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◀ Rulebooks

New Era: Sol 366 Edition

Classes

Characters

Feats

Gameplay

Adventuring

Interaction

Combat

Progression

Magic

Spell Lists

Equipment

Creatures

Appendix

Ver. 1.3.1

New Era vs. D&D

This page is an introduction to New Era and the mRPG rule set for players familiar with D&D 5th Edition, Pathfinder, and other popular tabletop RPGs.

Similarities

New Era is a primarily d20-based game, similar to D&D and Pathfinder. The core gameplay revolves around three phases - adventuring, interaction, and combat. Skill checks use the d20, while damage rolls and other event tables use the d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and percentile die (d100/d%). Actions that require skill checks have a difficulty rating which the character's roll plus relevant modifiers must equal or exceed for them to accomplish the task at hand.

Key Differences

  • Your Ability Scores are the same six typical for a d20-based RPG. You may be tempted to use the same ability score modifiers table as D&D, but it's different here! While the average score for a human is still 10, it's possible for them to go as high as 30.
  • Instead of experience points, players earn character points. These are a metacurrency that both tracks your progression and can be spent to unlock feats.
  • Characters generally level up faster in mRPG than similar games. To compensate for this, the level cap for each class is 30 instead of 20.
  • In mRPG-based systems, characters start out Classless and at Level 0. You choose your class the first time you level up - or perhaps later, in some adventures, if the party doesn't know about magic at the start of the campaign.
  • New Era is a magic-focused system, where all classes have access to spells of various types. Your class determines what forms of magic you receive as you level up, but any character can learn any spell if they find it through other means in-game. There are no hard limits on what spells can be cast by which classes.
  • Combat in mRPG-based systems uses a "three-actions-per-turn" rule set, with one reaction between the end of your turn and the start of your next. The actions and the units of time they take up are known abstractly as action frames. Actions and reactions resolve in a "Last-In, First-Out" order, similarly to the Stack in Magic: The Gathering. For more information, see the section on combat.