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Showing posts from August, 2017

Cypher System - GM prep

Game Master (GM or in D&D, DM) prep is a chore. No matter how much you love world building and creating stories, there is a lot to get done in order to play a game. Generally, GMs end up handling scheduling, educating players about the game, creating stories and maintaining the flow of the game. To make things as easy as possible, the Cypher System uses a simple level system to determine difficulties and levels of effect. This can be a wonderful thing when you want to focus your prep time on stories and interactions. The level system is very simple and applies to everything the GM is responsible for. The difficulty of a task is given a level from 1-10 (sometimes greater). To achieve success, a player needs to roll equal to or higher than the difficulty * 3 on a 2-sided die (d20). So a level 10 difficulty requires a 30 (which is impossible) and a level 1 is a 3. Anything that is a difficulty 0 is automatically successful. To create Non-Player Characters (NPCs), traps, Cyphers ...

Cyberpunk Concepts for D&D 5e

After a fun conversation with my friend Allison (@moonstruckmaid) I started thinking about a cyberpunk mod for D&D 5e. It has a fair amount of crunch like Shadowrun and I think that cyberpunk would do well with a level-based system. Concept 1: Character classes modded from D&D 5e More on this soon, but in short, mod the classes to reflect a cyberpunk setting. Concept 2: Characters exist in an Augmented Reality (AR) version of the world that replaces reality. No one walks around outside of AR; doing so is a cultural taboo. Therefore, the incredible effects of hackers that mimic spells are a part of the reality people experience. Additionally, the disconnect between physical meat people and cyber avatars makes cultural norms change. Concept 3: Cyber death is a result of system shock in AR. When a person's avatar is destroyed, they find themselves locked out of the System, trapped in meatspace. This is potentially deadly in real life because there are no offline service...