cost scaling is based entirely on how many techs you have, and the base rate of discovery is how many years pass—though i’d consider multiplying that by population, if it wouldn’t be too crazy. will mess around w it :) thank you again!!
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hi, thank you—i really appreciate the feedback! having a rest action for cities and diplomacy between teams are the very next things i want to do; i just don’t know how to implement them in a way i’m happy with, yet.
there isn’t really a time-scaling function: meeps and techs both increase in cost the more of them you have, respectively. discovery is supposed to be accelerated by libraries and universities, but their outputs may be too low and the increase rate may be too high. if i can ask, how many hoplites (or meeps in general) did you have at the point where it felt too long?
thank you! :)
hi, thank you so much!
i didn’t think of foci as recharging, especially since that would mean players could get one and be done. however, it makes sense for a mage to be able to recharge a focus, so i’ve added a rule saying that :)
also i thought of foci as being like wands or staffs, but ritual daggers and similar cool items would be really neat! there’s not a rule for what they should be. the text is focused more on function than form, but you should take that as an invitation to make the form interesting to you and your friends.
so happy to hear y’all had fun!! thank you as well for your kind words :D
i had been thinking about introducing simple backgrounds, giving a skill or maybe even +1 attack or 1 energy. maybe will add abstract backgrounds as a rule like that, though having specific backgrounds are really nice to give your characters flavor!
hey PR and thank you!!
someone asked me similar with regards to my bite-sized dungeon pamphlet. my feeling is that i don’t think of tables as being very useful. someone else responded to them to use chatgpt, and that sort of reflects my feelings about it—what effort spent making a table is better spent than making a specific, concrete place? i don’t know if it’s helpful to have a table of things like, “ruins”, “caves”, “tower”.
but what i think would be more interesting is using the monster table, instead, because that tells you about the inhabitants. what are werewolves doing with treants? what about hoblins with giants? what treasure are they holding onto, and why? i think those are more productive prompts that tie directly into the site and its various dimensions.
Hi there! I’m open to FMC proper being translated, but FMC Basic is constantly changing and isn’t a cohesive system as much as a bunch of house rules. Y’all are free to make your own ruleset inspired by it, or even translate it, but I would feel bad if y’all put work into translating it and then it changed.
thank you for your kind words and feedback! i wanted to clarify some aspects, mostly that this isn’t meant to be a complete / totalizing system as much as a supplement or substitution for some aspects of OD&D.
for example, i will add explicit rules for hirelings! but the way i would treat them is just hiring them for a month and doing morale checks like for other NPCs.
another example is the ‘basic roll’, which i don’t consider to be a specific resolution procedure, as much as a point at which you would turn to randomness. i like 50-50, some people like 2-in-6, and some people might insert ability checks.
(also: neither dungeons nor the overworld are really point-crawls! i make a comparison between the wilderness proper and a point-crawl, but that’s just because i think it’s interesting to restrict movement between ‘wild hexes’ based on what paths are familiar to the travelers.)
Hi! I think the contents of a dungeon, because they are most of the work, are the most interesting parts. I wasn’t really interested in providing generic flavor tables because I don’t find them compelling or flavorful.
The idea is that you go into this with a fun idea for a dungeon, but don’t know where to start with regards to layout and stocking. For lack of ideas to make your own dungeon, there’s so many existing dungeons out there, and they wouldn’t be helped by this because they already exist.
thank you so much! yes, i’ve allowed players to split or combine attacks as they wish—the default in the LBBs is that characters have 1 attack per hit die (against regular figures), so the idea is just that you can choose to combine them instead though you are not forced to.
i probably would not allow monsters who already have multiple attacks or damage dice to keep them; instead, i would consider that to be encapsulated/replaced by the simple skirmish system which just looks at their hit dice.
hi there! i don’t think it’s possible to read the text critically, as a product of its cultural context, and not arrive at the conclusion that the authors were influenced by a socially ingrained prejudice against indigenous people (especially considering the western genre’s influence on sword-and-sorcery pulp literature). luckily for us, gygax explains this himself in a forum post from 2005, comparing the position of lawful-good characters who are obliged to slay evil characters (where evil, above all else, is a racial categorization) to the position of american soldiers killing not only native american warriors but women and children (“nits make lice”). again, i think all this is quite clear from the text itself, but this interpretation agrees entirely with gygax’s own. take it up with him!
thank you! and chainmail lists armor classes from 1 to 8 rather than from 9 to 2 (or from 10 to 17, which is extremely modern). descending armor class as it appears in D&D is a post-chainmail modification by gygax, seemingly because a system similar to target-20 may have been used in the game at some time prior to publication.
i thought it’d be more interesting to have the original values to encourage people to look at it as a distinct set of rules.