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Monday, January 7, 2013

Trimming the d30 Fat Fluff

When it comes to the d30 Companions, one of the things Welbo and I try to take great concern with is avoiding the fluff. For example, here's one of the pages that we had in a previous internal version that you WON'T see in the final d30 Sandbox Companion.

Why?

Because we talked about it, and it felt like space-filler.

So if we felt like that was page filler, imagine how many must have felt about The Armory's 30 Sided Dice Gaming Tables...

In addition to this waste of space (at left), there are additional PAGES for dwarf, elf, gnome, and "hobbit" height. That's 5 pages out of 40 dedicated solely to the height of characters. Wow! THAT'S fluff. It's obvious that the book was meant to capitalize on a polyhedral novelty. But that's not my goal.

My goal is USEFUL stuff for the DM, aided by the use of the d30. The book should be the reason to own/use a d30, and not the other way around. That means trimming fluff like the height charts, and adding useful stuff like additional encounter charts by terrain type.

So most of the fat has been trimmed, and we're making sure the rest of the book is as meaty as possible.

More updates to follow SOON!
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3 comments:

  1. Matthew SchmeerJanuary 7, 2013 at 10:25 AM

    Maybe save all those for the d30 Fluffy Companion?

    ReplyDelete
  2. New Big DragonJanuary 7, 2013 at 10:40 AM

    That actually sounds like a better idea than you may have intended!

    ReplyDelete
  3. AndrewJanuary 14, 2013 at 9:33 AM

    What I did for physical traits for characters was a number of tables you could roll on, then I synthesized them into a single big percentile roll. It may not be precisely probability clean (I know it is not) but you can either roll for a number of traits, or roll once for a number of traits already combined. I really like the result.

    For this particular game, all the characters are human, but it's the idea that counts.

    That's on pages 269-273 of my free .pdf for "The World Between for Fictive Hack." Great thing about a free .pdf backed up by POD is that I don't have to worry about the amount of fluff I put in...

    http://fictivefantasies.wordpress.com/fictive-hack/

    Keep up the good work!

    ReplyDelete