Blast From the Past

I stumbled on a printed-out manuscript of some old house rules I made up for Pathfinder. That project started out as a bunch of small changes I was going to make to the rules, but the changes grew to the point where I figured I might as well write my own game instead of expressing my changes as a set of house rules. That's when I started work on my own personal d20 heartbreaker, combining elements of Pathfinder and True20 into an unholy mishmash.

Over the last few years, I've refined some of the assumptions behind those house rules. However, since I'm trying to get back into blogging and other forms of writing, I figured I'd do a series of posts on those old rules, the good and bad points about them (as I see it), and some new rules incorporating some ideas from those house rules. I hope to do a post on each chapter of that manuscript. Following the sequence of chapters, the topics, in order, will be:

1. Character Creation (die rolls, point buy, and default arrays)
2. Classes (with an emphasis on the core classes)
3. Gamemastering (encounter and NPC design, plus character advancement, for reasons to be discussed later)
4. GM Tricks (ways to make these house rules waaay more flexible than the standard game)

The first post might be coming later this week, and I'm going to try to get these posted in fairly rapid succession (at least compared to my usual turtle-paced writing).