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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Today’s topic will be resource mechanics. A resource mechanic gives characters a reserve of something (health, stamina, mana, etc.) that can be spent to do things, or that they need to conserve. In this post, I’m only going to discuss the types of resources that all characters will share as part of the goal of…
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In my last post, I discussed resolution mechanics used to determine success or failure of actions, and I introduced Aetrimonde’s version: the Core Roll. Today, I’ll cover circumstance mechanics that can alter these and other rolls. Warning: this post contains math. On top of the resolution mechanic, I also want a circumstance mechanic: something that…
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For today’s post, I’ll be talking about Aetrimonde’s resolution mechanic, called the core roll, that is used to determine the success or failure of just about every action in the game. An RPG needs a resolution mechanic to avoid the cops-and-robbers problem. (“I shot you!” “Nuh-uh!” “Yes so!” and so on.) This is some kind…
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When I sat down to take Aetrimonde from a hodgepodge of houserules to a game system that would stand on its own, the list of what I liked and disliked about 4e wasn’t quite the same as what I’ve discussed in my last two posts. For one thing, that was about 10 years ago, and…
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In the previous post, I talked about the things that 4e did well for the types of games I wanted to run. But if 4e had been a perfect system for my purposes, I wouldn’t have felt the need to invent houserules, or homebrew content, or eventually, to write Aetrimonde. 4e got a lot of…
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There’s never going to be a “perfect” RPG system, because different GMs and players and groups will want to tell different stories, in different styles, and no single system is going to be the right one for all of them. 4e was no different: it did some things well, and some things poorly, and I…
Aetrimonde 