d20 Designers Suck. Film at 11.

I'm getting a little ranty again, so bear with.

... What the hell is it with bad d20 design?

It's not just limited to my substandard work. No, I have to see godawful crap pop up on sites and message boards every day. Spell level limits for spellcasters (remember those from 2e?). Feats that take a page to describe for an effect that isn't even worth the slot. Classes that give you the benefit of two spellcasting progressions and class features. Etc., etc.

And it shows up in professional work all the time, too. Scarred Lands has feats with a limited number of uses per day that don't tell you how many uses they get. Prestige classes with abilities listed on their progression chart that never appear in the actual class feature list. The new Dragonlance has adapted Heroic Surge (from Mutants & Masterminds), for those of you who think the 3e version of haste for every class is a really good idea.

To some extent, I blame WotC. I won't blame them for much, but they've rarely given out good tips on how to design things like prestige classes. People are pretty much up in the air. There was a good article on feats early in 3e's lifespan, but it's since become somewhat dated (feats are clearly beefed up a bit in 3.5) and so designers don't really have any help from the folks at the company. You have to figure out the dos and don'ts by looking at a lot of the Wizards-established material and judging by eye. And in some cases, even that's a real bad idea - for example, Book of Exalted Deeds has some feats that are real whoppers as far as feat balance is concerned. Granted, not all feats will be equal (that's part of the point) it is still pretty easy to overpower them.

So I've been thinking I should share some of my thoughts on d20 design in the upcoming weeks. But for now, skills in Upgrade. It's a little extra bonus for missing my post yesterday. Job issues.

Unlike attributes, skills in Upgrade are not rated by number. You can be a Novice, Expert, or Master in a skill, and have a corresponding level of expertise. There's two extra types which aren't ratings per se, but are used in place of them in certain situations. These are Talent and Program. Talent refers to something you have a talent for, but no training. Program refers to a skill you have programmed - you have great expertise, but little creativity.

Skill rolls have two frames of challenge rather than one. There is difficulty, which determines how hard it is for you to do the task. Then, there's challenge, which is how hard the task is. For example, if you're jumping across a wide gap, difficulty is how much room you have to run before you can make the jump, and challenge is how wide the gap is.

Difficulties are rated the same - Novice, Expert, and Master. When rolling an attribute to determine success for a skill, you are at +2 if your skill is better than the difficulty, -2 if it's lower, and there's no modifier if it's the same. Talent means you have only a -1 when using the skill when the task is if Novice Difficulty, but the normal -2 otherwise. Program means you never have a penalty or bonus when rolling that skill - you just use the attribute straight.

Skill rolls are 1d10. If you roll above the challenge (typically a 10), you succeed, yay for you.

That's all for now.