once she hooked up with Princess Ozma, she knew that she had magical protection greater than anything that Oz or the Nome King could throw at her.

On the subject of character growth and advancement, I feel that it's important for PCs to have a sense of accomplishment and empowerment. This does not always translate into (warning! TVTropes link)More Dakka. Sometimes, having a wing of the local hospital named after one of the PCs is enough.

(I recently published an Oz RPG, so I've done a lot of thinking on this one.)

I'll argue the idea that old-school gamers don't like roleplaying. They simply allow it to emerge from play, rather than being the purpose of play. The way to find traps in a dungeon is not to make Search rolls, but to imagine yourself in the room the DM just described and describe yourself examining the room's features so that you might discover the trap. In RPG circles, that's called "immersion" and is one of the goals of many games.

One thing you might do on the Schadenfreude angle is what Prime Time Adventures does. Their mechanic sets up not only who succeeds, but who describes that result. And depending on how things go, it doesn't even have to be any of the people involved in the conflict.

Well, looks like they already picked something, but I like "athame."

Her newest entry is up. Meet the first new race: the apsuri.

Linkified.

Thanks. One day I will master these forums. Today is not that day.

My fiancee is working on a campaign setting for Pathfinder called "The Southlands". It's a new continent that can be imported into your existing campaign or treated as a distinct setting of its own. There are even a few new races, for those time when elves and orcs seem a little too trite.

To help her format her ideas, she's set up a blog at http://southlandsproject.blogspot.com/ Updated every other Saturday with some new race or other piece of the setting for you critique, comment on, or even use in your game. Only two updates are up yet, but it's just getting started, folks. Check it out!