Couple of custom rule add-ins all in one place

Rules Discussion House Rules
1

I am thinking of making a super long and difficult campaign with insane amounts of dice and to do so I need some additions to the rules, so I am here to ask you guys what you think.

I want to make my chars go to insane levels of Abilities like 20, and I have made a table, to accompany it.

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To buy such high ability scores, the level cap must not exist so level 100 could be reachable, but would be EXTREMELY hard, and xp would be a much better tracker of progress.

I have also “made” two feats, one of which is partially on the site here

  • Have a feat that give you 1 feat point and lowers one of your scores (GM chooses) by 2.

  • Feat that lets you “combine” two attributes when rolling with either of them.
    You can add the dice of the other stat as it is the power level of this Feat.
    Cost of the feat is double of the power level.
    PL1 → 2, PL2 → 4… PL10 → 20… PL20 - > 40
    Both attributes must be higher or equal than the power level of the feat.

E.G. Energy 3 & Agility 5 - Max PL is 3. Cost is 6
When doing an Agility roll you can add 1d8 to your 2d6 roll
When doing an Energy roll you can add 1d8 (not 2d6) to your 1d8 roll.

I am not sure if the attribute thing is overpowered, and if it maybe needs some other rule to balance it out.

Truth be told I have never come to an above level 5 game so I am way over my head in this. :smiley:

(I am not active enough, so I am not aware of any of these things already exist)

2

There’s a reason that attribute scores cap at 10 in game, even for Bosses, and it’s not because we didn’t want people to keep playing past level 9. Beyond the score of 11 in your table the statistics of the dice stop following the nice probability curves that they’re supposed to and they stop interacting with Advantage the same way.

Even if it did somehow work, your dice progression is wrong. You need to do some stupid things to keep the average results correct, like progressing from 7d12 to 9d10 then going from 10d10 to 9d12 a couple of levels later. Even then it doesn’t work correctly with advantage anymore. I made a post about it on the old Mightybell forums that someone kindly transferred over when we changed websites.

As for the feats, I’m not sure I like how variable the one that gives you a feat point is. Depending on how nice the GM is feeling then it could either be a free feat point with basically no drawback (like if you go from 2 to 0 in Deception and don’t plan on ever lying) or completely cripple your character (like if you go from 9 to 7 in Agility at level 9, essentially putting you 2 levels behind the rest of the party). With a consistent GM though, it could work.

The “combining attributes” thing is absolutely overpowered, no question about it. Adding dice to your pool is significantly better than advantage, and also stacks well with advantage on top of that.

In the example you gave, adding that extra d8 increases your average Agility roll by 5, approximately equivalent to Advantage 4 on all Agility rolls; which would cost 32 feat points to get a weaker version of in the Core Rules:

4x3=12 from Attack Specialisation (for one particular weapon type) + 4x2=8 from Skill Specialisation + 4x1=4 from Lightning Reflexes + 4x2=8 from Defensive Reflexes = 32 and you don’t get bonuses to bane attacks from those 32 points either

This feat could maybe work if you restrict it to a single kind of action (either Damaging Attacks or non-combat rolls, like Attack/Skill Specialisation) and double the cost to 4 points per tier (non-combat rolls) or triple it to 6 (for damaging attacks).

Sorry to be so negative, I hope my criticism is at least constructive.

3 Likes
3

I basically agree with what @SamWilby said here. A few possible additional things to note:

A level cap doesn’t actually exist in the game. A suggested stopping point of level 10 is written in for 2 reasons:

  1. Higher level characters are usually powerful enough that engineering challenges for them can become difficult
  2. The core rules don’t include attempt balancing or information for encounter challenges past level 10
    • This includes balancing in terms of the increased number of feat points you would have

If you want “insane levels of abilities” you should do this via feats rather than higher attribute scores, or more commonly through the items they can get or achieve making for themselves.

You can easily make a “super long and difficult” campaign with the current idea of stopping at level 10, or going beyond to level 20, etc. Remember that levels are different for OL than compared to say D&D. Level 5 is really like level 12 (12 XP), level 10 is like level 27, as you gain increases at each XP. So level 20 would be like level 57.

You would have to define the “attributes for feats” thing far more in depth. Personally I don’t like it b/c Feat points are more valuable than attribute points. With what you wrote, for example, I could spend 3 Attribute points to get something to a Score of 2, then bring it down to a score of 0 and get a feat point. I could do this several times, getting a 3:1 trade going.

Feat points can be very powerful, in fact, I was considering making an encounter guide that instead of using levels to balance an encounter, it bases it more on feat points (or number of 3 point, 2 point, and 1 point feats to be specific). That’s how much feats matter in the game.

I think you’ll be surprised at how powerful characters already are at the higher levels. Especially starting at Level 5, and certainly at level 7+

If you are wanting to make sure you have a longer game, than it is about slowing down progression rather than giving more levels, and remember, OL already says you can go past level 10, you just keeping using the system as is, in that you still have the same attribute caps and point progression for XP.

Now, 2 things you could do for a longer game:

  1. Allow the attribute cap to increase from 9 to 10 at some point, like level 15 or 20
  2. Make another variable, let’s say EXP, that you give out. It takes, let’s say, 5 EXP to get 1 XP
    • Naturally you can just do this by giving out XP more rarely, and awarding Legend Points instead (and you could increase the cap of 10 max legend points you are allowed to hold onto as well)
4

You will never be forgiven!!!
If I didn’t want criticism, I wouldn’t have posted. :smiley:

Tnx for linking this, I tried finding it (as it seems like a question many people would have), but with no luck.
I was not off by much I mean I had a good progress till 16 and my thinking after that was “Fuck it, Roll d20. You will already be a god.” As for advantage, at those levels, it loses meaning with you rolling this many dice, so I was not even thinking of it.

I wasn’t thinking about Attribute scores, but Defence scores (Guard, Toughness, Resolve). The reason I think the GM should choose is the feat you buy with that point, it needs to have some drawbacks.
Limiting it to only one point sounds cool in my opinion, and most people would only choose it if they need it.

I have made a mistake when explaining the cost (so much that I tricked myself).

Cost of the feat is double of the power level, plus the cost of power level before.
PL1 → 2, PL2 → 6… PL10 → 110… PL20 - > 420
Both attributes must be higher or equal than the power level of the feat.

So at level 3 it is 12, which is as you said too low.
My point was that at higher levels it’s cost becomes extremely high, even without taking anything else.
To have PL 10 you would need to be level 35 with 104 XP.
To have PL 20 you would need to be level 139 with 414 XP.

It is much better at lower levels (like level 5-7).

5

Maybe I wasn’t quite clear, I linked that post as an example of how increasing the attribute cap just doesn’t work. You say advantage loses meaning at those levels, but you’re also likely to have a lot more advantage from feats at those levels. At that point the numbers are just so absurd that there’s no point, the difference between an attribute you’ve invested in and one you haven’t is basically binary success/failure. I’d really recommend that you don’t go past 10 (11 just about works, so maybe have the cap at 10 so you can get 11 through Martial or Extraordinary Focus).

Your idea of making the cost of that feat exponential is better, but it makes it much better at lower levels. As as player, I basically have no reason not to pick up a couple of levels in this feat, especially in an extremely long campaign like you seem to be thinking.

On that note, I also think that the single bonus feat point you can get with your other custom feat is probably worth just cutting. In a long campaign where you’re going past level 10 then that single feat point isn’t going to be worth as much. For a shorter campaign, it might be interesting, but that’s not something I’d include if you’re planning on running it as ridiculously long as you seem to want to.

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I like a theme of feat that combine 2 attributes, but i’d rather use advantage based on secondary attribute than additional dice. How about 1 advantage per attribute score with max advantage value based on level of the feat. Depends on tiers number, I think the feat should cost from 3 to 6 points per tier, about 18 total.