Examined In Greater Detail
I spent a bit more time poking around Keith Davies’s site. I’m not sure whether the site is technically called “In My Campaign,” of “Keith Davies – In My Campaign,” it seemed a little ambiguous to me. I mean, the initials would seem to indicate there’s a middle name in there too, so it’s hard to say. Anyway, there’s some good stuff here.
Keith Davies – In My Campaign
Actually, I’m not quite sure how I got from the Echelon d20 page to the main page. I think it took some acrobatics of navigation, since clicking “home” just about anywhere just brings me to the Echelon d20 home. I must have clicked on one of the recent/popular posts and somehow got transported over to the main site. *shrug*
So, I’m really not sure where to start with this site. There’s tons of cool ideas and information related to game design, and a lot of it looks like it covers the same ground (and the same kind of information) that I do, just in different ways. There are even clear influences of wuxia, which I totally drew on for a bunch of my own stuff.
…Hehe, I just found a page wherein he describes reviewing another d20/system project (“Threshold d20”) for comparison to his own Echelon d20. And here I am reviewing his system for comparison to mine. So. Meta. Threshold d20 Review.
Reading through the content of Keith Davies’s site actually spurred me to review the Revised System Reference Document and related legal material in case there was something I needed to watch out for – I don’t think there is, I don’t devise d20 System material for a purpose other than commentary, criticism, or research.
I agree with a lot of the design principles that I’ve seen here, it’s just… I don’t know. Maybe there’s a liberal-traditional split here. I see lots of designs that fall within the strict confines of the d20 System that don’t really innovate or add anything new. They’re variations. They don’t fix design problems so much as displace them.
Classless systems seem to me like a recipe for boredom and aimlessness. I know some people really like classless systems but one of the things I notice about some of the heavy-hitters (like White Wolf/Storyteller products) is they have another character-defining system comparable to classes, like “vampire traditions.”
It’s mostly just a different way of doing thing. But then, in games that lack classes, or class-like mechanics entirely (like Big Eyes, Small Mouth), something fundamental is lacking: Context. Cohesion. Part of how you define a character is through his or her companions, and if you don’t “get” your companions, your own character suffers.
Maybe it’s just me. Or maybe I don’t hang out with the right kind of roleplayers. Maybe if I played GURPs, I’d have a better understanding. I mean, I like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls (for all the class structure they lack), but those are games that I think function largely because they’re single-player computer games. Solitary, not group games.
But now I’ve gotten totally off-topic. *frown* I’ll come back to this.
My username on any number of systems over the years has generally been ‘kjdavies’. ‘Davies’ is a common last name around here, first names starting with ‘K’ are fairly common, so inserting the middle initial is usually enough to make the name unique enough for the systems administrator. Also, my dad’s name is Keith too, so I ended up using my middle name through high school, until I got tired of correcting people in university and finally decided to continue using Keith.
So, ‘KJD’ is how I label things that need my initials.
Also, the kjd-imc site originated after I had been posting to rec.games.frp.dnd for quite a while and had adopted a practice of marking my new posts with ‘{kjd-imc}’ (and later ‘{kjd-gaz}’, ‘{kjd-mod}’, ‘{kjd-raw}’, and so on for higher-resolution labelling) to make it possible to find them again later.
When I created the site it was specifically for these posts, and it was originally called KJD-IMC (hence the domain name). That was a little too opaque, even for me, so I just expanded the abbreviation.
My background is largely d20-based — I started some 15 years before that, but I’ve forgotten a lot of it because d20 already solved a lot of what dissatisfied me about D&D, and was easier to hack on. Most crunchy stuff on KJD-IMC is derived directly from D&D 3.x, and it shows. The more out-there stuff eventually became Echelon, and ultimately was put on the newer Echelond20 site.
As far as classless is concerned, I think most classless systems I’ve seen lack cohesion because they are too high-resolution. You’re given a box of LEGO and told to build something… which is kind of cool because you can, if you have enough skill, build almost anything. It’s a fiddly pain in the ass getting there because of the system expertise you need to develop and the time spent tweaking and twinking, and… bah.
Echelon tries to avoid that my giving you big pieces to work with. Unlike HERO, say, where you pick (or design) the moves that go with your unique martial arts style (that looks like many others because those are the good moves), plus decide how many combat skill levels to put toward it, and how applicable to make them, and… I just provide bigger pieces that answer those questions. If you want a samurai character you might then just take the Martial Tradition, Clan of the Wolf fighting style (sword combat style), and a couple of other things and your too-san (daddy) would be proud.
Echelon is classless because classes didn’t bring anything to the design, and in fact impeded it. Archetypes describe common sets of choices to make and generally leave some open, and the capstones often give mechanical goals… but you aren’t required to do these things.
I think together these will let me avoid most of the hazards of classless games.