Swords & Wizardry Launch

jgbrowning · Post by **jgbrowning** » Fri Oct 17, 2008 9:24 am

Downloaded and skimmed - looks very clear and clean. I'll have to read more of it over this weekend. Glad that it's seeing the light of day, Matt.

joe b.

Aliegha · Post by **Aliegha** » Fri Oct 17, 2008 10:20 am

cant wait to check it out

Thoth Amon · Post by **Thoth Amon** » Fri Oct 17, 2008 1:25 pm

If it is ok to ask a question about your design choice on this thread, why did you use D6 for hit dice on all three classes yet D8 for monsters and variable damage for weapons?

Mythmere · Post by **Mythmere** » Fri Oct 17, 2008 2:10 pm

Thoth Amon wrote:If it is ok to ask a question about your design choice on this thread, why did you use D6 for hit dice on all three classes yet D8 for monsters and variable damage for weapons?

I used d6 with a bonus that approximates the Supplement 1 averages, so numerically the character hit dice correspond to the d8 HD, which in turn corresponds to the variable weapon damage. Fighters have a +2 to that d6, clerics have a +1, and the MU has a -1. It was a compromise between the d6 from the White Box and the numbers from Supplement 1. Why a compromise, when it ends up being neither fish nor fowl? Because at one time I was trying to capture the feel of the White Box while retaining the flexibility of the post-whitebox for house-ruling and compatibility. I abandoned that goal and split the projects into a white box group as well as my core (post-WB) project, because it became clear to me that my biases were getting in the way of my writing the White Box project accurately, and that I simply couldn't do both in one set of rules.

Why didn't I change the hit dice back to the traditional ones at that point? Mm, I don't really know. The average was the same, and I really liked the feel of it, so I kept it as one of the "legal-oriented" modifications that you've got to have in one of these things. But in truth, the d6 with bonus for character hit dice really wasn't ever a "design" type of thing; it resulted from having too many goals at once, and stayed because I just felt affectionate toward using a d6 for all the classes...

But numerically in terms of averages, it matches up with the d8 monster HD and the variable weapon damage.