First post here, so if I mess up on any formalities, feel free to call me out on it! I've been developing an RPG based on the D20 system for a while for a group that meets every Friday. I've got about 2 notebooks full of rules and items and little notes, and just recently I've decided to begin making the game a little bit more formally written.
   Just about everything is done now, as far as gameplay and rules, and its just a matter of making it pretty and presentable, and making sure how it is written in the rulebook makes sense!
   Essentially what I'm asking in this post is for those who have perhaps a greater wealth of experience than me playing these games (I'm only 19, so I've got about 5 years of Tabletop gaming under my belt), to perhaps suggest things they noticed don't happen often in other games that maybe should?
   critiques on what is already done are welcome on every front, from mechanics to design. although I'm telling you now to expect bad grammar and spelling. I've got an editing team that's gonna look through it up and down for that kind of stuff when it's done. link to the folder. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kto6pfnlrupeqwm/AAA2KyPg-Y_tKbMx9M6cymMOa?dl=0 The Document is called LegendsofGaia_fpages.pdf. the rest of the documents in the fodler are references and are subject to change. although the shop is mostly done.

just a taste of what the land of Gaia looks like, for those of you who are more visual

Wow, you have gotten very far along considering that this is from a homebrew campaign you've been doing.

On the deviant art page is says "found a company that will do color prints for the same price as i was gonna get my black and white copies. so i changed over, and began coloring the book. in addition to the added color, the berserker class has been finished! long time between uploads, but its been alot of work.
i also decided it was time for a sprite change. treasure time!"

How are you planning to distribute the book?

Why do you want to go color if the map is black and white and there aren't many other illustrations?

Mechanics wise, what we've done is create an event system for dealing with anything that could happen outside of combat (we have combat covered, but all of our RPG systems have been weak outside of combat.) "Events":
http://gameartsguild.com/content/index.php?title=Squawk:_Events

So I recommend you have a generic mechanic for handling all things the GM wants to "roll" for, but which aren't otherwise covered by game mechanics. It looks to me like you sort of have this covered with "Skill Checks" on page 10.

You might give specific guidelines on how the GM should assign "set difficulty."

thank you for the reply.

As of now, I don't have any plans to distribute printed versions, and was only going to print a couple copies for myself and a few friends. as for distribution to anyone who is interested, I was thinking of putting up digital copies either in a Facebook group, or Google circle, or maybe even its own website after a few web design classes.

and generally squawk is handling essentially the same way LoG will.

Even though it is not formally in the book yet, the idea is a the GM sets a difficulty and a few skills players can use, and than one or more players rolls the D20 and adds any skill modifiers, and any situation based modifiers

wasn't sure whether to put that in the very beginning section, the events section, or even in the couple pages of GM tips in the back. I'm thinking the events section when I'm done with the character creation section. (classes are tedious)

Again, thank you for the feedback!

i have not looked at the rules yet but that map is incredible it looks like you have the basis of a great setting there

and its d20 so im sure it will be great mechanically as well

does that map cover the whole planet or just a section and how many square kilometres does it cover

considering its called the grand ocean i assume there is some room between the east and west. However i notice there is no such naming at the north and south which would seem to indicate a very flat planet (or maybe im just reading to much into the map)

as for missed formality’s you did fine except you forgot to call anybody an arsehole

ok first major issue i notice is the focus on making sure races dont feel samey. While classes should feel difrent its not that important for races and you could end up putting stupid ideas in your races in an effort to make them unique. However the front page of your devientart page seems to indicate its mostly beastmen races so you can probably get away with uniqueness.

speaking of which i would advise against the continued use of devientart for sharing your progress devientart has a retarded definition of pornography that is sure to bite you in the arse eventually its why i dont use the place im not an artist but if i was i sure as hell would refuse to advocate a definition of pornography that is an insult to both art and pornography. if your doing animal races your bound to run into the matter of unusual reproductive organs.

edit:
also in the preface i like what you said about advancement

i really really do not like creation myths but this is passable i would say most would find it good

the whole kills for the greater good thing will really alienate any d&d players though (and to be honest i find the idea that there would not be enough land to make enough food laughable)

i should have posted this ages ago but i got distracted from reading the book by talking to my friends and helping with a friends dev work.

also other things

oh god critical skill fails thats not good

however the luck mechanic is quite good it makes critical skill successes good somehow i am seriously considering stealing that idea

luckily so far theres no sign of critical fumbles which is good

Thank you so much for the feedback!

as for Gaia and its size, i was thinking roughly earth size, if not a tad larger. each continent is going to get its own close up, with a scale. so i will have to figure it out eventually. For the Great sea, i had planned on it being huge, so huge that no traveller has gone all the way around. they either died out at sea, or found something out there (DUH DUH DUUUHHH!).

As far as making races feel different, its true. i have looked at the races and figured out a mechanic i want them to have, and had to work it in lore wise to fit with that race to avoid sameness. I am attempting to try and add as much variation as possible. which means i could have easily gone overboard, although some changes are gameplay related. vampyres and asheru are now way different than they used to be because one was overpowered and the other underpowered, so despite the huge differences, balance is at the heart of alot of those decisions.

I'm probably going to keep the idea of killing for the greater good, but yeah you are right, the whole not enough land for food thing is.... not great. I'll admit i haven't looked back in a while. i will probably change it to some sort of warring over land and power and whatnot between and inside the races, that looked something like what happened before the void war. so sammael decided to create a destructive race that the other races could pool their attention to and not just civil war themselves to death. but its still in the brainstorming phase. (also the old name for the Korr was the slorren, but i reused that name for the lizard people, and forgot to edit the earlier parts. whoops.)

After seeing the D&D community rip apart critical fumbles in 5e, i quickly threw that idea out. but after so much warhammer, I've gotten so used to 1's just failing. and i kind of like the idea. i mean it wouldn't cause anything bad to happen beyond just failing that one test, but if you roll a dice there should be a chance at failure i think.

Oh and Deviantart.... yeah im gonna get my own website up soonish hopefully. than setup camp there

Quote from: Fleshmonger;819657As far as making races feel different, its true. i have looked at the races and figured out a mechanic i want them to have, and had to work it in lore wise to fit with that race to avoid sameness. I am attempting to try and add as much variation as possible. which means i could have easily gone overboard, although some changes are gameplay related. vampyres and asheru are now way different than they used to be because one was overpowered and the other underpowered, so despite the huge differences, balance is at the heart of alot of those decisions.

Much depends on what you are trying to do here. If you are just trying to do homebrew D&D, then maybe you should go back to a more generic Tolkien-wannabe feel for race mechanics. If on the other hand you are trying to make a unique setting that you have a specific vision in mind for - which I think is what you are doing here - then I would keep the things about your setting that make it unique, especially the races. (Squawk is sci-fi so it's far from the same thing, but we've really tried to keep the races different and interesting, all the way down to the mechanics: http://gameartsguild.com/content/index.php?title=Squawk:_Characters#Backgrounds )

Oh I Definitely don't want just a d&d knockoff, hopefully something that feels different, as I'm not trying to compete with d&d, I want it to be for a slightly different audience. Of course you can't make a game without putting at least a few people off.

i got distracted by other things i will get back to reading it now

you have taken the lawful and chaotic alignments to a ridiculous extreme which in many ways seems more like evil for chaotic and good for lawful

i can live with the greater good destruction deity especially with it being balanced out by an evil death god but many of the other chaotic deitys really sound more evil to me

in general the deities you have really dont work with the alignment system i love alignments in d&d but they just plain dont work here

i notice that the evil karma earning is focused on hurting others for there own gain which is fine but its also important to consider those who are evil for evils sake which as an extension of what i mentioned earlier seems to have largely being wrapped up in chaotic

the dragons were what really interested me im a bit worried that those might be the only dragons i would much prefer those to be special dragons and then there are more lesser dragons for slaying and whatnot but really each dragon deserved there own paragraph.

you also seem to be having a fair bit of focus on neutral as a belief system which while people who believe that is an important part of any setting (it gives a group of people that every other alignment can hate) it is important to remember those who are simply neutral because they are neither good or evil although looking at it some more it seems to be just that 1 line about even neutral having a driving force.

my first concern in character gen is the armour saving going down as it gets better that's bound to cause scaling problems as characters become more powerful the large numbers may help with that though. however looking at the dodge skill i realise that's deliberate you want a definite power cap i prefer to be able to keep amassing power constantly but many people much prefer to have a limit so that's going to be the real skub of this system. at first i was a little worried about the large numbers because as you levelled up they would get far to high to deal with but it seems thats not going to be a problem.

the special character abilities section does not really fit a system like this though creating your own powers is really more for games like risus or a storygame but i suppose its not to bad

looking at the secondary statistics they look mostly alright although some of the names are a bit odd especially wisdom used for history knowledge the only thing that is mechanically a bit odd is intelligence also deciding common sense i know a lot of very smart people who are also complete idiots (me included). you have shot down any arguments over if charisma means beauty so thats nice but having a separate acrobatics skill from your dex just seems silly. it is also worth noting that it seems there's a lot of things that can be done by both wisdom and dungeoning.

i quite like the stat presets.

next up races

you have done an incredibly good job on the races i will edit this post later to give my views on each race.

i find it quite interesting the large amount of influence race continues to have as you level up i was wrong thats going to be this systems skub i dont like it myself but i would not say its bad.

oh your using the 4e powers system thats fine its only 4e thats not allowed to use it its fine for other systems to use it.

Asheru:
i quite like the concept of the Asheru although i think the lore needs a bit of clarification how does the soul merge work does the Asheru soul piggyback on the other soul or is it more of a true joining do they have a distinct personality and communicate with there host or do they just sit there or what. i am assuming that some comunitys are glad to have an Asheru child as you said it can be sometimes devastating whats it like when its not devastating.

Dracopyre:
not much to say here except the description of there breath weapon has the basic illusion description instead of the breath description good work otherwise.

Dwarves:
first thing i notice about the dwarves is that stubborn seems massivly overpowered like game breakingly overpowered not so much the slow resistince as the knockback resistance. Also what the hell man dwarven beards should be for both genders.

Elves:
beauty beyond compare is a pretty nice touch and im a sucker for short range combat teleports not much more to say here.

Eyen:
i quite like the idea here and the bit about the humans not abandoning them really made me feel it brought a tear to my eye. the bigest problem here is with the types there should probably be a medium size in there somewhere and even if you decide against that you definitely need to give thresholds for whats small and whats large or if you put one in whats medium. secondly it does not make a whole lot of sense for mystic animal to be separate from size you cant really give them all the benefits of there size i suppose but you need to work something out.

Felryse:
i quite like the concept but it makes no sense that they can only modify themselves at character gen either add a fluf reason for it such as it has to be done at a young age or allow features to be added at any time, although if you allow features to be taken later you will probably need a larger selection of enhancements.

Humans:
a lot of people are going to be very happy that theres more to humans then adaptability its never bothered me but oh god the rants i have seen. the different humans by location are pretty cool not a big draw for me but its still a nice touch, what i do love is that humans are the best liars thats the real solving of the known as a baseline problem.

Korr:
ork korr dont age but how long do goblin korr live for. i quite like that the korr can reproduce with both 40k style spores and spawning pits. the orks dont stop growing but there legs do how exactly do they continue to grow after there legs stop does there torsos growth speed up to compensate or does it stay at the same speed.

Lurents:
i quite like these its what i would probably play if i were to be in a campaign of this. it seems odd that if you have the water magic spell you dont have to worry about drowning but wont you eventually run out of mana (on which note i quite like that there is a separate spell system as well as the ability system). the mind games sound very very fun there are a lot of possibility’s there. i do wonder though the lurents are not overly religious do the magic users still worship the dragons.

Ordok:
magicless rock people cool. i really like there racial ability anything that rolls into a ball and smashes into things is fine by me (i used to have an remote control toy that rolled into a ball it was called the shell shocker i think i might see if i can find out what happened to it)

Skrall:
well thats a darn nifty idea nice racials to.

Slorren:
injects a bit of war history into the game i like that before this it was all ancient deity stuff the race is quite nice to. i know this line should bother me The Slorren are cold blooded killers because man has made them so but it doesn’t without any surrounding edge it does not seem as edgy as it normally would so keep that line but be prepared for people to overreact and say its edgy. leaping around is always great fun.

Undead:
im a sucker for undead as a race that interacts with others and whatnot i played as forsaken back in wow (of course those were auctualy evil unlike this race which is only sometimes evil i think (dont tell grumush or whoever the hell is leading the horde now i said that sylvanas will have my rotting skin for a rug)) (i really need to get back into wow). imortal soul seems a silly why roll for that instead of just basing it off the age of the thing in question and the age of the undead i love the idea though but of course undead who were only recently killed cant really benefit from it. (although its fine here i would never use good undead in d&d thats *BLAM* worthy)

Vampyre:
i like the lore here but it really really needs to be a template even if applying the template ends up with the exact same result as just having it as a race it needs to be a template for if anybody gets turned mid campaign, on that note you should explain how the Vampyre create more of themselves exactly.

Werepyre:
another race that desperately requires a template probably even more so then the Vampyre as i understand it if the first time a good person kills something is a full moon they get cursed its quite easy for a player to get cursed right at the start of a campaign (although at that point it might not be that hard to adjust things it will still cause problems.

Oh I've always had a hard time with alignments, when i play i tend to just be neutral. but i made each thinking that they were each their own extreme. like a compass. north is good, south is evil, east is lawful, and west is chaotic. and each player is a dot on that compass. when i thought of it, evil was always for selfish game, and being destructive without gain is chaotic, at least as i saw it. lawful is following rules and codes and guides regardless of why. while being good is trying to benefit people regardless of anything. just going out of your way to help. and you can be anywhere in between. characters dont have to play to the extremes, but those are what they are.

I tried keeping secondary stats simple, so i thought of common sense and puzzle solving and that sort of stuff went together. of course common sense in social situations can be different, but i put that more with charisma and just being generally smooth. and yeah, charisma and looks are two different things in LoG

I did some testing with armor save and the lowest it could possibly go, with enchantments and everything, to 2. with the addition of enemies having armor piercing weapons raising that number to make it easier to peirce, as well as magic ignoring armor completely.

and last but not least, dragons. there will be plenty of dragons, all based on elements, as well as their smaller cousins, drakes, as well as their very small cousins, wyverns. those are just the big 9 baddies

thank you for all this feedback though! lets me know where i need to be clearer, or rethink an idea.