Goodman Games

252 days? So do you count ages in their years or ours? I mean, that's just under 70% the length of our Earth year. It would make logical sense to count them in theirs (simulationism, for you GNS Theory fans). That's what I default to. You might find some references that use Earth years, especially ...

(although I'd have to check the number of weeks in a Dragonmech year to be sure) The DragonMech year is 252 days, and the weeks are each 6 days long, which gives you 42 weeks. The things you learn as a line developer... But, hey, the DragonMech design crew has never disappointed me before with the ...

WORKING LANGUAGE We're swearing at the game. I'm swearing. Dieter's swearing. Based on some of the feedback, I'm pretty sure playtesters were swearing. Playtesters usually are. At about this point in any project, designer fatigue sets in. You look at your baby, and all you see is warts and blemishes...

I'm highbrow - I don't want fluff, I want flavor. Anyone can make or adjust rules. Flavor is something unique to the creator, and it's the thing I most enjoy reading and adapting and outright stealing for my home game.

Another question: A mech's fuel bins store 9 days worth of coal. Is that 9 days of 24 hour activity? Or 9 days of 8 hour activity? I assume it is the first so a mech could operator for 27 days assume it was only on for 8 hours a day. It depends - how realistic are you trying to be? For most groups,...

The Lunar Skinstealer's host domination acts as the dominate person spell. Dominate person only works on humanoids. Obviously the Skinstealer can do more than humanoid given the Dronog example. Should it work on all creature types like dominate monster, humanoids plus aberrations, humanoids plus lu...

And the Bastion has a lot of intrinsic character - older, rugged, the castle motif. People who want "traditional" dungeon-crawl adventures in DragonMech could do worse than explore an abandoned Bastion.

We chose to err on the side of inclusiveness, rather than putting together tables of weapon/power source compatibility. As you point out, a lot of them are pretty obvious if you read the weapon descriptions. However, we've also decided that DragonMech Battles is going to err in the other direction. ...

Just watched Ariel and War Stories again. Ariel got me wondering, what would be the equivalent of the Core Planets? Are Stenian City-Mechs the best bet? The Stenian Confederacy has more city-mechs than any other, and they're the closest analogue to a typical fantasy "good guy" nation. The...

1) Who mines the metals used for coins, especially among cultures like the L'Arile Nation or the Elves and how do these materials end up spread among the mechdoms and cities? 2) Who the heck carts around hundreds of pounds of gold--or even platinum, in same cases--to pay for mech construction? Hypo...

Alternately, you could try allowing items that give higher bonuses but have some drawback to go along with it, like it gives you +4 STR but also gives -4 INT. This would be a good way to get more impressive-looking items into an e6 game (if that were your intent) without messing up play balance too...

I'll have to wait and see on phase order and the Tactics Phase. That may end up making it difficult for me, since I'm not tactically inclined. We've found that it's usually a pretty simple calculation - you'll see if you're better off fighting, running, or doing something else in most situations. A...

mythfish wrote:

walrusjester wrote:Perhaps you could even feed your own HP into the weapon to raise the crit damage.

Ooh, that's cool. I vote for that. :)

Perhaps the neatest underused weapon type in the SRD is vicious. It offers a very interesting tactical choice...

If you end managing to find space for "mech feats" (such as well-coordinated crew), "mage jockey pilot" would be nice. One or two extra abilities as long as you have a mech jockey piloting it. Or should it be a sorcerer? We've talked about something very like this. Certain kinds...

Depends on the status of DragonMech in the 4e landscape. I think the combat system will integrate pretty well with the core rules, whatever they turn out to be. It'll be a hybrid solution, since we don't have access to any 4e stuff ourselves, but we're deliberately making the game simple and flexibl...

I thought I'd migrate this into a new thread, in case there was any discussion to be had on it. Now, necrotic steel might be onto something if you could make a mech of it and then cover the mech in magical darkness so you can have the Str bonus even during the day. But as it stands, it's got more pe...

Okay, I have to talk about this one... For the record, what is considered natural darkness? Because the nights tend to be pretty bright, what with the giant moon hanging in the air and all. Natural darkness would be whenever the sun is below the horizon. The moon is closer, so it has a larger refle...

As before, I'm really enjoying these mechs! Necro-mechs are probably my favorite kind to design, and they're very easy to use as the center of an adventure. Keep 'em coming.

We've deliberately left the planes alone within the official setting materials. For one thing, people's tastes differ, and we haven't seen any consensus form around one model or another of planar activity. No point annoying people by closing a door to their preferred campaign style. Second, emphasiz...

I'm pretty sure Colossal frost launchers shouldn't be 1 PU either. However, 16 PU makes sense. I'm embarrassed to admit this, as lead DragonMech developer, but I don't remember which book the frost launchers come from. Where did you find them? And if you want elven deity alignments, you get elven de...

I'd wondered if we'd get to see the famous psionics-in-DragonMech person here. Welcome aboard! Ironically enough, just a few minutes ago I finished a (hopefully final) revision to the rules for putting special characters like sorcerers into boarding parties. It's kinda tricky to integrate individual...

These are really cool. Thanks for sharing 'em with other DragonMech fans!

Will the Gearwrights ever find out those spells are in existence? I can't quite decide if they'd be interested, ecstatic, or horrified. If we do 4E DragonMech, you may well find an answer to this question. The other new question, which arrived upon running over Tannanliel's characteristics in my mi...

Tannan, as the foremost arcane mech designer in history, has created a bunch of weird spells specifically to help with that very problem. Consider how useful it would be to have a medium-level divination that functioned like True Strike, only for reaching your Craft DC.

One of the more interesting things I noticed is that while a single normal ork is completely powerless over a mech, you take a pack of 20 of them, all with ropes and grapples, have 19 of them 'aide another', and the leader of the pack has a pretty good bonus to his roll to take the mech down. I int...