Before jumping into another big area of Arcana Unearthed's design, like classes or the magic system, I thought I'd discuss some of the general issues I faced as a designer starting the book.

Removing Alignment
Getting rid of alignment isn't as easy as you would think. Alignments may be unrealistic ways of looking at people, but they are extremely useful for categorizing groups of creatures when you need to. For example, one new class in the book is the champion. The champion isn't really just one class, though, it's many -- depending on what you're the champion of, two champions can actually be pretty different in abilities and approach. For example, there are champions of life, death, light, darkness, and freedom. Now, with alignments, it would be easy to give the champion of freedom powers that work against lawful evil creatures (oppressive, freedom-hating types). Without alignments, that becomes trickier. But that's good, in the end, because it forces me to be creative. Now, I'm not 100 percent anti-alignment. In fact, for a certain type of game, I think it's a great tool. However, it can become a designer's crutch. It's just too easy -- sometimes -- to give someone a +1 bonus against a particular alignment.

Without alignments, I have to remind myself that concepts like "good" and "evil" are still around, they're just relative. That means that, while they don't work their way into the game's mechanics, they still have a place in the flavor of the implied setting. For example, there are still demons around, and some people make human sacrifices to appease their demon lords. That's still clearly "evil," at least from the point of view of most of the people who live in the campaign world. The difference is, the villains doing the sacrificing probably don't consider themselves evil. And if those committing the sacrifice believe that what they are doing will actually save lots of lives in the long run by appeasing the demons, who won't then bring a famine to the land, well, no one has to puzzle out how that affects the paladin's detect evil ability -- in this book there are no paladins and no detect evil spells. If you want to know whether someone's evil, you'll have to puzzle it out for yourself.

Armor Class
I've heard a lot of people express an interest in changing armor from Armor Class to a damage reduction system. I myself was very interested in the idea and have now spent considerable time exploring it with different options. I've decided, however, that while a workable system could be created, it's too big a change. The reason? The characters created to work properly in such a system would look very different from normal d20 characters, and one of my goals is to make this book -- while complete -- also compatible with "normal" d20 System rules. See, the whole foundation for base attack bonuses, magical enhancement bonuses (and their value), touch attacks, and various spells assumes that armor gives you a high Armor Class. If it doesn't, then even people with the worst base attack bonuses will hit most of the time. The attack roll becomes fairly meaningless, and thus so do magical enhancement bonuses, etc. Worse, touch attacks lose all meaning. All attacks, in effect, become touch attacks.

Now, these problems are not insurmountable by any means. They can all be fixed. But the proper way to do it is to not only change armor, but base attack bonus progressions, what magical bonuses mean to weapons (and their relative values), and so on. Suddenly, while workable, the finished character sheets for this game don't look like their d20 counterparts. That is a problem.

What I'm toying with now is to present the guidelines for handling this (since I've done the work) as a variant rule either in Arcana Unearthed or in The Diamond Throne: Malhavoc Handbook II. Stay tuned to this design diary if you're interested in this idea.

On the topic of Armor Class, though, I thought I'd mention that the biggest problem with the standard base attack bonus vs. Armor Class system is that, particularly at higher levels, it becomes extremely difficult to have Armor Classes high enough to challenge attack rolls. When you've got 15th level characters, attack rolls of 35+ are fairly routine (d20 roll + base attack bonus + Strength modifier + magic weapon + spell effects + Weapon Focus + other feats). Even for clerics and rogues. But it's really rare to see an Armor Class in the 30s. Sure, it's possible, but the character's got to have really focused on Armor Class to get there. That makes for a lot of uninteresting rolls -- uninteresting because you know you're always going to hit.

So to help a bit, I've introduced some new ways to get higher Armor Classes. For some not-heavy-armor-wearing classes, there is a level-based Armor Class dodge bonus. For those who do like heavy armor, there are some new types of armor and some armor specialization feats that make the character who wants to really be a tank into a tank. As I've mentioned earlier, some of these changes include what I am calling exotic armor. This is armor you have to be specially trained to wear correctly to utilize its unique designs. The changes aren't drastic, but I think it's enough to make a difference.

Next week I'll discuss a bit about game balance and DMing issues.

 

DESIGN DIARY PAST ENTRIES

* Arcana Unearthed Races -- December 5 , 2002
"I started with the races. While I knew that the game needed humans as a basis, I wanted all the other races to be new. I didn't want to just create dwarf and elf analogs with different names...."