Heroic Roleplaying in a World of Swords, Sorcery, and Steam
I’d like to introduce Aetrimonde, a TTRPG I’ve been designing with heavy inspiration from the houserules my group used back in our Dungeons and Dragons 4e days. I’m not ready to publish Aetrimonde yet, but I’m opening up this blog to discuss its design principles, mechanics, and systems.
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Category: Design and Mechanics
Posts about my goals for Aetrimonde and how I implemented them in the system’s underlying rules.
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In a recent post on the creation of Gwynne, elf artificer, I revealed the artificer class’s Tinkering feature, which allows them to temporarily modify an enchantment on a magical item. But at the time, I didn’t go into details about what an enchantment was. Well, today I’m going to be revealing the basics of Aetrimonde’s…
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Today, I’m going to talk about the first of Aetrimonde’s subsystems, ritual magic. I’m defining subsystems to mean parts of the rules that not all characters will necessarily interact with, or interact with in a deep way. Everything I’ve revealed so far (heritage, class, skills, perks, feats, powers, equipment, even how enemies work…) is common…
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I’ve shown off enough enemies, and discussed how they scale in difficulty, that I think today is a great time to share some of the guidance that the GM Handbook has for building encounters. The Encounter Metric Every enemy has an Encounter Value (EV) that represents how difficult they are to defeat, based on their…
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Today, I’m going to follow on from my previous post on level scaling and take a look at how PCs would fare against enemies of higher and lower tiers. This post may be best viewed on a larger screen, because there are some large tables in it. Accuracy As a baseline, let’s take a look…
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Today, I’m going to go over how characters–and the enemies they face–scale with level. This is tied into one of Aetrimonde’s core design principles, Solid Level Scaling, so I want to get it right, and that means putting some thought into the math. Player Character Scaling Let’s start by going over how PCs scale with…
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Having discussed the balancing of attack bonuses and defenses in today’s first post, the last major, overarching point of balance to discuss is damage vs. health. Choosing the Point of Balance The underlying decision here is not how much damage I want characters and monsters to be able to take, but how many turns it…
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It’s a double post today! In this post, I’m going to get into the design and balancing assumptions that ensure a “typical” attacker will hit a “typical” defender about 2/3 of the time. And, in the post that follows, I’ll be going over the related process of balancing damage against hit points. Attack Mechanics As…
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As I’ve just gone over how skills work, I thought today would be a good opportunity to cover some of the design decisions that went into skill and ability checks. Typical Skill and Ability Checks Unlike attacks, where I have benchmarked things so that a typical character will have +4 in the ability they use…
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In the post series on Unified Mechanics (first post here), I described in general terms how some core mechanics would work, but I didn’t attach all the necessary numbers to them. In this series, I’ll start hanging numbers on that framework to achieve a benchmark I mentioned in an earlier post: that a character should…
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Today’s entry in the Unified Mechanics series will cover ability mechanics, which are used to quantify a character’s raw, well, abilities. I’ll also touch briefly on some of the major character stats that will derive from abilities. I found there to be a couple of silly things about D&D’s ability mechanics, even in 4e, and…
Aetrimonde 