Gamesmiths,
I come to the forge because I hear you are the best there is. Judging from what i have read on other forum topics I believe I have heard correctly. I have been building a system with a friend for a little over 2 years now, just casually working on it in my spare time. I am looking for a few things; First, critique on my ideas. I am also looking for playtesters to try and run a campaign over something like IM or google buzz. i'm really not picky about venue and am totally willing to work with you.

From a lore perspective:
there's a lot going on, its set in a sci-fi universe in which the level of magic or technology depends a lot upon the culture in which you're talking about. the TL;DR version of it is that there with the discovery of shadow magic in a race known as the altay, they shattered their home planet. fragments make it to earth, rain down and change the ley lines of the universe and man discovers magic. droid technology explodes, as does space travel technology and 4 mother ships are made outside one of the other planets in our system. droid incursion happens and humanity flees earth for the stars in the motherships. the faster than light jump fails on 3 of the 4 ships. one becomes a hive of pirates, one becomes a communist society, one becomes the defender against the droid incursion on the rest of the universe.
more on that here here:
http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2010/218/5/a/Theory_Lore_by_deathprophetik.pdf

From a combat perspective:
a soft-leveling system, using classless characters who can pull from pools of abilities to customize their characters as much as they like. combat itself is based upon action points (every action has an action point value), once you're out, your turn is done. you can also choose to interrupt actions.
more on that here:
http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2010/218/8/1/Theory_by_deathprophetik.pdf

if you're interested, you can email me at: Deathprophetik@gmail.com

Since I am a mechanics guy I will read through the combat rules and have a few comments:

- it seems you are using the d20 system for the baseline of the game, you might want to make your game more of a mod for d20 than a full game that adds new rules
- the action points are a bit confusing to me, it seems they run along a multiple of 5?  with heavy attacks being 50 and light attacks being 25...  It seems that one would rather make two attacks with a hatchet than one from a greatsword, if there are no actions that take 1-4 points than just make actions run 1-5 so attacking with a light weapon takes 5 and a heavy takes 10 this should give you enough granularity
- the spell options seem to add small bonus, be sure these aren't hard to track for the player
- make sure that all of the stats are balanced and useful, this should help reduce bad min/maxing; the current d20 6 stats are decent but CHA gets the boot and some of these like WIS are just placeholders for certain classes...  they don't really integrate into the system well...  what i mean of course the cleric is gonna have wisdom and the mage intelligence...  so whats the difference...
- my suggestion is to reduce reduce reduce... get rid off everything unnecessary
- be sure that your rolling system is robust enough to handle higher levels... as d20 usually cannot with the straight 5% increase per bonus into it, meaning if you take a fighter with +30 to hit and a bard with +10 to hit the disparity is enough to the point that a fighter will always hit and a rogue never will if attacking ac 30.  This leads to extremely polarized class play.  If you are really making a system were players can build their class then by default (generally speaking) spell casters are less combat oriented and fighters are more combat oriented.
- be sure to have the right level of healing and enough for the party since there isn't a healing "class" the party has a whole might have to work to heal themselves.

hope this helps.
Jeff

thanks locke. i'm going to start looking at each of these points in detail now and ill see if i cant resolve these issues.

Locke wrote:
Since I am a mechanics guy I will read through the combat rules and have a few comments:

- it seems you are using the d20 system for the baseline of the game, you might want to make your game more of a mod for d20 than a full game that adds new rules
- the action points are a bit confusing to me, it seems they run along a multiple of 5?  with heavy attacks being 50 and light attacks being 25...  It seems that one would rather make two attacks with a hatchet than one from a greatsword, if there are no actions that take 1-4 points than just make actions run 1-5 so attacking with a light weapon takes 5 and a heavy takes 10 this should give you enough granularity
- the spell options seem to add small bonus, be sure these aren't hard to track for the player
- make sure that all of the stats are balanced and useful, this should help reduce bad min/maxing; the current d20 6 stats are decent but CHA gets the boot and some of these like WIS are just placeholders for certain classes...  they don't really integrate into the system well...  what i mean of course the cleric is gonna have wisdom and the mage intelligence...  so whats the difference...
- my suggestion is to reduce reduce reduce... get rid off everything unnecessary
- be sure that your rolling system is robust enough to handle higher levels... as d20 usually cannot with the straight 5% increase per bonus into it, meaning if you take a fighter with +30 to hit and a bard with +10 to hit the disparity is enough to the point that a fighter will always hit and a rogue never will if attacking ac 30.  This leads to extremely polarized class play.  If you are really making a system were players can build their class then by default (generally speaking) spell casters are less combat oriented and fighters are more combat oriented.
- be sure to have the right level of healing and enough for the party since there isn't a healing "class" the party has a whole might have to work to heal themselves.

hope this helps.
Jeff

cool, just a few things i saw that you might want to think about.  You don't need to justify your ideas to me.  Another suggestion:  Do it first, do it better, or dont do it at all.

"Droid" is a Star Wars term.  If you plan on distributing your game, it may be best to change the name of those things.

It's one of the few sci-fi terms that is off limits, but yes, "droid" is owned by Lucas. Motorola pays him for their Droid line of phones.

Android is fine however. :P

Just use the full term and you're not in any trouble. ;)

(It's worth noting that this is a rarity in design, but in general if you know a term sounds familiar because of a significant IP, check really quickly to see if there's a "Wordmark" for it. You can do that at http://tess2.uspto.gov/ which is the US government's online search site. It should render MOST stuff that is relevant, but may miss some, so it's not perfect.

Generally, unless you use something that someone particularly litigious has wordmarked you'll be fine.

The search engine "Lougle" was probably perfectly fine when used in Hot Tub Time Machine, and EVERYONE knows where that came from. :P

(Avoid Lucas terms like the plague, tbh . . . I think he sues people just to avoid having to ever actually do the final 3 movies.) :)

Hi everyone,

This discussion should probably move off-forum, to email or whatever you like. Aio, set that up if you could.

Or if you want to maintain a public discussion here, then a new thread in either Playtesting (assuming you've done some) or Publishing for the various terms issues (which I think is less important or interesting in this case) would be fine.

Best, Ron

Matt,
thanks for the info. the last thing i want to do is infringe on someone elses copyrighted work. so i really appreciate that.

Ron,
unfortunately my thread has proved to be rather fruitless. so i suppose its back to the drawing board. i definitely dont want to clutter up your forum with my thread but i can't seem to find anywhere to delete/move it. so, if my thread is deleted i wont take offense. the information your users have given me has all been very helpful, so thanks to all of them and thank you for hosting/moderating.