Benefits of Time and Space

I had not looked at the Hack'D & Slash'D rules for a few weeks, so I was able to go back to them with fresh eyes and see some things. I'm making some adjustments, and will be releasing version 3.0 in the medium term. Here are some changes...

I unified range throughout. There was very little strategic benefit to having some spells with 30', others at 60', and some at 120'. There was little benefit to having different ranges for shortbows and longbows... it was a lot of looking up rules for very little benefit in play. I changed everything to 60' - the default movement for a character is 60', and the basic range for magic is 60'. If you cast a ranged spell or fire a ranged weapon beyond 60', you suffer -1 edge. Simple, easy to remember, and clean. I realized that these different ranges were largely a holdover from the D+D roots of the game, and were not needed. It is hard sometimes to see where the D+D DNA is still coursing through the game. This was one place.

I decided I didn't like armor check rules. I went back to armor being half damage on a successful check, and that you check armor instead of level. I had changed all of the damage resists for spells back to a trait check with half damage as the result, so armor was the outlier with scaled damage reduction. I didn't add any bonuses for getting an 11 or 12; these are still just successess on resists. This is also consistent now across the rules; you only get a bonus for an action of 11 or 12, not for a resist or 11 or 12. It keeps things cleaner.

I cleaned up some language around these concepts. I think this is all unified now, but I need to spend some more time with a fine-tooth comb to make sure I've caught it all.

I added the bestiary into the core rules - there are now 50-is monsters in the core rulebook. It's not truly a core rulebook, and actually has the full game. Missing a monster section was kind of a big deal, the more I thought about it.

I'm going to layer in the rules for signature spells that were in the 'companion' document. These should be in the core rules, so that the rules for expanding spells going forward are already set up.