"Ryan S. Dancey" wrote:
> From: "Scott Nimmo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> > *When ED is stable and profitable they might like at making a line for
> > d20 Earthdawn but it will never be only d20
>
> When I first read Earthdawn (v1.0), I thought "FASA has proved to be a
> company run by geniuses again. Look, right there in the ability chart it
> says "here's this big honkin' chart with values from 1 to 50. And here's
> this note saying "characters start with ability scores between 3 and 18" In
> other words, they put a D&D game right there on the shelf and pretended it
> wasn't the same game. It's got classes, races, spells, magic items, and
> monsters.
>
> Ryan
In many ways Earthdawn is D&D "done right". They've got an in world
explanation for character classes, dungeons, etc. Their class/level system
actually makes a lot of sense. They've done all sorts of interesting
things with magic items, names, yada yada yada.
Unfortunately, the game was significantly unbalanced in a great many
respects. It desperately needed a second edition that cleaned up
some of the glaring problems with things like multiclassing.
I like both the Earthdawn setting and the fundamental concepts
behind the rules. But it is largely unplayable as is, especially at
high character levels.
I also strongly suspect the niche it filled (a better D&D) is a much harder
one to fill now that D&D has significantly raised the bar. I think that a
second edition of Earthdawn could still be better than D&D but I'm
not at all sure that it could be better ENOUGH to attract any signficiant
audience.
I wish they'd go the D20 route. You could fairly easily translate most
of the things that make Earthdawn "better" into D20. Hmm. There
might be a legal problem, though. One of the things that definitely
differentiates Earthdawn is character advancement (characters buy
skill levels one by one until eventually they meet the requirements
of the next level) and it would be challenging to state this without
violating the OGF rules.
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