Race/Class Edit

[Uatu]

Weren't the rangers based on the rangers of Tolkein mythology? They were sort of mystic trackers in those days, and thus got a few mystical powers.

Plus, druid spells in those days were sort of in between magic-user and cleric spells (cure light wounds was a 2nd-level spell, etc.).

[Shadow Stranger]

In the official Middle Earth Role Playing the Ranger gets some Channeling (Priest) spells. What did Tolkein think of MERP? No one knows because it started around a decade after his death.

What did Tolkein think of D&D? This question is moot because he died in 1973, and the game was not invented till the next year.

[manikus]

But let's not forget that Rangers must have Intelligence of at least 13. So, presumably starting at 9th level, they seek out someone to teach them some wizardly ways.

[manikus]

Originally Posted by Shadow Stranger In the official Middle Earth Role Playing the Ranger gets some Channeling (Priest) spells. What did Tolkein think of MERP? No one knows because it started around a decade after his death. What did Tolkein think of D&D? This question is moot because he died in 1973, and the game was not invented till the next year.

Actually, it's not moot, as he spoke of fans recreating his characters and scenes from his books. He did not like it. He thought it was very ridiculous as a matter of fact and in one interview described how a cult following much like Harry Potter has received would be the worst thing possible for him as a writer.

[Shadow Stranger]

He was an old school gentleman by all accounts, I suppose you could expect this.

As for Dungeon Craft, one really challenging idea would be to have a capacity to base a design in any D&D campaign world. Al-Qadim, Birthright, Dark Sun, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Kara Tur, Maztica, Mystara, Planescape, Spelljammer. (Designs for all of these campaigns may be a bit ambitious. Defunct campaigns like Dark Sun and Dragonlance still have their own sites. The former would require Psionics while the latter really needs the three moons.)

Spells are already customizable. You could have pre-generated default versions of spells.txt, one per campaign world. They could be named spellsdl.txt, spellsfr.txt, spellsds.txt and so on. This would require rewriting the program so it could handle this.

Classes are currently fixed, the list of possible class abilities would have to be hard-coded. Then classes.txt would assign the abilities to each class.

[manikus]

Ideally, the class abilities wouldn't be hard-coded, but would be something similar to the current GPDL functions, so we could put together just about anything we could imagine. Of course the default DC would ship with a default set of abilities so that the designer would only have to fool around with it if she wanted to.

[Funky Dynamite]

Exactly. That would be awesome.